Internet

Facebook Uses BitTorrent to Upgrade Servers

June 25, 2010

Facebook has thousands of servers to maintain and upgrade scattered across many locations. Imagine you're the IT staff responsible for updating all those servers in a timely manner across the Internet so they're all running the same code. Some of these upgrades are hundreds of megabytes.

Fortunately, BitTorrent is great at distributing large files very fast via its P2P technology. Facebook's Tom Cook (systems engineering group) spoke at the Velocity Conference with a speech titled 'A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations' where he explained how BitTorrent made server deployment much faster.

Posted in Internet, News, Social Networking

Cool Octiv Mini - iPod & iPhone Dock

June 22, 2010

Altec Lansing today introduced the Octiv Mini (M102) audio dock for iPhone and iPod users ($59.95). Sporting an angular slant and a large speaker, the Octiv Mini also functions as an alarm clock when combined with the free Altec Lansing custom Alarm Rock app. Unlike most docks, the alarm display is done on the iPhone or iPod display via the free app. So I suppose one drawback is if you take your device off the dock you lose the ability to see the current time.

Altec Lansing said, "Pound for pound, the Octiv Mini holds its own against bulkier speaker systems, and is even more appealing when considering similarly priced stand-alone chargers."

"Because the Octiv Mini functions as a dock, a charger and an alarm clock with the included app, it represents an amazing value that will be appreciated by those who will not compromise on sound quality for a smaller footprint," stated Steve Schlangen, Altec Lansing product manager.

Posted in Apple, Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Internet, MP3 Players & Digital Audio, Mobile Phones

Review of iOS 4

June 21, 2010

Ars has an in-depth review of Apple's iOS 4 that is worth reading. iOS 4, previously known as iPhone OS 4, is a major update to Apple's mobile operating system. The big features include multitasking, categories, opening up of thousands of APIs to third-party developers, and a spell check that doesn't proactively change what you type, but rather underlines your questionable words in red and lets you pick from a list of suggest words.

The biggest feature is the background app support.

Posted in Apple, Gadgets, Internet, Mobile Phones, Reviews, VoIP, Wireless

Edit YouTube Videos Online

June 17, 2010

Today, YouTube announced a new feature that lets you edit your YouTube videos online. Sweet!

Here's what you can do:

Combine multiple videos you've uploaded to create a new longer video
Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos
Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs
Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click -- no upload necessary

We've all been there / done that where we upload a video, wait for it to encode, then play it back to realize we had awkward pauses, didn't stop the camera on time, or simply wanted to cut a piece out. Well, now you can easily cut out these portions as well as create a mashup of several of your videos. Check out the video of how it's done:

Posted in Internet, Video Hardware & Software

USPS Ate My Netflix DVD. Damn you USPS! Or was it Animal?

June 15, 2010

So I check my mail awaiting a couple of Netflix when what do my eyes behold? Two glorious red envelopes - which means I received both movies my family and I wanted to watch. When what do my eyes behold? One of the Netflix envelopes is simply the outer tear off sheet that has my home address on it.

Posted in Home Entertainment, Internet, Personal and Humor

Netflix on iPhone Hack

June 2, 2010

So you want Netflix running on your iPhone do ya? Well, you've come to the right place for an easy to follow tutorial to get sweet streaming movies and TV shows directly to your Apple iPhone. Who can wait for the official Netflix app? Certainly not me!

Posted in Apple, Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Internet, Mobile Phones

To (Hyper)Link or Not to Link - That is the Question

June 1, 2010

The best bloggers and news sites seem to hyperlink like crazy. Usually its because they think they're doing you a favor by referencing a related article, web page, company, etc. so you don't have to hit up a search engine to find it yourself. Other times it's used for internal linking so you hit another one of their web pages and they get an additional pageview plus ad impression.

Posted in Internet

Next Justin Bieber?

May 12, 2010

Ladies, meet the next Justin Bieber sensation. I know this blog is mostly about gadgets, man caves, and VoIP/telecom, which are all typically dominated by males. But I know I have a female audience as well - and this is for you. The 12-year-old Oklahoma kid, Greyson Michael Chance has become a YouTube sensation with his rendition of Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi". You'll be able to catch him on Ellen DeGeneres show tomorrow. And after you watch this video, you know you will be watching or DVR'ing it!

Now just don't say I never did anything for you ladies. You can thank me later.

via The Daily What

Posted in Home Entertainment, Internet

Adobe Flash 10.1 Adds P2P VoIP, Social Networking, IM

April 16, 2010

The latest version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (still in beta) adds support for RTMFP Groups. This is huge because it enables clients to easily communicate with other clients in a network in order to share the transport of media and communications without maintaining a connection to every peer in the group. Groups can be defined by their functionality and access can be controlled by the client application, whether it's a VoIP app, chat app or a social networking app.

They also added support for Directed Routing, which enables a developer to create communication applications and send data messages to a specific peer in the group. Critical features of RTMFP include low latency (critical for VoIP), end-to-end peering capability, security and scalability.

Posted in Internet, Reviews, Skype, Social Networking, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Opera Mini iPhone Review

April 13, 2010

Opera Mini has just been approved and is available in the Apple App Store. I have to admit Opera Mini was my favorite browser on my old clunky Apache 6700 Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. It was lightning fast. Opera Mini uses caching servers to compress images and text before sending the content down to your mobile device, which is what makes it so fast.

I downloaded and tested Opera Mini on my iPhone 3GS this morning and here are my thoughts.

Posted in Apple, Computer Software, Internet, Reviews, TMCnet, Wireless

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Next

VoIP & Gadgets Blog

Internet