Gates, b2, willj - looks very similar.

[PapaiMark]

Microsoft has dismissed reports that it holds "screw Google" meetings once a week in Washington.


Microsoft has denied that the company holds meetings where the company develops strategies to undermine search giant Google.
The denial follows a report by Daily Finance that said, "Microsoft is at the center of a group of companies who see Google as a threat to them in some combination of business and policy...the effort is designed make Google look like the big high-tech bad guy here."

Daily finance went on to say that these meetings are known by some insiders as "screw Google" meetings.

Citing a source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to avoid retribution, Daily Finance reports that the meetings occur once a week, are led by Fred Humphries, Microsoft's chief lobbyist in D.C., and include several people who work for Law Media Group.

"Law Media Group has several people who work full-time on Google-bashing," the source told Daily Finance. "Everybody knows Microsoft is trying to throw roadblocks at Google and knock them off their game. Microsoft is trying to harm Google in the regulatory, legal, and litigation arenas because they're having problems with Google in the competitive marketplace."

Ginny Terzano, Microsoft's Washington spokesperson, called the report absurd.

"This is absurd. While Google is a healthy competitor, Fred is focused on advancing policies that benefit our partners and consumers, and not running meetings of the type you describe. Your sources are badly misinformed, and your information is wrong."

[sabbie]

poor google 

[PapaiMark]

Tuesday, September 01, 2009 11:10 PM PDT
A worldwide outage of Google's Gmail online e-mail system on Tuesday was caused by a traffic jam on its servers, according to Google's official Gmail blog.


The problem was that some recent changes designed to improve traffic flow on request routers, servers designed to direct Web queries to the appropriate Gmail server, overloaded the system after workers took some Gmail servers offline to perform routine upgrades.

"As we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes placed on the request routers," Ben Treynor, site reliability Czar wrote on the Gmail blog. "At about 12:30 p.m. Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system "stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!". This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them also to become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded."

The overload resulted in people around the world being unable to access Gmail for about 100 minutes, Treynor said, though he noted that IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally.

Gmail engineers were alerted to the problem within seconds of the failures and after figuring out what the problem was, brought additional request routers online. Now, Gmail is more than 99.9 percent available to users, he said.

"We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again," he wrote.

One fix the company plans to make is to ensure request routers will work better by having them slow down when overloaded instead of refusing to accept traffic. Treynor said the request routers need to have sufficient failure isolation so that a problem in one data center doesn't affect servers in another data center.

The company will work over the next few weeks to make these changes and further improve reliability, he said.

poor google