CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be producing roughly 15 petabytes of data each year (15,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words, the LHC is not only huge in physical size (filling a 17-mile long underground path), but it will produce enormous amounts of data for researchers to bite into.

CERN seems to be well-equipped to handle the data from the gigantic particle accelerator when you take a look at their data center.

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Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

We have used the good old WayBack Machine (a.k.a the Internet Archive) to track down screenshots of what websites looked like back in 1996-97.

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We stumbled upon this very weird picture on the front page of the Swedish IDG News website next to an article about how businesses can promote themselves on Twitter. The strange thing is that the image they used is the Twitter logo on what looks like a cigarette pack.

What were they thinking? Twitter smokes?

We have taken a screenshot so you can see what we’re talking about.

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A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.

Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place.

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Google Chrome has its “incognito” mode, IE 8 has its “InPrivate browsing” mode and Safari has its “private browsing” mode. It’s only a matter of time until Firefox adds one as well. These new privacy modes in the various web browsers will create serious problems for site owners that rely on revenue from affiliate programs and targeted advertising. It will also change the landscape for web statistics software and skew visitor statistics for websites.

Why? Statistics software (for example Google’s own Analytics), affiliate tracking, and targeted ads all rely on cookies to work. People have been able to disable cookies for a long time, but this is the first time that people will be able to enter a browser mode that prevents cookies from being stored with just a simple click.

In this article we focus on the site owners’ perspective and will cover three main areas where the browser privacy modes will hurt them.

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We’re a few days early, but Google is about to turn 10 years old this month (they opened their doors in September 1998).

On the Web, a decade is a looong time, so we were curious to see what the Google website looked like when it originally launched.

At the time, Google didn’t have much on the actual Google.com domain: Only two links, one to the regular Google version, then hosted at google.stanford.edu and called “Google Search Engine Prototype,” and another to a beta version named “Might-work-some-of-the-time prototype.”

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Every day brings a new set of outages on the Internet. Websites go down, online services run into trouble, networks have glitches, and so on. When a lot of users are affected, these outages make the news and set the blogosphere abuzz. We here at Pingdom work with downtime-related issues every day and probably spend more time reading about these things than most, so we decided to sum up the year so far for your convenience, and add some analysis of our own in the process.

These are 14 (not 13, that would be bad luck! ) of the more notable Web- and Internet-related outages and incidents so far in 2008. We chose outages that have either affected a lot of people, or have other implications that we deemed important to highlight.

One thing that the following examples clearly show is that no one is immune to downtime. Not Google, not Microsoft, and not Apple. In addition to this, sometimes whole parts of the Internet itself simply break.

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Twitter seems to be making good on their promise to improve the stability of their microblogging service, at least when it comes to the website itself (which is what we monitor here at Pingdom). Lately, their website has shown a significant improvement in both availability and response time. Is the infamous Twitter “fail whale” facing an early retirement?

We have the numbers.

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