Cory Doctorow's article last week on whether Apple's digital hub concept can survive the political machinations of Hollywood garnered unprecedented attention, thanks to a mention on the geek news site Slashdot. Like others who have been "Slashdotted," we were unprepared for the tidal wave of traffic. After a few hours we managed to move the cached article from our database server (behind a 128K ISDN line) to our main server at digital.forest (where they have a huge OC-12 Internet connection); that helped, but even our main server maxed out serving 100 simultaneous connections with no respite until the load started to wane in the afternoon. Although I still don't think it's necessary to design a system just to handle an isolated spike in traffic like this, a move to Mac OS X on a faster Mac will probably ease future concerns.
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/06901>
Also, Cory sent a clarification surrounding his statement that the FCC had announced it "would open proceedings to mandate the BPDG proposal, turning this 'standard' into the law of the land." He writes:
"In the FCC rulemaking proceeding, the FCC commissioners and spokespeople clarified this, saying that the FCC proceeding was looking for comments on what sort of Broadcast Flag mandate, if any, would be appropriate; further, they said that the BPDG proposal would not receive any special consideration. For information on how you can submit your own comments to the FCC rulemaking, visit the link below and sign up for regular updates."
Finally, as always, I encourage you to check out the ongoing discussion on TidBITS Talk surrounding this topic. Although the outlook may seem bleak regarding legislation in the U.S. seriously hampering the kind of digital lifestyle that Apple has been promoting, the efforts of individuals can make a difference, both by convincing companies we support to stand up and by sounding off directly to our elected representatives.
