Comments on: Debate: Can the Internet handle big breaking news?

CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh debate whether the tendency of Web sites to stagger under high demand can be avoided, or is even that big of a problem.

[bvdon]

So... the DVD is not dead. Simply, we can't stream these large amounts of data on the Internet in great numbers. We've got a ways to go before the physical media goes away.

And music? Don't get me started with the crappy MP3 quality. What ever happened to high fidelity? We have foregone high fidelity these past 10 years with the MP3, Ipod, etc.

At the very least, we need 44.1Khz, 16 bit stereo. Vinyl and tape have yet to be bested by anything digital.

[James5mith]

Sudden spiking demands is probably one of, if not the only, vaiid argument of cloud computing. A breaking news day that has a 100 fold increase over a normal news day? The cloud picks up the slack until levels are back down to normal, you pay for the extra power (literal, CPU, network, etc.) that you use, but only when you use it.

The only question with cloud computing, and the one that prevents me from ever even thinking it's a valid idea, what happens when your "cloud" provider uses the same economic theory to build their infrastructure as everyone else? If one cloud provider offers service to all the major news outlets, will they truly have the capacity to handle increased spikes from them simultaneously, or will they simply choke the way the current system does.

Cloud computing is a good fit for the spike & surge demand usage model, due to it's on-demand payment and capacity structure. But until it's truly distributed, until you know that your capacity is not going to be hindered because a bean-counter decided to only budget infrastructure for "normal" not worst-case usage scenarios, it's not trustworthy enough to consider.

[LDMcLean]

Bing Crosby was certainly one of the greatest performers of the 20th Century. Between 1927 and 1962 he scored 368 charted records under his own name, plus twenty-eight as a vocalist with various bandleaders, for a total of 396. No one else has come close; compare Paul Whiteman (220), Frank Sinatra (209), Elvis Presley (149), Glenn Miller (129), Nat ?King? Cole (118), Louis Armstrong (85), the Beatles (68). He scored the most number one hits ever, 38, compared with 24 by the Beatles and 18 by Presley.

Between 1915 and 1980 he was the only motion-picture star to rank as the number one box-office attraction five times (1944-48). Between 1934 and 1954 he scored in the top ten fifteen times.

He was a major radio star longer than any other performer, from 1931 until 1954 on network, 1954 until 1962 in syndication. In 1960 he received a platinum record as First Citizen of the Record Industry for having sold 200 million discs, a number that doubled by 1980.

He also recorded a song called "White Christmas" and Bing's recording is still listed by the Guinness as the greatest selling recording of all time, despite the short-term fuss in 1998 about "Candle In The Wind".

[stridergak]

It is kind of sad that the death of Michael Jackson is considered big news. I remember the internet in my part of the world slowing to unusability when the towers fell on 9/11. This is more the issue, I think.
I wonder if anyone has looked into whether it really was largely unavailable for several hours. Did this happen all over or just in pockets?
A real emergency is the issue.

[mikeblogs]

Using the death of media icons to test the resilence of the internet is a bit bad taste, but a bit better than the UK gov who store their bad news to release at such times.

The old phone network stays running in these situations because they start blocking your call attempts to keep within capacity. 7/7 in London, Mobile phone network moved to emergency mode, which meant they were reserved for key staff - mass blocking for ordinary punters. The Internet does better.

We need more transparency on our internet packages, particularly what peak hour allocation per user is engineered into the system. In the UK this looks to be anything from 15-30Kbps per second per user enough for text based web pages, but not enough for Video streaming.

Emergency planners when they get around to it will probably suggest that during a real emergency we keep the video streaming to a minimum, to reflect the actual capacity in place. This is less an internet engineering issue and more a transparency of service parameters. FCC need to look at labeling - here's one http://bbbritain.co.uk/kitemark.aspx

[mikeblogs]

Using the death of media icons to test the resilence of the internet is a bit bad taste, but a bit better than the UK gov who store their bad news to release at such times.

The old phone network stays running in these situations because they start blocking your call attempts to keep within capacity. 7/7 in London, Mobile phone network moved to emergency mode, which meant they were reserved for key staff - mass blocking for ordinary punters. The Internet does better.

We need more transparency on our internet packages, particularly what peak hour allocation per user is engineered into the system. In the UK this looks to be anything from 15-30Kbps per second per user enough for text based web pages, but not enough for Video streaming.

Emergency planners when they get around to it will probably suggest that during a real emergency we keep the video streaming to a minimum, to reflect the actual capacity in place. This is less an internet engineering issue and more a transparency of service parameters. FCC need to look at labeling - here's one http://bbbritain.co.uk/kitemark.aspx

[Dooley89]

Totally amazing how there are even Fan Boy arguments on a news site about which musician is better, oh boy what an age we live in...

[AlexesC]

I think part of the reason his death generated so much noise compared to some of the bigger stars that have died has to do with the fact that for the last---I actually can't remember the years before we were making fun of MJ.

So many people were using him as the butt of every child-molester joke ever. Talking about the work he got done, and so on.

As soon as he died, they were faced with an onslaught of guilt and subsequently shock. The thought of the last thing they ever said about this man before he was alive being some sort of medically altered child-molesting freak really makes someone's death hit home, the way that a lovable person's death (Billy Mays) just can not.

All the bs about his death being a shock because he was such a huge star. Heath Ledger was a huge star. His death was a shock, but it didn't do what MJ's death did. Why? Because the last thing anyone said about Heath Ledger before he died was how excited they were about The Dark Knight.

It makes no matter if the things they said about MJ were based on alleged truth, the point is, when you're a bully, and the "nerd" dies, something about it isn't so much fun anymore.