Big bangs and black holes: Why the world didn’t end on 10th September 2008

NOTE: This article is for normal people, not scientists. The asterisks (stars) point to more scientific footnotes if you’re interested.

You may have heard on TV (September 2008) about a large science experiment happening deep underground in a large tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border. You’ve probably been told that the purpose of the experiment is to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang (the moment when the Universe is thought to have come into existence), and you might have heard about the possibility of tiny black holes (micro black holes) and other dangerous phenomena being created by the machine the scientists have built.

This machine is called the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, and in this article I would like to explain very clearly and in the simplest possible terms, one simple fact:

The LHC poses absolutely no risk to the existence of Geneva, planet Earth, humanity or the Universe.

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Tutorial: How to make WSUS 3.0 Selfupdate work with Apache

The problem: You want to run Apache or another web server besides IIS on port 80 on a machine which is also running Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). When you disable IIS’s Default Web Site running on port 80, WSUS stops working normally and the following error is reported in the Event Log:

Event ID: 13042
Type: Error
Self-update is not working.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The cause: While client machines use an IIS web site on port 8530 by default to interact with WSUS, some files are required to be accessible on port 80 as well.

The solution: Make the needed files available via Apache or the other web server you want to run on port 80.