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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/07/week_in_review/

El Reg shrinks seven days onto one webpage

Attention span not required

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Bootnotes, 7th November 2009 05:22 GMT

Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V

Week in Review As a service to our with readers with (particularly) short attention spans, we at The Reg have squeezed the week that was into a single webpage. Or at least most of it. Before your attention drifts elsewhere, we should get to it:

Jimmy Wales [1] is awarded a €10,000 prize, Carly Fiorina [2] stands for US Senate, Esther Dyson [3] gets NASA gig, Bill Gates [4] is serenaded by Bono, H Ross Perot Jr [5] loses his rhino, Anna Friel [6] avoids ralph, a Minnesota mum-to-be [7] plans TV labor, and Vint Cerf envisions shared mobile airwaves [8], prepares for interplanetary interwebs [9], and says that Google doesn't know who you are [10].

Metrotextuals come out of the closet [11], the terminally ill are happier if they abandon hope [12], net-using Yanks misplace their friends [13], animal lovers rally to defend irradiated monkeys [14], and people who search rather than browse the web remember more [15] of what they find.

US unemployment tops ten per cent [16] while chips sales upgrade from terrible to bad [17]. Nokia Siemens cuts 6,000 jobs [18], Microsoft axes 800 [19], and Novell trims between 100 and 130 [20]. Fujitsu workers in the UK plan to strike [21].

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announce a partnership [22] while Cisco plays hardball [23] with Tandberg. GFI Software buys SORBS [24], T-Mobile and Orange ink a merger agreement [25], and the Rackable-SGI combo posts [26] revenue gains while profits dip.

Cisco's profits slip 19 per cent [27] while the company predicts better days ahead, Adaptec's CEO faces ucertain furure after dreadful results [28], and GlobalFoundries chairman Hector Ruiz takes a "voluntary" leave of absence [29].

Windows 7, still virus-vulnerable [30], sells reasonably well [31] but fails [32] to rake in gobs of cash. Redmond raises the price [33] of the SQL Server and says worms are resurging [34].

IBM gives i/OS a facelift [35], discounts its Power engines [36], and embarrasses itself when the Congestion Charge system crashes [37], a unified communications software demo flops [38], and Texas dumps [39] its IBM-provided voter registration system.

Apple's Steve Jobs is honored as Fortune's CEO of the Decade [40] after Cupertino is accused [41] then unaccused [42] of killing Atom support in its next OS rev. A Mac game deletes a file [43] every time a player destroys an alien ship.

The iPhone gets Marvel Comics [44], 100,000 apps [45], a data-gobbling bug [46], a cool reception [47] in China, and a vague rumor [48] about its next iteration. A new hack [49] sets it free and a Dutch hacker relents [50] on his threat to extort jailbreakers.

HTC launches [51] a WinMo phone, Motorola's upgraded Droid will be called the Milestone [52] in Europe, and The Reg reviews the Sony Ericsson S312 [53], T-Mobile Pulse [54], and Samsung Galaxy i7500 [55]. Sony Ericsson renames 'Rachael' the Android Xperia [56].

Nokia will shut down N-Gage [57], T-Mobile says there's money to be made [58] in mobile service, Opera betas a Symbian browser [59], and Orange's iPhone won't save you money [60] but the company will pay cash for old kit [61].

Most touchscreen users want buttons [62], a fifth of iPhone users watch porn [63] on their handhelds, and the Advertising Standards Authority says that the depiction of "STRONG REAL SEX" is not pornographic [64].

Yanks [65] and fruit bats [66] enjoy oral sex, a Hong Kong truckdriver is a manipulative cad [67] (even in Lego form [68]), orgasms can cause amnesia [69], hot-tub injuries are skyrocketing [70], and the Irish brogue is globally acknowledged to be the world's sexiest accent [71]. Explosive diarrhoea is no excuse [72] for exposing yourself in your truck.

The European Commission is poised to recommend black boxes for cars [73], Peugeot's BB1 e-car is bound for Blighty [74], Gordon Mrray is jumping aboard [75] the e-car bandwagon, and an electric superbike [76] debuts in Las Vegas.

New laptop designs appear from Asus [77] and Dell [78], VIA shows new netbook/notebook CPUs [79], and Asus demos [80] its redesigned Eee Keyboard (but its 'smartbook' will be delayed [81]). E-readers appear from Creative Labs [82], Sony [83], and Bookeen [84], and Litl shows off a "netbook appliance [85]".

For just $99 you can enhance your social standing with a Twitter-only [86] pocket pal.

SuperTalent introduces a USB 3.0 thumb drive [87], Toshiba fits 320GB [88] onto a 1.8-inch hard drive, Tandberg Data debuts a capacious DAT drive [89], and Drobo finds investors [90].

Sun adds inline dedupe [91] to ZFS, Arkeia buys Kadena [92] for its dedupe technology, and Hitachi hints [93] at on-drive deduping. Intel promises a fix [94] for its glitchy SSD firmware update tool.

Blade servers are hot [95], ScaleMP frees SMP clusters [96] from the need for InfiniBand, 3Leaf makes big SMPs [97] out of x64 clusters, Quanta invests [98] in Tilera's 100-core chip plans, Liquid Computing moves toward commodity x64 iron [99], and Yahoo! open sources [100] its back-end software.

Vigin Airlines embraces cloud computing [101], Unisys launches a private cloud line [102], RightScale unveils [103] a new Cloud Management Platform, Microsoft chops cloud costs [104], and IBM launches a free public beta [105] of a new cloud computing development and test environment hosted on its own machines.

Red Hat rolls out [106] its bare-metal Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor, Skype confirms [107] that Skype for Linux will be open sourced in "the nearest future", Karmic Koala frustrates [108] early adopters, the latest Moblin version adds nettop support [109], and a Linux bug [110] gives untrusted users root access.

Security scares include ransomware-style malware [111], Facebook zombieware [112], newfangled cookie attacks [113], and user accounts exposed by backdoor security holes [114] in Facebook and MySpace. A senior FBI tech says that facial recognition is useless [115], a judge sanctions a lawyer for leaking 179 people's personal details [116] in an electronic court brief, and the Israeli secret service hacked into a Syrian official's laptop [117] to obtain nuke-plant secrets.

Olympic ticket scams [118] are already underway, the founder of BetOnSports received four years in the slammer [119], a cable modem modder [120] faces up to to 20 years in prison, and two men have been accused of breaking into the computer system [121] of their former employer - a simple feat, seeing as how the company didn't bother to delete their passwords. A minimum of five British police forces have suffered major computer failures [122] during the past year as a result of malicious internet attacks.

That is all. ®