Your sympathetic interest in pedophiles, and pathetic drug addicts is duly noted, Michael.

WTF?

We interrupt this week's edition of Tech Talk to observe what a sad state of affairs we have when a psycho, drug laced, pedophile can hold humans spellbound with his OD just because he made catchy songs with a good beat that are easy to dance to.

Right, because nobody noticed when Elvis or Kurt Cobain died.

Hoo!

I have always marveled that while slow, the net never quit outright, as it did yesterday in a lot of cases. New York particularly shocked me, because as I found out later, the outer wall on the buidling the pop was in, had been damaged by the towers falling.

Not that marvelous; after all, the whole point of the internet was to build a network where large parts of it could be destroyed in a nuclear war and the surviving bits would still be able to function.

I remember when we used to be able to avoid insipid celebrity opinions.

A total Worldwide Web crash-a complete internet blackout-would cause far more chaos, disruption, and anxiety than the current economic crisis because it would not allow for denial: the usual ego-preservation strategies would fail in the face of its immediacy.

I predict this, too, will crash under its own weight.

Hilton Runn/Foie Grasie

Yesterday, boradband simply wasn't happening at all on eiher of my lines from home, and the cell phone was noticeably slow but serviceable as was the dialup.

I noticed no issues yesterday on my home line or from my server, and haven't heard of anyone else having issues (apart from topical sites, and now you) with bandwidth.

Yesterday, boradband simply wasn't happening at all on eiher of my lines from home, and the cell phone was noticeably slow but serviceable as was the dialup.

Also, during 9/11, the disparity between what the TV news stations knew and what the internet knew favored the TV stations. With MJ, the news broke first on the internet, and they had the scoop for quite a while before the TV stations got the details out.

End-user bandwidth might have also been a factor. Broadband users can hammer more sites than dial-up users, and there are more broadband users now than in 2001.

I have always marveled that while slow, the net never quit outright, as it did yesterday in a lot of cases.

I would like to emphasis that the internet was fine, both during 9/11 and yesterday. Yesterday a few topical sites were overloaded, but the rest of the internet didn't notice much.

I have always marveled that while slow, the net never quit outright, as it did yesterday in a lot of cases. New York particularly shocked me, because as I found out later, the outer wall on the buidling the pop was in, had been damaged by the towers falling.

I imgine there's a few differneces that might account for this difference; We're far more 'on the net' as a people than we were then... the net wasn't nearly as universal. Broadband aps weren't used nearly as much... such as video and audio streams. And since that time, more folks are using the net as their primary source of news.

So, it's not a magic bullet. A data center will still need to decide whether or not it makes business sense to maintain capacity for a once in N years spike. The difference is that now demand can be aggregated, which results in less spiky demand (overall).

It’s amazing that even robust servers can go down with too many simultaneous queries.

It's usually not the servers, it's the connections and bandwidth. The internet protocols only allow so many simultaneous connections per IP address, and even large bandwidth connections can be saturated by a sudden rush of data.

One would think that the advent of cloud technologies and redundancies would have ended that by this stage in the Internet’s maturation.

Cloud computing itself is still in it's infancy, I doubt any of the above mentioned sites use it. Redundant servers don't help when your internet connection is pegged.

Load balancing is the key, but with traffic like this simple server load balancing isn't always enough, you run into bottlenecks on the gateway, DNS servers, even switches.