UCT's extra bandwidth

UCT seems to have gotten some extra temporary bandwidth today. Looking at the graphs we see a spike at 14h00 (GMT+2) in the traffic graphs.



Most of the increased bandwidth usage seems to have consumed international traffic and so that international portion of UCT's bandwidth allocation is finally pegged against the limit of 26 Mbps.



Which is interesting.

Because it means that until now, the international traffic has been crowded out by national traffic. Much of which will be to the Akamai cluster at IS, and the upcoming Google Global Caches (GGCs) and local servers.

So more international bandwidth isn't going to help unless the actual "last-mile" to UCT is drastically improved.

Facebook making money via Google

Does anyone else see a Google Custom Search box beneath the applications list?

Facebook could be raking in some serious money from that.

Facebook CDN

I don't know how this slipped through the cracks, but I've just noticed that Facebook has started hosting some content on static.ak.fbcdn.net [fbcdn presumably = facebook content distribution network]

Is Facebook planning on using multiple CDNs?

Both static.ak.fbcdn.net and static.ak.facebook.com seem to be hosted by Akamai, so for us "lucky" .ac.za we get routed through IS. This is actually good news, as we have a very high-speed connection to IS from TENET. Unfortunately, most institutions connect slowly into TENET (~30 Mbps for UCT!) and implement some shaping on popular websites. So we don't get most of the benefit.

Stephenson <=> Protagonist

So I installed the Six Degrees Facebook app, and while browsing famous and/or interesting people I found that Neal Stephenson is friends with... Hiro Protagonist.

<=>


Talk about life imitating art. Or is that life intimating art?

Facebooks $10m 'fund'

You may have read reports of Facebooks US$10m fund.

After much praising of the "fbfund"'s less onerous conditions (no equity required) as compared with traditional vernture capital, we find hidden away near the end of the article the following nugget:

Accel Partners and The Founders Fund will have the right of first refusal to provide future venture capital financing to companies.

So they do want equity after all (via their right to provide venture capital financing), but only on the successful companies. I wonder if the tax implications are better this way.

All in all

Thank you Pink Floyd, Facebook, and especially b3ta!