So what is it about human kind and that almost suicidal inclination towards hubris? Whether it's building a massive ship, then branding it "unsinkable", then sailing it perilously close to an even more massive iceberg, or maybe creatin some strange wing like appendages, then flying too close to the sun, etc etc. We seem to have a preternatural desire to be the architects of our own downfall.

So when Mozilla - remember, the people that brought you the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client - decided it would try and go for the world record for number of downloads, to coincide with and publicisie the popularity of its new Firefox 3 software, something bad was bound to happen. And it did, well, nothing on the scale of mass genocide, but it must have been a bit embarassing for the firm when its servers crashed after a few hours because they couldn't cope with the load. It's not as if there was much of a record to beat anyway - Guiness Book officials have never acknowledged such a category before.

19 Jun 2008