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Flickr outage reveals site's scale

Doubtless many Flickr customers were not happy with the site's problems Monday, in which the Yahoo-owned site displayed the wrong images. Perhaps more interesting than the explanation of what went wrong, however, was the revelation of the volume of traffic the photo-hosting site handles.

"Flickr serves hundreds of millions of photos each day. On the highest traffic days, just over a billion photos are served," said Flickr developer Eric Costello in a blog entry about the problem.

That's a lot of photos--more than 11,574 per second on busy days.

Costello also took pains to apologize … Read more

Sell your photos via Flickr?

Dan Heller, author of the Photography Business Blog and a longtime watcher of the idea of selling photos on the Internet, observed Tuesday that there's "low-level buzz about Flickr possibly getting into the stock photo business." He concludes, "For Flickr to do it is obvious. Not doing so while they are on top of the game would be suicide."

It's an interesting possibility. With some tweaks to the Web site and an opt-in check box on the image upload page, Yahoo and Flickr photographers could begin selling images to the sorts of folks who … Read more

Attention IM developers: Exit means exit

The open-source programming movement prides itself on giving people control over their own computers.

So why is it that even in the latest version of Linux I've been trying, Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, clicking the Close button in the upper-right corner of the GAIM instant-messenger software only minimizes the program?

It's not just GAIM, the default IM client software for GNOME. Kopete, the client for the rival KDE user interface software project, exhibits the same behavior.

This program behavior has always bothered me with Windows-based IM software, such as AIM and Yahoo Messenger. But why … Read more

IBM bemoans Joomla-Mambo split

It's unfortunate for the Mambo open-source publishing software project and for its customers that its developers had to decamp with their source code to start the Joomla project, according to a high-ranking IBM software executive.

"It does look like the company that was shepherding this along got a little bit off track on their interests vs. the open-source community's interests," said Rod Smith, vice president of emerging Internet technology for IBM's Software Group, in an interview Tuesday. "That's a bad thing," because Mambo had a lot of traction, and the "fork&… Read more