15th April 2010 Archive

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Commodore 64 may come back as Warren Beatty

The C64 is dead. Long live ~~the C64~~

When the Commodore 64 returns from the dead, it may not be called the Commodore 64. In mid-March, a company calling itself Commodore USA unveiled what appeared to be a new incarnation of the iconic early-80s machine. "You fell in love then. Fall in love again," the site said as it dissolved from an image of the original …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 00:40
Big Blue juices OS formerly known as 400

Native XML i am

In conjunction with the launch of Power7-based blade servers this week, IBM is also delivered a long-awaited upgrade to its proprietary i For Business operating system (formerly known as OS/400), with i 7.1 bringing native XML and encryption capabilities to the integrated database management system embedded in the OS. IBM is …

Operating Systems 15 Apr 2010, 04:21
OU: Digital divide now between clued and clueless

Calls for learning in the workplace

The vice chancellor of the Open University has said the digital divide is now between people who do and do not understand how to exploit IT fully. In an opening speech to the Jisc conference in London on 12 April 2010, Martin Bean said that the digital divide was no longer about haves and have-nots in terms of access to IT and …

Science 15 Apr 2010, 06:02
US gov cries foul on MPAA piracy claims

A Mickey Mouse operation

That massive amount of money that business groups such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claim is being lost due to piracy and copyright infringement? Well, fuggedaboutit. Such is the conclusion of a 37-page report (pdf) by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO …

Media 15 Apr 2010, 06:02
Is Oracle severing its LSI relationship?

Cutting the knot

We're hearing rumours that Oracle is ending the Sun-LSI relationship whereby Sun incorporated drive arrays from LSI. When Oracle bought Sun it inherited two storage OEM deals. One was with HDS for 9900 high-end arrays, based on its USP-V product, and has been terminated. The other deal saw Sun's mid-range 6000 storage products …

Storage 15 Apr 2010, 07:02
Novero TheFirstOne designer Bluetooth headset

Review In the ear of the beholder?

Apparently comprised of ex-Nokia hands, Novero is a company focused on phone accessories for users on the move. The matter-of-factly entitled, TheFirstOne is Novero’s designer Bluetooth headset heralded to ‘change the way we look at technology’ and is priced accordingly at £120. Novero's TheFirstOne and indubitably not the …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 07:02
Commissioner pledges protection for net neutrality

Kroes: 'We must guard freedom of expression'

Internet users must be able to access whatever content they want, regardless of telecoms companies' demands that high-bandwidth publishers pay them, according to a European Commissioner ahead of a consultation on net neutrality. Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said that whatever business model internet service …

Broadband 15 Apr 2010, 07:24
Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

Icelandic plume knocks out airports

Hundreds of passengers are likely to be stranded this morning as a volcanic ash plume has grounded flights across the country. The plume, from a volcano in Iceland, could take several days to clear. The ash can be thick enough to knock out jet engines. Currently Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow airports are closed and 90 per …

Science 15 Apr 2010, 07:40
Herd of sheep, off tits on drugs, savagely Tased

'None suffered heart attacks', exults stungun maker

In shock* news it has emerged that a group of sheep in America, out of their minds on Class A drugs, have been repeatedly blasted using controversial electric Taser stun weapons. Rather than some kind of degenerate drug-fuelled brouhaha indicative of the moral decline among America's sheep community, the ovine electro-stunning …

Science 15 Apr 2010, 08:05
HP fingered in bribe probe

Germany and Russia raid Moscow HQ

HP's headquarters in Moscow were raided by Russian investigators yesterday looking for evidence the computer giant bribed its way to victory in a big contract. The raids were ordered by German authorities, investigating because the payments are believed to have been made via a German HP subsidiary. The ink giant is suspected …

The Channel 15 Apr 2010, 08:59
All-in-ones grease great quarter for PCs

Bounceback-and-a-half

Who said desktops were dead? Worldwide sales of PCs soared 24.2 per cent in Q1, compared with last year when the market slumped by seven per cent. The rebound was fuelled by both desktop and portable shipments, both of which exceeded expectations, IDC said. The first quarter in 2010 was the first time since Q308 that desktop …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 09:09
Sony pledges 'affordable' 3D TV experience

But keeps mum about the price

Sony today pledged to make viewing this summer's World Cup in 3D "more affordable", momentarily forgetting that - so far - no one is broadcasting the matches in more than two dimensions here. It also set out its 3D stall, promising not only screens but also Blu-ray Disc players and PS3 games that can take advantage of the …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 09:10
Sony preps pair of PS3 3D updates

One for games, one for Blu-ray

Sony has roadmapped two key PlayStation 3 firmware updates that will bring stereoscopic 3D functionality to the games console. Why it takes two updates isn't clear, but that's how many Sony plans to release. The first will be pushed out before June to allow the consoles to play stereoscopic 3D games - for which you'll need a …

Games 15 Apr 2010, 09:24
Wii Fit fall woman turns into nympho

'It began as a twinge down below...'

A Manchester woman who took a tumble from her Wii Fit board is suffering an earth-moving side effect of the Nintendo-related mishap: she's now a nymphomaniac. "Randy" Amanda Flowers, 24, was diagnosed with "persistent sexual arousal syndrome due to a damaged nerve", the Daily Star explains. She's susceptible to the "slightest …

Games 15 Apr 2010, 09:45
Two new LTO tape gens announced

Capacity boost flaunted

The Linear Tape Open Consortium has announced two more LTO tape generations, taking capacity up to 32TB compressed with LTO-8. It has achieved this with an increased compression history buffer. It says that testing shows this can improve compression rates from the existing 2:1 to 2.5:1. Consequently raw tape capacities grow …

Storage 15 Apr 2010, 09:53
Swiss HSBC data breach victim count trebles

How deep does the rabbit hole go?

A French prosecutor said bank account details of 79,000 customers was stolen from the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC, three times the number previously admitted by the bank. Bosses at HSBC Private Bank (Switzerland) admitted last month that details of 24,000 bank customers were taken by an IT worker at the bank three years ago. …

Security 15 Apr 2010, 10:23
Toshiba tips hat into tablet ring

Android, Windows 7 models inbound

Toshiba has confirmed plans to release an iPad-alike tablet later this year powered by Google's Android OS. The manufacturer is also planning a Windows 7 version with two screens, Toshiba's US digital product chief, Jeff Barney, told news agency Reuters last night. The Android tablet will have a 10.1in display, he added, but …

Tablets 15 Apr 2010, 10:52
Game unwraps software too early for some

New, but not minty fresh

Game Group PLC has gone into mini-crisis management mode, after selling ex-display stock as new to online buyers on gamestation and gameplay websites. The games arrived stripped of their plastic wrapping, which made some customers suspect that they had received used copies. The games retail giant blames the snafu on a mix-up …

Games 15 Apr 2010, 10:53
Shrek's Donkey poses with bustier-clad strumpet

Asinine fashion shoot shocker

DreamWorks and Paramount big-wigs are none too happy with a fashion shoot in men's mag VMan, featuring characters from the Shrek movie franchise cavorting with scantily-clad models. The studio powers that be gave VMan the green light for the spread, apparently hoping for some top exposure before the imminent release of Shrek: …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 10:54
Facebook starts random application shutdown

Updated Anything Apple can do...

Facebook has started shutting down iPhone applications, taking a sudden interest in trademark infringement in naming and logos - some of the time, anyway. The applications concerned all interact with Facebook, providing an enhanced interface, batch-uploading of graphics and so forth. The site has started cutting off …

Mobile 15 Apr 2010, 11:04
US librarian in chief puts Twitter into aspic

The first draft of history is now 140 chars long

The short-form outpourings of Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and millions of other Twitterers are to be preserved for the ages after the US Library of Congress revealed it would begin archiving Twitter. The prime DC knowledge repository asked the company, which lacked a business model until yesterday, to hand over all its users' …

Mobile 15 Apr 2010, 11:25
DNS Trojan poses as iPhone unlocking utility

Poisoned Apple

An application that offers to unlock iPhones is actually designed to hijack internet connections on compromised Windows PCs, security watchers warn. Spam messages direct potential victims to a domain called iphone-iphone.info that offers links to download a Windows executable called blackra1n.exe. The application claims to …

Security 15 Apr 2010, 11:30
IBM predicts reoffending rates for prisoners

Florida follows UK into Minority Report territory

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is paying IBM to provide it with software which will predict which of its charges are most likely to reoffend, following a similar deal in the UK. Florida deals with 85,000 kids a year. It will use IBM's predictive analytics software alongside its existing screening systems. The …

Government 15 Apr 2010, 11:38
Death row inmate claims allergy to lethal injection

No guarantee of 'quick and painless execution'

An Ohio death row inmate is attempting to postpone his imminent appointment with the lethal injection gurney by claiming a possible allergy to the anaesthetic used by the state to dispatch its condemned prisoners. Darryl Durr (pictured) is sentenced to die next Tuesday for the 1988 rape and murder of 16-year-old Angel Vincent …

Law 15 Apr 2010, 11:52
Opera Mini tops the iTunes chart, but can it make any money?

Good PR doesn't always equal profits

iPhone users are tuning to the Opera Mini browser, which now tops free apps polls around the world. But giving away a product isn't necessarily the best way to make money. Cult of Mac noticed that Opera's Mini browser was topping the charts, and promptly checked the 22 iTunes stores to confirm that Opera Mini is the number one …

Mobile 15 Apr 2010, 12:25
He gave me the hairless eyeball

Face tracking fun for all the family

"Hello everyone, this is my giant disembodied eye project," says Nirav Patel, a software development engineer at Apple, who thinks up interesting stuff in his spare time. With Evil Eye, Nirav takes a webcam, a Microvision Showwx laser pico projector and a frosted glass dome light shade to build a face tracking eyeball that " …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 12:49
Blighty's first ~~home grown~~ war robot takes to Welsh skies!

Pigs may not fly, but pork barrels can

The UK tentacle of French arms giant Thales is delighted today to announce that its new "Watchkeeper" drone aircraft for the British Army has made its first flight in UK airspace. The machine first flew in 2008, above Israel, where the Hermes 450 it is based on is made. A slight £12m+ markup, but each one comes with 38 free …

Government 15 Apr 2010, 13:16
Lenovo ThinkPad X100e

Review Cheapest ThinkPad ever, anyone?

As netbooks approach adolescence, they're outgrowing the original bargain basement specs and compromises acceptable to a beach girl, and heading towards £500. But around this price they're meeting ever-cheaper thin and light notebooks, or "ultraportables". The result is an overcrowded and confusing market place. The second …

Laptops 15 Apr 2010, 13:35
Why doesn't Nokia buy Palm?

Comment It's a perfect fit, and going cheap...

Nokia has endured a painful two years - a kind of corporate Lost Weekend. Instead of alcoholism, Nokia found itself distracted by completely avoidable, self-inflicted corporate restructuring and IP issues, and so technologies we saw two years ago will only start to appear in phones next year. This was very bad timing. Instead …

Mobile 15 Apr 2010, 13:39
More vultures attack Compellent

Ravening lawyers' class action ambulance-chasing

Two more legal firms have joined in the hunt to extract cash from Compellent and deliver it to aggrieved investors with a modest emolument going to the lawyers for their expenses. Robins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is looking for aggrieved investors to join in its class action and alleges: ...throughout the Class Period, …

Storage 15 Apr 2010, 13:57
Big Brother Watch manifesto makes plea for privacy

Look at yourselves, insists pressure group

The latest manifesto into the lists (pdf) comes not from a party standing at election, but from a pressure group. Big Brother Watch has high hopes that the next government might listen to what it has to say on on the intersection of technology and civil liberties. Only occasionally alarmist, Big Brother Watch are generally …

Government 15 Apr 2010, 14:02
NextIO teams with Fusion-io for 5TB flash SAN

1.7 million IOPS box on the way too

NextIO has inked a deal with Fusion-io to produce a 5TB flash SAN to share flash storage between connected servers. NextIO started out as a producer of switches that virtualise PCIE connections and represent a bunch of servers with access to Fibre Channel, Ethernet, InfinBand etc through a single switched PCIe box. It then …

Storage 15 Apr 2010, 14:19
Angry Romanian hackers deface Telegraph for Top Gear toss

'Gypsies aren't Romanians, morons'

Subdomains maintained by The Daily Telegraph website were defaced by a group of angry Romanian hackers on Thursday. The two subdomains - shortbreaks.telegraph.co.uk and wine-and-dine.telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php - were sprayed with identical digital graffiti by the hackers from the previously unknown RNS – Romanian National …

Security 15 Apr 2010, 14:21
KIN'ell, Microsoft! Is that a breasticle I see before me?

Let me get my hands on your mammary gland

Is a man's nipple erotic? If, dear reader, you answer yes to that question then perhaps Microsoft's latest efforts to advertise its wares should be slammed for promoting so-called sexting among young people. Earlier this week the software vendor unveiled its KIN "social phone", which is a mobile that nods happily in the …

Mobile 15 Apr 2010, 14:30
IBM Workload Optimized: Here comes the hype wave

Can enterprise analytics really be interesting?

IBM pushed out some more of its “Workload Optimized” offerings last week, with the introduction of analytic packages based on its mainframe and x86 systems. These bundles join the previously announced Power system bundle that it rolled out late last spring. What it's doing here is combining IBM hardware with a full slate of …

HPC 15 Apr 2010, 14:54
Vendors bet on England World Cup fail

Offer money back if team wins

Firms are falling over themselves to cash in on the Fifa World Cup. TomTom today was the latest manufacturer to pledge to refund the purchase price on one of its offerings if England wins the international soccer tournament. By a TomTom Go 550 satnav between now and 8 June, and you'll get your money back if Rooney and Co. …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 14:55
Retailer claims customers' immortal souls

You didn't know? You should have read the Ts&Cs

Games retailer GameStation has claimed that it owns the immortal souls of 7500 punters who purchased goods from its website earlier this month. It said it mentioned this fact because it shows that rather a lot of consumers don't bother to check retailers' terms and conditons before making a purchase. In fact, it said, 88 per …

Games 15 Apr 2010, 15:45
IBM prunes low-cost AIX rev

Just for cheapskates

IBM has radically improved the bang for the buck on its Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blade servers this week, and is expected to soon deliver similarly priced entry rack and tower servers. And now it has a new, lower-cost AIX 6.1 Express Edition that will match the less expensive hardware and therefore help Big Blue's …

Servers 15 Apr 2010, 15:51
Sony working on 'major' PlayTV update

PS3's TV tuner due for software revamp

Sony raised UK gamers' hopes yesterday with the promise of a "major" update to the PlayStation 3's PlayTV add-on, only to dash them by announcing that the key new feature will be Facebook integration. A company blogger also pledged that "other great enhancements to PlayTV and brand new features will also be included in the …

Games 15 Apr 2010, 16:05
Oracle releases emergency security patch for Java

Code-execution threat no more

Under criticism for not patching a critical vulnerability in its recently acquired Java virtual machine, Oracle on Thursday released an emergency update that eliminates the zero-day threat. Functionality in the Java Web Start component made it trivial for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on end-user machines. Tavis …

Security 15 Apr 2010, 17:25
Apple bans Pulitzer Prize political cartoons from iPhone

Censorship goes from silly to serious

This week, a California political cartoonist was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Last December, Apple's App Store police barred his work from its hallowed online halls. As reported Thursday by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Mark Fiore submitted his cartoon app NewsToons to …

Phones 15 Apr 2010, 19:09
Oracle murders free OpenSolaris CD shipping

Community mulls fork

Oracle has murdered the OpenSolaris free CD shipping program. On Wednesday, with a post to the OpenSolaris website discussion mailing list, Oracle program manager for Solaris core OS technology engineering Derek Cicero announced that the company "is no longer offering a free OpenSolaris CD program at this time." Program links …

Operating Systems 15 Apr 2010, 19:10
Intel: Killer cables may leapfrog USB 3.0

Seeing the Light Peak

Intel sees its high-speed, long-distance Light Peak optical cabling technology as the next interconnect step after USB 3.0. "We view this as a logical future successor to USB 3.0," IDG News Service quoted Intel senior fellow Kevin Kahn as telling his audience at the Intel Developer Forum currently underway in Beijing. "In some …

Hardware 15 Apr 2010, 20:55
AMD claws back to profitability

G'bye Global Foundries, 'ello black ink

Business is picking up at AMD, which has announced its financial results for the first three months of 2010, which president and CEO Direk Meyer identified as having attained "record first quarter revenue." That said, it's not a simple matter of reading the company's bottom line to fully understand exactly what shape Intel's …

Business 15 Apr 2010, 21:37
Google money machine tops self with 23% revenue leap

Q1 trumps Christmastime

At the end of last year, Google's top secret money machine returned to overdrive. And in the first quarter, it was more of the same. For the quarter ending March 31, Google pulled in $6.77bn in revenue, a 23 per cent leap from the same period last year - the 2009 quarter where the company was most affected by the worldwide …

Financial News 15 Apr 2010, 21:59
Google in talks to re-admit Android to Linux kernel

Linux Collaboration Summit Multi-year process?

Android's deviant Linux could be readmitted to the main kernel following talks at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco today and Friday. Developers from Google's Android team are due to meet the Linux kernel devs in the hope of working out their differences and closing an awkward chapter in the history of Linux. …

Operating Systems 15 Apr 2010, 22:10