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25th October 2005 Archive

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  • Dutch introduce phones for kids

    Big daddy's watching you

    Two Dutch telcos - KPN and Scarlet - have introduced mobile phones specially made for young children. On Wednesday, national carrier KPN will unveil a kid phone - iKids - with a built in GPS receiver, which remains working even when the phone isn't activated. Parents can select three 'safety zones', areas where their children …

    Mobile 25 Oct 2005, 08:27

  • AMD flirts with channel via new, sexy portal

    Hopes to catch VARs and DMRs

    AMD wants its channel partners to feel the love - the love that is Opteron. The chipmaker has created the new AMD Commercial Channel Access Program to pump partners full of technical knowhow, test units and of course financial incentives in the hopes of increasing Opteron and other AMD64 chip sales. AMD's recent rise into the …

    Servers 25 Oct 2005, 08:30

  • Intel to pump $650m into US fab

    300mm wafer output boost

    Intel is to spend $650m upgrading its Rio Rancho, New Mexico 300mm-wafer plant the chip giant has announced. The expansion of Fab 11X will create more than 300 new jobs at the facility, the company added. The cash will be used to increase the fab's capacity, allowing Intel to punch out even more 90nm and, soon, 65nm processors …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 08:34

  • Apple opens iTunes down under

    Powderfinger, Eskimo Joe et al ready for download

    Apple has finally launched the Australian version of its iTunes Music Store after almost a year of speculation that the debut was imminent, and the appearance of the Aussie flag in the recently released iTunes 6.0.1 jukebox. By UK standards, the songs are cheap: AUD1.69 per track, equivalent to 72p a song. Videos are priced at …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 09:13

  • Ericsson buys Marconi

    £1.2bn for assets and name

    Ericsson is paying £1.2bn for the name and most of the assets of Marconi. Marconi shareholders will receive 275p per share and keep ownership of Telent plc. Ericsson's chairman has reportedly said job cuts of up to 20 per cent will be unavoidable. Ericsson gets Marconi trade marks, its optical networks business, the majority …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 09:24

  • iPod chip maker Q3 revenues, income rocket

    PortalPlayer in the ascendant

    PortalPlayer, the audio chip maker whose products power the majority of Apple's iPods, saw Q3 income jump 221.9 per cent year on year. For the three months to 30 September 2005, PP recorded sales totalling $57.9m, up 29.8 per cent sequentially and 126.2 per cent on the year-ago quarter. Net income came to $10.3m (40 cents a …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 09:33

  • Merseyside mourns dead chicken

    Floral tributes for poultry foetus

    Merseyside police have ordered the local community to "stop grieving" after Liverpudlians flocked to deposit flowers, cards and teddy bears in tribute to a dead chicken found in an alleyway. According to the BBC, one card read: "RIP Little Baby. Safe in the arms of Jesus. From someone who is a loving mother xxxx." A spokeswoman …

    Bootnotes 25 Oct 2005, 09:39

  • Intel ships ATI-based mobo

    Just while it has no low-end chipsets of its own?

    Intel has begun offering ATI-based motherboards as anticipated. The launch is intended to protect the chip giant's mobo business while it shifts chipset production away from low end. The D101GGC board is based on ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset family. Specifically, it uses ATI's RC410 integrated North Bridge and ATI's IXP450 …

    System Builder 25 Oct 2005, 09:44

  • Brit-based sociologist testifies in Intelligent Design trial

    Argues case for ID's inclusion

    A British-based professor of sociology has testified in a US federal court that intelligent design (ID) is a scientific concept, not a religious one. Professor Steve Fuller, from Warwick University, said that the intelligent design philosophy, which holds that life on Earth is just too complex to have arisen without the aid of …

    Science 25 Oct 2005, 10:04

  • Sweden champions the cow-powered train

    Bovine biogas

    Those readers who have ever wondered, like you do, how many miles to the cow you'd get from a bovine biogas-powered train need look no further than the Swedish cities of Linkoping and Vastervik for the answer: 2.5. That we are able to reveal this astounding fact is thanks to the aforementioned centres of population which are …

    Science 25 Oct 2005, 10:07

  • Nvidia preps GeForce Go 7300

    According to Asus...

    Asus has pre-announced Nvidia's upcoming second mobile GeForce 7 series graphics chip, revealing the part's existence in its latest notebook launch. The OEM's A6Vm laptop will sport the GeForce Go 7300 GPU, according to Asus' website. The graphics chip, as yet unannounced by Nvidia, incorporates TurboCache, allowing the 128MB …

    PCs 25 Oct 2005, 10:13

  • DeXtrous Delphi with DavidI

    Borland roadmap explained

    Borland is famous for confusing its loyal fans; well, it sometimes confuses us. So, we asked David Intersimone and Jason Vokes to guide us through its roadmap, with particular reference to Delphi. Delphi was originally a very strong competitor for Microsoft's Visual Basic Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment. David …

    Developer 25 Oct 2005, 10:33

  • Hong Kong man convicted for movie sharing

    BitTorrent user found guilty

    A Hong Kong man has been found guilty of copyright infringement for his use of BitTorrent. Chan Nai-ming was found guilty of infringing copyright after he made three films available. Hong Kong police claim he is the first person charged with copyright offences as a result of using BitTorrent. BitTorrent enables large files to …

    Music and Media 25 Oct 2005, 10:39

  • MS adopts stronger encryption for IE7

    Code maker

    Microsoft plans to adopt a stronger cryptography protocol in the next version of its web browser software, Internet Explorer 7. IE7 will replace the SSLv2 (Secure Socket Layer) protocol with the sturdier TLSv1 (Transport Layer Security) protocol in default HTTPS protocol settings as a means to provide improved security for …

    Security 25 Oct 2005, 10:55

  • Abba crowned queens of Eurovision

    Waterloo best song ever: official

    Abba's Waterloo has been voted the Eurovision Song Contest's best ever tune during a 50th anniversary event in Copenhagen, Denmark. Organisers decided to allow viewers in 31 countries to vote on a shortlist of just 14, a wise move since it avoided the embarrasing spectacles of the Greek jury awarding douze points to a Cypriot …

    Bootnotes 25 Oct 2005, 10:58

  • SpyMedia: More Austin Powers than James Bond

    Blows subscribers' cover in email

    SpyMedia hasn't even launched yet and already Register readers are telling us about it. Unfortunately they aren't telling us how great it is but because the company sent a welcome email to all subscribers and left all their addresses clearly visible in the To: field. Customers were not impressed. One said: "This is such a …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 11:33

  • VeriSign and ICANN strike monster net deal

    Verisign drops lawsuits, gets dotcom registry to 2012

    VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organisation ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012. The agreement is a huge boost to ICANN, dragged down by the lawsuits and fighting for autonomy against both the US government and …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 12:04

  • AMD nabs market share from Intel

    Saw higher shipments growth rates in Q3 too

    AMD's share of the x86 chip market reached 17.8 per cent during Q3 as the chip vendor grabbed market share from arch-rival Intel and lesser competitor Transmeta. The latter's share will soon barely trouble the scorer - in this case Mercury Research - now that it's down to a tenth of a percentage point from two-tenths of a …

    Servers 25 Oct 2005, 13:12

  • No winner in space elevator contest

    It's a rollover!

    No one managed to claim the top prize in NASA's Beam Power Challenge and Tether Challenge, competitions to develop technologies that could be used in space elevators. The two top prizes of $50,000 went unawarded because none of the ten finalists managed to meet all the qualifying criteria, NASA said. To win the Beam Power …

    Science 25 Oct 2005, 13:16

  • VoIP security framework erected

    Talks about talk

    An industry group has released what's billed as the first comprehensive description of security and threats to Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. The framework - dubbed the VoIP Security Threat Taxonomy - was put together by the newly formed Voice over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) and is designed to provide the industry with a …

    Enterprise Security 25 Oct 2005, 14:25

  • Sun's grid: lights on, no customers

    14 months of utility computing vision

    Many of you will remember the fanfare and bravado surrounding Sun Microsystems' Sep. 2004 announcement of a $1 per hour per processor utility computing plan. What you won't remember is Sun revealing a single customer using the service. That's because it hasn't. The missing customers prove quite shocking when you consider that …

    Servers 25 Oct 2005, 14:43

  • Tropical storm Alpha triggers fatal floods

    Busy week for record-breaking storm

    Flooding caused by tropical storm Alpha has killed at least seven people in Haiti, according to reports. The storm dumped at least 38cm of rain on the Caribbean island of Hispanola before it weakened into a tropical depression. However, this is the 22nd named tropical storm of the season, and means that the US' National …

    Science 25 Oct 2005, 14:54

  • Is it a passport, an ID card, or a fiddle? A minister explains

    Analysis We analyse McNulty's train of logic

    Government contributions to last week's debate on the third reading of the ID Cards Bill were largely unenlightening, with Charles Clarke in particular confining himself to reading from his flash cards ('will help to control the Big Brother state', 'ID fraud costs £1.3 billion', 'a third of terrorists use false ID'), but a …

    Music and Media 25 Oct 2005, 15:00

  • CEOs should follow NBA and make geeks wear real clothes

    And ninethly Put your pants on, coders! Grow up!

    Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society - Mark Twain The collision of professional sports and IT tends to embarrass both camps. It happens most often with techie advertisements surrounding sporting events. Or sometimes you'll see a jock with an iPod or BlackBerry in hand. Conversely, you could …

    Bootnotes 25 Oct 2005, 15:42

  • Tiscali power glitch reaches across Europe

    Lights out at TINet

    A power outage in Tiscali's Frankfurt data centre disrupted net services to its German customers on Sunday. Power was down for 40 minutes between 2005 and 2045 on 21 October knocking an unknown proportion of the ISP's Germany hosting customers offline and affecting at least one UK firm whose international partners used the TINet …

    Data Networking 25 Oct 2005, 15:48

  • Storage vendors launch open source consortium

    Building on existing efforts

    Eight major storage vendors, including IBM and Cisco, have joined forces to develop a common open source platform for managing storage devices. The idea is that customers will be able to use the result of their labours to make it easier to manage their storage systems, regardless of the vendor. Brocade, Sun, CA, Engenio …

    Storage 25 Oct 2005, 16:04

  • OFT OKs C&W's Energis buy

    No competition probe

    The UK’s Office of Fair Trading has waved through Cable & Wireless’ takeover of rival telco Energis. The OFT announced this afternoon that C&W’s takeover of Chelys Ltd, Energis’ owner, will not be referred to the Competition Commission.” “We do not believe that Cable & Wireless could impose higher post-merger prices on CPS ( …

    Financial News 25 Oct 2005, 16:24

  • Scramble to fix Skype security bug

    Hanging on the telephone

    Security researchers have identified two groups of potentially serious security vulnerabilities involving Skype, the popular VoIP client software. Both create a means for hackers to run hostile code on systems running vulnerable versions of Skype. Skype has issued patches for the "critical" security bugs. In the first case, a …

    Enterprise Security 25 Oct 2005, 16:38

  • St. Fister cured of Itanic wickedness

    The final miracle

    The fourth and likely last Itanic miracle has occurred with St. Fister – he of the blessed hand – being cured of all the chip’s wickedness and beastly impulses. Mike Fister once worked as Intel’s server processor chief. In this role, he managed to make Itanium processor hatred disappear with but a wave of his arm and a …

    Servers 25 Oct 2005, 21:04

  • Gluecode gets IBM makeover

    A fresher take on open source

    IBM has released a refreshed and re-packaged edition of its Gluecode application server, in the first formal move since buying Gluecode to crush open source and undercut closed source competitors. The systems giant has added the Apache Geronimo M5 code base to Gluecode, meaning certified support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition ( …

    Applications 25 Oct 2005, 21:07

  • IBM shows Xbox chip but won’t speak its name

    Three speedy cores

    IBM has helped Microsoft do the impossible and deliver a product on time. Big Blue today revealed specifications for the unnamed processor that will slot into Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console due out on Nov. 22, at the Fall Processor Forum here. The rather fancy, custom chip boasts three processor cores each running at 3.2GHz …

    Consoles 25 Oct 2005, 21:55

  • Fujitsu vows to carry Sun with four-core SPARC

    Jupiter rises in 2008

    Fujitsu today spilled new details on the upcoming versions of its SPARC processor that will slot into future servers built by the company and Sun Microsystems. One of the main new chips disclosed by Fujitsu is the SPARC64 VI+ chip – code-named Jupiter – that will ship in 2008. The processor, built on a 65nm process, will run at …

    Servers 25 Oct 2005, 22:45