22nd June 2009 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

Fail and You Unites browser with self-delusion

Last week, in a bold attempt at being relevant again, Opera Software unveiled Opera Unite, which is marketese for "web server inside a web browser." The less obvious news tidbit from the release is that Opera Software is evidently still alive, and it's only when you've been clutching that single digit market share for a decade …

Applications 22 Jun 04:39
Green GT motors through trial run

Leccy Tech 62mph recorded down track's straight

Green GT's leccy racer of the same name has finally taken to the track, having completed an initial shakedown of the Paul Ricard Circuit in Le Castellet, France. Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com Christian Pescatori, a Le Mans veteran, successfully pushed the car through 18 laps of the 2.37 mile …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 07:02
Samsung Story Station 1TB external HDD

Review Nice one, Sammy

Samsung has been making hard drives for years, but it's taken a wee bit longer for it to decide that if Western Digital, Seagate and co. can extend their drive production efforts to nice, shiny external storage units for consumers, it can too. Samsung's Story: strong and (almost) silent What Samsung has lacked thus far is …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 08:02
Don't call me Ishmael

Stob Choosing a name for your new PC

'No, you don't understand,' the White Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man."' 'Oh, do get on with it, you pedantic old weirdo,' snapped Alice crisply. Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll (1871), revised Verity Stob (2009) It started when we were all in …

Verity Stob 22 Jun 08:02
Bolivian TV falls for Air France crash hoax

Dramatic images of flight 447's last moments

Bolivian TV channel PAT has been left looking a bit daft after broadcasting extraordinary images of the last moments of Air France flight 447, lost over the Atlantic on 1 June: According to the report, the snaps were retrieved from a recovered Casio Z750, which was subsequently traced via the serial number to its owner - " …

Spam 22 Jun 08:49
Satnav technology becomes self-aware

Recognises your favourite roads, driving style, etc

Satnavs are smart gadgets but they can’t drive on your behalf. So software firm Journey Dynamics has designed the next best thing: a GPS box that apparently learns your motoring habits and then selects the best route for your various journeys. The firm claimed that its MyDrive application analyses “tens of thousands of …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 09:20
Health Dept puts HealthSpace under review

Online records system given hospice bed

The Department of Health (DoH) has suspended development work on the project to provide online personal health records. It has confirmed that staff have been moved to other areas of work and said it is reviewing the future of the project, but indicated that it has not been discontinued. HealthSpace has been developed as a …

Government 22 Jun 09:38
Wanna buy an old PC factory?

Mothballed IBM plant for sale - models, balls, the lot

We're all used to hearing about factory closures these days, but have you ever wondered what happens to a manufacturing plant when the jobs have gone? The answer is here, where industrial auctioneer Sweeny Kincaid is selling the contents of a "Former IBM PC Manufacturing Facility in Greenock" via an online auction. Greenock …

PCs & Chips 22 Jun 10:02
BT deposits Wi-Fi in cashpoints

Link machines get even linkier

BT Openzone is set to expand further with a deal to put hotspots in cashpoints, forgetting for a moment that it's not a mobile phone network, and making maximum use of the unlicensed spectrum available to Wi-Fi. The latest deal is with cashpoint specialist Cashbox - suppliers of those stand-alone machines found lurking in the …

Wireless 22 Jun 10:06
German MP jumps ship for Pirate Party

Porn probe Social Democrat's search for new berth

A German MP has quit the Social Democrats in protest at the country's approval of controversial laws to crack down on child porn, and pledged his support for the Pirate Party. Joerg Tauss's defection from one of Germany's ruling coalition partners means the Pirate Party - whose key policy demand is the right for computer users …

Policing 22 Jun 10:11
Sony talks up Motion Control

Developers treated to tech rundown

Sony has treated a handful of its development partners to more detailed information about the firm’s upcoming motion-control gadget for the PlayStation 3. Although Sony announced that Motion Control – which is still at the prototype stage – will eventually work alongside the Eye Toy peripheral, Sony has since stated that the …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 10:20
DataDirect takes on EMC in the cloud

Atmos to meet that WOS

EMC's Atmos cloud storage product has competition coming: WOS, the Web-Optimised Scaler from DataDirect Networks. DataDirect (DDN) supplies high-bandwidth, hardware-accelerated, block storage arrays to the high-performance computing (HPC) and rich media markets. Think of it as a SAN array on steroids, the block equivalent of a …

Storage 22 Jun 10:34
Dinosaurs actually slimmer than we thought, say boffins

Unfeasibly lardy elephant exposes duff calculations

American researchers say they have uncovered a mathematical mistake made by the dinosaur boffinry community, meaning that the weight of live dinos has long been massively overestimated. In a development with devastating consequences for various much-fancied works of fiction, it now appears that in fact the dinosaurs were …

Biology 22 Jun 10:36
Iranian hacktivists hand-crank DDoS attack

Farsi hackers do without botnets

The controversial outcome of the Iranian elections has spawned a parallel conflict on the internet. The cyberconflict is more akin to hand-to-hand fighting than the more sophisticated botnet-powered assualts that have accompanied political conflicts involving Russia and its neighbours over recent months. Cyber attacks against …

Enterprise Security 22 Jun 10:42
Orange unveils GlastoNav

Navigate your way through the mud

Watching your favourite bands while standing in foot-deep mud is tricky enough. Luckily, Orange has designed a mobile phone application that could make this year’s Glastonbury festival go slightly more smoothly for you. Orange's GlastoNav: past the bogs, round the mud, follow the waft of weed smoke... GlastoNav is “the …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 11:00
T-Mobile's second Android revealed

US buyers to get the myTouch 3G

T-Mobile's US operation has taken the wraps off of its second Android handset, which the carrier has called the myTouch 3G. T-Mobile's myTouch 3G - aka HTC's Magic - has been launched in the US As T-Mobile was the first network operator to launch a phone based on Google’s OS, consumers have been waiting anxiously for news …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 11:05
Windows 7, Bing and security: Mr Ballmer regrets

Steve hopes Microsoft money can buy your love

You can measure the size of a man's regret by how much he spends to make up for his mistakes. If you've missed your girlfriend's birthday, for example, then that could be a lolcat. If you're Steve Ballmer and you've let Google run away with online search and advertising, that could be $5.5 to $11bn of Microsoft's operating …

Microbite 22 Jun 11:08
Palm Pre developers told to read a book

No SDK for WebOS until the end of summer

Developers chomping at the bit to get their applications onto the Palm Pre are going to have to wait a little longer, as the Mojo SDK necessary won't be around until the end of the summer at best. While launching an SDK three months after the device might compare well with Apple's iPhone (which only managed an SDK a year after …

Mobile 22 Jun 11:14
KCOM hands network management to BT

Straight to Hull, boy

KCOM has scaled back its ambitions again and will concentrate on selling managed services to corporates after outsourcing its the management of its network assets to BT. The company formerly known as Kingston Communications pitched the deal as extending its "network reach through access to BT's national network", with BT's …

Channel Register 22 Jun 11:34
Union attacks fire-brigade control room IT modernisation

Claims of 'meltdown' not ideal for fire service project

Union officials have launched a public attack on a government networking and IT project designed to reduce the number of fire-brigade control rooms from 46 to 9. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) says that the Fire and Resilience Control (FiReControl) project is in "meltdown" and can't possibly be ready in time for the London …

Government 22 Jun 12:07
Facebook tackles potent click fraud scam

Disgruntled advertisers turn anti-social

Facebook is investigating reports that advertisers on the social networking site have been left well out of pocket as a result of click fraud. Networks of compromised PCs are often used to click on banner ads, generating income for unscrupulous affiliates at the expense of online advertisers, who effectively wind up paying for …

ID 22 Jun 12:25
Mellanox cranks up InfiniBand switches

648 ports and 40 Gb/sec are the magic numbers

With all of the talk about 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the commercial server racket these days, it is easy to forget that the king of high bandwidth in server networking is still InfiniBand, which runs at 40 Gb/sec in the new round of products that are coming out. Mellanox Technologies, which makes chips for processing the InfiniBand …

Data Networking 22 Jun 12:31
Apple won't let Commodore onto its baby

Ruling bodes badly for Spectrum

Apple has rejected a licensed Commodore 64 emulator application for the iPhone, citing its own rules that forbid virtual environments - something aimed more at Java developers than nostalgic gamers. Publisher Manomio thought it was on to a good thing; cashing in on all those iPhone users still desperate to hear the …

Mobile 22 Jun 12:37
WD 2TB Caviar Black appears on promo card

I'll swap you a hard drive for Ryan Giggs

Western Digital could be set to add a 2TB model to its Caviar Black range, if a picture of a promotion card in Japan is to be believed. Up until now WD has reserved the 2TB capacity for its desktop Caviar Green range, spinning at 5,400rpm. This is used in WD's MyBook World Edition shared home backup product. WD also has an …

Storage 22 Jun 12:51
Apple iPhone 3GS

Review This object of techno-lust just got even better... and pricier

Everyone knew that Apple was planning to unveil version 3.0 of the iPhone OS at its Worldwide Developer Conference this month. As expected, the new OS adds some long awaited features such as ‘copy and paste’, multimedia messaging (MMS) and the ability to ‘tether’ your iPhone to a laptop computer so that the notebook can share …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 12:52
Plantronics touts 'world's best' Bluetooth headset

Crystal clear call clarity?

Plantronics has launched what it claims is currently the world’s most advanced noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset. Plantronic's Voyager Pro: filters out noise and wind The firm claimed that Voyager Pro’s call clarity secret lies in its superior AudioIQ digital signal processing algorithms, which filter out almost all …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 14:43
Google submits to Beijing porn drive

Thumbing nose at Tehran OK, but not at Beijing

Google's attempt to burnish its public image by helping anti-government demonstrators in Iran has been hobbled by its apparent submission to a Beijing anti-porn drive that has even drawn fire from the US government. Last week Google trumpeted its subversive credentials by offering a Farsi translation tool, the same week that …

Government 22 Jun 14:45
Blade Runner house yours for $15m

Frank Lloyd Wright classic seeks loving owner

Fans of Blade Runner with very, very deep pockets are directed to Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House, which featured in the movie and is up for grabs for a modest $15m. The last of the architect's four "Textile Block" abodes, the 6,000-square-foot Mayan-inspired pad was built in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles for Charles …

Bootnotes 22 Jun 14:53
Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

Sign equine pledge or face jail

The Sun is having a field day on "barmy" new EU regulations which require every horse owner to sign a pledge that he or she will not eat their mount. Naturally, the "Horse Identification Regulations" - due to come into force next month and "partly aimed at stopping harmful vets’ drugs entering humans’ diets" - target our …

Bootnotes 22 Jun 15:50
O2 tells Apple fans to talk to the hand

Updated No Safari to iPhone land

O2, who hold the UK exclusive on the iPhone, provides a useful online ordering tool for those looking to get the latest Apple hardware - as long as you're not using Apple's Safari browser. Everyone else is most welcome: Firefox, Internet Explorer and even Opera Mobile can all connect and apply for a long-term contract. But …

Mobile 22 Jun 16:09
iPhone 3G S sales surpass 1m units

Firmware 3.0 downloads growing...

Apple has announced that over 1m iPhone 3G S units have been sold since the handset was launched last week. The firm’s keeping specific 3G S sales figures for individual countries close to its chest, but O2 today confirmed to Register Hardware that the figure does include its own UK sales tally. The iPhone 3G S was released …

Reg Hardware 22 Jun 17:02
After six months, Steve Jobs speaks

One million reasons why 'The iPhone is winning'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs took his first small step towards retaking the reins in Cupertino on Monday morning, issuing a short statement in a press release announcing that sales of the company's new iPhone 3GS* (Reg review link) have topped one million since its release last Friday. Jobs has been conspicuously absent from any Apple …

Mobile 22 Jun 17:26
Platform leaps from grids to clouds

Traffic cop in the sky

Platform Computing's Load Sharing Facility was one of the pioneering commercial programs for coordinating workloads running on parallel supercomputers, and it comes as no surprise that Platform wants to take what it knows about managing grids and apply it to managing clouds. There are some big differences in the software stack …

Virtualization 22 Jun 17:54
Kodak retiring iconic Kodachrome film

Joins smoke signals, hammer and chisel

Eastman Kodak is retiring Kodachrome this year, as digital photography winds the once-iconic color film into obscurity. Kodachrome is widely recognized as the world's first commercially successful color film, offered in Kodak's portfolio for the past 74 years. But nowadays, Kodak gets about 70 per cent of revenues from its …

Odds and Sods 22 Jun 18:19
Microsoft goes green to win IE 8 and Bing users

Revives failed 'facts' thinking

The planet and economy have been co-opted by Microsoft in its latest effort to win back the web from open-source and Google. Microsoft has announced a $10,000 prize for developers that build what it calls "economy or ecology" themed web applications in its Will Code for Green challenge. All applications must consume Bing and …

Applications 22 Jun 18:47
Microsoft plucks Yahoo! data center efficiency expert

Powers up GeoCities veteran

Microsoft has hired a Yahoo! data center veteran to help build an energy efficient infrastructure beneath its planned cloud and online services. The company said Monday that Yahoo! vice president of operations Kevin Timmons has joined its Global Foundation Services operation where he'll head up the recently-created data center …

Business 22 Jun 21:25
Another Xbox chief leaves for EA

Executive exchange program

It's becoming more and more plausible that Electronic Arts and Microsoft's Xbox unit intend to keep swapping executives until they run each other's companies. The latest round of chieftain interchanging involves John Schappert, Microsoft corporate veep of Live, Software, and Service. The job put him in charge of Redmond's …

Business 22 Jun 21:29
Google News serves up...Wikipedia links

Walesian prophecy fulfilled

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales likes to discuss the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit" as some sort of breaking news source. And apparently, Google agrees with him. As noticed by The New York Times, the world's largest search engine is now including Wikipedia links on Google News, billed as "a computer-generated …

Music and Media 22 Jun 21:41
Voltaire's monster Infiniband switch

40Gbit/s, 324-port Boss Hogg

Voltaire is announcing general availability of its 40Gbit/s quad data rate InfiniBand switch at today's International SuperComputing 2009 event. The company launched an Ethernet switch earlier this month: an 8500 with 288 ports. But InfiniBand is still Boss Hogg, as the Grid Director 4700 features a 51.8Tbit/s backplane …

Storage 22 Jun 22:06
US city ends FaceSpaceGooHoo log-in grab

Bozeman bows

After a virtual avalanche of news coverage, the City of Bozeman, Montana has decided it will no longer ask job applicants for their FaceSpaceGooHoo log-ins. As we explained last week, the mid-sized American burg was requiring City job seekers to surrender usernames and passwords for all "social networking" sites they used, …

ID 22 Jun 23:12
VMLogix plugs virt jukebox into Amazon cloud

Gold record storage

As they move to virtual environments, one of the things that IT shops need is a jukebox that stores all gold images for software stacks used in development, testing, and production. The programs that do this are called lab managers - because they were initially used in software development labs that were the early adopters of …

Virtualization 22 Jun 23:21
People just not that into Blu-ray

I'd rather be surfing

Winning the next-gen DVD format war turns out to be a bit like getting crowned "most popular stench." Blu-Ray may have overwhelmed the competition, but that doesn't mean folks plan to invite it into their home. Although nearly half of Americans now own a high definition television, the overwhelming majority show little …

Music and Media 22 Jun 23:46