Online im software

Zmanda, a company commercializing the open-source Amanda backup software, announced a partnership by which customers can store their data at Amazon.com's S3--the online Simple Storage Service. The partnership spotlights the growing influence of Amazon's S3, which provides customers with online storage whose costs are tied to the amount of storage needed. It's one of ***

Last week, the Skype VoIP service went down for two days, affecting customers worldwide. On Monday, Villu Arak, writing on the Skype blog Heartbeat, attributed the outage to "a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly." But the root cause? "The disruption," he said, "was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. ***

Thanks to a new charity drive started by Microsoft, IM-obsessed teenagers can now tell their parents that by staying online, they're helping charities like the Sierra Club, Unicef, and the National AIDS Fund. The initiative, called "I'm," is centered around a unique little gimmick: start a conversation in Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger with the word "I'm," and Microsoft will donate a (small) portion of Messenger's advertising revenue to one of its partner charities. Yes, this is real. We're not talking the "forward this e-mail and Bill Gates will donate money" tales of urban legend fame. But it's not quite as simple as you might think. First of all, the "I'm" campaign is tied to Windows Live Messenger, so users of multiplatform IM software like Trillian (as well as other instant messaging clients) aren't included in the deal. ***