A few weeks back Apple announced at their annual WWDC that the new Mac Operating System, Max OS X Lion, would only be available in digital form from their Mac Store.

Like iOS upgrades the Max OS X Lion upgrade also comes in at a hefty size, a 4GB download infact, the problem with this is not everybody has high speed internet or caps that high, even in the United States.

Apple has however seen this as a problem and are offering consumers free WiFi access at iStores to upgrade their Max OS to Mac OS X Lion. No word yet on whether South Africans will also be able to upgrade their Max OS for free at local iStore’s, I have also reached out to Digicape but have not received any word yet on whether they will give customers free WiFi access for the upgrade.

I am glad to see that Apple are actually passing the savings on to their consumers this way, as they are saving on packaging by distributing Mac OS X Lion digitally. I do however not see customers unplugging their iMac’s and Mac Pro’s and taking it to stores to upgrade, MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro users would be the ones that would benefit from this.

It’s no secret that when it comes to innovation and setting standards in the local broadband market, MWEB is at the forefront. MWEB, the company that revolutionised uncapped Internet in South Africa, has now gone and done another first in South Africa by upgrading all 512k customers to 1Mbps.

This news comes after rumours have been doing the rounds that Telkom will be doing away with their 512k ADSL lines and upgrading all customers to 1Mbps, however no promises have been made by Telkom as to when the switchover will happen.

MWEB has taken the lead, and from today the 512k option will be obsolete from their product line. MWEB will be upgrading all current 512k customers to 1Mbps speeds at no extra cost and the new 1Mbps uncapped products will also be priced the same as the previous 512k products.

Users that are already on a 1Mbps data only option will get a price reduction and from now on only pay R299pm, while the new 1Mbps All Inclusive package will be priced at R599pm.

Telkom started roll out of its 10Mbps ADSL network the past weekend. The upgrade of about 19000 4Mbps ADSL subscribers to 10Mbps started on Friday at round about 8PM and will last up to 7 days to complete.

Users that are approximately 1.5KM from the exchange can expect to be upgraded to the higher 10Mbps speeds while other users further away will be bumped up to 8Mbps. Should you not be able to sync at these speeds Telkom will try and sync at lower speeds decreasing at 1Mbps each try.

Apparently the 10Mbps upgrade is only available to current Telkom 4Mbps users that are on the new Metro-Ethernet and ADSL2+ exchanges, where these exchanges are located is unknown but according to reports on the MyBroadband forums users are being upgraded in certain areas of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.

The big question on everyone’s’ lips are still will lower-end users also be upgraded to higher packages like Telkom did previously with the upgrade from 192Kbps to 386Kbps? And also will the 512Kbps user again be left out?

Have your line been upgraded to 10Mbps yet? To find out if your line has been upgraded to 10Mbps head on over to SpeedTest.Net and do a speed test or log into your router and check the speeds at which your line is syncing.

In my previous post I discovered that Amatomu was in the process of upgrading to beta version, so here is the official statement of what is happening and what happened.

It’s bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let’s start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you’re missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded – more accurately than ever before – and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

We’ve also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C’s as we’re going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team

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