Links List 7.18.08

Posted July 18th, 2008 by Joe Pendry

During the first half of 2008, Royal Pingdom surveyed 13 of the top news websites in the world and found that five of them had more downtime then the other eight. Those who had 99.9% uptime were Forbes, New York Times, CNN, Voice of America, Washington Post, Bloomberg, BBC News and Guardian Unlimited. However, out of the five ranked with the longer downtime, International Herald Tribune, Times Online and ABC News had the longest continous outages. Overall, the news sites had excellent uptime.

VMware’s ThinApp 4.0 debuted this week. Know as the company’s first application virtualization project, the software allows users to run ‘any version of any application on a single operating system without any conflict.’ ThinApp offers new features such as Application Sync and Application Link. With this release, Microsoft and Citrix can expect more competition.

Citrix unveiled its new weapon in the virtualization sector: Project Kensho, which acts like the middleware between applications and microkernel-based hypervisors. The global leader in application delivery infrastructure noted as virtualization continues to become mainstream, ‘users need ways to automate and secure the lifecycle of their application workloads without being tied to a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format.

Twitter is testing a new design for its users. Apparently, there have been ‘sightings’ of this new design upon login and once the page is refreshed – poof – the design is gone. The reason for the new look might be in conjunction with the acquiring of Summize. We wonder what kind of staging and testing processes Twitter is following during this phase to prevent (more) Twitter downtime.