The ancient Greeks were so ahead of their time that sometimes you are truly humbled. Just look at the amazing calendar device called the Antikythera mechanism. (Video included further down.)

The Antikythera mechanism did several things:

• It showed the position and movement of the sun, moon and planets.
• It worked as a calendar.
• It kept track of when the Olympic games and other events were being held.
• It predicted solar eclipses.

It’s the world’s oldest known complex scientific calculator, and some have even gone as far as calling it a computer.

Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here).

For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.

The blog search engine Technorati suffered from both downtime and slowdown during large periods of December 12 and 13. In those two days, the Technorati website was completely unavailable for a total of more than 9 hours.

There are indications that the problems may have been caused by database issues at Technorati.

In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):

An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).

Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.

The website of the UK bookstore Blackwell was unavailable for more than 7 hours this Wednesday, December 10. Blackwell is the largest academic bookseller in the UK, and one of the first to start selling books online.

The Apple Mac market share has been reported to be around 8-9 percent and growing, but if this search volume graph from Google is any indication, the Mac market share is nothing compared to its mind share.

It can’t be easy to be a web hosting company. On the Internet everybody wants a free lunch (or at least a very cheap one). And this of course includes hosting.

To prove this point, we looked at search data from Google and found something quite interesting for the term “web hosting” (using Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool).

This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

As you perhaps noticed we didn’t have a summary post last week (due to time constraints here at Pingdom), so this time we will cover the last two weeks.

JPG, PNG and GIF are the three image formats that websites use for their images. We decided to find out exactly how common each format is, and how large the images of each format tend to be. After analyzing more than 23 million images, we have found some very interesting results.

Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.

It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.

At 8:38 a.m. EST yesterday, December 3, the Technorati website all of a sudden started refusing access to all visitors, responding with an HTTP 403 error (access denied). The problem was not resolved until 9:44 a.m.

Wikia Search, the Web search engine from Wikia, Inc. has been having recurring problems with their website since 2 p.m. EST on Monday (December 1).

One third of the requests to the website result in a HTTP 503 server error message (service unavailable).

Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jokes, some are dry and to the point, and some drop the ball completely.

We make our living here at Pingdom by monitoring websites for problems, so we tend to stumble across more of these error pages than most people do. This post includes error and maintenance pages for 24 of the most popular Web 2.0 services out there. While two of them can definitely be considered examples of what NOT to do, the other 22 are here to give you plenty of inspiration and hopefully put a smile on your face.

Cyber Monday saw slowdown and minor issues for several e-commerce websites. A standout was the GAP website which was completely unavailable for a total of 1 hour and 25 minutes.

The online bargain-hunting on Black Friday caused problems for several e-commerce websites, but none was affected worse than Sears.com. The website buckled under the pressure of the increased visitor numbers and was unavailable for large parts of the day.

Dr. Pepper decided to offer everyone in America a free bottle of soda (something they had promised to do if the new Guns n’ Roses album was released this year). All people had to do was to register for a free coupon on the Dr. Pepper website.

Now here comes the twist: Dr. Pepper had time limited the offer to just one day, and there are more than 300 million people in the United States. And we all know people love free stuff.

We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).

Keep reading to learn how he did it.

There are lots of vintage ad collections out there, and it’s always a fun to look through them. For your viewing pleasure, we have handpicked nine of the most fun, creative or just plain weird computer ads we have ever seen.

Inside you will find classic ads from Apple, Texas Instruments, IBM, BASF, Honeywell, Maxell and more.

This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important or interesting, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).

This week includes the failed launch of a major EU initiative, as well as downtime for Yousendit and LiveJournal.

There has been a lot of talk this week about the Dow Jones stock index dipping below 8000 for the first time since 2003.

Now let’s put this into perspective with a very telling old ad.