It wasn’t a good week to be an Alaskan vice-presidential candidate, an online publication or even a multinational science project — as all were compromised by hackers this week.

At least one of the Large Hadron Collider’s more than 1700 superconducting magnets failed, springing a leak and spewing helium gas into the subterranean tunnel that houses the atom smasher, report officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

After experimenting with ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, Microsoft has now decided to go straight for the Jobsular with its next set of ads for Windows. Directly targeting Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC’ series of ads, Microsoft’s new adverts are all introduced by a man who looks like John Hodgman (the PC in the Mac ads).

Those of us who run Linux on our home machines have a harder time testing sites for Internet Explorer compatibility, or accessing sites that require proprietary IE features. IEs4Linux is a script that can help you set up three older versions of IE on any system running Wine. Unfortunately, the program is not as polished as it should be.

Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has quietly released a utility that allows you to create multiple desktops on Windows Vista or Windows XP.The utility lets you open different applications in each separate desktop and easily switch between the desktops with hotkeys or by clicking the tray icon, Linux style.

Deletionpedia is a site that catalogs everything that gets deleted from Wikipedia, from temporary deletions during clean-up to complete entries that are removed after a period of discussion. Some existed for years and had hundreds of edits, while others were vanity entries or obscure points of reference that had been barely touched.

Microsoft’s version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates’s company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company.

Nvidia wants to reinvigorate the 3D market by developing its own glasses hardware and driver software, which they hope will avoid the pitfalls of previous efforts. Do we have the technology to make stereoscopic 3D tech practical? And more importantly, is this something that, as a gamer, you’d be open to embrace?

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that’ll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I’m somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly

CEO Mark Hurd is not running Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard, but he’s not running Bill & Dave’s old shop either. He is trying to do to HP what Lou Gerstner did to IBM a decade ago, transform his company into a services powerhouse, growing through acquisitions and lay-offs.