26th August 2009 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Big chip for big boxes: IBM cracks open lid on Power7

Gauntlet time

IBM has divulged some specs of its forthcoming Power7 chips and their related Power Systems servers, throwing down the gauntlet to its peers. The company confirmed last fall that the Power7 chip would span up to eight cores and would use a 45 nanometer manufacturing process developed at IBM's East Fishkill, New York foundry. …

Servers 26 Aug 00:07
US broadband speeds 15 years behind South Korea

Slow like molasses in winter

You can't escape ads on US TV each day from Comcast, AT&T, Sprint or some other provider crowing about how they are making their networks faster for TV, internet and phone. Fast is relative, though, and it seems broadband is only inching forward in the US, with the country calculated to be 15 years behind speed leader South …

Telecoms 26 Aug 00:12
Yahoo! News confused on theft of Lego giraffe's todger

Anatomy 101

Editors at Yahoo News are either horribly bad at anatomy or have a better sense of humor than they're given credit for. Or maybe both. How else to explain an article on the UK version of the site reporting the repeated theft of a 30 cm penis from a Lego giraffe at a Berlin tourist attraction? At time of writing, it read: …

Odds and Sods 26 Aug 00:16
Multitaskers: suckers for irrelevancy, easily distracted

Report fingers generation goldfish

A recent study implies it's not cool to brag about your skills as a multitasker. This will comes as bad news to those of us who regularly consume multiple simultaneous media streams - texting while watching television, hopping between websites and IM, or coding while listening to Jay-Z. You know who you are. Specifically, …

Odds and Sods 26 Aug 00:29
Teen kidnapped over Sony PSP

When resale goes bad

Perhaps exchanging used video games for an eighth their value in store credit isn't such a terrible idea after all. A 17-year-old lad from Utah discovered there's worse things than getting jerked around by retail after getting kidnapped in a PSP sale gone bad. Utah police say the boy on Saturday was forced into the car of 21- …

Crime 26 Aug 00:39
Kettle car breaks speed record

Celebratory cuppas all round

The British kettle car has successfully smashed the 100 year old record for fastest steam-powered vehicle. The car hit an average speed of 139.843mph over two runs at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The British Steam Car Challenge was driven by Charles Burnett III and broke 150mph for its fastest trip over a measured …

Physics 26 Aug 08:19
PC buyers not turned on to Blu-ray Disc

At least five years until BD supplants DVD in PCs

Less than four per cent of the PCs that will have shipped this year contained a Blu-ray Disc drive, market watcher iSuppli has estimated. And it doesn't look like there's going to be any surge in demand in the near future. Come 2013, the proportion of new PCs with Blu-ray will have risen to just 16.3 per cent. PC punters, it …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 08:25
Nokia 'seeking partners' for ARM-based netbook

Wintel not the fruit for phone giant, claim moles

Nokia's first netbook, the Booklet 3G, may be based on Wintel technology, but Taiwanese manufacturer moles claim the Finnish phone giant is working on an ARM-based model. The sources, cited by DigiTimes, are vague on the details and admit Nokia's ARM-based netbook - we refuse to use the marketing term 'smartbook'; an ARM chip …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 08:45
AMD Bulldozer core to weave multiple threads

But not the way Intel's HyperThreading does so

AMD's 'Bulldozer' core design will incorporate some kind of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology, it has emerged. But it's not going to be like Intel's HyperThreading the smaller chip maker has insisted. This week, AMD showed off its 'Magny Cours' chip architecture, a design that crams in six of the cores found on its …

PCs & Chips 26 Aug 09:23
Legal ruling may hit outsourcing claims

Employment tribunal ruling could open floodgates

More people could resign and claim compensation for unfair dismissal if their company is taken over by another firm whose offices are further away following an Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) ruling, an employment law expert has said. The ruling interprets the law governing transfers of staff from one company to another in a …

Law 26 Aug 09:44
SpectraLogic yanks dedupe limitation

More drives pile into libraries

SpectraLogic has removed a common limitation of deduplicating virtual tape libraries (VTLs) - the inability to add more drives to a bought VTL. It has also added a global hot spare tape drive to its libraries plus enhanced hardware component monitoring. SpectraLogic provides integrated disk-based virtual tape libraries (VTLs …

Storage 26 Aug 09:48
Blimp radar makes first flight

Vid Defence against terrorist death drones, kamikazes

A new US military radar system, suspended beneath a tethered "aerostat" balloon so as to see beyond the horizon, made its first flight yesterday. The JLENS blimp-scanner is intended to finger such things as enemy cruise missiles or unmanned aircraft. The US military - particularly the Army, as opposed to the Air Force …

Physics 26 Aug 10:04
PS3 Slim unscrewed

iFixit takes latest console to bits

As postal services the world over prepare for an flood of PlayStation 3 Slim deliveries, the guys at iFixit.com have already taken a screwdriver to Sony’s latest console. iFixit took the PS3 Slim to bits Sony’s chief design focus for the PS3 Slim was more effective heat dissipation, iFixit concluded after taking the Slim to …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 10:07
Notorious hacker Analyzer pleads guilty on credit card scam

$10m scam perp puts hands up

Notorious recidivist hacker Ehud Tenenbaum has pleaded guilty to credit card fraud as part of a plea bargaining agreement with US authorities in a multi-million dollar fraud case. Tenenbaum, known as The Analyzer, pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud over his involvement in a sophisticated computer hacking scam reckoned …

Enterprise Security 26 Aug 10:30
Offical Mini N97 shot spied online

Launching this year, says Vodafone

What’s thought to be the first official image of the rumoured Nokia N97 Mini has appeared online. Nokia hasn't admitted the N97 Mini's existence Images of the N97 Mini lying beside the original N97 cropped up online last month, but this latest image shows the miniaturised handset bathed in light-brown splendour. The …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 10:45
Small businesses cheer on economy

Smile darn ya smile

British small businesses are getting bullish about the future - nearly three-quarters of them are increasingly confident about the economy. A survey of small businesses from Barclays Commercial found 57 per cent of respondents said they were "hopeful" about the economic outlook and a further 17 per cent were "excited" about …

Small Biz 26 Aug 10:53
Man mods 25-year-old phone into media centre PC

Mobira Talkman transformed (internally)

Most of us, if we had a 25-year-old mobile telephone - a Mobira Talkman, to be precise - hanging around, we'd flog it on eBay to some spotty kit collector. Not so one Finnish fellow - he turned it into a media PC. From 1984, the Mobira Talkman... For those who missed out on the early days of mobile communications, the …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 10:53
Who rejected Google Voice on the iPhone?

Apple's decision not exactly rocket science

So Apple is taking the fall and AT&T washes its hands of the whole affair, but would Apple still be examining Google Voice if approval wouldn't upset its biggest customer? The responses to the FCC investigation are in, and clearly state that there was no contractual agreement between AT&T and Apple to prevent VoIP, or Google …

VoIP 26 Aug 10:54
Consumers: Gucci out, gadgets in

Tech biz not rag trade defining new fashions, says MS

Register Hardware’s hacks wouldn’t be seen dead in flares or walk around the with seat of our pants a foot below our bum cracks. We're not unusual, Microsoft tells us, because technology is increasingly replacing clothing as a fashion-defining medium. A recent report by the software giant concluded that a new breed of style- …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 11:01
NHS email feeling better now

Day off just the ticket

NHS email access is getting back on its feet today after a nasty sick day yesterday. We had several emails from readers unable to send mail to people with nhs.uk email addresses yesterday. Messages sent to the mail.nhs.uk were getting timeout messages. Internal email was unaffected. A Department of Health spokesperson said …

Government 26 Aug 11:19
Office 2010 to come loaded with WGA's bastard child

Microsoft takes advantage

Microsoft has stretched its twitching anti-piracy tentacles more widely across the globe with the expansion of its Office Genuine Advantage Notifications program into 13 more countries. The software giant confirmed yesterday that 41 countries could now enroll in Redmond’s voluntary program that offers end users “enhanced …

Applications 26 Aug 11:21
Placky MacBook revamp on the cards, claim moles

Overhaul to put an end to cracking cases?

There has been talk of an iMac refresh coming in the near future and now it's being claimed that the plastic MacBook is going to get a (long overdue) revamp soon too. After Apple recently renamed October 2008's metal MacBook as the 13in MacBook Pro, the plastic model continues to define the entry level for the company's laptop …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 11:34
Sony takes on the Kindle

Ebook war is declared

Sony's new Daily Edition is aiming to take on Amazon's Kindle with its 3G connectivity and touch screen, but it will have to provide an acceptable face for DRM, with library lending and open standards. The Daily Edition will be available in the US come December, and includes 3G GSM connectivity that will allow users to …

Notebooks 26 Aug 11:40
UK population to abandon Midlands

Orange finds everyone heading for hills

Orange has been asking people where they would like to live, and assuming connectivity makes it possible it seems the North will not just be grim, but also deserted. Orange surveyed 3,281 office workers in the UK and discovered that 16 per cent of them would take a £6,900 pay cut if they could pick where they worked, while 42 …

Mobile 26 Aug 11:42
Asus CEO blasts ARM netbooks

Lacks clear USP, apparently

Asus’ CEO has turned on ARM-based netbook PCs, hinting that the segment lacks a unique selling point. During a recent investor conference in Taipei, Jerry Shen reportedly said: “Currently, I still don’t see a clear market for smartbooks.” 'Smartbook' is the term coined by chip maker Qualcomm to imply there's some substantial …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 11:55
How to run Mac OS X on a generic PC

No need for hacked software

Eighteen months ago, if you wanted to run Apple's Mac OS X on a generic Intel box your only option was to fish around on the internet for a hacked version that modified all the relevant low-level calls. And then hope it worked on your hardware. Not snapped on a Mac Even if you managed to get it up and running, Apple's …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 12:02
MS phishing filter blacklists everything

You all look bloody shifty to me

A wide range of uk.com websites were misclassified as malign by anti-phishing technology built into the latest versions of Microsoft's browser software on Wednesday. Microsoft's SmartScreen Filter, which is built into IE7 and IE8, labelled every uk.com top level domain site as a phishing site following what appears to be a …

Enterprise Security 26 Aug 12:24
Novell starts distie cuts

More to come, warns EMEA boss

IT distie Avnet has buddied up with software firm Novell in a distribution deal for the UK. Financial terms of the agreement were kept secret. Avnet said it would farm out Novell’s entire portfolio of data centre, identity and security management, and end user computing solutions to its business partner network. Middle man …

Channel Register 26 Aug 12:25
Cisco and EMC allegedly sitting in tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

VMWorld speculates on possible joint venture

Rumours in the lead up to VMworld 2009 next week are suggesting that Cisco and EMC have formed a joint venture company, to market a jointly-developed product. According to a person somewhat familiar with the situation, the JV company is hiring sales reps to sell the product. This is not the 3-way Cisco-EMC-VMware deal …

Servers 26 Aug 12:31
Huge 'vampyrus' bats being hunted to extinction

Tagged aerial scrumper study: Batshit crisis looming

Scientists say that the world's largest bat, the six-foot Pteropus vampyrus, is threatened with extinction at the hands of bat hunters across the Far East. They have called for fewer bat-hunting permits to be issued by local governments. Despite the name, P vampyrus is not a blood-drinking bat like some South American species …

Biology 26 Aug 12:47
Man beaten and stabbed by Gumtree scammers

Police issue common sense warning

Police today warned users of the popular classifieds website Gumtree to be on their guard after a man who responded to a car advert was almost killed in a brutal robbery. On July 30 the 42-year-old took a large amount of cash to meet the supposed seller of a VW Golf in Barking, east London. He was punched, kicked and stabbed …

Policing 26 Aug 12:50
Fujitsu cuts 1,200 UK jobs after revenue mauling

Even though EMEA sales grew 38% in Q1...

Fujitsu Services is shedding roughly 10 per cent of its UK workforce with the announcement that 1,200 jobs will go, following less than pretty revenues. In June the Japanese tech firm reported an 11 per cent drop in first quarter revenue, down to ¥1.04tn (£6.7bn). It pulled in a net loss of ¥29bn (£186m) during Q1. However, …

IT Director 26 Aug 13:04
Designer draws hydrogen-powered Aston Martin

Leccy Tech Not Vantage, but 'Volare'

The last season of Top Gear ended with Jeremy Clarkson complaining that the Aston Martin V12 Vantage could be the last of its breed, thanks to environmental constraints, speed restrictions and global oil-related issues. Volare is a hydrogen fuel cell-powered Aston concept Now 23-year-old British automotive design graduate …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 13:19
Unravelling the cloud confusion

Reader Workshop Everything as a service?

In the last article we looked at whether virtualization provided a springboard to that loosely knit set of capability some refer to as 'cloud services'. But, as we've found previously when discussing such topics, cloud is a can of worms (if that's not too much of a mixed metaphor). So, what is meant by cloud services? As we …

Software 26 Aug 13:22
Nokia designs phone-based financial app

Handheld cash machines?

Nokia has realised that there’s money to be had in… er… money, so has announced that it will launch a mobile phoned-based financial service. Unimaginatively called Nokia Money, the service will enable you to send money to someone else using their mobile number. You'll also be able to buy goods and services, pay utility bills …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 13:57
Google applies patch to nasty Chrome vulns

Heal thy bleeding sores

Google has pushed out a patch for two severe vulns found in its Chrome browser. Mountain View released Chrome 2.0.172.43 yesterday that fixes an attack on Google's V8 JavaScript engine. Mozilla security wonks spotted the Chrome security flaw in V8. It could have allowed an attacker to gain access to sensitive information, by …

Malware 26 Aug 14:24
Lightning-gun tech 'approaching weaponisation'

Settings: Gadget bricker, skeleton-strobe, smoking boots

The Pentagon continues to pour funding into Arizona-based laser plasma lightning blaster-gun firm Applied Energetics, formerly known as Ionatron. The US Army says that the firm's lightning guns are "approaching the level of maturity needed to begin weaponization". The military assessment came as the US Army Research, …

Physics 26 Aug 14:31
Amazon does virtual private clouds

Next step, real private EC2 clouds?

Early this morning, the Amazon Web Services division of online retailing giant Amazon announced something that more than a few businesses have been waiting for: a complete virtual private cloud hosted on the company's Elastic Compute Cloud. With the new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC for short, the company is carving out …

Storage 26 Aug 14:37
French govt to investigate immolating iPhone claims

Spate of accidents prompt inquiry

France appears to have been struck by a barrage of incendiary iPhones - and the country's official consumer affairs organisation is to investigate the matter. According to local news agency AFP, six new cases of exploding Apple handsets have come to light this week in addition to two previous incidents reported earlier this …

Reg Hardware 26 Aug 14:47
Cutting your teeth on desktop virtualization?

Reader Study Complete our poll and share the experience

It could be argued that desktop virtualization was where it all started in terms of the current hoo-ha around virtualization as a whole. Most attention might now be focused on the server, but there's still plenty of potential for virtualization on the desktop. While desktop virtualization may be simple in principle, in …

Software 26 Aug 15:01
Nokia banks on cash transfer biz

Inter-bank exchange via SMS

Nokia is about to launch its own money transfer system, Nokia Money, providing the convenience of banking services to the developing world as well as cashless transfers for everyone else. Nokia Money will launch next year, with more details to emerge at the Nokia World next week, but the service is based on that already …

Mobile 26 Aug 15:02
Mininova flattened by Dutch court

Ordered to remove BitTorrent files or face big fine

A civil court has ordered Pirate Bay rival Mininova to carpet bomb all "infringing" BitTorrent files held on its servers within the next three months or face a fine of up to €5m ($7.16m). Dutch-based pro-copyright lobby group Stichting Brein, which recently took aim at TPB’s operations, brought the lawsuit against Mininova. …

Music and Media 26 Aug 16:00
FSF launches Windows 7 anti-upgrade letter campaign

Less is more "sins"

The Free Software Foundation is mobilizing against Windows 7 with a campaign to dissuade IT decision makers from installing the operating system. The group has sent letters to 499 of the top Fortune 500 organizations, warning that a move to Windows 7 will increase their dependence on Microsoft and encouraging the use of GNU/ …

Operating Systems 26 Aug 18:28
Microsoft apologizes for digital head transplant

It's black. It's white

Microsoft has apologized for digitally removing the head of a black man from a website photo and replacing it with the head of a white man. Yesterday, countless bloggers and other netizens noticed that Microsoft's Polish site had reproduced a photo from the company's main English language site - with one obvious change. The …

Odds and Sods 26 Aug 18:34
YouTube to share ad money with viral videos

One-off vids allowed into partnership program

YouTube plans to turn more skateboarding dogs into cash by selling ads for the creators of one-off viral videos. Since 2007, YouTube has invited users who produce a steady stream of popular clips to become "partners" in its advertising program. Once a content creator is accepted into the program, Google begins pitching …

Music and Media 26 Aug 18:50
US music publishers sue online lyrics sites

Go call you a lawyer

Music moguls are opening up another can of web whoop-ass on alleged copyright-infringement miscreants, this time suing online lyrics sites. And no, this isn't a move by the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), which is apparently still basking in the glory of its $1.92m victory over the file-sharing mother of four, …

Music and Media 26 Aug 21:15
Sun goes over Rainbow Falls

At Hot Chips, not in a barrel

Sun Microsystems, muzzled by Oracle's impending $5.6bn takeover, somewhat surprisingly showed up at the 21st annual Hot Chips conference sponsored by the IEEE and hosted at Stanford University - the birthplace of Sun - where Sun's chip techies talked about the future Rainbow Falls Sparc T processors and their integrated …

Hardware 26 Aug 22:19
Dig deep for Microsoft's Windows 7 advice line

Pay to play - and migrate

Microsoft has made much of how software and hardware written for Windows Vista will work with Windows 7. And that would he great - if Windows Vista hadn't been such a monumental flop and the majority of Windows applications today weren't still tuned for Windows XP. The good news is that Microsoft is piloting a service for …

Operating Systems 26 Aug 22:24
Adobe rubberstamps (only) CS4 for Snow Leopard

CS3? It's not 'not supported'

Adobe has announced that its Creative Suite 4 (CS4) has been tested and cleared for use on Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system. But it has no plans to test the compatibility of earlier versions. If you own CS3 or earlier, according to an Adobe FAQ (PDF), you're on your own. "Older versions of Adobe creative software were …

Applications 26 Aug 22:41
Mechwarrior maker claims Microsoft 'destroyed' studio's culture

And nearly killed Bungie

FASA Interactive founder Jordan Weisman blames Microsoft for "destroying" his game studio after it was assimilated into Redmond in 1999. Gamers may recognize FASA as the former creators of the popular Mechwarrior PC franchise — and a reviled Vista-exclusive shooter very loosely based on the cyberpunk Shadowrun universe. But …

Music and Media 26 Aug 22:46
Twitter botches patch for nasty account-hijacking bug

All your tweets are belong to us

For the past 24 hours, Twitter engineers have been fighting a gaping hole that makes it easy for hackers to hijack the accounts of users who do nothing more than view a booby-trapped message. So far, the hole is winning. The XSS, or cross-site scripting, bug resides in an application programming interface Twitter provides to …

Security 26 Aug 22:54
Storage Fusion lowers prices on intimate searches

Storage resource analytics as a service

UK start-up Storage Fusion will offer a storage resource analytics (SRA) service in the cloud, with customers getting an unprecedented level of detail about heterogeneous storage arrays at a far lower cost than they would from enterprise SRA tools. Tools such as EMC's ECC and IBM's Total Productivity Suite are good for the …

Storage 26 Aug 23:12
Tibco snaps up DataSynapse for $28m

Cloudy aspirations

Tibco Software has purchased grid/cloud outfit DataSynapse in a deal with worth $28m. DataSynapse was not only an earlier player in grid computing with its GridServer middleware for creating and managing grids of computing capacity, but it carved a niche for itself in the early 2000s by developing a set of vertical …

Servers 26 Aug 23:33
Poor porn protection hurt Firefox 3 uptake

"Certain bookmarks" best left unexposed

How we yawned as Microsoft churned out dull report after sponsored study to "prove" Internet Explorer 8 beats Firefox on security, performance, and ease of use. Turns out, all Microsoft had to do against Firefox was talk more about IE 8's porn mode with InPrivate Browsing, which hides your online stash from the eyes of loved …

Applications 26 Aug 23:57