One Shot Design

Tuestday February 24, 2009, 1:30 AM UTC-8. A widespread outage of Google’s mail service left millions of users unable to access their account. Google’s rep Acacio Cruz is acknowledging the problem and promising to resume service as soon as possible.

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.

We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.

Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress.

Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager

According to research firm IDC, netbooks sales grew 12% in Western Europe during 2008, amounting to a 30% market share. IDC predicts a continuing market growth in 2009. Asustek and Freescale representatives are contemplating using Google’s android on netbooks.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg coyly attempted to clarify his company’s policy regarding ownership of user information:

Who owns and controls your Facebook information? This has been a question many have debated over the weekend, but Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, finally gave us the answer (almost) yesterday.

Monster.com’s database having recently been broken in by crackers for the second time raises the question: is your information safe on social networking servers?

Read the full article at PCWorld.com

Barcelona, Spain - British mobile operator Vodafone has unveiled a new Android mobile phone at the Mobile World Congress. The HTC Magic will be the second phone featuring Google’s Linux-based operating system to enter the market. The Magic will be available to Vodafone customers in the UK, Germany, Spain and France; and it won’t be bundled with a SIM card in Italy.

China-based Huawei, maker of the Vodafone 710 and 716, plans to start selling Android phones in the third quarter of 2009. The company is also considering other operating systems such as Symbian and an embedded Linux from the LiMo Foundation.

There is an interesting article on Information Week titled Windows 7 Vs. Linux: The Battle For Your Desktop. The author looks at “how Windows 7 and desktop breeds of Linux shape up against each other, mainly in the light of what’s come before on both sides”. It is a good compement to my previous analysis: To each his own: Linux for netbooks and Windows for laptops.