Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Open source in itself is a success story. From being a niche concept, it has become a mainstream movement (well, more or less) and has received the attention of both individuals and businesses worldwide.
There are thousands of open source projects and products out there, but which ones are the most successful? By successful we mean widely used and widely known. While there are many successful open source products, a few stand head and shoulders above the rest. We have listed them here below.

We here at Pingdom LOVE technology, but for a while now we’ve had a nagging suspicion that regular people – the broad masses if you will – really couldn’t care less about tech, including Web tech.
A look at Google’s daily list of the top 100 hot search trends pretty much confirms that suspicion.
Over a ten-day period, only 8 out of 1,000 trending topics on Google were in any way tech related.

Open Source is an interesting subject, not to mention that the Open Source movement has become a true power through the years, providing us with a great range of freely available software.
From time to time we’ve looked at different aspects of Open Source in this blog, so we decided to cherry-pick some of our very best Open Source-related articles and present them for your reading pleasure.

IPv6 can theoretically hold 2^128 IP addresses. As you’re probably aware of, that’s a huge number:
2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
Have you ever wondered how you would actually SAY that number if you had to read it out loud?

The newly released Wolfram Alpha is a great tool for doing calculations and data conversions, and it also has a significant amount of data that you can play around with. This post is about how webmasters and sysadmins can benefit from this new service.
So if you’re a webmaster or sysadmin (or just an Internet geek), let Wolfram Alpha’s two supercomputers do some work for you and make your life a bit easier.

That constant blog companion, the RSS feed, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. These days RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but that wasn’t always the case. The meaning of RSS has changed a number of times since its initial inception in 1999.
Here is a look at the evolution of the meaning of RSS.

Amazon has just launched a pretty cool service for those of its AWS customers who have large amounts of data that they want to upload to Amazon S3: AWS Import/Export. It’s essentially what used to be called a sneakernet, i.e. you can just mail your data on hard drives to Amazon via snail mail instead of sending it over the Internet.

In the blue corner… Google! In the red corner… SEO! … aaaaaaand, FIGHT!
Is it just us, or are the results from search engines getting out of control? Often several of the top ten search results will contain websites that seem to have received their position mainly through SEO efforts, not by being truly great resources (at least not great enough to be in the top ten).

Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.

The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

A huge number of blogs use Feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. Since the service was launched in 2004, it’s pretty much become the de facto standard for this. With so many bloggers relying on Feedburner, reliability and performance is of course extremely important. RSS feeds, just like websites, need to be available all the time on the Web.
We have tested Feedburner’s RSS feed performance and uptime.

Things are going very well for us so we’re looking for more people to join the Pingdom team here in Västerås, Sweden. To be more specific, we’re looking to add two more programmers, a technically inclined copywriter, and a web designer to the team.

We know there are a lot of people out there who love Firefox (including us here at Pingdom), so here is a whole bunch of really nice Firefox-themed wallpapers that you can adorn your desktop with.

You may remember our April Fool’s joke this year: SaveIE6.com. Want to hear something cool? The petition on that website now has more than 1,000 signatures. 🙂

Gmail was down for an unknown amount of time today. Judging by the talk on Twitter some people were still having issues several hours after Google said the problem had been fixed.
This article is about managing user speculation, and the real-time, online discussion that inevitably follows.

The Internet keeps getting larger and more widespread, and the number of websites just keeps growing. But if you take a closer look at those numbers, you will find something interesting: If you look at year-by-year growth, it peaked in 2007.
However, it looks like 2009 might have a few surprises in store for us.

Last week we posted an article about how much money the large tech companies are making, but another really interesting thing to look at is how large their workforce is. Just as with revenues and profits, these numbers can be quite surprising (and impressive).
We used the same group of 15 well-known tech companies that we looked at last week: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

Have you ever wondered how much money the really big tech companies are making?
We have, so we looked at the money earned by 15 large, well-known tech companies to find out: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

Twitter is a great place to find out what’s going on “right now”, and the Swine Flu situation is no exception. As of this writing, half of the trending topics on Twitter are related to the Swine Flu (or “H1N1” as it’s also called).
With real-time services that facilitate communication in the way Twitter does, are we about to enter an era where we can stay informed to a much higher degree and therefore be able to minimize the ill effects of things such as the Swine Flu?
In short, will Twitter help counter the Swine Flu pandemic?

The other day we were looking at what we’re all looking at – screens – and being nostalgic. Then we realized there isn’t much to be nostalgic about.
Here’s what we remember of the good old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screens that used to adorn our desktops.