Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service has caused a bit of disarray around the web as servers have failed. Among the sites/services affected are Foursquare, Quora, Reddit, and Hootsuite (ht: The Next Web). The issues appear to be coming out …

Rackspace announced that it has acquired Cloudkick, which creates web apps for cloud-server management. 

Rackspace considers the move a way to better position itself in Silicon Valley, as Cloudkick was originally funded by Y Combinator, and its headquarters is in San Francisco, "making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering Fanatical Support and innovation in cloud computing," a representative for Rackspace tells WebProNews.

Update: Opera has released the beta version of Opera Unite in Opera 10.10 beta.

Original Article: Today Opera has released a product (as promised), which it claims reinvents the web. That may seem like an exaggerated statement, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.

If there is any accuracy to data released by Netcraft, then the Internet has about 182,226,259 sites.  That’s 948,000 more than a month ago.

Netcraft looks at the number of sites hosted on the different top servers. The following graph represents market share for top servers across all domains from August 1995 to October 2008:

We often think of it as a search engine, an email provider, or even a source of income, but a new report states that, as a developer, Google is also doing reasonably well.

One benefit of being owned by Google has to be the mind-boggling amounts of server space they have available, with something like 45 or 50 massive data centres located around the world and an estimated 500,000 servers or so in total (you can find them quite easily — look for the football-field sized building with no windows and a four-storey air-conditioning system attached, right next door to a big dam).

About three months ago, Ask joined a tree-planting program created by Dell to offset carbon emissions.  Those trees are presumably doing just fine.  The bigger piece of news relates to energy-efficient servers the two companies discussed, and those are also on track.

Last week, Google announced its plans to set up shop in Kenya.  Now Google.org is showing an interest in Kenya’s southern neighbor, Tanzania, and has made known its plans to participate in “Believe Begin Become – Tanzania’s National Business Plan Competition.”

The company’s global privacy counsel had some critical things to say about proposed Swedish wiretapping legislation, but picked a strange example when comparing Sweden to other countries.

Research firms and think tanks are constantly looking for new ways to process oil in order to increase gasoline production, given the world’s dependence on the valuable commodity. Analyzing chemical bonds and refining techniques, however, many not be the only solution when it comes to achieving optimum efficiency.

When it comes to licensing your Windows 2003 Terminal server environment most people can never remember what is needed and the Microsoft documentation seems to go on a bit:) Here I try to make it simple for you…

 9 times out of 10 it’s just a matter of the following: 

Universities in Canada fear the potential for abuse that could take place under the US Patriot Act, so to avoid the gaze of American investigators they have moved their RefWorks accounts to Ontario.

SlideShare launches today — the YouTube of Powerpoint. While Powerpoint destroys thought, so does TV. And misgivings aside, slides can be an art form in and of itself.

Digg.com has introduced its own lab, named (accurately, if not creatively) Digg Labs. This new addition will allow visitors to test features and consider concepts before they are introduced to the main Digg site. User feedback could also prevent things from making the transition from Digg Labs to Digg.

Spending for Windows servers passed that for Unix servers in the fourth quarter of 2005, as Windows passed the venerable operating system in the global market for the first time.

We’ve talked here before about filtering IP traffic by source for mail servers.

Dell announced the release of a comprehensive database featuring its quad-socket PowerEdge servers with new Intel Xeon dual-core technology and the new Microsoft SQL Server database. The package is intended to simplify migration to Microsoft SQL Server database and business-critical data center operations.

Today, Sun Microsystems is expected to introduce its new line of 64-bit network servers, which are code-named Galaxy, and use dual-core Opteron processors from AMD.

The computer company will help deliver Napster’s legal music download service to university campuses.

Sometimes I’m a little surprised by how long some ideas take to bubble up. Other times I’m surprised by the form they take.

Global sales of servers continues to increase, but for the first time Windows boxes have matched Unix machines.

Alan Coopersmith, who works at Sun Microsystems, blogs about how Microsoft’s blogs are changing his opinion of his competitor …