I like to keep up with the latest going-ons of the webhosting community and I found this interesting article at Unixy who are managed hosting providers. The basic idea around it is to spread out the attack over multiple Nginx reverse proxy nodes so that your main server is not the focus of the attack. It’s really a great idea if you have a single large site that is a target of a DDoS. I really hate DDoS attacks and have spent many sleepless nights fending them off and I hate losing sleep. It may seen common sense to some, but it really is a low tech solution which generally requires much more expensive hardware and expertise.
If you use Fedora and get tired of rebooting with the new updates, fear no more because Ksplice has announced it is free for all Fedora users. Ksplice is a tool that allows users to update their kernel without having to reboot for the changes to take affect. This is great for critical systems that cannot suffer any downtime or people who just hate rebooting and loading up all of their applications again. Ksplice was previously free for Ubuntu desktop users so now Fedora gets some love too. It is also available for Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu Server, and CloudLinux, however, those users currently need to pay $3.95/month per server for the service. I hope to try this tool out sometime next month with Fedora.
It was only a matter of time, but AMD is dropping the ATI name from its Radeon video cards. It seems they have done some research to see that the perception of ATI and Radeon were fairly equal and when Radeon was paired with AMD it was actually seen as a stronger combination. Other branding changes include the dropping of Sempron, Athlon Turion, and Phenom from the processor names. The Opteron brand will remain for servers and workstations. Here is a graphic if you are confused as I am:
There haven’t been a whole lot of changes for the stove-top, but this may be something to change all of that. Check out The William, a revolutionary new stove-top idea. This idea almost makes me wish I knew how to cook.
Google has added a new feature to Gmail – the ability to make calls to phones and not just online. For the rest of the year, calls made to phones in the U.S and Canada from Gmail are free and low rates are available for calling to other countries. This is pretty neat because with Skype you have to pay with minutes for this feature at the moment. Google will be rolling out the feature over the next few days, so be on the lookout.
15 years ago you came into our lives as a revolutionary OS. You were my first OS and introduced me to the computing world. Things sure have changed in the last 15 years. Thanks for the good times!
There is more news on the security and antivirus front! AVAST Software, the makers of avast! antivirus, has received a $100M investment from Summit Partners. avast! is currently the most used antivirus software out there with its fully-functional free antivirus software with paid upgrades. AVAST claims to receive 60,000 new malware samples a day which is more than I would have guessed by a long-shot, so the security software industry must be doing exceptionally well. Curiously enough, Summit Partners has invested in other firms such as McAfee and Postini which were gobbled up by Intel and Google respectively. Maybe the recent McAfee purchase is a sign of other firms planning to purchase antivirus companies and Summit Partners wants to be a part of the action.
Valve has a Steam client planned for Apple, but there is no love for the Linux gamers out there. According to GameIndustry.biz and their interview with Doug Lombardi there is no Linux version of Steam being worked on right now. It is possible that it might come in the future but Linux gamers are going to have to wait a bit. Hopefully with the work done for the MAC OS X Version it won’t take much more to make a Linux version.
Since NASA is planning to retire the long used Space Shuttle, they are giving them away for FREE! The only catch is that you need to be a *qualified institution, have an indoor facility to house the shuttle, and pay for the $29M for shipping and maintenance fees. This seems like a deal to me! There is no definite retirement date for the shuttles themselves, but their retirement homes could be decided as soon as this fall.
Intel took its virus protection plan to an extreme and bought a market leader McAfee. The deal is an all cash deal which is somewhat surprising due to the amount, but Intel must have it burning a whole in their pocket. It is also surprising because Intel usually snags up other hardware companies and this is a newer venture for them. The article and others speculate that this deal is to help Intel enter the mobile market, but I’ve seen some suggest that this might be a way to have a hardware based security system where a chip within your computer would make it secure regardless of the OS. That might be a nice idea so we will see how it plays out.
