Repairs begin on undersea cable

A French ship has begun repairing two undersea cables in the Mediterranean that were severed on Friday, disrupting internet and phone communications.

A robot submarine will locate the ends of the cables on the sea bed and bring them to the surface to be re-connected.

They were cut within 5 minutes of each other, possibly by a trawler net.

Egypt says it has been able to restore most of its communications by re-routing services, but other parts of the Middle East remain badly affected.

Experts have warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and that the knock-on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies.

Lengthy process

Experts from France Telecom Marine arrived at the site of the damage to the SEA-ME-WE4 and SEA-ME-WE3 lines onboard the cable ship, Raymond Croze, at 1330 GMT on Sunday, spokesman Louis-Michel Aymard said.

They then sent a remotely-operated submarine robot called "Hector" to the sea bed to begin the search for the two ends of each line.

It is unclear how long repairs will take, as a ship could have dragged the cables several kilometres from their normal positions.

Once located, the cable ends will be brought to the surface by the robot and repairs will be carried out in a special facility on the ship - a process that could take days.

"We have to fix the cable fibre by fibre, and it's a very huge cable," Mr Aymard told the Associated Press.

France Telecom said it expected to repair SEA-ME-WE4 by 25 December and SEA-ME-WE3 by the end of the year.

A third line, operated by FLAG Telecom, was also cut and will be repaired by another ship.

In January the same line was damaged off Egypt's Mediterranean coast, severely disrupting internet and phone communications for many in the Middle East for days, although only two lines were snapped then.

A few hours before the three lines were cut, a suspected sub-sea earthquake damaged a local GO cable to Malta, severely disrupting communications to the island.

Apple to ditch Macworld gathering

In a surprise move, Apple said it is to abandon its annual tech gathering Macworld after this January's event.

Meanwhile news that the keynote address will not be given by CEO Steve Jobs has reignited speculation about his health following cancer four years ago.

Concern was raised earlier in the year when Mr Jobs appeared at the firm's developer conference looking gaunt.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling refused to discuss the issue and said shows like Macworld were no longer relevant.

"Apple is steadily scaling back on trade shows and in recent years is reaching more people in more ways than ever before," Mr Dowling told BBC News.

"Every week 3.5 million people visit our retail stores. And like many companies, trade shows are a minor part of how Apple reaches its customers."

Mr Dowling also said that as the company had scaled back on such shows, it had ramped up "stand-alone launch events like the September iPod launch seen by millions of people on the internet".

IDG which runs the show put a brave face on things.

"We are on track for a terrific show with strong attendance numbers and nearly 500 exhibitors showcasing their products," Paul Kent, general manager of Macworld Expo told the BBC.

"The conference and expo has thrived for 25 years due to the strong support of tens of thousands of members of the Mac community worldwide. We are committed to serving their interests," he said.

"Greatly exaggerated"

Macworld is regarded as a highlight for Apple fans with new product launches fronted by Mr Jobs.

When Mr Jobs went on stage at Apple's world wide developer conference in June, his physical appearance shocked many. He appeared thin and emaciated and speculation became rife that he had suffered a setback after a bout of pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Later in the year, he joked about it on stage in San Francisco when he launched the new range of iPods. At one point in his demonstration he appeared in front of a giant screen that displayed the words "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".

This was in reference to an obituary that had been mistakenly published.

But analysts are again pointing to the possibility that Mr Jobs's health is an issue.

"I think Steve's health is a factor," analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray told MarketWatch.

"I think it means there's a change of power at Apple... Steve Jobs is playing less of a role. And that is not up for debate.

"Apple could have dismissed a lot of rumours by having him give the final keynote and they opted not to."

The keynote will be presented by Phillip Schiller who is Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing.

Falling share price

It has not been a good week for Apple.

Earlier Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey downgraded the stock, cut his estimate for Apple's 2009 profit and warned "some nicks have started to emerge".

Mr Bailey pointed out that the first two quarters of next year would be tough for the company with deteriorating consumer demand.

"Shipments of MacBooks, iPod nanos and iPhone were all slightly lower than what was expected going into the [December] quarter," he wrote in a note to clients.

However he said Apple's ability to innovate would keep it ahead of the competition.

Sales of Macs in US stores last month fell 1% from a year ago, while industry-wide PC sales rose 2%, according to research firm NPD Group Inc which tracks retail sales.

Shares of Apple fell just over 5% in after hours trading on the news of the Macworld announcement to close at more than $99.444 (£58).

Yahoo throws down data gauntlet

Search engine Yahoo is to cut the time it stores personal data from 13 months to three.

It is hoping its decision will provide a benchmark for industry. Currently Google stores data for nine months and Microsoft for six months.

International data protection officials have been urging firms to do more to protect the data of users.

Privacy advocates have welcomed the move and challenged rivals to go even further.

"I would challenge industry to move to 30 days across the board. People should demand that their information is expunged as rapidly as possible," said Simon Davies, head of Privacy International.

Business needs

A recent rash of data leaks has left users concerned and organisations embarrassed, he said.

"The less time data is online means less risk that rogue companies can establish dangerously comprehensive profiles on users," he added.

Yahoo said its decision to cut the time it stores information gathered from web surfing came about following a "review of its data practices".

"This policy represents Yahoo's assessment of the minimum amount of time we need to retain data to respond to the needs of our business while deepening our trusted relationship with users," said Anne Toth, Yahoo's head of privacy.

As well as anonymising user log data, the policy will also apply to page views, page clicks and ad views and clicks.

But the search giant has reserved the right to keep data for up to six months if fraud or system security are involved.

Privacy campaigners have argued that firms are currently keeping data unnecessarily. Mr Davies is sceptical about what he described as "mixed messages" from industry.

"Only last year, firms were saying that they couldn't go below 15 months but the logic of what Yahoo has done suggests there is no reason why they can't go even lower," he said.

A Windows cluster claims number 10 of the world's most powerful supercomputers!

The ego cluster is 1950 blades each with 16 cores and 64 GB memory. 4xDDR IB and 1GB/s GigE networks. Every blade is based on a TYAN motherboard with 4 sockets and AMD Opteron 8347 HE (Barcelona b3) CPUs cadenced at 1.9 GHz (nope, not the fastest by any means). Dawning, AMD, and Mellanox. Fat boxes, fat pipes, thick glue. Performance tuning. LINPACK benchmark. Fingers crossed. The next TOP500 list comes out at SC08 in Austin.

The TOP500 List was created by a wise old group of elders, bent and gnomish, with hooded eyes and long white beards. Ahem, you see, it was these Founding Fathers of the Top500 List who decided that LINPACK would be the best way to rank supercomputers. Or else it was an influential user base who championed the LINPACK test through its early days, and convinced everyone else to accept it as a de facto standard. Either way, LINPACK performance numbers remain relevant and you can get them on most large to medium-sized systems. However, and yet, please-do-keep-in-mind, HPC applications show much more complex behavior than LINPACK, so the benchmark doesn’t give such a great indication of real-world performance. That’s right. . .

It’s like engine torque on a dynamometer. The bench test will almost always score higher than your midnight run down Main Street. Or else it’s like the small print disclaimer for an attention deficit drug:

*the result of the LINPACK test is not intended to reflect the overall performance of a system; instead, it provides a measure of the performance of a dedicated system for solving a specific set of linear equations. Since the LINPACK problem is very regular, the performance achieved is quite high; the performance numbers give a good indication of peak performance and provide an idea of how much floating-point performance is theoretically possible from a given system.

But LINPACK is solid, LINPACK is reliable, LINPACK is deserving of some serious reverence. The LINPACK benchmark gives you that stable and enduring historical yardstick which has always eluded Major League Baseball. A year ago we did a Top500 run on our internal Rainier cluster, and reached 11.75Tflops. One short year ago. Today the Dawning cluster reached 180.6Tflops. More than 15x higher. And the judges at Top500 have LINPACK to make sure everyone takes their home run swings on the same playing field. At SC08 we’ll see how we’ve done against history. If you can't make it to Austin, check out the cool video, https://www.yousendit.com/download/Y2o4WGJIcVhRWUtGa1E9PQ

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Heard about The Lizard? What makes The Li (npack Tuning Wi) zard so special is that it’s going public. Not right away, not immediately, but just as soon as Frank gets it tweaked and polished. The Lizard automates a good many of the procedures needed for a Top500 run, to include validating the cluster and optimizing for LINPACK. Pretty soon anyone (we-ell, any slick IT Pro with too many MCSE or MCSA certifications on their Wall of Fame) will be able to benchmark a cluster.

A shameless product plug, sure. But how’s it any different than an NBA point guard snapping out his jersey number after lofting up the fast break oop for a tomahawk dunk? We’re in the game, we’re playing team ball, we’re loving our work.

For now the Lizard still takes a backseat to the traditional methods of manual tuning, but an early test adopter in the US, R-Systems, has been making some bold predictions: "The Lizard is a thing of beauty. It incorporates the undocumented wisdom of Linpack experts to "dial in" clusters and help validate them. I expect the efficiency ratings on the Top500 list will look very good for the Windows HPC 2008 systems."

HPC is and always will be rocket science. Just ask AI Solutions, a little mission design outfit in Maryland: “NASA wanted us to analyze the decay rate of debris from a destroyed Chinese weather satellite, and its impact on NASA spacecraft over the next 20 years. Without supercomputers we’d have been waiting for results for a month or more, but with Windows HPC Server 2008 we completed the analysis in three days.”

HPC is and always will be pushing boundaries. EVE Online is the world’s largest Massively Multiplayer Online Game, hosting 50,000 users in a single environment. Not sure there’s any other MMOG out there that can do that, but CCP Games wants to go farther still. They’re using Windows HPC to take virtual worlds into the next century now.

This year our Many Faces of Go won the 2008 Computer Games in China, beating the champ, even though Mogo had more processing power. Maybe it was all due to Surface. Picture it: those shiny stones on a touch screen checkerboard of 19x19 squares, with 200 or so moves per position as opposed to the 35 legal moves in chess. Go experts were consulted in the creation of the UI and 100s of details were analyzed to ensure it remained true to the game’s long tradition, but you really don’t need a Surface box. Any standard Go frontend that speaks Go Text Protocol can be used to play Go against the HPC cluster. WHPC users can visit Smart-Games’ website and download the parallel version of the game and run it on their cluster for diagnostic purposes or for just pure fun! (Hmmm, sounds familiar, wasn’t that how LINPACK got started?)

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All right, let’s talk business, commercial users, economic news you can use. Let’s talk Dell. Drop in the box. Preconfigured. Factory pre-installed Windows HPC Server 2008 and Dell PowerEdge nodes, just in time for Thanksgiving. Raise a glass. Say no more. Moment of silence.

And how about Mathworks? Those preinstalled Dell clusters come with install instructions for MATLAB. Life just got better for umpteen million HPC users in academia and government.

Ansys optimizes their software for HPC. They’ve gotten serious performance gains on Windows HPC Server 2008, they’re giving their customers more capacity and faster turnaround time, but what they’re really eyeballing are new ways to help engineers work with ever-increasing data sets --which is exactly the same problem facing so many big organizations: the data deluge is a tidal wave already.

Cray’s CX1, tell me you’ve seen it. Like it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, or maybe Mies Van Der Rohe, less is more, form follows function, that is one gorgeous desk side cluster. And Cray’s giving away a CX1 in their sweepstakes with us, pay attention, it ends Jan 21st, eleven days before the Super Bowl.

IBM is offering test drives. They’re running Windows HPC Server 2008 on their global network of on-demand supercomputing centers. Log in, buckle up, take a ride in a supercomputer (which reminds me, anyone paying attention to the news out of Ferrari these days?). “IBM’s On Demand Centers are an effective way for new users to tap into the power of supercomputers,” said Steve Remondi, CEO of Exa Corp., Burlington, Mass. “Many of our customers have never used supercomputers before, but they immediately realize that high-performance computing offers a competitive edge.”

ISVs: streamline your HPC development and deployment. HP, Dell, Cray, and Viglen all have a variety of discounted hardware, as well as Windows HPC server 2008 certification programs. Test your server apps on optimized clusters, let those big guys do the heavy lifting, broaden your reach and scale.

HPC is and always will be the next big thing. Or so the old joke says. From the days of vector processing and symmetric multiprocessors and “MPP” offerings, HPC has been a fascinating technology that never quite translated outside the confines of top-level science, engineering, and research. The environment was complex, parallel programming was difficult, the eco-system was highly fragmented. But all that’s changing fast. If you want a preview of coming attractions, a good sneak peek at the future, take a look at Windows HPC Server 2008.

Alternative Internet Browser Comparison for Vista

I’m certainly not a big fan of change, but there comes a time when you might grow tired of your current internet browser, Internet Explorer, and perhaps you might want to consider what else is available. There are an absolute ton of internet browsers available now and, while each and every one fundamentally achieves the same goal of allowing you to easily surf the internet, you will find that each and every one of the major internet browser’s functionality is usually drastically different and offers a variety of different features that may not be available in certain others. This article will be highlighting and focusing on the following web browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera and Maxthon.

Firefox

“The award-winning Web browser is now even faster, more secure, and fully customizable to suit your online life. With Firefox 2, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.”

Firefox is definitely up there as being one of my all-time favorite internet browsers of all time and the developers continue to add fantastic features to an already great package. Security issues are also hastily rectified should they arise.

Main Features: Improved Tabbed Browsing, Spell Checking, Search Suggestions, Session Restore, Web Feeds (RSS), Live Titles, Integrated Search, Live Bookmarks, Pop-up Blocker, Phishing Protection, Open Source, Automated Update, Protection from Spyware and Search Engine Manager.

Tagline: “The Firefox Web Browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web.”

Link: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Safari

“Experience the web, Apple style, with Safari: the fastest, easiest-to-use, web browser in the world. With its simple, elegant interface, Safari gets out of your way and lets you enjoy the web — up to 2 times fast than Internet Explorer.”

Main Features: Blazing Performance, Elegant User Interface, Easy Bookmarks, Pop-up Blocking, Inline Find, Tabbed Browsing, SnapBack, Forms AutoFill, Built-in RSS, Resizable Text Areas, Private Browsing and Security.

Tagline: “Experience the web, Apple style, with Safari: the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world”

Link: http://www.apple.com/safari/

Opera

“Why Opera? Safe, secure, powerful and fully customizable, the Opera Web browser is faster and more secure than other browsers available on the market. Opera delivers robust security and a far-richer feature set than any other Web browser and it’s free.

Opera is the Web pioneer that delivered tabbed browsing in 2000, and Opera 9.2 features lots of other great tricks for quick navigation, including Speed Dial, a quick way to put all of your favorite daily sites at your fingertips. You can also take, save and trade Notes attached to any Web site while browsing, or Create Search shortcuts from any search field on the Web. Opera 9.25 is super fast and free, secure and stable, and offers lots of great tools for Web Developers.”

Main Features: Transfer manager, Tabbed browsing, Password manager, Integrated search, Mouse gestures, Fast Forward, Notes, Keyboard Shortcuts, Full-screen mode, Speed Dial™, Fraud protection, Integrated BitTorrent, Widgets Support and Thumbnail Preview.

Tagline: “The award-winning Opera Web browser The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available.”>

Link: http://www.opera.com/

Maxthon

“Maxthon Browser is a powerful tabbed browser built for all users. Besides basic browsing functionality, Maxthon Browser provides a rich set of features to improve your surfing experience.”

Main Features Tabbed Browsing, Anti-Freeze, Mouse Gestures, Super Drag&Drop, Maxthon Smart Acceleration, Magic Fill, Online Favorites Service, Feed Reader, Super Proxy, URL Alias, Ad Hunter and Screen Capture.

Tagline: “Tabbed environment with features such as extendible multi-language support, pop-up filter, plug-ins, skin support. Formerly MyIE2.”

Link: http://www.maxthon.com/

Go Daddy Plans $2M Company Party

At a time when many companies are scaling back, annual holiday parties and cash bonuses may be on the chopping block this year, however, Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com) is throwing its biggest party ever this Saturday to reward its employees, who have
According to Go Daddy's announcement this week, the Arizona-based company is planning on spending $2 million on this year's holiday party, which like last year, will be held at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix.

This year, however, the company will fly in all of its out-of-state employees and their guests, chauffeuring them from the airport and putting them up in a brand new hotel. Almost 4,000 guests are expected, attending from as far away as Washington, D.C.

"Someone asked me, why spend all the money on such a spectacular, expensive party...I say, why not? We've had our best year ever as a company and this achievement is because of our employees," Go Daddy chief executive officer and founder Bob Parsons said in a statement. "I learned a long time ago, if you treat your people right, the rest takes care of itself."
From its inception, Go Daddy has been setting high standards for its employees, known for rewarding their effort by paying top performers' mortgages for a year and giving away other incentives such as cars, cash and exotic vacations, for which it also foots the bill on taxes associated with the prizes.

Likewise, Go Daddy has increased its corporate donations, which it expects to top its philanthropic works total from last year, with 2008 contributions of more than $1.65 million. Its advertising budget has also remained healthy, having just announced last week it would advertise in the Super Bowl for its fifth consecutive year.

As many companies slash jobs, Go Daddy has been expanding its workforce, and it expects to be honored on the annual "Best Places to Work" list for the fifth consecutive year.

"So why shouldn't we celebrate a little this year?" Parsons said. "We have a 45 percent market share of new domain names worldwide and are growing in every area of our company. Our people deserve a party."

By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com

Serious security flaw found in IE

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.
Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of the world's computer users.

"Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.
As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flaw, said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.

The websites have been mostly serving up programs that steal computer game passwords, but the flaw could be "adopted by more financially motivated criminals", a Trend Micro security researcher said on Monday.
Richard Cox, chief information officer of anti-spam body The Spamhaus Project and an expert on privacy and cyber security, echoed Trend Micro's warning.

"It won't be long before someone reverse engineers this exploit for more fraudulent purposes. Trend Mico's advice [of switching to an alternative web browser] is very sensible," he said.

PC Pro magazine's security editor, Darien Graham-Smith, said that there was a virtual arms race going on, with hackers always on the look out for new vulnerabilities.

"The message needs to get out that this malicious code can be planted on any web site, so simple careful browsing isn't enough."

"It's a shame Microsoft have not been able to fix this more quickly, but letting people know about this flaw was the right thing to do. If you keep flaws like this quiet, people are put at risk without knowing it."

"Every browser is susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It's fine to say 'don't use Internet Explorer' for now, but other browsers may well find themselves in a similar situation," he added.

Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company?

Craigslist's Jeremy Zawodny reviews the progress of MySQL as a project, and discovers that through third-party forks and enhancements like Drizzle and OurDelta 'you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free.' Is this a good thing? On one hand it demonstrates the strong community around MySQL, but on the other, it could make it harder for Sun to fund core development on MySQL by diverting potential revenue from the core database project. Is this the fate of successful open-source companies? To become so successful as a community that they can't eke out a return as a company? If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?