31st August 2009 Archive

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AMD plays it cool with low-volt Istanbuls

No new server chips until 2010

AMD is today expected to complete its rollout of the six-core Istanbul series of Opteron processors with the final chip in the family: a low-voltage part for two-socket servers. AMD has been dabbling with voltages and clock speeds to make Opterons of various performance levels and thermal envelopes since the 64-bit Opterons …

PCs & Chips 31 Aug 04:02
Feds break Apple's code of App Store silence

Fail and You Heads you're in. Tails you're out

Oh, Apple Computer. What sorts of antics are you into this month? Since the iPhone was released two years ago, watching Apple keep its obsessive vise grip on the device while trying to promote third party application development has been one solid I-didn't-know-you-could-do-that after another. Battle the recording industry …

Mobile 31 Aug 06:42
Spotify, DRM and the celestial jukebox

Cache for questions

With Spotify launching a new offline music player for iPhones, it has taken a big step forward to giving itself a future. Now it faces the same dilemma as Real's Rhapsody: why pay for a universal jukebox when your music will disappear when the sub runs out? This particular universal jukebox is growing at a fantastic rate, but …

Music and Media 31 Aug 07:02
Japan gives the wheelchair a hi-tech overhaul

GPS and obstacle-avoidance on board

A Japanese firm has developed a hi-tech wheelchair that's able to avoid obstacles and find its way around - while being more comfortable for the passenger. Rodem: a sort of high-tech wheelchair getting around on Pictures: TechOn Rodem – roughly translated as Robot for Enjoying Mobility, TechOn reports - is a universal …

Reg Hardware 31 Aug 09:02
Apple joins expanded HTML 5 leadership team

Ministry of W3C talents

Apple is stepping up to an expanded leadership team helping steward the magnum opus that is HTML 5. The manager of Apple's WebKit WebApps Team, Maciej Stachowiak, has been named co-chairperson of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTML 5 working group. Stachowiak is a longtime developer on the WebKit open-source browser …

Applications 31 Aug 10:02
'Grid computing Red Hat' lands elephant on VMware cloud

Hadoop for the future

Cloudera - the star-studded Silicon Valley startup that commercialized the epic number crunching of the open source Hadoop project - is now offering a version of its stuffed elephant distro for use on VMWare's imminent vCloud. Inspired by research papers describing Google’s proprietary software infrastructure, Hadoop is a …

Servers 31 Aug 10:02
Intel says data centers much too cold

Frozen assets a waste of cash

Intel wants you to know that data centers are wasting energy - and money - by over-cooling their servers, burdened by warranties that may prevent them from aggressively raising their temperature. During a wide-ranging discussion on enterprise-level cloud computing last week, Intel's director of platform technology initiatives …

Servers 31 Aug 11:02
Soundcast Outcast Junior

Review 60W outdoor sound system – the ultimate in ASBO tech?

Aimed at outdoor music lovers, the Outcast Junior comes from American manufacturer Soundcast Systems and, compared to the larger Outcast model, is the more compact and affordable version. It features four 3in drivers at the top of the unit and a 6.5in sub-woofer in the base, all powered by a 60W digital amplifier. Despite …

Reg Hardware 31 Aug 12:02
Sun sales plummet 30.6% in Q4

What? You didn't think we'd notice?

If the impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle was meant to be reassuring to Sun's customers and to stabilize its sales, that sure didn't work. Not with revenues down 30.6 per cent to $2.62bn and the company posting a $147m net loss in the fiscal fourth quarter ended in June. After the market closed on Friday, Sun …

Financial News 31 Aug 13:02
Iomega desktop NAS getting iSCSI support

Second-generation product

Iomega has introduced an updated desktop NAS box, a kind of pre-loaded Drobo with added iSCSI block storage access. The small office/home office (SOHO) StorCenter ix4-100 was introduced in February and provided a pre-loaded desktop NAS box with four hot-swap SATA drives and 2, 3, 4 or 6TB capacity. It ran EMC's LifeLine OS, …

Storage 31 Aug 14:02
US health-care debate clogged world's inboxes

Pharma-spam cashes in

When the US debates health care reform, the world's inboxes get clogged with health-related spam. A recent report (PDF) by security firm MX Logic indicates nearly 70 per cent of spam in August was related to the topic of health. August was the month that saw the debate over proposals to reform US health coverage rage, as …

Spam 31 Aug 15:02
Microsoft denies "screw-Google" political lobbying

What's in a name?

Microsoft is certainly working to outflank Google in Washington, DC, but it has dismissed the notion that it holds regular "screw Google" meetings. A company spokesperson told Daily Finance that it's absurd to hang the "screw Google" tag on meetings between chief lobbyist Fred Humphries and politicians and DC lobbyists. " …

Government 31 Aug 16:13
Semiconductor sales rise 5.3% in July

The chips are up

Sometimes, the good news is that things are getting less bad. So it seems to be with the semiconductor industry. According to a report from the Semiconductor Manufacturing Association today, worldwide chip sales hit $18.2bn in July, up 5.3 per cent sequentially from the $17.2bn level set in June. If you like to look at the …

PCs & Chips 31 Aug 16:17
AppleT&T's MMS legal woes double

Gentlemen, start your photocopiers

Two lawsuits filed earlier this month against Apple and AT&T Mobility alleging that the companies misrepresented the iPhone's ability to send MMS message have been joined by two more. As we reported mid-month, two essentially identical lawsuits were filed in Louisiana and Illinois. Now, two equally identical lawsuits have been …

Mobile 31 Aug 17:56
SMBs unimpressed by netbooks

Cool for school, not work?

Netbooks might be gaining popularity among consumers and college kids, but small and medium businesses (SMBs) are proving immune to their charms. More than two thirds of SMBs plan on buying new PCs and laptops in the next six months, but netbooks are a low priority, according to a Spiceworks survey. Just 13 per-cent of SMBs …

Notebooks 31 Aug 18:01
German state election exit polls leaked on Twitter

A little bird told me...

German election officials are once again shaking their fists at Twitter after forecasts for several state elections were leaked ahead of schedule. It's the second time that German election data have prematurely circulated on the Web2.0rhea service. On Sunday, a pair of Twitter users posted exit poll results for state …

Government 31 Aug 18:40
VMware vSphere gets more gadgets

Freebie console for freebie hypervisor

Server virtualization juggernaut VMware kicks off its VMworld fest in San Francisco today by rounding out its vCenter management tools for the new vSphere 4.0 stack, which wraps around the new ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor. The company is also launching a free Web-based, hosted management tool that will allow companies that use …

Virtualization 31 Aug 18:52
IIS bug gives attackers complete server control

Linux and Chrome flaws too

A hacker has uncovered a previously unknown bug in Microsoft's Internet Information Services webserver that in some cases gives attackers complete control of vulnerable machines. Proof-of-concept code published Monday has been confirmed to give remote root access to servers running version 5 of IIS on Windows 2000 with Service …

Security 31 Aug 20:03
iPhone thieves collared by Jobsian GPS

The telltale status symbol

A trio of blundering brigands have been busted after an iPhone they had stolen betrayed their whereabouts. This tale of technology overcoming uninformed criminality comes to us from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which reported Monday that an unnamed victim was robbed of his iPhone and wallet early Sunday morning. Apparently, …

Mobile 31 Aug 20:19
IT test cloud follows Amazon with tunnel to earth

Skytapping gets IPSec

Less than a week after Amazon introduced its Virtual Private Cloud, letting you readily marry your internal IT infrastructure with an external setup floating on its EC2 web service, the Jeff Bezos-backed Silicon Valley startup SkyTap is offering much the same thing on its own infrastructure cloud. Today, SkyTap added an IPSec …

Servers 31 Aug 20:58
EMC absorbs FastScale Technology

Ionix carves up and slims down servers

Storage giant and systems management software wannabe EMC added another tool to its data center utility belt today when it snapped up FastScale Technology for an undisclosed sum. Because everybody has cloud on the brain these days in the IT vendor community, the FastScale Composer Suite tools were being pitched by EMC's Ionix …

Servers 31 Aug 21:54
Japanese boffin boasts electrospray OLEDs

As cheap/expensive as newspapers

Displays created using self-illuminating organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology "could be manufactured as inexpensively as printing newspapers," according to one of the researchers involved in developing the new manufacturing process. As reported in Nanowerk, one Yutaka Yamagata of the Japanese research center, RIKEN, …

Music and Media 31 Aug 22:18
Judge acquits mother in MySpace suicide case

Violating terms of service not a criminal offense

A federal judge has officially acquitted Lori Drew, the Missouri mother accused of using MySpace to bully a 13-year-old neighbor girl who later committed suicide. In July, US District Judge George Wu in Los Angeles had tentatively overturned three misdemeanor counts against Drew of illegally accessing computers without …

Music and Media 31 Aug 22:31
Microsoft says US is top malware target

The United States of infected PCs

Windows users based in the United States are the most likely to benefit from Microsoft's malicious software removal tool, which has removed malware from nearly 2.2 million US machines, more than the other nine top countries combined. Over the same period, the MSRT has disinfected 383,378 machines in China, 282,152 in Brazil, …

Security 31 Aug 23:20
Microsoft throws Hyper-V R2 into the ring

Takes metal chair to VMware

Microsoft has picked a fight with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor, offering up a freebie download of its own Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hypervisor on the opening day of the VMware-backed VMworld in San Francisco. If you have a hankering to do server virtualization Microsoft-style, you can download Hyper-V R2 here. Hyper-V R2 is a …

Virtualization 31 Aug 23:23