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The Raving 

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high,
And wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets.

Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the SAVE command
And waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering,
Long I sat there wond’ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning,
Turning yet to churn some more.
“Save!” I said, “You cursed mother!
Save my data from before!”
One thing did the phosphorous answer,
only this and nothing more,
Just, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

Was this some occult illusion?
Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired,
Ones I’d never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed the choices:
Choose: “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

As the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting,
Baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key,
choosing one and nothing more,
From “Choose Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

With my fingers pale and trembling
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending,
Hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee
Timidly I pressed a key.

But on the screen there still persisted
Words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted,
Haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

I tried to catch the chips off-guard,
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine:
I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation,
just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking,
Blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away
And paced across the office floor.

And then I saw dreadful sight:
A lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me,
Shook me to my core.
The lightning zapped my previous data,
Lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

To this day I do not know
The place to which lost data goes.
What demonic nether world is wrought
Where data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls,
Beyond the ether, into black holes?

But sure as there’s C, Pascal, Lotus,
And Microsoft the whore,
You will one day be left to wander,
Lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

PC-industry watchers have long speculated that struggling Gateway would eventually be purchased -- it was just a matter of time.That time has come. Taiwan’s Acer is buying Gateway for $710 million, which will make Acer the No. 3 computer maker, behind HP and Dell.

From the Associated Press:

Acer said Monday it is offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 per share in a deal expected to close by December, pending regulatory approvals in Taiwan and the U.S.

The offer price amounts to a premium of 57 percent to Gateway’s Friday closing price of $1.21. Gateway traded at $81.50 in 1999.

The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Gateway and Acer and is subject to standard closing conditions, it said.

The deal will create a multi-branded computer company with over $15 billion in revenues and shipments in excess of 20 million units per year, Acer said in the statement.

You can read the official news release here.

And while that’s going on, Gateway separately will move to buy Packard Bell.

Computer maker Gateway Inc. on Monday said it will exercise its right of first refusal to acquire the parent company of Packard Bell BV, a European computer vendor based in Paris.

The shares are held by Lap Suhn Hui, who sold eMachines Inc. to Gateway in 2004.

Gateway acquired the right of first refusal as part of an agreement with Hui that waived some non-compete arrangements when he bought Packard Bell BV.

Acer is succeeding where Compaq Computer Corp. failed in the late 1990s.

Struggling to compete with the direct-sales model of Dell, Compaq tried to buy Gateway at one point. The companies had reached an initial agreement, and their respective PR staffs had drawn up news releases and were preparing for a big announcement.

But Gateway founder Ted Waitt walked away from the deal at the last minute, reportedly because he decided he didn’t want to work for Compaq’s management team.

Gateway also owns the eMachines brand, which it bought in 2004.

Gateway, now based in Irvine, Calif., began as Gateway 2000 in a Sioux City, Iowa, barn in 1985. It often played on its agrarian roots, with marketing and packaging the evoked Holstein cattle.

Update: Looks like Gateway will keep its familiar black-and-white packaging. The brand stays, says Acer.

People fearing they might miss Gateway’s signature black-and-white dairy cow PC boxes after the company is acquired by Acer Inc. have little reason to worry: Acer not only plans to keep the Gateway Inc. brand just the way it is, the Taiwanese company hopes to expand it.

“A strong U.S. brand such as Gateway’s can be expanded overseas into other markets,” said Gianfranco Lanci, president of Acer, in a video feed at the Taipei news conference to announce the deal.

Sometime in the next few weeks, an official beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista will be released, according to the Windows Vista Team Blog, with the final release expected in the first quarter of next year.

A Beta release of Windows Vista SP1 is slated for availability in the next few weeks.  A small group of testers has been putting a preview of the SP1 Beta through its paces to help prepare for broader release.  We made the choice to start with a very small group of testers because we think it’s better for both our customers and for Microsoft to keep the beta program small at the start.

A later pre-release of SP1 will be available to a larger group of testers  via MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

But Ed Bott says chances are good you won’t be one of the lucky few to get your hands on it.

Microsoft says the next SP1 beta will be released to “a moderate sized audience.” Invitations have already gone out, and testers who’ve been accepted to the beta program have received confirmation via e-mail and online at Microsoft’s Connect portal for beta programs. There’s unlikely to be a public beta until a release candidate is available, although it’s virtually certain that the code from the upcoming beta will leak onto public websites and spread via torrents within hours of its official release.

Mary Jo Foley has even more specific numbers:

Vista SP1 will go to about 10,000 to 15,000 selected beta testers by mid-September, officials said. The SP1 beta build will be made available to these testers for download form the Microsoft Connect site. A broader public beta of SP1 is likely around the time Microsoft delivers a release-candidate test build of the service pack, officials said, while declining to provide a timeframe for that build. The final “gold” release of SP1 is now slated for some time in Q1 2008.

What’s in it? As expected, not much in terms of features or interface changes. Look for performance enhancements and bug fixes, including a fix for Vista’s nasty sleep/resume problems.

A white paper from Microsoft has more details about what’s inside.

Also coming in the first quarter of next year: Windows Server 2008. Coming in the first half of next year: Windows XP Service Pack 3.

More Here

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has, along with others like Richard Stallman, literally changed the world of software forever. Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, while more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world’s mission critical server infrastructures. Linux-based distributions seem to pop up every day, while more and more devices now run Linux at their core, from mobile phones to inflight entertainment systems, to the world’s mission critical server infrastructures.

The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what’s happening with kernel version 2.6? However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going : what’s happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What Linus has been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time? What does he get up to in his spare time?

Complete Interview

Vista has a nifty little feature called the Network Map. It can show you the design of your network, and even give you some basic information about the computers connected to it.

This map shows two hardwired computers connecting to a switch, which jacks into a wireless router that also has three Wi-Fi-connected PCs linked to it. In some cases (when Windows’ own Wi-Fi drivers are being used) you’ll see the quality of the wireless connections, which is great when troubleshooting a connection that may be on the other side of the house.

However, at this stage in Vista’s adoption by consumers, there are apt to be a lot of mixed networks, with both Vista and XP systems. And XP systems don’t show up on the map.

That’s because Vista has a technology called Link Layer Topology Discovery, or LLTD, which is not in XP. But, Microsoft has an update that will let you add it. There’s also a Knowledge Base article with more details. Note that Service Pack 2 for XP is required.

It installs quickly and, in the cases where I’ve put it on XP systems, it has not required a reboot. If you’ve got a mixed XP/Vista network, it’s a must-have.

So how much music do you have on your computer? Dozens of songs? Hundreds? Thousands?

How would you feel if you went to play some tunes and suddenly found all of them . . . gone?

A new computer worm that works on Windows-based computers erases MP3 files — all of them. From Ars Technica:

. . . A newly-uncovered worm called W32.Deletemusic does exactly what its name implies–it goes through a PC and deletes all MP3 files in sight. And that’s it. Simultaneously low-threat and highly annoying, the worm makes its way from computer to computer by spreading itself onto all attached drives of a given PC, including flash drives and removable media. If that media is then removed and inserted into another computer, it continues its music-eating rampage on the new host.

Fortunately, antivirus vendors are rating this low-risk — it’s in the wild, but not widespread. There’s no indication that this is currently being delivered via the usual high-traffic methods, including e-mail or infected Web sites. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.

But because it moves from drive to drive — even removable ones — it would be particularly deadly on a home network, where each family member might host his or her stash of music. Oh, the humanity!

As the Ars story points out, this isn’t the first piece of malware to target music files:

. . . Nopir-B made its rounds some two years ago and posed as DVD copying software, according to security firm Sophos. When users tried to run it, Nopir-B scolded them for participating in piracy and proceeded to delete all MP3s from their computers. Similarly, last year’s Erazer trojan deleted not only MP3 files, but AVIs, MPEGs, WMVs, and ZIP files as well in a “crusade” against piracy.

. . . And it likely won’t be the last. I’m not going to say that this is an evil move by the greedy recording industry, which hates what digital music has done to their fiscal Nirvana. But I bet that, deep down inside, they’ve got to be secretly pleased.

Members of the Ubuntu colocation team suggest the attack could have begun with a Chinese IP address.

The Ubuntu community had to yank five of the eight Ubuntu-hosted community servers sponsored by Canonical offline Aug. 6 after discovering that the servers had been hijacked and were attacking other machines.

It was suggested during an IRC (Internet relay chat) meeting of the Ubuntu colocation team Aug. 14 that the source of the troubles might have been a Chinese IP address trying to log onto the servers by brute force “for a long time now it seems,” said a participant.

On Aug. 14, the community began to bring the machines back up in a safe state so that they could recover data from them. Unfortunately, according to Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, the servers were all found to be out of date, stuffed with Web software, and missing security patches—at least in the instances where it was easy to determine what version they’re running.

“An attacker could have gotten a shell through almost any of these sites,” Bono wrote in a posting, regarding a change to location server policy that resulted from the incident.

“FTP (not sftp, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, so an attacker (in the right place) could also have gotten access by sniffing the clear-text passwords,” he said. Also, “the servers have not been upgraded past breezy due to problems with the network card and later kernels. This probably allowed the attacker to gain root.”

Bringing the servers back up has taken longer than the managers would have liked, Bono said. Given that they’ve been relying on help from members spread over the globe, there are “arbitrary limits imposed by those remote hands” and there’s a “(relative) lack of bandwidth” available with which data can be copied from the machines, he wrote.

During the Aug. 14 IRC meeting, location teams were given a choice to migrate to the Canonical data center or stay on the hosted/outsourced servers. Canonical, based in the U.K., is a provider of services to individual and corporate open-source software users.

The pluses of moving to the Canonical data center, Bono said, include better hardware and bandwidth, full-time support from Canonical’s systems administration team—including software maintenance—and integration into Ubuntu’s existing backup infrastructure.

Some of the minuses the Ubuntu community will have to deal with in a move to Canonical—the company behind the Ubuntu distribution—include having less software supported—with the wiki engine MoinMoin, the blog platform WordPress and the Ubuntu community forum Planet on the short list of still-supported applications.

The migration was still in swing as of Aug. 14, and the collocation team leaders were looking for help. “I’d be very happy if I got one index.html file to ubuntu-fi.org today as a start MoinMoin would be very nice too,” one said during the IRC meeting. “One thing I would ask for is patience. I understand that a service outage like this makes many people anxious,” he said, requesting that those anxious about restoration of services go to the #canonical-sysadmin channel and ask publicly so that the first available systems administrator can answer the request.

In the meantime, data isn’t lost, although applications must be deep-sixed since executable code simply can’t be trusted following the intrusion.

“Due to the nature of the intrusion, we must assume that any and all executable code of any sort on the old sites is dangerous,” said the meeting leader, “Spads.” “…We have data, but executable code (python, PHP, Perl, any CGI, etc.) will need to be replaced.”

If you’re reading this article, you might be interested in getting a dedicated server, or simply learning more about dedicated hosting services.

First of all, please note, that a dedicated server is rather expensive service, and you shouldn’t waste your money if you don’t plan to use it in full measure.

But if you really have a serious website, and want to run a successful business – you cannot do it without a dedicated server.

Of course it’s just mere words, so let’s enumerate the facts!

Freedom and security

Dedicated server will give you a freedom. You will not need to share it with other websites. It will also give you additional 3rd party security for your site and emails. A dedicated server will allow you deep access to your server to configure and optimize your server anyway you need. You’re able to choose the software to install.

Power and functionality

With a dedicated server you get on average 50-100 Gb of hard drive, plus about 1,000 Gb of data transfer. You may customize the configuration and choose any CPU, RAM, or whatever you need. A dedicated server reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these.

Respectability

You simply CAN NOT run a popular website on a shared hosting. It’s not serious.

Summary

If your website turned into a popular and reliable resource; if you have tons of daily visitors; if you work B2B; if you need additional security and functionality, power and freedom – go ahead and buy a dedicated server. Don’t be sorry about the money you spent! Think about the future!

If you’re an amateur to the web world specially web hosting then there are many decisions you have to make. Hosting provides the concrete base on which every E-business works as well as blooms. There are numerous choices available in the market but it’s the Linux and Windows hosting which heads the list. Everyone has their own knowledge bag according to which they govern their business but which is profitable to you may not be profitable for someone else. That’s why majority of the people are in trouble waters while choosing the hosting server for their business. Let’s delve into each hosting and get the clear picture. The usual cost involved in running a server generally doesn’t affect the cost of complete web hosting package. Windows Hosting is owned and developed by Microsoft whereas Linux is an open source and free too. The crux is that using Windows Hosting can be more expensive at times but it has its own benefits too.

According to the common myth people assume that because their computer runs Windows they too have to buy Windows hosting package. But this myth is absolutely wrong. You can normally access your web account through FTP or a control panel and both the servers support these methods. But the major difference lies in the FTP commands that are somewhat different in Linux and Windows. In short, occasionally when you try to get your FTP program to do something it returns an error message. Still, this won’t happen very often. Linux and Windows Hosting provide same features that include PHP, mySQL, POP3 and many more. The major difference arises when you want to create your site using Access, Windows Streaming Media, ASP, .NET environment, FrontPage or any other Microsoft technologies. Then you’re bound to use a Windows as your hosting server. However, in Linux there is a limited support for these technologies and what all are available are very expensive. That’s why it’s wise to think twice before selecting a hosting server as shifting from one server to another can be very hard.

The next points to argue are the reliability and stability of the servers. Windows is far more insecure in comparison to Linux. Windows is widely used operating system for home PC’s but not Linux. However, Linux is equally insecure as whooping number of successful hack attempts have been made on it till now. Thus, in the end we can say that the security of both the servers usually depends upon the competency of the system administrators. Herein, if you’re security minded then you’ll choose the best and secured hosting company irrespective of the chosen server. Now discussing the performance there isn’t much difference between the two. Linux is faster than Windows as Linux is loaded with extendable implementation. Whereas Windows tries to provide “’all in one” package which isn’t fruitful at times. There isn’t much difference between both the servers but in terms of performance Linux outshines Windows.

Thus, if you’re hunting for the server for your E-business then think before you jump on any conclusion and don’t leave any stone unturned.