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Web sites on Thanksgiving Night and Black Friday for some major retailers we caught off guard by shoppers.

Victoria, Macy’s, and Lowe’s we surprised on those two periods which hit them hard.  Their sites slowed down by online browsers and shoppers.  This caused transaction times on their respective sites to come to a crawl.
Black Friday is the time for retailers to turn their red ink black.  The slow down hampered those efforts. Some sites crawled at a rate 4 times slower than normal.  This would cause shoppers to simply use the power of the mouse to shop somewhere else.
Macy’s site saw its load time go from 12 seconds to 15 or 20.  Lowe’s slowed down 300%.  Office Depot’s normal load went from 10 to 25 seconds.   In a time when seconds count this is a big deal for retailers who are trying to stay afloat.

The Mozilla Foundation has seen a 26% spike in revenue over the past year.  At over $66 million in revenue the company behind the open-source web browser Firefox seems to be in good financial health.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s chair said in a blog posting, “”The highlight is that Mozilla remains financially healthy: we’re able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people.”

All seems well with the world…for now.  in 2005 Mozilla recieved about 85% of its revenue from Google.  Some of this cash may be related to a deal the two have where Google is the default option in the Firefox search bar and Google has created a Firefox homepage for searching.

But what happens in 2008 when this contract between Firefox and Google is up?  According to a FAQ page:
We have a range of options. We may continue to work with Google which has so far provided a good fit with what our users find useful in the product. If for some reason that doesn’t make sense then we could look at other potential partners. We have significant retained earnings, which allows us a good degree of flexibility.

Let’s see if Mozilla can still retain its employees and its place in the browser wars after this contract is up.

Mozilla also offers a range of other products such as Thunderbird (e-mail client) and Sunbird (calendar).

With the help of the global PC grid Canadian researchers have been able to squeeze decades of cancer research in about 2 years.

The research team thanks the IBM World Community Grid of PCs and laptops that makes up one of the world’s five biggest supercomputers.  With this supercomputer the researchers say that they were able to the data would have taken 162 years t0 analyze.  The data is part of a study that focuses on proteins that could lead to cancer fighting drugs.

86 million images of over 9,000 proteins that could be linked to cancer were researched by the work of this super computer grid.

So I’m sitting in my local Vespia’s waiting to get my tire fixed.  I have come from work so I had my laptop ready to start “working” on things.  For grins and giggles I figured I’d try to connect to the network using my wifi connection.  To my surprise a “WLAN” popped up with a 2/4 signal strength.

I tried to track down my IP address.  66.155.149.101 happened to show up.  Doing a look-up on this shows that the IP is owned by PAETEC Communications.  Is this something that Vespia’s is running or is from another store nearby?  According to their site:
PAETEC can also help you reduce costs by combining your voice and data networks. Reduce the number of lines by migrating to Voice over IP and get more bandwidth to your location at the same time. Our MPLS VPN product also supports video, so you can conduct conferences and train new employees when needed without having to travel.

Could Vespia’s be using this company to handle their retail traffic and customer base?  How easy would it be for someone to hop on the wireless network and get into the internal network complete with name, addresses, and telephone number, and credit card numbers?

We’ll have to wait until next time, my car’s done.

During their Fall Membership Drive a public radio station out of New York City was holding a contest giving away an Apple MacBook Pro.  You didn’t need to join as a member to get in on the contest, just call in with you information.

I figured, what do I have to loose.  I called into WNYC and gave them my name, address, and phone number.  I figured, these guys are a big public radio station what will they do with my info.

Well two weeks later I got a membership letter from local public television station, Thirteen (WNET) and yesterday I got a letter from the Sierra Club.

This really upsets me.  I am going to write to WNYC and see what the deal is with this and why are they selling my info.