May 02
The South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) submarine communications cable system, which connects South East Asia and Europe, is reportedly cut in three places, off Palmero, Italy.
“IP Backbone capacity has been impacted due to an ongoing shunt fault in seg 4.1 of SMW4 between Alexandria & Marseilles with Cable Fault on FP#2 at 1886.152 Km from Alexandria towards Palermo. The Cable ship Electra has been mobilized by the consortium for repairs.” That’s the official version.
The SEA-ME-WE 4 is an international sub-marine cable consortium of 16 companies including Airtel and Tata Communications.
The submarine cable system outage has resulted in service disruptions in its terminal stations, including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.
The cable repair ship has already been mobilized, however it’s been several days and services are still severely impacted.
Apr 24
A few months ago I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook. A couple of months after I had bought it I started experiencing a weird problem. The netbook would shut down automatically during boot up. It would start booting up normally and suddenly without any warning it would just shut down automatically.
I also discovered that this would happen two times in a row but the third time i tried to boot it it would function normally. I didn’t know what to make of it.
At first I thought it was a virus problem. I tried scanning for viruses but didn’t find anything suspicious.
I though maybe it was my Windows installation (I use XP), so I installed Ubuntu as a second OS. I figured that since Ubuntu is Linux based – Windows viruses would not affect it and if Windows was corrupted or had some malicious spyware or worms, Ubuntu would still function normally. But I soon discovered that Ubuntu was affected too. So this meant that this was a hardware problem.
I also realized that the problem occurred the every time I turned on the machine after it had been switched off for a few hours. It would shut down twice but at the third attempt it would boot up normally. I have never come across this problem before with any other computer and found it very strange.
I started researching on the net and found out that several other people had the same problem – but surprising enough the Acer website did not mention the problem at all. I found out that a possible solution was updating the BIOS software.
Updating the BIOS is a dangerous step and if done incorrectly it can turn your computer into a paperweight. But I decided to take the risk. I was desperate. I downloaded the latest version of the BIOS(v.3114 – my old BIOS version was v.3105) from the Acer Aspire One driver and software downloads page. I also found out that the Acer Aspire One had a BIOS recovery routine and it is possible to reflash the BIOS using a USB drive. I found a very useful blog post which provided instructions on how to reflash the BIOS. I followed the instructions and it worked! My Acer Aspire One works like it supposed to!
Be very careful while updating the BIOS. If you do it wrong – your computer will stop working and it’ll not be able to boot at all. It might just be easier to send the computer to the service center and let the experts take care of the problem.
It’s disturbing that Acer does not acknowledge the problem. I found several posts on the Internet from people who are affected by this problem but I did not find any official mention of it. Do the folks at Acer believe that ignoring a problem will make it go away?
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