25th September 2009 Archive

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Microsoft pulls music service from wireless carriers

Exclusive Musiwave goes Zune only

Nearly two years after spending $46m to acquire the Musiwave mobile tunes service, Microsoft has informed wireless carriers they can no longer use the service once their contracts expire, according to a source familiar with the matter. This source, who requested anonymity because he feared reprisals from his employer, says …

Music and Media 25 Sep 00:07
Intel and VMware get their RAS on

IDF Server memory futures

Not content with adding comprehensive power-saving features to its processors, Intel is working on extending advanced power management for server memory as well as improving memory-error protection. These improvements are under the umbrellas of RAS - a term originated 'way back when' by IBM to denote technologies related to …

Servers 25 Sep 00:14
Intel: 'Westmere' works wonders

IDF Punts performance data for desktop, notebook 32nm CPUs

Intel reckons its upcoming 'Clarkdale' desktop 32nm - kind of - processor will run rather faster than equivalently priced chippery you can have today - and that includes quad cores. Clarkdale is a dual-core part, though it has HyperThreading on board so it appears as a four-core processor to the operating system. In PCMark …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 01:02
US judge postpones Googlebooks hearing

$125m pact 'raises significant issues'

A US federal judge has postponed a fairness hearing that was set to decide the fate of Google's $125m book-scanning settlement with American authors and publishers, after the Department of Justice raised concerns over the pact. On Tuesday, the plaintiffs in the four-year-old case - the US Authors Guild and the Association of …

Music and Media 25 Sep 03:23
Mainframe emulator goes commercial

Hercules, son of z/OS

Roger Bowler - the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator - has put together a company called TurboHercules to try to commercialize the decade-old program that he created as a "programmer's plaything." Rather than go straight at the IBM mainframe base, which many a company has tried to do and ended up in court …

Servers 25 Sep 05:14
UK government ignoring own rules on open source

Where's a policeman when you need one?

Open source vendors are calling on the UK government to put its money where its mouth is and police its own rules on public sector open source software procurement - which were revised in February this year. Some OSS makers argue that despite the first major overhaul to the government’s open source and open standards strategy …

Channel Register 25 Sep 08:08
Updated iMacs inbound, claim moles

Thinner bodies, better audio and Blu-ray?

Apple is poised to announce a series of technical and aesthetical improvements to its iMac range, moles familiar with the company’s PC plans have claimed. Although specific details are still unknown, the moles told website AppleInsider that the new family of iMacs will sport classier enclosures clad in a thinner ‘industrial’ …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 09:35
Balancing act for servers that flash the cache

Comment Lazy storage arrays making data-hungry servers wait

Multiple flash locations in the server-storage stack are upsetting balanced I/O conventions and making overall system design much more difficult. Designing and implementing server-to-storage systems is going to become very much harder, because existing assumptions about server and storage I/Os per second (IOPS) handling are …

Storage 25 Sep 09:38
Cloud storage hits the High Street

Carphone punters get online storage

Carphone Warehouse will offer its customers Geek Squad-branded online storage services by Trend Micro. The storage services will actually be provided by Spare Backup and will be embedded within a Trend Micro Internet Security PRO service, co-branded by TMI and Spare Backup as "Geek Squad". Spare Backup and Trend have signed a …

Channel Register 25 Sep 09:53
Swedish military combustobra: Jubtastic snap

Overheated conscript caught on camera

You demanded it, and here it is: our exclusive snap of a Swedish military combustobra incident, which shows just what happens when buxom female recruits subject government-issue brassieres to excessively "rigorous exercises": As you can see (in close-up, if you click the pic), fire-suppression operatives have moved quicker …

Bootnotes 25 Sep 09:55
Intel writes cheque for on-demand videogame tech

Funds firm developing HD TV game delivery

On-demand access to the latest videogames through your HD TV has just taken a step closer, following an Intel cash injection into a US firm. Intel has invested an unspecified amount of money into TransGaming, which is developing a digital distribution service and associated hardware for on-demand delivery of videogames through …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 10:03
Automated out of existence?

Workshop Service management and the human factor

If your job involves managing IT, IT services or business services it’s probably not escaped your attention that for better or worse, your job entails working with other people. Whether strong demarcations between “IT” and “The Business” exist, or whether your firm takes a more ‘progressive’ approach, there are numerous …

Service Management 25 Sep 10:34
Probably the best server survey in the world

Reg Readers, we need you!

Last week we asked you to tell us about your desktop environments. The response was fabulous, with over a thousand people filling in our survey. This week, we want to build a picture of your x86 server environments: what’s working and where are the challenges? Is today a time of change in the data centre, particularly as we …

Servers 25 Sep 10:44
EU to shout at media player makers over noise levels

You can pry my iPod from my cold, dead ears

A European Commissioner is preparing to present manufacturers of portable media players (PMP) and music-capable handsets with a mandate, following concerns that mobile music fans could be damaging their hearing. Next week, Meglena Kuneva - European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs - will present details of an EU mandate to …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 11:09
Penis pill spam: The hard figures

$1,600 per spam run a day?

The economics of male enhancement pill spammers have been laid bare by security researcher Dmitry Samosseiko. Samosseiko, of Sophos, uncovered research that showed how Canadian pharmacy spam punting unlicensed prescription medicines including Viagra is largely the work of partnerka, the Russian affiliates of spam and malware …

Spam 25 Sep 11:37
Londoners' votes put at risk by Boris' bigwig

Election e-counting imposed against advice

Boris Johnson's top official is headed for a clash with the elections watchdog over his personal decision to use electronic counting machines at the next London election - despite serious concerns over fraud and costs estimated by his own staff at £1.5m more than a manual count. Leo Boland, chief executive of the Greater …

Government 25 Sep 11:37
Nokia E55 smartphone

Review Does the business for the Qwerty customer?

The Nokia E55 is actually one of a pair of very similar handsets simultaneously released by Nokia. Its brother is the E52, which is pretty much the same, except that it has a standard numeric keypad rather than the E55's SureType-style Qwerty keypad with two letters assigned to each key. That aside, both phones come with Wi-Fi, …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 11:52
Oxygen-from-Moon-dirt passes vomit comet test

Air & rocketfuel can be made at lunar bases - or on Mars

American boffins say they have developed a viable process for making oxygen out of moon dirt, which could allow humans to live for long periods in lunar bases. The new tech has been tried out under the equivalent of the moon's one-sixth-G gravity aboard NASA's famous "vomit comet" low-gee simulator plane. A long-term moonbase …

Space 25 Sep 11:59
Trucker prangs rig while cracking one off

Drug-induced five-knuckle shuffle, police suspect

Swedish police believe that a German lorry driver who crashed his vehicle near Borås earlier this week may have been off his box on drugs, according to the Borås Tidning newspaper. Suspicions that the unnamed 30-something trucker, who collided with the central reservation and flipped his vehicle, could have ingested illegal …

Bootnotes 25 Sep 12:33
Ford creates battery-powered Focus

Leccy Tech The Focus Battery Electric Vehicle

Car giant Ford has released technical details about its Focus-based leccy car – the Focus Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV). Focus Battery Electric Vehicle, from Ford To create the Focus BEV, Ford essentially took a regular Focus and replaced its engine, gearbox and fuel tank with a 23kWh lithium-ion battery pack and 100kW/ …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 13:02
Pop stars back 'Three Strokes' policy

They're not strikes, honest

Another day, another joint statement from a bunch of artists. This one comes from a number of signed artists who say they aren't the Featured Artists Coalition (but most of them are). The er, FAC members now say they too want a "graduated response" to internet copyright infringement, and have persuaded Lily Allen to sign up to …

Music and Media 25 Sep 13:03
Flickr!: Now! with! added! Yahoo!

Outraged users decry logo tweak

The famously-sensitive users of Flickr have reacted with outrage at Yahoo!'s decision to stick its logo on the photo-sharing service. Well, Yahoo! should have had some idea of what would happen, following the backlash against allowing Flickr users to upload videos. The purists didn't want that, and they don't want to be …

Applications 25 Sep 13:20
SIM card hack suspect released on bail

That's an awful lot of credit

An alleged Jamaican phone system hacker who is accused of pinching 10m Jamaican dollars(US$115,000) in call credit from local carrier Digicel has been released on bail. Phillpott Martin, 26, of St Andrew, Jamaica, faces three counts of theft and one count of conspiracy to defraud over the scam. The computer science student …

Crime 25 Sep 13:37
IBM in £24m battle with UK spooks

Exclusive UK.gov's secret IT disaster

British spymasters are involved in a multimillion-pound wrangle with IBM over a secret intelligence network that was scrapped after years in development because of security fears and missed deadlines. Phase Two of the SCOPE programme - designed to allow wider access and collaboration on intelligence across ten government …

Government 25 Sep 13:47
Vodafone picks a Linux-phone

LiMO lives and Symbian scowls

The LiMO Foundation is celebrating Vodafone's endorsement with two handsets from Samsung, but the news that the Linux-based alternative isn't dead won't be received well over at Symbian. The LiMO Foundation reckons to have already launched 42 handsets using its platform, but these are closed affairs only really of interest to …

Mobile 25 Sep 14:12
Vertu presents €5K flip phone

For 'discerning global citizens' only

Ultra-expensive mobile phone manufacturer Vertu is back with its latest credit crunch-defying handset - Ayxta. Vertu's Ayxta - it's not a Nokia 7510, honest The phone forms part of Vertu’s existing Constellation collection and is apparently the first of the firm’s phones to feature a flip design. Designed to attract “ …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 14:20
Duff DAB, megamogs and ass-assassins: Your thoughts

Commentblurt It's like Points of View without the winking

It is not often that an issue will unite our beloved readers in a rousing chorus of concentrated, directed bile. If you think about the subjects that get you hot under the collar, there is always a balance, with the numbers in favour of each seemingly poised in a yin and yang-type cosmic display of karmic harmony: Windows vs …

Letters 25 Sep 14:41
Google Books opens French front in war with publishers

Scan scam exam

Google has been called on to defend its Books project in the French courts after a publisher accused it of copyright infringement on Thursday. Editions du Seuil is seeking €18m damages from the search giant for scanning its books without permission, Bloomberg reports. "The act of digitizing is to copy. It is a considerable …

Music and Media 25 Sep 14:42
Vodafone is all thumbs on multitouch

Fumbling the H1's real capabilities

Vodafone's claim that the H1 would support "multitouch" caught our eye, but it was eight hours before we discovered how fast and loose the operator was playing with the dictionary. In response to El Reg's questions Samsung finally admitted that in this context "multitouch" means one can touch the screen in different ways: such …

Mobile 25 Sep 14:45
Open source code quality improving

Can Microsoft say better?

The quality and security levels of open source code are continuing to improve, according to the latest annual audit by code analysis tools vendor Coverity. The third edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source report measured a 16 per cent reduction in static analysis defect density over the past three years among the projects …

Enterprise Security 25 Sep 15:25
Blind one-legged man wins arse-kicking contest

Rum-fuelled piratical rampage quelled by Taser

A partially-sighted, one-legged man who had consumed a substantial quantity of rum was accused of attempted murder after he set about four American policemen single-handed earlier this week brandishing an assortment of cutting and stabbing weapons. The understandably alarmed plods subdued their assailant by the use of a Taser …

Bootnotes 25 Sep 15:30
Microsoft's support tweaks leave some email admins out in the cold

Pulls Exchange 2007 SP2 rug from under Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft’s wonky Exchange Server roadmap has claimed a high-class victim in Redmond’s 22 October OS launch assault, as its recently released Exchange Server 2007 SP2 won’t support Windows Server 2008 R2. The software giant quietly revealed the decision in a backwater blog post on Monday. "Two primary technical points drove …

IT Director 25 Sep 15:42
AI robots to mark exams

Smarter than humans, claims vendor

Our "education" system is taking another step towards total automation with the introduction of AI robots to mark examination papers. Pearson will unleash the bots next month to mark English papers, reports the TES. Apparently the system "'understands' the meaning of text much the same as a human," Pearson claims in its …

Applications 25 Sep 15:43
Lily Allen incites mails

Mailbag Not fair

Well, that didn't last long. Lily Allen closed her music business yesterday blog - cheekily named after a Billy Bragg lyric - after four days, citing abuse from freetards. Last night she signed up to a pledge not to persecute freeloaders that much. "i've shut down the blog, the abuse was getting too much," she posted. "i'm …

Letters 25 Sep 16:01
Sony says ‘No’ to UMD swap shops

Cans plans for UMD-to-PSP Go! game transfers

Sony has confirmed that owners of old-school PlayStation Portable (PSP) units won’t be able to transfer UMD-based games onto the digital-only PSP Go! The PSP Go! doesn’t feature a UMD bay, but Sony had previously said it was considering ways of allowing UMD games to be transferred onto the PSP Go! Details of how Sony hoped to …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 16:03
FCC ferrets around for spare spectrum

Got any ideas?

The FCC is asking for suggestions in the hunt for more radio spectrum, having established that there's not going to be enough to support the next generation of broadband requirements. The US regulator wants ideas for making better use of all the spectrum below 3.7GHz, and it wants them by 13 November 13. It's asking (pdf) for …

Mobile 25 Sep 16:46
Novell forces customers to pay for maintenance

Patches and service packs? That'll cost ya

Commercial operating system and add-on systems software maker Novell this week felt the ire of its user base, as it warned partners that in a few months it would be requiring that customers get a maintenance contract on software before they would get access to patches, updates, and technical documents for that software. It …

Channel Register 25 Sep 16:53
Home Office jumps the gun on DNA research

Again?

The single most significant piece of research cited by the government in its review of current DNA practice was incomplete and published prematurely following pressure from the Home Office. This inconvenient undermining of the consultation process came to light as the BBC did some background research into the issue, following …

Government 25 Sep 17:09
Tech trendsetters reveal all

100 Per Cent Design The fashion show for the material world

With London Fashion Week now, oh so last week, designers of a different sort are gathering at Earls Court, London for 100 Per Cent Design, the annual contemporary interiors and architectural event. Here, established designers and manufacturers rub shoulders with er, less well established designers and innovators, to show off …

Reg Hardware 25 Sep 17:30
IBM punts fixed-cost BlackBerry support plan

One-stop monthly service contract

IBM is snuggling tight with Research in Motion (RIM) to simplify how it sells management and support plans for BlackBerry phones in enterprises. Big Blue has punted BlackBerry business support services for years, but in the past, customers had to navigate a bit of a contractual labyrinth to get things up and running. Under the …

Mobile 25 Sep 18:28
Google hits Android dev with cease-and-desist letter

Updated Open source only goes so far

Google has sent one of the most prolific independent developers for the Android phone a letter demanding he stop distributing software that greatly expands the capabilities of the fledgling smartphone operating system. Neither Google nor the developer, who goes by the handle Cyanogen, is saying much about the cease and desist …

Developer 25 Sep 20:04
Microsoft apes Google with chillerless* data center

* - mechanical back-up required

Microsoft has unveiled a mega data center that operates without chillers, joining Google in the embrace of so-called "free cooling." Google is apparently operating a chillerless facility in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, and yesterday, its Redmond arch-rival boasted a similar set-up at its new data center in Dublin. According to a …

Servers 25 Sep 20:06
MMS (finally) comes to AppleT&T

US braces for more iPhone congestion

AT&T has made good on its promise to bring the multimedia messaging service to the iPhone. The feature, which has been available since June for iPhone users on other networks, went live on Friday in the US, where AT&T is the sole authorized carrier for the device. That means US-based iPhone users will finally be able to embed …

Mobile 25 Sep 22:35
Mozilla free-love coders caressed by Palm

Chastise ~~Apple's~~ 'Orwellian' smartphone lockdown

Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform. Ajaxian.com co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith have accepted new positions helming Palm's developer relations team. The duo …

Developer 25 Sep 22:41
UK webhosts in champagne throwing cat fight

Updated Down goes RapidSwitch

Get your popcorn. It's time for the UK webhost cat fight to end all UK webhost cat fights. Earlier this week, according to the forum dwellers at WebHosting Talk, the UK hosting outfit PoundHost sent a routine marketing email to a group of its customers - and forgot to hide their addresses in the BCC field. At which point, one …

Networks 25 Sep 22:50
US to cede control of ICANN?

Toothless global panel awaits

The US government has reportedly agreed to cede control over ICANN once its current pact with the internet oversight body expires next week. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a California-based non-profit that oversees the internet's address system. It currently operates under the auspices of the …

Networks 25 Sep 23:47
HP: We will grow faster than IT

Profits still half of Big Blue

If you wanted to make the most profitable and the largest IT company in the world, you would probably not come up with anything that looked like either Hewlett-Packard or IBM. Both companies have historically had their strengths and weaknesses, but they are starting to look more like each other - and to talk more confidently …

Channel Register 25 Sep 23:57