Earlier this week we studied what countries around the world had lost and gained the most Facebook users over the past 6 months. With Facebook going public today, we thought we’d take a quick look at where the social network has the greatest potential for growth. So we posed this question:...
Exascale computing is the next frontier in the world of supercomputing. While the performance of current supercomputers is measured on the petascale (computer systems capable of producing performance over one petaflops), exascale computing represents a thousandfold increase on the petascale. Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to...
Websites are getting more dynamic, and more heavily scripted. JavaScript is going through something of a renaissance. Perhaps, however, it is time to start reigning in the amount of JavaScript code that’s included on the average web page. Stats from HTTP Archive show an alarming trend: This chart shows an...
Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again. Read on...
Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as...
The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall. But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world. In...
Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers. Every Friday we bring...
“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day. This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating. Besides showing...
We’re looking for guest bloggers for this blog, and you could be one of them. If you follow the Royal Pingdom blog, you know we love cool and geeky stuff, like what’s happening with the Internet, web, performance, gadgets, and more. Do you think you could contribute one or more...
In our continuing series of interviews about web performance, we’re now joined by Yannick Kunegel, Manager, Systems Engineering – Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Citrix Systems. Citrix may not be the company that comes first to your mind when thinking about web performance or web companies. But if you look...
Microsoft is not the company that comes to mind when you think about great design. Apple, perhaps, but not Microsoft. But that may be changing, which we discovered when we looked back over 30 years of hardware designs from Microsoft. Although it took Redmond quite a while to get up...
In this show, we talk to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, about security in general and firewalls in particular. We discuss that Panda Security reported that in Q1 of 2012, 6 million new malware samples were created. We also mention the latest Internet Security Threat Report from...
In just over two years, the share of web traffic in Asia that comes from mobile devices has almost tripled. In fact, in some countries, close to half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. India is very close to mobile traffic breaking 50% of all web traffic, as...
As we reported last Friday, the number of DNS root servers on the Internet has grown significantly the past few years. Now we will take a closer look at how those root servers are distributed across the world. Since the root servers are critical to Internet’s DNS infrastructure, they would...
Today, May 5, it is 20 years since the first version of “the grandfather of 3D shooters” – Wolfenstein 3D – was released. In the two decades since 1992, can you imagine how many hours gamers around the world have spent with that game, not to mention its successors like...
As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the number of Internet users has doubled in the past five years. To handle this enormous influx of users, Internet’s infrastructure needs to grow as well. The Domain Name System (DNS), a critical part of that infrastructure, has more than met the...
After our last interview with a representative of the Apache HTTP Server Project, we didn’t expect to hear so soon again from the leader in web server software. But we now have the great privilege to present an interview about web performance with Sander Temme, member of the Project Management...
This week we thought you would be interested in reading about what’s been happening with Google’s Chrome OS. Google has added functionality, like support for Google Drive, as well as a new UI, but the OS has still not gained mainstream adoption. We picked out a few articles that may...
In January, we reported that South Korea has the fastest average Internet connection speed in the world, a position it’s commanded for many years. Now, in the latest figures from Akamai, covering Q4 2011, South Korea has increased its average Internet speed to 17.5 Mbps with close to 48 Mbps recorded as...
The United States is the “founding father” of the Internet, so it’s somewhat ironic that none of the 50 best-connected cities in the world today is American. Instead, the list of the top 50 cities in terms of connection speed is dominated by South Korea and Japan. Cities from only...
We’re going to show you a chart that confirms what some of you already suspected, and Microsoft probably isn’t too happy about. A lot of people only use Internet Explorer because they have to at the office, but at home they use a different web browser. On workdays around 35.1%...
There’s no doubt that when the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it revolutionized not only the mobile phone industry, but the tech industry at large. But what we have discovered is that, at least in terms of the guiding principles behind the iPhone’s raison d’être, Apple has been thinking...
We’ve noted many successful open source projects and products before on this blog, and the Web is arguably the biggest one of them all. Two such products we’ve failed to recognize, however, are the very first web browser and server, simply called World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee. Today is especially important...
Knäppa is a recyclable camera just introduced by IKEA. It is complete with zoom (move your arms in and out) and image stabilization (rest your arms on something). Clearly, Knäppa is super simple, made out of one sheet of cardboard that folds up, one button, two plastic screws, two batteries, and...
George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the...
