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15th June 2010 Archive

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  • Ancient typewriters reborn as USB keyboards

    Your vintage Underwood can upgrade your iPad

    The personal computer may have consigned the typewriter to the dustbin of history, but some vintage models are being reborn as USB keyboards. Jack Zylkin, an enterprising tinkerer and the mind behind USB Typewriter, developed his typewriter conversion system at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's Hive 76. This self-described " …

    Odds and Sods 15 Jun 00:15

  • New York Times bans 'tweet'

    'Outside of ornithological contexts,' that is

    Writers at the New York Times were recently requested to stop referring to Twitter updates as "tweets" by the Gray Lady's standards editor, Phil Corbett. With the internet causing radical upheavals in newspapers across the world, it is reassuring to find at least one that's prepared to stick to its guns. In an electronic mail …

    Odds and Sods 15 Jun 00:36

  • Internet 1 - England goalkeeper 0

    Online amusement at Robert Green howler

    The internet loves nothing more than an excruciating moment of embarrassment caught by the cameras. When that moment happens to be in the middle of a World Cup match between England and the United States, well... Robert Green As many online viewers have pointed out, even the hoardings at the side of the pitch were urging …

    Odds and Sods 15 Jun 04:31

  • Nominet election campaign starts rolling

    'Vote for me, I wrote for El Reg!

    The election campaign for two Board positions at dot-uk registry Nominet has kicked off, with seven candidates vying for two positions. But despite efforts to revitalise the organisation after several years of infighting, voters will be disappointed to see a cast of the usual suspects on the ballot. Five of the seven …

    Government 15 Jun 05:02

  • Synology DiskStation DS410 Nas box

    Review Box clever

    Synology’s DS410 is a four drive Nas aimed at the small business market – or home use if overkill is your thing – with claimed read speeds of up to 110MB/s in RAID 5 whilst keeping power consumption down to 56W. Synology's DiskStation DS410 four-bay Nas Initial impressions are as expected, a high build quality coupled with …

    reghardware 15 Jun 07:02

  • ACTA restricts developing economies, India tells WTO

    Secret IP treaty not a sweetie

    A secret trade agreement designed to harmonise some countries' intellectual property laws could destabilise existing international agreements and harm the economic prospects of developing countries, India has said. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a secret IP treaty being negotiated by the US, Japan, the …

    Law 15 Jun 07:02

  • Wireless mics get national frequency early

    Stargazers evicted ahead of schedule

    Channel 38 will be available for wireless microphones, nationally, three months earlier than planned. Channel 38 (which lies at 607.25MHz) is where Ofcom would like wireless microphones to hang out indefinitely, and the regulator had already promised to get the frequency clear by the end of 2010. That's been achieved early …

    Mobile 15 Jun 08:02

  • God particles breeding like bosons

    Family of Higgs actually five, US research suggests

    US researchers have suggested that the elusive God particle - the Higgs boson - may actually be no less than a quintet of divine, and as yet elusive, components of the universe. The theoretical Higgs boson is required to give mass to the 16 other particles described by the Standard Model (see graphic), the "internally …

    Physics 15 Jun 08:30

  • Apple revamps Mac Mini as skinny HDMI box

    Apple TV death knell sounded?

    Apple has sliced roughly half of the metal off its old Mac Mini and re-released the starter computer as a box that now looks a lot like the Apple TV. And it has an HDMI port. Does this mark the death knell for Apple's "hobby" project, we wonder? Like the Apple TV, the new Mini has an built-in power brick. Yet it measures 197 …

    reghardware 15 Jun 08:48

  • Sarko to walk tall in factory visit

    French prez weeds out vertical rivals - again

    French president Nick Sarko has once again demonstrated his touchiness about his lack of international standing by sending operatives ahead of a planned factory visit to make sure he isn't overshadowed by less vertically-challenged workers. According to the La République des Pyrénées, Le Prez is due to pop into the Turbomeca …

    Bootnotes 15 Jun 08:51

  • Apple to sell unlocked iPhone 4

    Pre-order pricing announced

    Apple UK will sell the iPhone 4 Sim-free. Pre-order pricing, posted today, puts the 16GB version of the iOS 4 handset at a whopping £499 and the 32GB version at £100 more. Only black iPhone 4s are available to order now. A Sim-free iPhone 3GS can be ordered for £419. It has 8GB of storage. Alas, while Apple has posted …

    reghardware 15 Jun 08:59

  • Twitter topples over

    No one can hear you scream

    A failed upgrade left the world Twitter-less for several hours last night. The service has now been restored, although users might be getting messages in a mixed-up order for an hour or two. A message on Twitter's blog blamed the failure on "the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching". An update at 11.51pm …

    Applications 15 Jun 09:01

  • You think mobile voice is expensive?

    Workshop Try data roaming

    The issue of mobile pricing can be something of a sore point in the business environment, and it's one that we're exploring through our Reg reader poll. We'll be reporting back on it a little further down the line as part of this workshop. But of course there are different aspects to pricing, and based on the feedback we’ve seen …

    Mobile Workshop 15 Jun 09:02

  • Deutsche Telekom duo not facing nosey charges

    Insufficient evidence of peeking at board members, journos

    The former chief exec and chairman of Deutsche Telekom will not face charges, after an investigation into spying on board members and journalists failed to find sufficient evidence against them. The spying took place between 2005 and 2006, and in 2008 the German telco admitted phone records were monitored. But Klaus Zumwinkel …

    Law 15 Jun 09:25

  • Samsung shows upcoming Bada, Android smartphones

    Wave 2, Galaxy 3

    Samsung has taken the wraps off its latest Android and Bada smartphones. Samsung's Galaxy 3: smartphone as mainstream mobile The Galaxy 3 and Galaxy 5 both go on sale in Europe next month. The Galaxy 3 - aka the i5800 - is a mainstream touchscreen handset aimed at folk who want to view multimedia and social network. The …

    reghardware 15 Jun 09:26

  • Can the cloud hold off data deluge?

    There really is a lot of it about... and it all has to go somewhere

    An article in CIO Magazine takes a look at a 2007 report from IDC (sponsored by EMC) estimating that the size of all digital data will grow by something like 1.2 million petabytes from 2009 to 2010, and will grow an astounding 44x by 2020; the number of individual files will increase by 67x. Even though the report is sponsored …

    HPC Blog 15 Jun 09:27

  • Bullfighter cuffed for lack of cojones

    Flees ring to face breach of contract rap

    Apprentice bullfighter Christian Hernández decided on Sunday that he'd prefer to pursue another line of work, fleeing the ring to derisive whistles from his fellow Mexicans and proceeding directly to a local police station on a breach of contract rap. Hernández, 22, blew his big chance in Mexico City's prestigious taurine …

    Bootnotes 15 Jun 10:01

  • Apple store flakes after iPhone 4 price reveal

    Broken links or error pages? The choice is yours

    Apple's UK online store crumpled under a mass of fanbois this morning, which may or may not have been related to its opening up for iPhone 4 pre-orders. The site posted pricing details for Steve's latest pocket wonder bar earlier and all seemed well - until the rest of the country piled in to check it out. Earlier this …

    Mobile 15 Jun 10:16

  • Anobit breaks MLC flash barrier

    SLC performance at MLC prices

    Israeli startup Anobit reckons it has the technology in its Genesis enterprise SSDs to make flash storage practicable for all tier one data. Flash solid state drives (SSD) are being used for the storage of the most active tier one data in storage arrays as they provide the IOPS needed without the expense of having a large …

    Storage 15 Jun 10:35

  • Murdoch hedges bets with e-reader purchase

    One can never have too many platforms

    Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has bought the software platform designed for the Skiff e-reader, but dropped the hardware which will likely never see the light of day. The Skiff was probably the biggest e-reader ever demonstrated, with a screen knocking 30cm diagonally and aimed squarely at laying out newspapers. The company, …

    Mobile 15 Jun 10:36

  • Gov hits brakes on vetting scheme

    Buh-bye barring

    Further erosion of New Labour’s Big Brother state looks likely to take place later today when Home Secretary Theresa May announces that the government is stopping implementation of the Vetting and Barring scheme (VBS), which was due to go live next month. As regular readers will be aware, this scheme required any adult who …

    Government 15 Jun 10:56

  • GCHQ imposes Whitehall iPhone ban

    BlackBerry secures monopoly

    The image of ministers and their advisors hunched over their BlackBerries is set to become an enduring legacy of the New Labour era, as it's emerged that RIM will maintain its stranglehold on the government smartphone market under the coalition. A Whitehall iPhone embargo is in place because encryption and electronics experts …

    Enterprise Security 15 Jun 10:58

  • Physical vs virtual: What's your poison?

    Sysadmin Blog Power management and VDI

    Virtualization is not new - mainframes have been doing it for ages, and other non-x86 operating systems have been slicing up servers for quite some time as well. Yet if I had to pin a single IT label on the first decade of this century, I'd tag it as the decade of x86 virtualization. Virtualization went mainstream in the …

    Desktop Mgmt Blog 15 Jun 11:02

  • Hardcore mobile survey for hardcore users

    Poll The serious end of the mobile services discussion

    Mobile technology is one of the most written about topics on El Reg, but does that mean it’s now ingrained in all organisations? Perhaps some bits are, but our guess is that other elements are still regarded as being a bit ‘special’ or even totally irrelevant to many. We also suspect that despite all the great industry …

    Mobile Workshop 15 Jun 11:13

  • Murdoch moves for full control of Sky

    What? He didn't already control it?

    Sky shares jumped 18 per cent this morning on news that Rupert Murdoch is seeking full control of the company. Murdoch's News Corp is offering 700p per share - an offer rejected by Sky's board of directors. Murdoch's son James has removed himself from negotiations - he is Sky's chairman as well as chairman and chief executive …

    Music and Media 15 Jun 11:25

  • Microsoft and Oracle lose among open sourcers

    Don't mention the cloud

    Microsoft and Oracle are losing out to Linux and MySQL while cloud computing's not exactly taking off, according to the latest survey of Eclipse users. The number of those building software using a PC running Linux has grown by thirteen percentage points in three years to almost a third, while those using a machine running …

    Developer 15 Jun 11:28

  • picoChip gulps another $20m

    Big money for little cells

    Bath-based femtocell specialist picoChip has raised another $20m in equity funding, but with a million chips already sold it's about rapid expansion rather than running costs. PicoChip designs chips for use in femtocells - very small base stations that connect over domestic broadband. As that market expands picoChip needs more …

    Wireless 15 Jun 11:56

  • Toshiba readies full-keyboard netbook

    Award winner reborn

    Toshiba has introduced a netbook with a "full-size" keyboard for mini-laptop owners fed up of tapping away on tiny keys. The machine is the NB250 and its spec is otherwise netbook standard: 1.66GHz Atom N455 processor, 1GB of DDR 3 memory, 250GB hard drive, 10.1in 1024 x 600 display driven by the integrated GMA 3150 graphics …

    reghardware 15 Jun 11:59

  • Sony Vaio P netbook

    Review Highly portable and highly priced

    Sony manages to conjure up some lovely pieces of kit, but it also has a tendency to slap outrageous price tags on them. And this was no more apparent than when it launched the Vaio P-Series last year. Sony’s Vaio P: small, light, but darned expensive Small and sexy, the original P-Series was designed to appeal to affluent …

    reghardware 15 Jun 12:00

  • FSA warns firms about social media promotions

    Formal ad rules still apply

    Financial services firms should keep tabs on their social networking, other internet communications and iPhone apps to make sure that they stay up to date and compliant, according to regulator the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Firms must apply all the strict advertising rules their formal communications are subject to, …

    IT Director 15 Jun 12:03

  • GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency

    Book Review Eavesdroppers uncovered

    If information indeed is power, then GCHQ is undoubtedly the closest thing the British government has to the Death Star. As the historian Richard J Aldrich notes in the introduction to his excellent new history of the Cheltenham-based agency it represents by far our largest, most expensive, most productive - and yet most secret …

    Government 15 Jun 12:05

  • Sony NEX-5 tips up in UK

    Not cheap

    Jessops has got its mitts on the first batch of Sony NEX-5 to hit the UK. Sony's Alpha Nex: a compact a DLSR sensor Silver and black versions of this compact system with interchangeable lenses are in stock at the retail chain – at the princely sum of £589 a pop. We haven’t got prices for the lenses yet. Sony announced the …

    reghardware 15 Jun 12:24

  • Microsoft throws Office 2010 at shoppers

    Free online, charged on desktop

    Microsoft's Office 2010 has hit retail stores with consumers being hailed as the suite's savior. The latest edition of Microsoft's suite hit high-street retailers and online merchants Tuesday in three flavors for the general public. Office 2010 is available or the first time as download with activation via a key card in …

    reghardware 15 Jun 12:27

  • Police confirm cybercrime budget cut

    Hello, hello, goodbye

    The Metropolitan Police have confirmed their budget for battling cybercrime nationally has been slashed by the Home Office. The Register revealed on Friday that central government funding for the Police Central eCrime Unit (PCeU) had been quietly cut by 30 per cent. A spokeswoman for the Met said the PCeU had been targeted as …

    Crime 15 Jun 12:33

  • How to follow the World Cup from your desk

    Internet awash with footy froth, oceans of cash

    The world and its dog are beaming World Cup insight and inanities into the web sphere. Here are our picks for insight. For fixtures, results, interviews, player information, statistics, ticketing info, venue info and more you'd be a fool not to go straight for Fifa's site and its Twitter feed. It's also got a decent amount of …

    Music and Media 15 Jun 13:02

  • An alternative take on collaborative project management

    Webcast It's all in the mind

    We’re all familiar with how projects are usually defined and managed. If you’re lucky, you use a specialist project management application, and perhaps some kind of generic content management system. But let’s be honest, the back of a beer mat and some follow-up emails is the best it gets. In this latest Regcast, we have …

    Tech Panel 15 Jun 13:02

  • Public sector IT: Our own pig in lipstick?

    Time to roast it. But slowly

    Tight budgets and less intrusive government mean that the stage is set for increasingly heated debate between those who want to overhaul public sector IT systems wholescale, and those who believe that now is not the time for radical change. At a recent online seminar (pdf), hosted by Adobe, about the future of frontline public …

    IT Director 15 Jun 13:33

  • US Senator wants Internet seizure rights

    Welcome to headline grabbing Groundhog Day

    A new bill introduced to Congress calls for a new government body to oversee the internet as well as provide emergency powers to a “director of cyberspace policy” as well as the President. The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman, would amend the Homeland Security Act of …

    Networks 15 Jun 14:02

  • RIM readies next BlackBerry, AT&T airs Aria

    iPhone-bothering HTC Android phone out of traps

    RIM is readying a new touchscreen BlackBerry, according to reports, while Android is slowly but surely getting its hooks into Apple's strongest bastion, AT&T. The US carrier will launch its first Android phone from HTC - currently leading the charge against the iPhone's US leadership - next week. According to The Wall Street …

    Mobile 15 Jun 14:17

  • Is that a Wi-Fi media server in your pocket?

    Personal music streaming is getting closer

    The distinction between the storage and transmission of stuff – a canyon wide enough to create rival industries in the past – gets more meaningless by the day. Vodafone's next personal Wi-Fi hotspot will have a file sharing built right into the dongle. That's if FCC filings and blog reports can be believed. The next-gen MiFi …

    Music and Media 15 Jun 14:18

  • UK.gov outlines £95m IT savings plan

    Closed shop, open standards?

    Ahead of next week's emergency Budget, Francis Maude, head honcho of the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG), has outlined plans to renegotiate government IT contracts to net £95m in planned savings. Targets by project have not been set, but Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General Maude said: “Each project will …

    Government 15 Jun 14:59

  • Sun slips nips onto iPad

    NSFW Topless babes offering up-front news analysis? There's an app for that...

    Today sees the launch of the Sun's iPad app which, for a small consideration, offers fanbois the chance to digest at leisure all of the paper's famous meaty goodness. For the debut God Pad edition, we find the lovely Chloe offering her up-front analysis of the government's growth figures. Handily, you can zoom right in to …

    Music and Media 15 Jun 15:00

  • Lone workers will like being tracked, says Orange

    It makes me feel safe when you watch me sleep, Edward

    Orange is pushing out research claiming that UK lone-worker staff would love to be tracked using GPS, for their own benefit of course. The research, based on interviews with a thousand people who defined themselves as “lone workers”, found that only 12 per cent have an alert button to use in case of incident, while 38 per cent …

    Small Biz 15 Jun 15:11

  • iPhone 4 no longer available to UK buyers?

    Who says? Apple

    Ordered your iPhone 4 yet? Tough - you've already missed the boat, if this afternoon's latest missive from Apple is to be believed. The firm's online emporium has been creaking all day since it started offering the faithful the chance to pre-order the iPhone 4. One Reg reader reported that it took him just under two hours to …

    Mobile 15 Jun 15:34

  • Neon updates zPrime mainframe accelerator

    IBM's lawyers combing source code

    Neon Enterprise Software, the cheeky provider of the zPrime systems software that allows production work normally running on IBM z/OS mainframe engines to be dispatched to cheaper zIIP and zAAP co-processors on those mainframes, has tweaked the tool so it can now offload even more work to those cheaper engines. The zPrime tool …

    Servers 15 Jun 15:54

  • NEC lops off HYDRAstor heads

    Update Just the one, dear

    NEC has shrunk its multi-node HYDRAstor grid archive down to a single node, for smaller businesses wanting their own backup and archive store in the office and not off on a cloud somewhere. The HYDRAstor HS3-210 is a 2U rack mount enclosure with four 1gigE ports and raw capacity of 4, 8, or 12TB. This translates to effective …

    Storage 15 Jun 15:55

  • Apple's US online store buckles under iPhone 4 preorders

    Updated Fervent fanboi overload

    Apple's US online store appears to be choking under the load of iPhone preorders. As of 10:00am Pacific time on Tuesday morning — the first day that the iPhone 4 is available for preorders — a trip to the iPhone order page where you are asked "Are you a new or existing AT&T wireless customer?" — after a long delay watching the …

    Mobile 15 Jun 17:11

  • Firefox 4 sneak peek flaunts Google open video codec

    Be like Opera

    Mozilla has turned out a Firefox 4 prototype that includes Google's newly open sourced WebM video format, while Opera has rolled the format into a developer build of its own. Last month, Google open sourced the VP8 video codec that it nabbed as part of its $124.6 million acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies …

    Developer 15 Jun 17:15

  • Newsweek: 'Zombies rise from grave, invade US'

    Konami cheat code infests ageing news organ

    An army of zombies has invaded America, according to Newsweek. "The undead have risen from their graves and invaded large portions of the East Coast," the venerable American news publication has reported on its website, Newsweek.com. "Driven only by an insatiable desire for brains, there seems to be no stopping their ruthless …

    Odds and Sods 15 Jun 18:28

  • Java father Gosling backs managed runtime gallop

    OpenJDK and Linux mods released

    Java father James Gosling has endorsed plans to juice managed runtimes on Linux from a company that was once at loggerheads with Sun Microsystems over his beloved language. Gosling has said he's "excited" by the Managed Runtime Initiative, which involves code contributions from Java appliance specialist Azul Systems, saying …

    Developer 15 Jun 18:55

  • Apple Store iPhone app promises buyer's remorse

    Jobsian kit impulse buy? There's an app for that

    Apple has released an iPhone app that allows US users to access its online store to puchase items, schedule appointments at its brick-and-mortar stores, read product reviews — and spend money very, very easily. Although the prosaically named Apple Store app appears to be rich in detail, deep in content and offerings, and a …

    Mobile 15 Jun 19:49

  • Researchers probe net's most blighted darknet

    150 Mbps of sustained garbage

    Researchers probing a previously unused swath of internet addresses say they've stumbled onto the net's most blighted neighborhoods, with at least four times as much pollution as any they've ever seen. The huge chuck of more than 16.7 million addresses had never before been allocated and yet the so-called darknet was the …

    Security 15 Jun 21:00

  • Dell lands custom gaming server deal

    OnLive: 'We don't need no stinking consoles'

    The E3 Expo is raging in Los Angeles today, and Dell's bespoke server techs are on hand backing up the launch of OnLive, the maker of an online gaming system that lets users play games over a broadband link from within a Web brower, with the video and data processing associated with the game being done back in OnLive's data …

    Servers 15 Jun 21:19

  • Critical and unpatched, Windows XP bug is under attack

    Red meat for full disclosure critics

    Five days after it was disclosed in a highly controversial advisory, a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system is being exploited by criminal hackers, researchers from anti-virus provider Sophos said on Tuesday. The flaw in the Windows Help and Support Center was disclosed on Thursday by researcher …

    Security 15 Jun 22:02

  • Mac OS X cranked to 10.6.4

    Security updates, bug fixes, better Braille

    Apple added another item to its busy day with the release of version 10.6.4 updates for both Mac OS X and Mac OS X server. Combine the OS update with the release of the new Mac mini, the beginning of iPhone 4 preorders, and the availability of the Apple Store iPhone app, and Cupertino is celebrating the 167th birthday of …

    Operating Systems 15 Jun 22:40

  • Google code hints at Chrome OS Dellbook

    Mountain View's unofficial pal

    It looks like Dell will join Acer and HP in offering netbooks based on Google's Chrome OS sometime this fall. Dell isn't among the official Chrome OS partners named by Google, but as noticed by Download Squad, the code repository for Chromium OS — the open source incarnation of Chrome OS — includes some rather conspicuous bits …

    PCs & Chips 15 Jun 22:41

  • iPhone 4 preorder system exposes private user data

    How to log into someone's account without really trying

    Preordering for Apple's iPhone 4 got off to a rocky start on Tuesday, with long lines, system outages, and an AT&T server that exposed sensitive account information for existing users of the must-have mobile device. For the second time in less than a week, Gizmodo reported, AT&T was caught exposing private information …

    ID 15 Jun 23:46

  • Clamshell dinner – Jobs and iPad munch netbook sales

    Two months, two million iPads sold

    Yes, the iPad will munch the netbook market, according to research firm DisplaySearch. With a new report released on Tuesday, DisplaySearch says that Apple shipped 700,000 iPads into the channel during Q1, accounting for 6.5 per cent of the combined netbook-tablet market by volume, and in Q2, the firm says, that share will …

    Business 15 Jun 23:51