SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

These days if you try to find news involving the word “cloud,” you’re more likely to get an article about cloud computing than you are finding a weather report. If the amount of news referencing “cloud” is anything to go by, the media has embraced this new terminology with open arms, starting in 2008.

Ask yourself this: “What would I use a tablet for?” Regardless of the recent drama surrounding the Crunchpad’s untimely end – and the disappointing Fusion Garage Joojoo tablet taking its place – it seems that the entire tech industry is ready to embrace tablets with open arms. There’s the never-ending hype about the possible Apple tablet, Microsoft Research’s Courier project, and netbook companies like Asus announcing they’re developing tablets in the coming year. We’re also seeing articles predicting 2010 as the year of the tablet, and others espousing why tablets signal the end of netbooks.

Although Lists isn’t a new concept (Friendfeed has had them for months) they have proven to be a great addition to Twitter. Lists make it easier than ever to categorize users and curate content for your followers and yourself. The ability to create lists does indeed add fantastic value to Twitter, and lists can even be grabbed as an embeddable widget that can easily be customized and added to your personal website.
Looking for cool twitterers for your lists? Look no further. Here are 25 notable geeks, picked from five excellent tech lists.

With the release of Google Public DNS, it appears that Google is making good on their earlier call to action for making the Web faster. In conjunction with that announcement several months ago, they launched the “Speed” site at Google Code with the headline “Let’s make the Web faster.” After setting up their DNS servers, which replaces the DNS servers from my ISP, I can confirm that my web browsing is indeed much zippier than before. So much so that it’s sort of shocking that ISP’s don’t seem to do much DNS optimization on their own – then again, why would they?
At first, this got me thinking about the self-serving aspects of Google Public DNS, in addition to Google’s other speed initiatives – which include Chrome, Chrome OS, and the announcement of the SPDY protocol.

There are an impressive number of website analytics packages out there, with a wide range in price and features. But many of those analytics tools are only available online: you have to log in to a website to get at your data. The options for a desktop-based tool are fewer and farther between, but there are a few useful tools out there.
Check out these four options to see if a desktop application will fit the way you handle your website analytics.

When Apple introduced push notifications to the iPhone this summer, we immediately thought of what a great match it would be for our monitoring service. After all, the main point of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service is getting alerts when your website or server goes down.
So, when we started work on version 2.0 of our iPhone app, this was one of our top priorities. Now the new version is here, with push notifications, graphs, and more.

In the past few weeks, there have been some major shifts in the BitTorrent community which have had a resounding impact on the larger world of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. They’ve led to some of the largest BitTorrent sites completely changing focus, or figuring out smarter ways to continue sharing files illegally.
Meanwhile, Adobe announced a massively interesting inclusion in their upcoming Flash player 10.1 update – a seemingly innocuous version number that is adding some world-changing P2P technology to Flash video streaming.
I’d like to discuss these opposing trends of illegal versus more legitimate uses of P2P technology, and what they ultimately mean for how we use the Web.

Google made a huge splash when it announced its plans for the Chrome operating system, a web-centric OS where essentially everything is run through a web browser. One great promise of Google’s Chrome OS is the arrival of low-cost, lightweight hardware, since most of the storage and other data handling is done in the cloud. Perhaps that 100-dollar computer will finally become a reality.
But there is a problem. A rather big one. The strength of the Chrome OS, that it makes maximum use of online resources, also limits its potential adoption. To have any real use of the OS you need a decent Internet connection, and that has some significant implications we need to look at.

Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

Wordpress has risen to be a powerhouse on the Internet that now dominates the blogosphere. It was started by the (now) 25-year-old Matt Mullenweg. Last week he was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. On the show Matt revealed that Wordpress has such a strong presence on the Internet that at least one in three Americans online have visited a Wordpress blog in the last month.
Wordpress lets you use thousands of powerful plugins that complement and extend the platform in a variety of ways. I have scoured the Wordpress Plugin Directory to find the very best plugins to share with you in this post.

Last week Google finally unveiled their much-talked-about Chrome OS, and subsequently worked the tech community into a frenzy. The operating system certainly lived up to Google’s initial promises of being browser-centric – it is basically just the Chrome web browser atop a custom Linux kernel.
Chrome OS is a momentous step towards making the fuzzy concepts of cloud computing more of a distinct reality. What follows are a few reasons why I think it matters, and how it will change the computing landscape by bringing us closer to the cloud than ever before.

It used to be that you’d pay a significant price premium for a slim ultraportable laptop – machines that were smaller and lighter than typical 5-6lb laptops. In the days before netbooks, they were really your only option for getting a thin and light laptop. But now that netbooks have carved out a segment of cheap and portable computers in the $200-$500 range, the ultraportables needed to adapt as well.

Twice a year, the world’s top 500 supercomputers are announced. The most recent winner is the Jaguar which pretty much wiped the floor with the competition, managing a performance benchmark 69% above the IBM Roadrunner which came in second.
Let’s take a closer look at the Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer in the world today.

There’s been talk about Twitter being the “pulse of the web”, and there is no doubt that the real-time web and real-time search are burning hot trends. At the heart of Twitter are its status messages, more commonly known as tweets, where people express opinions, share links and let people know what they are doing. Tweets are like the vital red blood cells in Twitter’s stream of information.
So how many tweets are pulsing through Twitter every day? When do we tweet the most? Read on to find out.

The popular bookmarking service Delicious was unavailable for several hours this morning, European time. A lot of people use the service for tagging and keeping track of bookmarked web pages, and use it instead of their browser’s built-in bookmark functionality. With the service unavailable, their bookmarks were missing in action.

For webmasters and web designers, the question of where to find high quality images and other media to use on your sites can be complicated. It can be expensive to purchase photos, even if you stick to stock photography. If you run a blog or another site that requires lots of photos, you can go broke just by purchasing images. But there is a way that you can legally use photos, music and even text for free: Creative Commons.

Most of us already know that Photoshop is the “industry standard” graphic design program. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s always the best option, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s the best value for money.
At its retail price of 699 USD / 470 EUR, Photoshop isn’t exactly cheap. And let’s face it, not everyone needs the all of Photoshop’s high-end features. For example, Photoshop has the ability to edit images in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) mode, a feature mainly needed by print designers. If you work exclusively with web design, you may not want to pay extra for this feature.
Fortunately, there are more affordable (and sometimes even free) alternatives to Photoshop, and I’ll take a look at some very competent ones in this article.

With the release of the Motorola Droid, it’s becoming clear that 2010 is going to be a very exciting year for Google Android. The operating system is now two years old, and Android 2.0 has begun shipping with new phones.
Gone are the growing pains of introducing a new mobile platform in an iPhone-dominated marketplace and dealing with shoddy first-generation hardware. Now Google, along with the other members of the Open Handset Alliance, can focus on spreading the word of Android with better phones, better software, and an increased presence in the public consciousness.
Here are ten predictions for what will happen with Google Android in 2010.

Perl has been around since 1987 and became an early darling of web developers. These days, however, you don’t hear much about Perl. Everyone seems to be talking about trendier languages like PHP, Python and Ruby, with Perl left in the back as a neglected, not-so-hip cousin.
That might lead you to think that Perl is dying, but as it turns out, it’s still used by plenty of websites out there, including some pretty big hitters.
Here are some of the more popular sites that use Perl extensively today.

In this post Twitter enthusiast Garin Kilpatrick shares his tips on effective ways to get more followers.
It is hard to put a price on a Twitter follower but the host of The Price is Right, Drew Carey, is offering to donate $1 to cancer research for every new follower he receives this year. The following eight tips will enable you to make the most out of your tweets and help you connect with as many followers as possible.