whale

This week we've seen a lot of the "fail whale," the cartoon cetacean that Twitter uses as a placeholder when its servers are swamped and its millions of tweets are inaccessible. Part of it's because, as Twitter has said, they've needed to do some crucial infrastructure repair this summer. That hasn't been made any easier by the global frenzy surrounding the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa: World Cup goals are delivering knockout blows to Twitter, and surprise results of games can be even worse. Right around the Netherlands' unexpected victory over Brazil … Read more

It's been way too long, but CNET's own Molly Wood is back for a special cross-coastal episode of The 404! We chat with Molly about what she's been up to lately, including a new Molly Rants blog on CNET and her recent conversation with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. She also hints at future CNET Conversation guests, so stay up on CNET TV for the latest news.

Molly is a perfect fit for The 404--don't believe us? Check out the latest episode of The Buzz Report for a ridiculous "study" from the U.K. Guardian that links syphilis outbreaks to Facebook! "Professor" Peter Kelly, the director of public health for the town of Teesside, links a sudden increase of syphilis in students to their propensity toward the popular social networking Web site , and that is the only evidence he offers. We're still struggling to draw the connection ourselves, but suddenly MySpace doesn't seem that bad after all.

The latest Burger King ad campaign is blowing our minds--apparently they're sponsoring Digg.com's 404 page with an ad for the $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger that will appear when users type in a query with no results. The exact message, according to WalletPop reads, "No results for 'Your Search Error' were found. Looks like your search had a typo. Blame it on your tiny hands. The beefy $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger gives tiny hands some trouble, too." Sponsoring an error page sounds counterintuitive for Digg since we assume that most of its users are tech-savvy. Maybe they'd have more success sponsoring Twitter's Fail Whale page.

Stick around for plenty more stories about the world's hottest chili pepper, cellphone etiquette, amateur snapshots from space, and, of course, we wouldn't let Molly leave without giving us a little taste of her famous nerd voice. Have a great weekend everyone!

Seriously, Twitter? We thought the company had learned by now that Steve Jobs has the mystical power to instantly summon the fail whale--or in other words, that nerd chatter surrounding any kind of Apple product announcement is enough to swamp the microblogging service's infrastructure.

An hour before Apple's San Francisco event to the much-hyped tablet device now known as the iPad, Twitter had already slowed to a crawl, spitting out tweets between eight and fifteen minutes late--and sometimes out of order--on both the Twitter.com home page and third-party clients. It doesn't seem like there were … Read more

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," … Read more

Earlier this week, I posted a video featuring an SUV, the T-98 Kombat, as made by Russian manufacturer Dartz (whose $1.5M Dartz Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition extravagantly decked out in whale penis leather--how high-brow is that--even got lip service recently on "The Colbert Report"). Anyhoo, this particular blog (located here for your convenience) garnered the snide comment of "It looks like a Hummer...big deal." Well, funny that you should say that, sir, as today's video features the Dartz Kombat one-on-one against the Hummer H1. Let's get ready to rumble!

The Dartz … Read more

Sometimes a gadget comes along that sweeps you off your geeky feet. Also, it's not very often that a curiously upholstered SUV comes along and crashes into the podcast like a wrecking ball. Today we bring you all of the above in one episode.

Motorola Droid

The commercial

Dating habits of iPhone users: A profile

Molly’s new true love: HP Envy 15

The tech world is all too familiar with Twitter's "fail whale" and have become accustomed to Gmail failures (which are inevitably chronicled on Twitter.) And while sometimes it's infrastructure (such as routers and switches) rather than software that fails, it often seems as if we too readily accept that software will inevitably breakdown.

Mark Donsky, director of product management at Coverity, commented recently about a recent static analysis of open-source projects performed on the Scan site that showed a 71.9 percent correlation between the number of lines of code and number of defects found.

This is of course, not an open-source problem but a general issue that occurs as more code is integrated into products. I've been told that Windows is developed with two quality assurance people to every engineer as the product has grown over the years.

Coverity is focused on software integrity and advocates static analysis early in the development cycle. While testing of all kinds, including static analysis are obviously good ideas, the tools and methods vary dramatically by engineering organization. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Object Management Group (OMG) recently paired up to form a consortium to establish standards for software quality. … Read more

Aside from some technical difficulties today and a giant bug bite, we've got a great show featuring all three of your favorite Web celebrities. Before we get to the stories, we want to remind everyone of The 404 logo contest and of our appearance on our buddy Clayton Morris' FoxNews.com's Strategy Room to talk about all the good tech, video game-related goodness at 2 p.m. EST.

On today's show, find out ways that kids now are using abbreviations in text messages to hide things from their parents. Apparently, "RU/18" is something that kids these days are getting on their cell phones. Also, Pfizer is giving away free three-month supplies of Viagra and Lipitor because of the recession, but only if you were on the drugs before you got laid off. We hope Justin isn't itching to get fired for this deal.

In regard to a story about China shutting down a sex-themed park, Wilson gives us way too much information about "the talk" with his mom when he was 15. Justin and Jeff learned everything from "Sesame Street." Speaking of more things naughty, there is a new version of "Star Trek" called "Star Trix", and we can't really say much more about it other than it's totally NSFW.

Finally, showers make you more productive at work. Just be sure to watch out for peephole-size openings at work. Be sure to write in at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. We'd love to see more of your submissions for our logo contest. See you on Tuesday after the Memorial Day break!

The 404 crew goes to see the new "Star Trek" film by director J.J. Abrams. It's a reboot of the venerable Star Trek television series that most geeks grew up watching. Our good buddy and Photoshop contest winner Jacky W. Chen came with us, along with Edouard, our new bouncer.

We try to keep the show spoiler-free today, but in case you didn't know from the movie poster, Tyler Perry is in the movie. Overall, we think it's a great, fun film, but there are some deep plot holes you could fly the Enterprise through. Check out our video wrap-up from the opening here in New York on CNET TV.

On today's show, we find out the origins of the name Twitter. Apparently, its etymology is whale-based. The Natural History Museum Whale also follows us today. In more crazy news from the Web, "DJ Hero" comes out soon to ensure that the next generation of children will not know how to play a single real musical instrument.

In more video game news, Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier is rated T for teen, but on the box, it contains "alcohol references, fantasy violence, mild language, partial nudity, and suggestive themes." We wonder what you have to do to get a M-rating now. Finally, if you're still living your mother's basement and playing World of Warcraft, we've got a gadget for you that will ensure that you will never get a girlfriend. It is a hut that will let players isolate themselves from the outside world, feed them, and possibly even wipe their butts. We're not sure if the last one is really a feature, but it's definitely in the same vein.

Keep calling into the show at 1-866-404-CNET (2638). We love your voice mails. Next week, we've got Molly Wood joining us on the show along with the equally lovely @LizMoney from the Gadget411 and Anna David!