DevOps Roundup: July 2 - 11

Browser Wars Update — IE Still Ahead
Net Applications updates the Browser Wars stats — currently IE still hanging on strong with 54% of the market share while Chrome is creeping up on Firefox’s 2nd place lead (19% to 20%, respectively).

Big Bang for San Diego Fireworks
The 15-min-condensed-to-15-s fireworks show/bust in San Diego was caused by a computer bug, says experts, and not anything to be faulted on the pyrotechnic side. The glitch must have been downloaded with the software coordinating the launch between the five barges.

Meet Nibiru, AOLs New Micro Data Center
AOL announces Nibiru, the micro data center that is about the size of a refrigerator and can plug into a single outlet. Micro data centers create new possibilities for expanding technology to remote locations, saving money on infrastructure, better solutions for data protection, and even the ability to create your own CDN.

Outages Normal For Cloud Development
Geoff Arnold, an industry consultant and entrepreneur-in-residence at U.S. Venture Partners, reflects on the recent AWS outage and concludes that for the size of AWS, Amazon isn’t doing that bad of a job. Services like Amazon and Google have major disadvantages right off the bat being first in the industry as well as having infrastructure that is too vast to test expansively. The complexity within cloud services also cause unpredictable failures to arise.

Behind the Scenes: Communication at the Olympic Games
The Register gives a brief history of communication at the Olympic Games and lays out the technology behind this year, the most connected games yet.

How Olympics Site will Handle Cyber Attacks
The Globe and Mail describes how experts have planned for cyber attacks during the Olympic Games and why they are confident they can overcome any kind of attack. (Answer: they hired ethical hackers.)

Netflix Making Comeback From 2011 Q3 Losses
Cable providers beware, Netflix announces 1 billion hours of video watched in June. For the 26 million worldwide subscribers, this is about 1.25 hr of video watched a night.

The Connected Car: Your New Data Hog (and the Solution to Reduce Costs)
As cars are becoming more connected with real time applications, the cost association with the data usage is growing and may even end up more than your cellphone bill. MIT grad student Alex Cornejo has come up with the idea of aggregating data from clusters of near by cars and establishing a cellular connection from a lead car in the cluster once a threshold has been crossed to reduce individual costs.