As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 PM EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re by now monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

As you will mind the game to see if The Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning will finally step out of the shadows of his brother, Peyton Manning, we will see if the nuts, cables, and bolts at NFL.com holds up to the pressure on Sunday.

As you get the chili, chicken wings, and taco dip (and buffalo chicken Super Bowl cupcakes) ready for the action, keen to see if New York will snatch its fourth Super Bowl title (or if The Patriots can score its third title), we’re on top of checking major sports sites around the US, to see how the online part of the Super Bowl shakes out.

Will Sunday see a repeat of SuperBowl XLII from three years ago, when The Giants won 17-14 over the until-then undefeated Patriots?

Until Sunday, when we will get some answers, we leave you with the winner of the USA Today Ad Meter for best Super Bowl money-making from the game three years ago.

Cue the theme from Rocky.

Top photo by Elver Barnes.

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From:
Are you ready for Super Bowl 46? You mind the game, we mind the site

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, fascinating, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and additional geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few additional topics thrown in to boot.

This week’s suggested reading

• Windows Azure: Scott Guthrie at Microsoft publishes a run of articles in this area Windows Azure.
• Open Source File, Sync and Share Project Adds Cloud Text Editing and More: OwnCloud Version 3 introduces online editing, photo gallery, PDF viewer, application store and improvements to existing functionality.
• OpenStack removes Hyper-V support in next release: Microsoft appeared interested in maintaining support for Hyper-V in OpenStack, but developers chose to remove the pushchair code.
• Amazon S3 Growth for 2011 – Now 762 Billion Objects: As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times.
• Cloud activity to explode in 2012: Tom Henderson writes for InfoWorld that key areas of growth in cloud actions include asset management, wellbeing monitoring, cloud service brokering, and service stacks.
• Intel Brings Larger Guns to AMD Server Chip War: With Intel getting ready to launch its “Sandy Bridge” Xeon E5 processors in Development and revving up its 22 nanometer processes to ultimately field “Ivy bridge” kickers, Advanced Micro Diplomacy is going to have to engineer some pretty impressive new Opteron server chips.
• Bruce Perens wore a suit and tie for his linux.conf.au 2012: His reason, “it reflects our community’s need to reckon more in this area how it appears to the rest of the world. Despite our many successes, he said, we have failed to realize the goals that our community set for itself many years ago.”

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From:
Weekend must-read articles #2

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the celebration season last year 28 scored a exact 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We chose to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Uptime per site

Out of the 59 sites we monitored, 28 show a exact 100% uptime score with no downtime at all recorded by the Pingdom monitoring probes.

Notable outages included footlocker.com, which experienced an outage lasting 4 hours and 46 minutes on December 21, resulting in the lowest uptime in our study, 98.573%. Gamefly.com was not far behind with an outage of 4 hours and 44 minutes on December 16. Officedepot.com saw an outage of 3 hours and 15 minutes on December 4. For the rest of the sites in the bottom 10 for uptime during December 2011, their outages were small and distributed over the month.

Response time per site

When we ranked the sites according to average response time during December 2011, the picture doesn’t change all that much. All the sites in the top 10 in terms of average response time also had 100% uptime, except jcpenney.com, which had a 99.998% uptime.

One site that clearly sticks out, and not in a excellent way, is paypal.com. Even after thoroughly investigating why it had an average response time of 3,800 ms during December last year, we can’t find any additional reason than that the site is just that slow. And note that paypal.com scored a 99.998% uptime during December.

Response time per day

According to ComScore, December 2011 had seven days that saw online sales above $1 billion per day. We were wondering if increased traffic on those seven days meant slower response time from the e-commerce sites. Here’s what it looks like when we calculate the average response time for all sites in our study for each day, in December 2011.

As you can see, there is no apparent relationship between how much was sold on a particular day and the average response time. There are also no sudden and major shifts in average response times, with two exceptions:

• December 9 to 10: We can’t find any particular reason for this being a busy online shopping time.
• December 22 to 23: December 23 was the last day customers in the US could house orders and have the goods delivered on time for Christmas. A last-minute rush to order things may clarify the increase in response time.

This means there is no support for the notion that just because lots of goods and services are being sold, sites will deliver slower response times.

In fact, the average response time per day in December 2011 was 404 ms, and the average response time per day for the top 7 days in terms of online spending was 402 ms.

All in all, a excellent month for e-commerce

The monitoring of these sites continues, and we’re sure to return with another report in the future. We also add to and adapt the list of sites on a continuous basis, to be able to give you the most up-to-date and relevant results.

In this study, we were pleasantly surprised that 50% of the sites scored a exact 100% uptime, and many of the sites also showed an impressive response time performance.

Did you do an online shopping during the celebration season last year? Were you annoyed or perhaps even disrupted by a slow site or a site that was down? Share your experience in the comments.

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From:
Uptime and performance of US e-commerce websites during December 2011 (study)

Pingdom’s movable Podcast is a weekly show in this area Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered the following topics:

• Welcome
• Updates on the progress of the Carbon Chirrup app for Windows Phone. He’s getting ready to submit it again. Fingers crossed
• We’re joined by Mario Lurig, he introduces an article he wrote in this area using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website. One of Mario’s current projects is Dice Candies.

In this area the show

The show is hosted by Magnus Nystedt at Pingdom and Saleh Esmaeili, User Experience Designer at dots & lines in UAE, currently effective on Carbon for Windows Phone and Android.

In each show we give out a money off code for our monitoring service. Listen to the show to catch that coupon and save some money.

Join us

We are always looking for fascinating guests. If you want to join us, get in touch.

Listen to the show

Subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Listen using the SoundCloud player:

Pingdom Podcast by Pingdom

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From:
Pingdom Podcast #5

Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in in this area 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “Disorder of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The public scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

Here’s what it looks like for the top 10 countries, with data going back to Q3 2007. Even though the USA on spot 13 falls outside the top 10, we chose to include it for evaluation.

The global average connection speed continued to increase in the third quarter of 2011, climbing 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. If you look at the chart above, you can see that, over the entire period from Q3 2007, all countries loved increasing speeds. Also, all countries have seen average speeds jump up and down between quarters, although the effect is much more noticeable for South Korea.

Overall, Akamai reported that the worldwide average connection speed increased in Q3, up 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. South Korea saw a growth of over 10% in the quarter. Many additional countries also loved a growth during the quarter, counting Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, and the USA.

In total, Akamai noticed increased average speeds for 86 countries, and a decline for 47 countries. Out of the top 10 countries, only Romania saw a decline in the most recent quarter.

We know what you’re thinking, that South Korea policy the average connection speed, but some additional public is quicker in terms of top speed. We’re sorry to disappoint you, but even in peak connections, South Korea policy, with 46.8 Mbps.

An Internet user’s dream

It would seem like South Korea is somewhat of an Internet user’s dream. The public also enjoys a very high Internet penetration. According to the latest World Bank figures from 2010, 82.5% of South Koreans are online, ranking the public in 11^th house worldwide.

We will continue to monitor Internet connection speeds around the world using Akamai and additional sources. Will South Korea continue to be number one? We’ll see.

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South Korea is still number one – has fastest Internet speed worldwide

Microsoft Windows Vista was released into retail on January 30, 2007, and there’s not been many nice words said in this area it since. It suffered from being ill-assorted with much of existing hardware and software, problems with drivers, imposing annoying wellbeing procedures on users, and more.

It seemed like everyone loved to despise poor Vista, enough to earn it a spot on the list of “Top ten terrible tech products.”

So today we can say pleased fifth birthday to Windows Vista. But what does it look like around the world when it comes to the use of Vista? Is anyone still using the much-maligned OS?

Still more well loved than Mac OS X

In StatCounter’s most recent figures for January 2012, Windows Vista is still the third most used OS in the world, commanding a 10.5% share of the desktop OS market. But Windows XP, released in 2001, domain at nearly 35%, crushing its younger sibling.

And with Windows 7 at 44% worldwide, only in this area two and a half years after release, it would seem clear that users have wanted to avoid Vista, either by never upgrading, or upgrading just as quick as they can.

But that doesn’t mean Windows Vista is not used at all, far from it. In fact, looking at 216 countries around the world, using StatCounter’s data, it’s clear that many millions of public around the world still use Vista. In the map, the redder a public is, the more well loved Windows Vista is there.

From this we get some key numbers:

• 84.2% – Out of the 216 countries included in our list, in 182 of them Windows Vista is the third most commonly used desktop OS, after Windows 7 and Windows XP.
• 26.5% – The highest percentage of Windows Vista usage is in Ireland.
• 1.03% – The lowest Windows Vista usage is in Cuba.
• 16 – The number of countries where Mac OS X is larger than Windows Vista.
• 2 – The number of countries where Linux is larger than Windows Vista.

What in this area Windows 8?

Even as Windows Vista celebrates its birthday, the OS is still hanging in there, with up to 20% of public browsing the web in some countries still using it.

Back in 2010, Windows 7 overtook Vista in just nine months. We can predict with quite some confidence that Windows 8, when it’s released shortly this year, will not overtake Windows 7 with the same speed.

If you’re still running Windows Vista, are you likely to upgrade to Windows 8 once it’s available?

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From:
Pleased 5th birthday Windows Vista – still number 3 OS worldwide

With Valentine’s Day approaching – it’s experience February 14, you know – we want to give everyone the opportunity to be a small extra lovie-dovie and cheesy to the geek in their life.

Now we know that many of you will flock to ThinkGeek or some additional geeky store to pick up some more or less well thought-out Valentine’s gifts, but that’s not excellent enough for us.

With just a simple tweet, you can win a gift certificate to be spent on flowers and chocolates for your geek this Valentine.

All you have to do is send out a tweet telling the world what you will do for the geek in your life for Valentine’s Day. Make sure the tweet includes the #pingdom hashtag and you’re in for a chance to win one out of 20 US$50 gift certificates.

Just click here to find out all the details and enter the competition.

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From:
Treat your geek on Valentine’s Day (competition)

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, fascinating, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and additional geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles on JavaScript performance, use of Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.

This week’s suggested reading

• JavaScript Performance: An article by Steve Souder in this area his speech at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup, which focused on script loading and async snippets.
• What JavaScript’s Inventor Really Thinks In this area Google Dart: Google’s Dart language, which attempts to address JavaScript’s supposed weaknesses, is getting a mixed reaction from the inventor of JavaScript itself, Brendan Eich.
• Node.js inventor extends JavaScript programming beyond browsers: Interview: Ryan Dahl discusses why his invention is catching fire with developers.
• Zend Developer Pulse: Zend, “The PHP Company,” is now doing a quarterly assessment that “takes the pulse on developers.” Here are the results from the initially one from Q4, 2011.
• Monitoring MaxCDN with Pingdom: Taras Mankovski noticed that stylesheets used on one of his sites were not always loading correctly. So he set out to monitor what was experience with Pingdom’s service.
• The future of End-User Experience Monitoring – The core of Application Performance Monitoring: Jonah Kowall at Gartner has published a new research note, discussing this critical aspect of APM.
• How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers: Copyleft licenses have been the most well loved choice for new open source projects. Recently, though, developers and companies seem to be moving from the GPL in favor of less restrictive permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind the trend and how does it impact your business?
• Ruby on Rails 3.2 said to speed Web app development: The new version of the Ruby on Rails framework features enhancements like a quicker dev mode that could aid Web development.
• The Disorder Of NoSQL In 2012: Siddharth Anand, a senior member of LinkedIn’s Distributed Data Systems team, gives his view of where NoSQL is today, at the beginning of 2012.
• 10 programming languages that could shake up IT: These cutting-edge programming languages grant unique insights on the future of software development.
• Node at scale: What Google, Mozilla, & Yahoo are doing with Node.js: Representatives from Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, and startup i.TV talk in this area using Node when instability is not an option.
• And finally…
• Minecraft™ LEGO® CUUSOO Project Passes LEGO Review: There will be an official LEGO set based on Minecraft.

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From:
Weekend must-read articles #1

On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs took to the the boards at the Yerba Buena Focal point for the Arts in San Francisco. The anticipation was that he would unveil Apple’s long-rumored tablet device.

The headline for the event was “Come see our latest creation.” That turned out to be the initially iPad.

And like it or not, the world of technology – perhaps the world in general – has not been the same since.

Over 55 million iPads sold so far

Just before Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he mentioned Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings, which had just been released a couple of days before the event.

He said, “By revenue, Apple is the largest mobile diplomacy company in the world now.” The company reported $15.68 billion of revenue for Q1, 2010.

Quick-forward two years and Apple is the largest company in the world, period, with $46.33 billion of revenue reported for Q1, 2012. And iPad has been a huge part of that success, selling 15.4 million units in just the last quarter lonely. Since its initiation, over 55 million iPads have been sold.

Apple sold more iPads in the latest quarter than HP sold PCs, according to Gartner’s estimate.

Mind the video not more than and relive the initially time Apple showed off its new device. The embedded video is just the initially part of the presentation; the additional parts are available on YouTube.

Soon, the iPad 3

Now there are rumors in this area iPad 3, supposed to be introduced soon with a higher pledge show, quicker processor, and possibly also LTE.

Will iPad 3 be as revolutionary as the initially iPad? No, but there’s every possibility that it will only reinforce Apple’s domination of the tablet market.

Do you have an iPad or some additional type of tablet? Competition in this space is heating up, and consumers are given more of a choice, which can only be excellent.

Let us know what your thoughts are on iPad and tablets in the comments.

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From:
Apple celebrates iPad’s second birthday

China has come a long way quick in the world of supercomputers and now occupies the number two and number four spots on the Top 500 list.

Now the public has full another major step forward by being only the third public in the world, after Japan and the USA, to launch a supercomputer made out of processors made in the public.

Just a few days ago, the Sunway Bluelight, a supercomputer that uses processors designed and built in China, was place into operation.

China is now number two

On the latest Top 500 list, from November 2011, only four out of the 500 computers use non-USA processors, and China is number two behind USA with 75 supercomputers on the list.

Japan is currently top of the supercomputing world with the Fujitsu-built K Computer, capable of more than 10 Petaflops per second in processing prowess.

China’s Tianhe-1A, then capable of 2.5 Petaflops, held the throne for a while in 2010, but since then China has not topped the list again.

Surely the Chinese authorities are keen on reclaiming the throne and perhaps they can do so with the Sunway Bluelight MPP. It is presently at number 14 on the Top 500 list.

Sunway Bluelight MPP

But it’s not for its performance, nor for its energy efficiency that the Sunway Bluelight is making headlines. It’s because it’s completely built with Chinese-designed and manufactured processors.

The Sunway Bluelight MPP was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Focal point in Tianjin, eastern China. It consists of of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Place in another way, 1,000 trillion calculations per second is a Petaflop.

According to China Daily the supercomputer was place into operation just a few days ago, something also noted by an article in Inside HPC, which also included the following video:

The supercomputing future is fascinating

No doubt, there is a lot experience in the field of supercomputing, much of which is never known in wider circles. Us geeks at Pingdom try to keep up with developments and report what we find especially compelling to you.

You may also want to go read our article where we compare the K Computer to Apple’s iPad. We try to figure out how many iPads it takes to match the supercomputer’s processing power.

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From:
New era in supercomputing is born – China’s homegrown Sunway Bluelight is operational