Google users hit by mail blackout

Google has apologised for the outage that hit business and consumer users of its popular e-mail service.

The GMail service went offline at 0930 GMT and, Google claims, was unavailable to all for "approximately two and a half hours".

But anecdotal evidence suggests it was out of action for many users for about four hours - one of the longest downtimes ever suffered by Google.

More than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, according to comScore.

In a statement posted on its official Google blog it said: "We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could.".

It said its engineers were still investigating the "root cause" of the problem.

"We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously," it added.

It said that those getting back into their e-mail may have to fill in a captcha form that asks people to decipher and re-type some scrambled letters before getting access to messages.

According to comScore, Google has the world's third most popular web mail service behind Hotmail with 283 million users and Yahoo with 274 million e-mail users.

Professional suite

More than a million business around the world use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail. Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.

Professional users are covered by a service level agreement that promises to be 99.9% operational in any calendar month.

The "premier edition" of the Apps service costs $50 (£34) per user for a year.

According to Google, its e-mail service suffered an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month in 2008.

The last outage of note was in August 2008 when users were unable to use Google Mail for "a couple of hours".

After the incident Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Mail, said in a blog post: "We're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly."

On its support page for Google Mail, the firm said "A number of users have had difficulty accessing GMail today.

"The majority are now able to access their e-mail accounts again and we're hoping to have service restored for the remainder very soon."

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The BlackBerry® STORM

What makes the Storm different from other Blackberry devices to come before it

Well, the lack of a physical qwerty keyboard is one thing, the other is that this is one of the first devices from RIM primarily marketed at non-business users. Unlike the recently released BOLD , the Storm has applications such as AOL and Yahoo Messenger, Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace available on the device out of the box.Before you jump to conclusions though, the Storm still retains business like functions of email attachment download (pdfs display, but not correctly), Microsoft Word To Go, and Excel To Go.
Weighing in at just under six ounces the Storm is a bit heavy in your pocket and doesn't come packed with a belt holster like it's cousin the Bold.Wrapping around the phone is a satin chrome bezel complemented with shiny chrome soft keys handling volume control, the 3.2 MP camera with flash, and voice dialing. The touchscreen has a generous 480x360 lines of resolution and below it you will find the usual Send, Menu, Back, and End keys. The top of the phone is adorned with a screen lock key on one side and a mute key on the other.

As a device, the Storm has given loyal BlackBerry users and new BlackBerry subscribers a touchscreen phone -- the defining trend in smartphones.

Available Features

• Camera (3.2 MP)
• Built-in GPS
• Media Player
• Video Recording
• BlackBerry® Maps
• Wireless Email
• Organizer
• Browser
• Phone
• Corporate Data Access
• SMS/MMS

Size and Weight

Height:
4.43 inches (112.5 mm)

Width:
2.45 inches (62.2 mm)

Depth:
0.55 inches (13.95 mm)

Weight:
5.5 ounces (155 grams

Display

• High resolution 480 x 360 pixel color display
• Transmissive TFT LCD
• Font size (user selectable)
• Light sensing screen
• Supports over 65,000 colors
• Screen Size: 3.25 inches (diagonally measure

Camera & Video Recording

• Camera: 3.2 MP camera with auto flash, auto focus, 2x digital zoom
• Video Camera: Depending on the amount of built-in memory available for use, a third-party microSD card may need to be properly inserted into the BlackBerry smartphone to enable the video recording feature

Data Input & Navigation

• SurePress™ touch screen
• On screen keyboard: portrait SureType® and Multi-tap, QWERTY landscape
• Dedicated keys: Send, End, Menu, Return

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Windows 7 : the Next Vista ?

The next big version, the one that was supposed to fix everything that was wrong with Vista, is here (at least in pre-beta form), and I can now say -- with some confidence -- that Microsoft has once again dropped the ball.
Just as slow as Vista. In fact, Windows 7's performance is virtually identical to that of Vista SP1 on the same hardware. If you were unhappy with Vista's CPU-hogging, memory-sucking ways, Windows 7 will provide little relief. And don't start with the whole "it's still in beta" crap. This is NO beta – at least not at a kernel-mode level.
Just as consumer-focused as Vista. Home Groups. Media Sharing. Federated Search. All very cool. All very slick. And all very much irrelevant to the enterprise desktop customer (though the Search stuff might be useful in certain scenarios).
Just as confusing as Vista. Microsoft has once again moved stuff around in the UI. After baffling its loyal users by completely upending the XP UI, Microsoft has decided that it wasn't satisfied with the end result.
Overal Evaluation:
looks pretty needs work people need more time to tinker with it, and well if it is Vista with a name change I will advice not buy it.

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