13th May 2005 Archive

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Sun plays hide and seek with key Solaris 10 goodies

ZFS and Janus go missing

Sun Microsystems continues to suffer from a nasty case of over-promising technology months and even years before it can deliver the goods. The latest such instance of this condition appeared today as a company official admitted that a much celebrated file system and highly touted Linux software tool won't arrive for Solaris 10 …

Servers 13 May 2005, 01:01
Gates backs Dell iPod skepticism

Windows v Mac all over again?

Are players in the Wintel alliance ganging against Apple Computer's iPod in the battle for control of the MP3 business? Seems that way. Bill Gates has predicted the demise of stand-alone MP3 players like Apple's iPod at the hands of mobile phones that combine functionality and - presumably - run Windows. To drive home the …

Mobile 13 May 2005, 08:36
Microsoft streamlines licensing

Pay the same, just know why you're paying

Microsoft is making its notoriously complex system of licensing easier to understand. But it is stopping short of changes that could cut software costs. On July 1, the company will introduce changes which should make pricing terms easier for customers to fathom. They are specifically designed to ease the administrative burden …

Software 13 May 2005, 08:55
Intel may get boost from robust Taiwan PC market

Notebooks galore

This story has expired from The Register's archive. You can now find it at its original location on the Forbes.com website: http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/05/12/0512automarketscan14.html?partner=theregister.

System Builder 13 May 2005, 09:34
Resto & pub webcams expose us to pervs, snoops

Smile! Your alibi is being ruined

An astonishing number of restaurants and pubs have installed webcams to observe patrons and beam their images across the internet without their knowledge, The Register has accidentally discovered. Occasionally, one stumbles onto a story quite by chance. This is just such a case, so bear with us through a bit of background. …

Security 13 May 2005, 09:37
Nvidia posts record revenues

Highest profits for three years, too

Nvidia last night posted a record quarterly revenue and the highest net income the company has seen in three years. For the three months to 1 May 2005 - or Q1 FY2006 - Nvidia notched up $583.3m in sales, three per cent up on the previous quarter and 23.6 per cent up on Q1 FY2005. Net income came to $64.4m (36 cents a share), …

Financial News 13 May 2005, 10:21
Gloves off in Dutch anti-piracy punch-up

ISPs fight back

Five Dutch ISPs will launch a "procedure on the merits" action against Dutch anti-piracy organisation Dutch Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands (BREIN). As reported yesterday, BREIN intends to sue the ISPs next month to obtain the identity of 42 individuals suspected of illegally swapping copyrighted music. The …

Music and Media 13 May 2005, 10:22
Judge imposes US Renesas chip sales ban

Translogic patent infringed, court rules

Renesas, Hitachi's spun-off chip business, can no longer sell its SH-3 and SH-4 processor families in the US, a District Court judge has ruled. Some 18 CPUs are covered by the ban, which also prevents Renesas from even importing the products onto US soil. The judgement, granted at the behest of Translogic Technology, follows …

Channel Register 13 May 2005, 10:23
O2 trials mobile TV

UK mass market test

A new trial by O2 is bringing mobile television a little closer to the mass market. The mobile operator has teamed up with NTL Broadcast to conduct a six-month trial to test mobile TV in the UK. Users will get a Nokia 7710 and have access to channels including Sky News, CNN, Chart Show TV, Sky Sports News, Cartoon Network and …

Mobile 13 May 2005, 10:31
W3C punts mobile web

Comment So what?

According to Computer Business Review, the World Wide Web consortium "has raised about $640,000 for three years to fund the initiative" to bring the benefits of the internet to mobile users. Most comment on the news ranks pretty high in the "stating the blindingly obvious" - observations such as "most people out of the 1.6 …

Mobile 13 May 2005, 10:31
Nvidia G70 to appear at E3

Inside a PS3 or on its own?

Nvidia's next-generation graphics chip, 'G70', will almost certainly make an appearance at Computex in June, not least because it will have already been shown off at the E3 show, which takes place next week. So said Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the company's Q1 FY2006 results conference last night. "We do …

Software 13 May 2005, 10:34
UK flies broadband flag for Tiscali

Splendid

Tiscali UK is driving the take-up of broadband at the European ISP, the company announced yesterday. Overall, Tiscali had 1.2m broadband users at the end of March - up 150,000 compared to the end of December. It didn't break out the numbers by countries but said the increase was "mainly achieved in the UK thanks to Tiscali's …

Financial News 13 May 2005, 10:35
EII - it's all go out there

Enterprise information integration news

Hot on the heels of IBM announcing that it was acquiring Ascential, thus (potentially) uniting its data federation platform WebSphere Information Integrator with Ascential's ETL and EAI capabilities, which was followed by Informatica announcing a partnership with Composite Software, we now have a slew of fresh news. …

Software 13 May 2005, 10:36
Firefox loses its shine

Spate of vulns raises security questions

The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox web browser has made security a major part of its marketing, but a spate of vulnerabilities found over the last nine months had sullied that message. In the latest incident, a 16-year-old security researcher - who asked only to be identified by his first name, Paul - found three vulnerabilities …

Enterprise Security 13 May 2005, 10:37
Grid computing: a real-world solution?

Analysis It appears so

The problem with grid computing has traditionally been tying it down into a real-world context. The theory is great – getting lots of individual technical components working together as if they were one big resource - but it’s the wackier or conversation stimulating applications that have received all of the attention. Everyone …

Servers 13 May 2005, 11:28
MS punts all-in-one security and backup service

OneCare to rule them all

Microsoft is to deliver an all-in-one PC health check service targeted at consumers. Windows OneCare will offer performance tuning, PC maintenance, backup and security functions via a consumer subscription service. Key capabilities and features of Windows OneCare will include: providing automatically updated anti-virus, anti- …

Enterprise Security 13 May 2005, 11:35
Dippy makeover sees return of DTI

Eminister named too

A week after being re-elected the UK Government has completed an embarrassing about-turn after deciding to stick with the old name for Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) after all. Immediately following Labour's record third election victory, President Blair changed the name of the DTI to the catchy if somewhat pointless …

Public Sector 13 May 2005, 11:36
Sun spits out tiny squirt of plasma

Smallest ever coronal mass ejection

The smallest coronal mass ejection ever observed has caught solar physicists totally by surprise, and reveals just how limited our understanding is of how these eruptions of solar material are generated. A coronal mass ejection is an explosion inside the sun that ejects a huge quantity of plasma into space. The plasma, composed …

Science 13 May 2005, 11:37
Intel: next-gen dual-cores not NetBurst

Going back to Pentium III, sort of

Intel has confirmed its second-generation dual-core desktop, notebook and server processors will not be based on the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture, but something more akin to the Pentium III. We knew this already, of course, but it's nice to see Intel going public at long last. The revelation comes from the chip giant's …

System Builder 13 May 2005, 11:50
MS unfazed by OSS schools report

Anomalous primaries

The long-awaited report on the use of open source software (OSS) in schools was published today by Becta, the Government's lead agency for ICT in education. As expected, the report concludes that OSS can offer a "cost effective alternative" to proprietary solutions. But it also cautions that an OSS implementation needs careful …

Public Sector 13 May 2005, 13:22
Cornell Uni develops apocalypse cube

Laser pulse rifles at the ready

It will not have escaped the notice of members of the neoLuddite Resistance Army (NRA) that today is Friday 13 May, a date ripe with significance and ill omen. And with good cause, because the media is awash with the news that a Cornell University research team has developed a self-replicating cube which has the ability to …

Odds and Sods 13 May 2005, 13:25
Orange blasted for extinguishing Wildfire

Campaign gathers momentum

Orange is facing a PR crisis following its decision to extinguish its Wildfire voice recognition system for mobile phone users. Earlier this week El Reg revealed that the French-owned cellco is pulling the plug on the voice activated digital personal assistant that does all sorts of clever things on the end of a mobile phone. …

Mobile 13 May 2005, 13:46
Google puts the brake on Web Accelerator

Cache from chaos

Google has disabled downloads of its Web Accelerator software less than a week after introducing the service. The suspension follows reports that the software was caching sensitive content, such as user control panels to online forums. The beta application, a free browser plug-in that for use with IE 5.5 and above or Firefox 1. …

Enterprise Security 13 May 2005, 13:49
I know what you downloaded from Freenet

Exclusive Anonymous P2P network open to easy forensic attack

The Freenet Project has been around since 2000. It was designed as a stealthy P2P network (some have called it a "darknet") that distributes its content so broadly that it's impossible to censor. There are a number of security features in Freenet that other P2P networks lack. Because data that the network's various nodes …

Enterprise Security 13 May 2005, 13:56
MS unwraps Xbox 360

Shipping around the world next holiday season

Microsoft unveiled the Xbox 360 last night, as anticipated. The unit, which most console fans have already seen thanks to recent photography leaks, contains a three-core IBM PowerPC processors, clocked at 3.2GHz and capable of handling six threads simultaneously. Each core has an AltiVec vector engine for handling multimedia …

Consoles 13 May 2005, 14:55
Garmin iQue M5 GPS PocketPC

Review The best GPS/PDA combo currently available?

Garmin was the first company to release a PDA with an integrated GPS receiver, the Palm OS-based iQue, and the M5 is its first Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition version. As soon as I opened the box and started playing with the device I realised that this was a GPS/PDA combo that meant business, writes Benny Har-Even. Some of …

Reviews 13 May 2005, 15:20
Adventurous squirrels swap passwords for coffee beans

Letters Or did we read that wrong?

Why don't we kick off this Friday's trawl through the letters bag with a happy reminder of just how secure everything is in this high tech world of ours. We refer, of course, to the news that the average US citizen is happy to hand over his password in exchange for a coffee. We Brits are just as bad, of course, requiring only …

Letters 13 May 2005, 15:35
How Hilary Rosen learned to stop suing and hate Apple's iPod

And ninethly Sister Strangelove made a man out of me

The young often when they have learnt all they can learn accuse her of an inordinate pride. She says yes of course. She has always known it and now she says it - Gertrude Stein The boring, tired adage states that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. As a middle-aged freedom fighter, I've always taken offense at this notion. …

Bootnotes 13 May 2005, 16:10
F5 picks up Watchfire's app firewall biz

Under new 0wn3rship

F5 Networks has acquired the web application firewall business of security firm Watchfire for an undisclosed sum. The two firms said that they would work together to migrate AppShield customers to F5's TrafficShield application firewall product, a technology F5 acquired when it bought MagniFire WebSystems last year. The deal, …

Enterprise Security 13 May 2005, 18:59
Disney greenlights outsourcing of 1,000 IT staffers

Team Rodent meets Big Blue

Disney will carve 1,000 IT staffers from its payrolls, shipping many of these workers to outsourcers IBM and Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), according to a media report. The cuts - which will account for close to one-third of Disney's total IT department - are expected to begin in mid-July. The employees affected work in …

IT Director 13 May 2005, 21:34
Ballmer and McNealy interoperate on ID

IBM becomes the new Microsoft

Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy have announced specifications for single sign-in between Java and .NET web service, while admitting to teething problems in their companies' landmark legal and technology agreement. The old foes - hosting a joint conference to update press on progress in their year-old relationship - even found …

Software 13 May 2005, 23:00