16th January 2010 Archive

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NASA Nebula - Obama's own private cloud?

Federal CIO munches Ubuntu's Koala food

The open-source Amazon-like compute cloud under development at NASA's Ames Research Center could become a means of hosting websites across the US government. Ames chief information officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that the engineers building NASA's Nebula infrastructure cloud have been working with the team put together by …

HPC 16 Jan 2010, 00:18
Steve Wozniak, your time is up

Comment Incompetence is not enough

It's time to file each and every story about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak into the circular "Does it really matter?" bin. The latest Woz news clogging the intertubes is that - quelle horreur! - his Royal Rotunditude's new favorite gadget is Google's Nexus One smartphone. Two words: Who. Cares. As much as I'm loathe to …

Bootnotes 16 Jan 2010, 01:30
Discounts damage for Microsoft Windows 7 PC boost?

Volume gets you so far

Things are looking up for PC manufacturers. The last three months of 2009 saw shipments of computers grow 22 per cent, while all - except Dell - enjoyed robust double-digit growth in the US and internationally according to Gartner. It was the strongest quarter of growth in seven years for sales of PCs, and it indicated a …

Operating Systems 16 Jan 2010, 01:35
ACLU challenges US laptop border searches

Civil liberties assessment still pending

Privacy campaigners are continuing a legal challenge against random laptop border searches by US customs amid concerns there may be a racial bias in those delayed and inconvenienced by stop and search powers introduced as part of the war on terror. The ACLU also argues that searches of mobile phones by US border agents in the …

Security 16 Jan 2010, 08:02
Philips 40PFL9704 40in LED backlit TV

Review Black is black?

LED backlighting is all the rage at the moment; it can dramatically improve the contrast ratio of LCD panels, helping them towards the deep blacks seen on plasma displays. But many of the sets available at the moment, including the LG we recently reviewed, use LEDs that aren’t individually addressable – so it’s still really all …

Hardware 16 Jan 2010, 09:02