Tag: announcements

Digg.com sold to Betaworks

Catching up with Slashdot today, I read about Digg.com being sold to Betaworks:

The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: ‘Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks’ social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.

This brings back a lot of memories.  Back when Digg.com started, it became a “big thing” almost instantly.  There was plenty of hype around it, and many people went as far as predicting the death of Slashdot.  Digg was supposed to be some sort of new and better Slashdot.  But when I tried using Digg.com, I immediately thought that that was not the case.

The two sites are very different.   One of the most obvious difference is that Slashdot is more focused on the technology, and Digg covers pretty much everything and anything.   But that wasn’t the most important difference for me.  The most important for me was that Slashdot seems to be focused around discussions and commentary, while Digg.com was just a delivery system for the news articles.  And even back then there were numerous resources where you could find news.  Finding the news hasn’t been the problem for years.  But finding good commentary and discussions has always been.  And still is.

Slashdot comments were and still are its greatest value.  Digg had discussions as well, but somehow they weren’t as valuable.  And if I think about it for a second, for me personally, the greatest value of Digg was not the actual site Digg.com, but the Diggnation show.  Which, once again, provided commentary and discussions of the top stories from Digg.com.  Too bad that is discontinued now as well.

PHP 5.4.0 released

These days, it is hard to imagine a web developer or an advanced web user who is not involved with PHP somehow.  For all of you folks, there are some good news – PHP 5.4.0 has just been released.  Of course, it will take a bit until it is well tested and pushed to most hosting companies, but you should take a brief look at the changelog to make sure you know what to expect.  Some of my favorite changes are:

  • Long-awaited removal of many configuration options: register_globals, register_long_arrays, allow_call_time_pass_reference, magic_quotes_gpc, etc.
  • Long-awaited removal of some confusing session-related functions: session_register(), session_unregister(), and session_is_registered().
  • Change of default_charset from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
  • Added Traversable iterator in mysq_result for MySQLi.
  • Plenty of performance improvements and memory optimization.
  • Plenty of bug fixes.

Also, have a look at the migrating from 5.3 to 5.4 document.

Good news from CheapVPS.co.uk

Through the years of hosting this blog as well as many other websites, I’ve received plenty of bad news from hosting companies. “We’ve been hacked”, “we lost your data”, “the company is shutting down”, “we are increasing the hosting fees for your plan”, and so on and so forth. In fact, now that I see an email from my hosting company I automatically assume that it’s bad news.

Gladly, my current hosting company – CheapVPS.co.uk – is better than most that I had experiences with, and it’s working hard to change my perspective. Their efforts seem to be paying off. Here is an email from them I found in my mailbox this morning.

Dear Customer,

We have some good news regarding your OpenVZ VPS!

Over the next 4 weeks we’ll be migrating all of our OpenVZ customers over to brand new, much higher specification servers.

There will be no changes to your account or your billing and the only downtime we anticipate should be for around 10 minutes while IP routes are updated to point to the new servers. Your IP address will not change.

Whilst every effort is taken on our part to keep things backed up, we recommend that you ensure you have adequate backups in place, prior to this planned migration.

We will be starting with hardware node vz1uk on Tuesday 29th November and working our way through to vz43uk. You will be able to check the node you are on, from your SolusVM control panel, we will also email you the night before we move your VPS over.

So to sum up:

  • No changes to billing
  • No changes to your account or IP address
  • Upgraded server hardware for no charge

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to submit a support ticket at :
https://secure.cheapvps.co.uk/

Kind Regards

CheapVPS

Thank you guys, you are awesome!

Native Client built into Google Chrome 14

TechChrunch points out that Native Client is coming built into Google Chrome 14:

As Google notes on their Chrome Blog blog today, the latest beta version of Chrome (version 14) has Native Client built-in. Their implementation allows for C and C++ code to be executed inside of the browser while maintaining the security that a web technology like JavaScript offers.

This is a big deal.  This is a bridge between system software and web applications.

Google+ – yet another social network

The rumors of a new social network from Google were confirmed yesterday with the announcement of Google+.  There are quite a few interesting ideas there.

Firstly, I’d been waiting for a proper social network from Google for ages.  Google Wave was more of a collaboration tool, which failed.  Google Buzz, even though useful, is not enough.  I am using Google for plenty of other things – search, email, news reading, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing of documents, etc – it only makes more sense to wrap it all around with a social network.

Secondly, I’m glad to see that Google is trying to solve the major problem that I have with each and every other social network in use today – sharing with specific groups of people.  I was born in one country, but currently live in another.  I speak two languages, which are not shared by most of my connections.  I have a number of different interests.  I’ve worked with many people in a few companies across several industries.  I desperately need a way to share with only specific groups of people.  I know that some social networks tried to provide the functionality – Facebook and Flickr, for example – but it’s not trivial.  I need more automation and control for that process.   Google+ has something called Circles, which looks and sounds like what I need.

Thirdly, video conferencing.  It’s been long overdue.  And the only real option there is now is Skype, which I’d rather stop using altogether.

Fourthly, group chats. Especially on the mobile.  There are a few alternatives that were developed in the last couple of years, but it’s hard to migrate all your contacts to yet another protocol.  Enough of my contacts are using Google, so this sounds promising.

Too bad, Google+ is still not available to everyone – it’s invitation only.  Hopefully, Google won’t repeat the mistake of the Google Wave, when they delayed the masses for so long that most people left before their friends joined.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, have a look this TechCrunch article and this GigaOm post.