25th May 2006 Archive

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Salesforce.com welcomes CRM lapse

It's a developer thing

Salesforce.com's campaign to go beyond CRM and become a platform player took a fresh turn Wednesday with services announced to win greater developer support and a new campaign highlighting its integration with traditional back office software. The hosted CRM provider has launched AppExchange OEM Edition, giving developers the …

Developer 25 May 2006, 01:11
Salesforce CEO champions Microsoft-free email

We're so hosted, dude

Salesforce.com's chief executive Marc Benioff has encouraged businesses to adopt hosted email and collaboration from Google and dump Microsoft. Announcing AppExchange OEM Edition in San Francisco, Benioff pointed the audience to Google.com/hosted as an example of an online service that provides the functionality of client/ …

Applications 25 May 2006, 01:18
Videogames make better doctors: official

Super stitch-up bros

Surgeons who play videogames before going into theatre are less likely to make potentially lethal errors, research has found. A 20-minute blast on games like Super Monkey Ball immediately prior to surgery made the sawbones quicker too. The study by the Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York found 303 surgeons on a training …

Biology 25 May 2006, 06:02
Report security vulns at your peril

From whistleblower to suspect ...

Has it really come to this? Researchers are now so wary of reporting security vulnerabilities that some infosec experts in academia are advising their student charges to walk away from problems. Pascal Meunier, author of the Cassandra system, and a researcher at the Centre for Education and Research in Information and Assurance …

Enterprise Security 25 May 2006, 07:02
International fusion project gets green light

€10bn nuclear gamble

A ceremony in Brussels has signalled the go-ahead for ITER, the experimental nuclear fusion reactor. The agreement means work will start on the €10bn project at Cadarache in France next year. ITER will become the world's most expensive science experiment on Earth. Only the International Space Station has swallowed more cash. …

Physics 25 May 2006, 07:02
Internet's first ever global forum outlines plans

Athens meeting open to one and all

The blueprint for the internet's first ever global forum to be held in Athens this October has been released. Following a meeting of 48 net luminaries from government, industry and civil society in Geneva this week, the format of the first four day meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been decided. The forum will …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 08:50
Vonage floats, then bobs

First day pains

Internet phone pioneer Vonage went public today, but received an icy reception. The stock price floated down from its initial price of $17 a share to close at $14.85. That's the worst first-day performance for two years, and customers who took up the company's offer have been burned. Vonage operates VoIP in the US, Canada and …

Financial News 25 May 2006, 08:50
IBM makes long distance call with storage software

Tune in your SAN

IBM has rung the bell on round four of its storage virtualization software package, adding in new tools for long distance data replication, more hardware support and upgraded networking support. In total, IBM has extended its lead in this still young market for software that can link together hardware made by various vendors. …

Storage 25 May 2006, 09:05
Nvidia grows Quadro NVS mobile GPU family

Only multi-monitor, business-oriented PCs need apply

Nvidia has extended its Quadro NVS line of mobile GPUs aimed at business-friendly notebooks that need to be connected to multiple displays - machines typically sold into the financial services world, for instance. Unlike other Quadro NVS parts, the 300M lacks TurboCache support to grab space from the host PC's main memory …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 09:09
Eastbourne finally gets a Sexual Health Action Group

Not before time

Let's face it - Eastbourne is not noted for its lively sex scene, unless the blue-rinse paradise has a hitherto unseen dark side inhabited by septuagenarian domininatrix driving gimp-suited retired wing commanders up and down the seafront at the point of a whip. That, however, may be about to change with the formation of the …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 09:33
Employee discontent grows at 4uBusiness

Firm takes 'urgent action' to halt losses

Staff at troubled 4uBusiness - the SME-focused sibling of phone retailer Phones4u - fear the firm is being wound down, with devastating consequences for employees. Earlier this week, The Register reported that staff at 4uBusiness are "leaving in droves" and morale among workers has hit rock bottom. Now insiders at 4uBusiness, …

Mobile 25 May 2006, 09:35
Intel quad-core Clovertown to consume 'no more than 120W'

50 per cent more than 'Woodcrest'

Intel's quad-core Xeon DP processor, 'Clovertown', will consume less power than the top-end dual-core Xeon 5000 part the chip giant unveiled this week. That said, it'll run hotter than 'Woodcrest' the next-generation architecture-based dualie due to debut next month as the Xeon 5100 series. In a presentation given by Intel to …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 09:40
Nvidia 'world's fastest' graphics card specs leak out

GeForce 7950 GX2 80% faster than the 7900 GTX, maker claims

Details of Nvidia's upcoming top-of-the-range GeForce 7950 GX2 SLI graphics card have slipped out ahead of the part's launch, expected to take place early next month at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan. According to a DailyTech report, the card contains two 7900 GTX GPUs each clocked at 500MHz. There's 1GB of GDDR 3 SDRAM …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 10:04
MacBook motion sensor malarkey gets useful

First there was MacSabre. Now welcome... SmacBook

If you thought the motion sensor in Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook laptops was only there to help protect your hard drive from accidental drops, or to do silly things like Star Wars lightsabre emulation, think again. Someone's come up with an application that's actually useful: screen control. You can see a video of the …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 10:31
Iraq grunts mourn loss of robot comrade

'Scooby Doo saved my life', sobs heartbroken US soldier

Those of us chronicling the inexorable Rise of the Machines™ know only too well the dangers of forming emotional bonds with technology - albeit a mere fondness for your Dyson, or a slight affection for your new Renault Laguna. The reason, as members of the neoLuddite Resistance Army among you are already aware, is that as soon …

Rise of the Machines 25 May 2006, 10:50
Nintendo to pitch Wii at under $250

Low Wii fee to drive demand

Nintendo has revealed its next-generation console, the Wii, will retail in the US for $250 or less, and no more than ¥25,000 ($220/£119/€174) in Japan. It also expects to have shipped more than 6m of the machines by March 2007, the company said today. That's as many machines as the total number of PlayStation 3 consoles Sony …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 11:04
Restructure punishes Lenovo numbers

Non China ops static or sliding

Lenovo’s fourth quarter figures were floored by a massive restructuring charge, the Chinese PC giant revealed today. Revenue for the quarter ending 31 March was HK$24.4bn (£1.68bn), up 417 per cent, reflecting the contribution of the IBM PC operation it bought last year. Pre-tax losses were HK$317m (£21.9m), but once …

Channel Register 25 May 2006, 12:17
Canon joins exodus from film photography

Will develop no more new film cameras

Canon is to stop developing new compact and SLR film cameras and devote its entire development programme to digital products, the Japanese camera company said today. Canon isn't getting out of analogue photography entirely. A company spokesman told the Reuters news agency that it would continue to manufacture and sell its …

Reg Hardware 25 May 2006, 12:21
Nominet racks up 5m .uk domains

Hosepipebanbuster.co.uk's place in history

Nominet has registered five million .uk domains since it was founded ten years ago. The Oxford-based .uk domain name registry is marking this important milestone with a nostalgic look-back over the last decade. Did you know, for example, that Nominet registered 2,000 .uk registrations in its first month of operation in 1996? …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 12:26
Unbundling US channels will change the face of TV

Comment À la carte pricing push

US Presidential hopeful John McCain is pushing the idea of à la carte pricing to the US Senate. À la carte is buying one cable TV channel at a time, rather than dealing in pre-set bundles, which often includes channels nobody wants. McCain says cable companies and the new breed of IPTV operators could have relief from national …

Entertainment 25 May 2006, 12:29
Interactive TV to capture MySpace generation

MyNetworkTV becomes MySpaceTV

Advanced Television says the exciting new TV station that News Corps Fox is planning to launch late this year in the US, will be given a radical new internet gloss over, modeled on the MySpace social networking site the news giant bought late last year. News Corp announced the service back in February with no clear new media …

Entertainment 25 May 2006, 12:31
Dating site hack suspect charged

No love lost

A Nottinghamshire man faces charges of computer hacking on Friday over an alleged attack on the website of London dating agency loveandfriends.com. Matthew Byrne, 38, from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, is accused of unauthorised modification of a computer (contrary to section three of the Computer Misuse Act 1990). He's …

Enterprise Security 25 May 2006, 12:32
BBC extends retirement age to 2044

Back to work for you, old timer

Those of you who were hoping that - come your 65th birthday - you'd be able to put your slipper-clad feet up in front of the fire and suck on a Werther's Original while your faithful Labrador brought you the Daily Telegraph gardening section, are in for a nasty shock: you may be slaving away at your desk for a little longer than …

Bootnotes 25 May 2006, 12:44
Police database patch-up planned

'Aged' and 'collapsing' and waiting for Impact

The "aged" and "collapsing" Police National Computer (PNC) that provides intelligence to the flawed Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) will be patched up by the end of the year, according to the man leading police efforts to build a national intelligence system yesterday. Following stories of mistakes derived from the CRB database, …

Public Sector 25 May 2006, 12:52
Users irked by Gmail glitch

G spot hidden

An apparent outage left many users unable to access Gmail, Google's free web-based email service, on Wednesday. Gmail, like many web services, experiences occasional availability problems. But the issue of Wednesday lasted several hours and hit a substantial number of users, judging by our postbag and posts on a Gmail forum. …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 12:54
Yahoo! image search exposes school to porn

Safe! Mode! Useless!

Vulnerable young minds were nearly exposed to an eye-popping smut gallery by Yahoo!'s image search – running in safe mode. A school in Shanghai was set to ask students to enter “www” as a search term as part of a class project about the internet. On a dry run however, the teacher noticed the search via both yahoo.com and yahoo. …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 13:34
Lab mice deaths cast doubt over RNAi

Setback for powerful therapy?

A technology that has been lauded as a panacea for many currently incurable diseases has been dealt a blow by researchers. A paper appearing in Nature says mice given RNA interference therapy (RNAi) died of liver failure and other complications. RNA is a close chemical relative of DNA. While DNA can be thought of as an …

Biology 25 May 2006, 13:38
C&W pumps up broadband spend

Profits down

Cable & Wireless (C&W) is to capitalise on its investment in local loop unbundling (LLU) by providing unbundled services to its corporate customers. So far, C&W has installed its kit in 411 BT exchanges via Bulldog, its consumer-oriented broadband ISP, and expects this number to double by the end of September. But the telco is …

Financial News 25 May 2006, 13:58
Germany to jam prisoners' mobile phones

We're jammin' in the name of the law

The German federal government is preparing a law that would allow the use of mobile phone jammers during major events, and in prisons. Blocking the use by criminals of mobile phones is seen as an important counter-terrorism weapon. By transmitting on the same radio frequencies as the mobile phone, a phone jammer can …

Mobile 25 May 2006, 14:01
Lib Dems set up ID freedom campaign

No 'decent reason' for ID cards

The Liberal Democrats are calling for people to renew their passports before the start of the summer holidays to evade having to register for an ID card before 2016. It also wants people to join its "NO2ID Renew for Freedom" campaign because it believes "ID cards will be expensive, intrusive and ineffective". A party …

ID 25 May 2006, 14:18
Microsoft reveals rival to jpeg

Windows Media Photo squeezes more from less

Microsoft is making a pitch for the jpeg picture market with a rival Windows Media Photo format which will be supported in Windows Vista and made available for XP users. The new format was revealed in crisp detail yesterday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle, where Windows Media Photo program manager Bill …

Applications 25 May 2006, 14:19
Ebay! cuddles! up! to! Yahoo!

The! feeling's! mutual!

eBay and Yahoo! are cuddling up together to expand their businesses in the US. The internet giants have struck a major strategic partnership "designed to mutually benefit both companies by better serving their user, merchant, and advertising communities". As part of the deal Yahoo! will become the exclusive third-party provider …

Financial News 25 May 2006, 14:50
CSC UK staff face compulsory redundancies

Cheap shots

Compulsory redundancies could be on the cards for CSC's UK employees as it attempts to fine tune the lay-off program it announced last month. The firm announced a voluntary redundancy scheme last month as part of a big cutback program in Europe. However, El Reg has been told that a flood of high paid staff have volunteered for …

Channel Register 25 May 2006, 15:05
TorrentSpy accuses MPAA of hacking

Counteroffensive

The company behind the TorrentSpy search engine has countersued the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over allegations that it hired a hacker in order to spy on it. Valence Media claims the MPAA paid an unspecified individual $15K to break into its systems and snoop for intelligence, SecurityProNews reports. The …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 15:28
BT wins rights to show Premiership football

Broadband TV service 'over the moon'

BT has won the right to show Premier League football "on demand" following an £84.3m joint bid with satellite TV broadcaster BSkyB. Exactly how much each company will pay is being kept under wraps. However, it is the most high profile content deal struck by the giant telco to date as it prepares for the autumn launch of its …

Telecoms 25 May 2006, 16:05
419ers unleash pedigree bulldog attack

Beware Cameroonians bearing puppies

We've just received a frantic email from someone who rather inadvisedly, and inexplicably, decided to buy an English bulldog from that well-known centre of pedigree breeds: Cameroon. Read on: I was scamed by ROINA WOMBAD her e-mail address is sourthbuffet@earthlink.net she has an add posted on postaroo she says she has an …

Music and Media 25 May 2006, 16:12
Teen hack suspects charged over MySpace extortion bid

In brief All your space belongs to us

Two New York State teenagers have been charged with computer hacking and attempted extortion following allegations they attempted to mount an internet shake-down targeting MySpace.com, the social networking website. Shaun Harrison, 18, and Saverio Mondelli, 19, allegedly hacked into the site to steal the personal information of …

Enterprise Security 25 May 2006, 16:24
Junk science - the oil of the new web

Comment Extraordinary delusions and the Wisdom of Chimps

Borges once wrote that what the world needs is more good readers, not more good writers. So when bad ideas and sloppy thinking abound, is it more the fault of the author, or the public's desire to misrepresent their views? Maybe you can help us decide. There's a case to made that James Surowecki's The Wisdom of Crowds is the …

Science 25 May 2006, 21:24