Filed under: Web services, web 2.0

Some of our questions about Twitter’s recent and well documented downtime have been answered by the Twitter Dev team.

This is a nice move from Twitter, and we’ve watched a slow progression into open communication and transparency happen over the past few weeks in Twitter-land. They’ve been using services like Get Satisfaction to open up the conversation with those who are passionate enough to care.

And there are a lot of us who care.

Enough to start 2,146 different topics on Twitter alone.

Some of the Twitter faithful asked obvious questions like “Why Ruby?”, while some of the superior questions highlighted were “Why wasn’t Twitter built as a messaging system from the begin?”. The answer was quite honest, and it was basically that Twitter was a one day project and it’s success was not projected.

Very humbling for a company with funding to come out and speak behind the scenes nit and grit. Check out the full post.

We hope to see more of this from Twitter and from other companies as well.

Twitter has also opened up a Tumblr blog to keep us up to date on all of the important status information.

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Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, Industry, Competitive strategy, Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), General Electric (GE), India, China

After posting better-than-expected earnings, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has a plan to keep improving. It says that two-thirds of its sale should come from outside the U.S. by 2013. It is a brilliant plan, but it might not work.

According to Reuters, at the rate things are going “two-thirds could come in five years,” said Steve Felice, head of the company’s Asia operations, referring to total company revenue. Dell’s earnings report showed that overseas sales were already growing much faster than those in the U.S. Total revenue at the company was up 9% to almost $16.1 billion. (Read the full transcript of the conference call that followed the earnings announcement.)

Getting solid growth out of Asia and developing regions can be tricky. GE (NYSE: GE) recently stated that its revenue expectations in China and India might be disappointing if the regions are hit by an economic slowdown.

Large growth in Asia depends on the Chinese GDP growing at a rate of 10% and emerging markets doing at least as well. With rising inflation in those countries and a possible drop in exports due to a faltering U.S. economy, the dream of Dell and other U.S. multinationals might go off track.

The other challenge to Dell’s plans is they’re the same as the plans of a number of its competitors, especially Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and China-based Lenovo. Not everyone in the industry can get two-thirds of their sales outside the U.S. unless those regions are experiencing hyper-growth.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247Wall St. and the author of the Tens Stocks Under $10 newsletter.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “You can’t make stuff like this up. The EU is actually testing a prototype system of cameras in airplanes to monitor passengers’ facial expressions in order to detect both terrorism and ‘air rage.’ The Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project used an Airbus A380 fuselage with six wide-angle cameras to watch for people running or loitering near the cockpit door, as well as a camera in the back of each seat to watch for facecrime like sweating too much, or acting nervous. But that’s okay, because the system won’t alert anyone until it sees a ‘combination of signs,’ instead of just one stray expression, or they might accidentally catch a lot of people who are afraid of flying or of being watched.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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kickassweb writes “If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to cease torrents, there’s now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad. It’s released under the LGPL and runs under Win2K, XP, and Vista. Quoting: ‘While the reset packet detection system included in this release is of interest, NNSquad views this package as more important in the long run as a development base for a broad range of network measurement functionalities and associated communications and analysis efforts.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FeatherBoa points out that the New Democratic Celebration in Canada has introduced legislation to limit the amount of control Canadian ISPs can exert over their subscribers. The bill would amend the Telecommunications Act to “prohibit network operators from engaging in network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination, subject to certain exceptions.” Support for net neutrality in Canada has been building for quite a while now. Quoting CBC News: “‘This bill is about fairness to consumers,’ said Charlie Angus, the NDP’s digital spokesman. It also looks to prohibit ‘network operators from preventing a user from attaching any device to their network and requires network operators to make information about the user’s access to the internet available to the user.’ The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases, Angus stated, such as providing stable speeds for applications such as gaming or video conferencing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An anonymous reader writes “I’m a fairly new physics professor at a well-ranked undergraduate university. When I arrived, I was surprised to discover there were no personal programming stipulations for our majors. This has led to a series of fairly animated faculty curriculum conversations, driven by the question: to what extent should computer programming be a part of an undergraduate science education (in particular, physics)? This is a surprising line of questioning to me because in my career (dominated by research), I’ve never seriously even questioned the need. If you are a physics major, you learn to program. The exact language isn’t so important as is flow control, file handling, basic methods/technique, basic resource management, and troubleshooting. The methods learned in any language can then be ported over to just about any numerical or scientific computational problem. Read on for the rest of the reader’s questions and his experiences dealing with faculty who have their own ideas.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sandman1971 writes “Over the long Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 was the target of a malicious Denial Of Service Attack which brought R3 to its knees. After investigating the matter, it was discovered that the source of the attacks came from MediaDefender, the famed company hired by the MPAA and RIAA to try and stop the spread of illegal file sharing. The kicker? Revision3 was taken down for running a bittorent tracker to distribute its own legal content.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AJILON FINANCE

Behavioural Finance

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The Chinese Finance Association

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The American Finance Association Home Page

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The RIAA just can’t get enough of going after University of Maine students, but it appears that the judges in Portland, Maine, may be getting wise to the industry’s lawyers’ antics. RIAA counsel submitted yet another ex parte discovery order to the Court (’ex parte’ meaning ‘without notice’), in BMG v. Does 1-11, but this time the judge refused to sign, pointing out that there’s no emergency since there is no evidence that records are about to be destroyed [PDF]. This is the same judge who has previously suggested the imposition of Rule 11 sanctions against the RIAA lawyers, accusing them of gamesmanship.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Aidtopia writes “FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing auctioning off an unused part of the 25 MHz spectrum on the condition that the winner provide free wireless World wide web access. The proposal sets coverage targets that ramp up to 95% of the population within 10 years. The catch: the provider must filter out obscene content.” I wonder what definition of “obscene” the FCC would like to use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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