Twitter's Biz Stone Preps Royal Wedding Servers

The upcoming Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton will be the first one in the age of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

With over 400 million expected to tune in online, according to the Wall Street Journal, media companies are prepping for Friday's festivities.

Twitter's official Flickr account posted a photo snapped by Troy Holden of co-founder Biz Stone prepping the company's servers for the upcoming royal wedding. You'll notice three of the Apple Xserves are already dedicated to Bieber tweets, while Lady Gaga and "Wills & Kate" only have one apiece.

Could it just be a cheeky joke? The joke Twitter Global Comms account wrote, "Rumours of Twitter needing extra servers for the Royal Wedding are greatly exaggerated. We only need one."

LOOK:

Comments

[bkerensa]

03:06 AM on 04/28/2011

No wonder why Twitter Failwhales so much.... Apple Xserves? Linux is the only way.

[stormbear]

08:38 AM on 04/28/2011

Why you hating on UNIX so much?

[bkerensa]

12:34 PM on 04/28/2011

Because Linux is better then Unix :P

[jsarets]

09:54 AM on 04/28/2011

Apple makes castrated software systems but fairly excellent hardware that runs Linux or *BSD quite nicely. They cut out a lot of the legacy IBM PC stuff like the 16-bit BIOS and the 8259A interrupt controller emulation which is there to support older versions of Windows. In terms of firmware architecture and hardware initialization, Apple makes a more modern product then you're likely to get elsewhere, although some retail motherboards (e.g. ASUS) are getting better.

Apple is able to be more bold about pushing new technology because they can control how it is released. For example, the new Thunderbolt bus is essentially PCIe for external devices, and because of the security implications of exposing the full power of DMA to pluggable devices, Apple needs to ensure that Thunderbolt is accompanied by an IOMMU (Intel "VT-d"), which allows the OS to allocate a separate virtual address space for each device on the bus.

There's a lot to dislike about Apple, but they're the tip of the spear in terms of modernizing the x86 system architecture. Intel can be a lot more bold because of Apple, and that's good for Linux.

[harry boi]

08:55 PM on 04/27/2011

separated at birth? http://bit.ly/dxSVVu

[Jenn Prentice]

05:05 PM on 04/27/2011

The internet coverage of this wedding is a stark contrast to the media coverage of Charles and Diana's wedding. I believe #royalwedding is the official Twitter hastag and you can also follow #liveblog for updates. Here's a few other ways to follow the royal wedding online if you're interested http://bitly.com/gAEZKw

[Nerdiac]

04:42 PM on 04/27/2011

Ahh, so that explains why there are so many fail whales on Twitter!; they use Apple servers! It all suddenly makes sense...

[StansDad]

04:33 PM on 04/27/2011

I thought they discontinued Xserves