It’s about time somebody realized that the party is over!

Three years after Napster unleashed the first wave of music-trading over the Internet — and a full year after the company was shut down by a court order — the labels are coming to terms with the notion that Internet file-sharing is reshaping their business, and they must compete with piracy or risk losing a generation of customers.

From the first moment I saw Napster, I knew that the record industry was going to have to dramatically reshape itself if it was going to survive. It seems as though the studios have finally realized this!

Let’s hope Apple can make this work!

Apple today announced that it has begun shipping the company’s first rackmount server, the Xserve. Introduced in May, Apple said they have received over 4,000 orders for the product to date….
According to Apple, industry standard test shows the Xserve out-performed similarly configured severs from Dell, IBM and Sun.

It’s the rackmount server for the rest of us [[:-)]]

A new worm is starting to spread

Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven’t had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

Just a quick note for those of you that think this points out a problem in the open source universe. Quite the opposite is true. Note that the flaw was discovered only two weeks ago and a solution was quickly provided so that only a few servers have been infected.

Do you think Microsoft would respond as quickly?

Brazil is the NY Yankees of world football!

As European giants Germany controlled much of the final, the Mannschaft always lacked that little, extra bit of magic. Brazil though, the modern heirs of yesteryear’s most romantic footballers and kings, had all the wizardry one could hope for. The final proved a battle of German efficiency and resiliency against Brazilian creativity and individual brilliance.

Congratulations Brazil!