23rd June 2010 Archive

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AMD's Opteron 4100s march into x64 price war

Battle for the clouds

The big guns are already on the field in the x64 server processor war, and the troops are finally going all in with today's launch by Advanced Micro Devices of its entry "Lisbon" Opteron 4100s. The Opteron 4100s are similar in many respects to the "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100s that entered the battle against Intel's "Westmere-EP …

Servers 23 Jun 04:02
Viewsonic VEB620 e-Book reader

Review Monitor maker's word view

Given ViewSonic’s penchant for monitors it might at first sight seem a little odd that its e-reader debut is to launch a pair of standard, 16 greyscale E-Ink devices, the VEB620 and VEB625, rather than going for colour. But E-Ink’s displays are easy on the eye, deliver excellent battery life, and are less expensive to build than …

reghardware 23 Jun 07:02
Microsoft claims 'biggest' show-biz investment with Bing refresh

Simon Cowell couldn't make it

Microsoft is throwing the combined might of Hollywood, the record labels and the games industry at Google with its latest Bing update. On Tuesday evening the company unveiled Bing Entertainment, which provides the ability to search, view and - depending on the medium - purchase films, TV, music and games. Microsoft called the …

Applications 23 Jun 07:50
Video calling impresses Brits, if it's Apple video calling

FaceTime, after all this time

More than three quarters of Brits surveyed said that video calling was the most impressive part of the new iPhone, once it had been branded FaceTime. Despite having been available on mobile phones for almost a decade, being the killer feature by which 3G telephones were promoted and been free (over Wi-Fi) for the last couple …

Mobile 23 Jun 08:02
Watchdog questions mass US data grab

Terror no excuse for huge bank data scoop

The draft agreement on handing European citizens' bank account details to the US needs tightening up to better protect privacy, according to the European data watchdog. The agreement was released in draft form by the European Commission last month. It now needs approval from the Council before negotiations with the US begin. …

Government 23 Jun 08:24
AMD muscles Nvidia with fanless GPU coprocessors

Anything you can do, we can do. Except ECC

Keeping pace with Nvidia in the GPU wars, Advanced Micro Devices has not only launched its "Lisbon" Opteron 4100 processors but also released the embedded versions of its "Cypress" family of GPUs, a counterpunch to Nvidia's "Fermi" chips used in its Tesla embedded GPUs. The Cypress GPUs already made their way into the ATI …

HPC 23 Jun 09:02
Aptare promises 'Web 2.0' storage management

OMG, my RAID array just defriended me!!!

Aptare has released a new version of its storage resource management (SRM) app called StorageConsole 8 that adds SAN fabric component coverage. SRM software fell into the doldrums a few years ago when it proved impractical to cover all the various Fibre Channel SAN arrays and fabric devices, filers and iSCSI storage network …

Storage 23 Jun 09:07
Women reveal all for X-rayted pin-up calendar

Docs cop an eyeful of 'absolutely every detail'

The German tentacle of display outfit EIZO has come up with a provocative pin-up calendar which shows that female beauty is indeed more than skin deep: Nice. This 2010 calendar was for some reason released in June, but there are still plenty of months left to promote EIZO's "medical imaging high precision displays for the …

Bootnotes 23 Jun 09:09
Small biz grits teeth over Bloody George's budget

Vintage Thatcher, and not in a good way, says union

Reaction to George Osborne's emergency Budget is mixed this morning, with most business leaders accepting the need for higher VAT and welcoming the cuts in corporation tax, while unions condemn him for a "vintage Thatcher" budget. The Confederation of British Industry accepted the need for VAT rises, welcomed changes to …

Small Biz 23 Jun 09:20
Vodafone sticks universal mail in shredder

Vodafone.not. Guffaw

Vodafone is shelving its vodafone.net service, trying to get subscribers to sign up to Vodafone 360 instead despite the stark disparity in services. Vodafone.net (or Vodafone Mail) has been knocking about since 2003 when the world's biggest mobile operator killed off the Vizzavi brand it bought off Vivendi a year earlier. …

Mobile 23 Jun 09:31
Linux 'copter flies in to Blighty

Parrot's AR.Drone priced up

Parrot's helicopter-like executive toy, the AR.Drone, will land in the UK in August, the company revealed last night. Priced at £299, the Drone is a tad too pricey to pick up for the offspring, but eminently affordable for your average gadget fan. After all, they'll need an iPhone to run the remote control software - 'nuff …

reghardware 23 Jun 09:42
Naked Cowboy wrestles Naked Cowgirl

Breast-igniting former stripper in NY trademark spat

New York's Naked Cowboy - who entertains the Times Square masses by strumming a guitar dressed in his undies - has taken exception to a Naked Cowgirl who he reckons is "ripping off his shtick". That's how the New York Post summarises Sandy Kane's infringement of Robert Burck's Naked Cowboy trademark. Burck is demanding the …

Bootnotes 23 Jun 09:52
Bring your own PC

Workshop Finance, warranty, support...can this model really work?

The rise of ‘consumer’ expectations in the workforce is driving some organisations to think up ways of giving their employees more choice when it comes to personal computers. ‘Bring your own computer’ (BYOC) has quickly become an umbrella term for employees, erm,.. bringing their own computer into the workplace. But just how …

Desktop Management 23 Jun 10:02
Sage goes Polish for latest buy

£41m for ERP software firm

Geordie accountancy software firm Sage Group has offered £41m for Polish company Teta. Teta offers personnel and Enterprise Resource Planning software to mid-sized organisations in Poland and Hungary. In the year ended December 2009 it turned over £21m and made a profit of £3m, and had assets of £22m. The tender offers a 15 …

Developer 23 Jun 10:05
iPad bandits stake out NYC Apple store

Distracting device nicked in distraction robberies

iPads have become the latest must-nick item amongst New York's ever inventive criminal fraternity. However, while the device's portability and all round loveliness is part of the attraction, we suspect NYC's crims are not reading Wired during their downtime. Rather the big iPhones' light weight and high value makes them …

PCs & Chips 23 Jun 10:06
Apple, Google, Microsoft – are you a Brand Taliban or Brand Evangelist?

Commentards, why it is good for your wellbeing

Day in, day out commenters do battle on Reg forums behalf or against companies. It used to be Microsoft, and then Google, but lately our readers are most polarized when discussing Apple. Why the passion, the animus? As some commentards note, we are talking about a phone here, a way of doing things there, and a software-based …

reghardware 23 Jun 10:39
CTIA shuns San Francisco for trade show

Takes bat home over cell-labelling ordinance

US mobile trade body the CTIA won't be going to San Francisco for its annual trade show again, in protest at the city's ordinance on cellphone labelling. The ordinance requires those selling mobile phones to provide radiative information at the point of sale, and was approved by the San Francisco Board Of Supervisors last week …

Mobile 23 Jun 10:49
Flying-boat tiltrotor catamaran design wins NASA compo

Brit four-winged Osprey pipped at post

Engineering students in America have won a NASA competition with their design for a combination aeroplane/helicopter/catamaran rescue craft. Students from Blighty worked on the runner-up design, a quadruple-rotor version of the famous V-22 "Osprey" craft. Two hulls are better than one, seemingly "The designs were creative, …

Science 23 Jun 10:54
The Reg guide to Linux, part 2: Preparing to dual-boot

Lining it all up

On Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with …

Operating Systems 23 Jun 11:02
Mobile phone masts not such a menace

Unlikely to hurt babies unless they actually fall on 'em

A study of children born near mobile phone masts has concluded that having excellent mobile coverage does not increase the risk of cancer in unborn children. The study, published by the British Medical Journal, used statistical analysis of 7000 children to establish that being exposed to the radiation from a mobile phone mast …

Mobile 23 Jun 11:06
Virgin Media in talks with power firms to expand network

Subsidies not included

Virgin Media plans to expand its cable network to up to a million homes in areas where BT doesn't think upgrading its network will be worthwhile - and the cable company says it won't need subsidies to do it. It is in talks with power companies for access to their streetside poles, which are used to deliver electricity in many …

Telecoms 23 Jun 11:17
Yanks spend big on 3D

Europeans too

Americans have already spent more than $55m on 3D TV and Blu-ray kit - despite a dearth of suitably stereoscopic material to play on them. The total comes from local market watcher NPD, which yesterday said that all the money had been spent during the three months from February, when 3D kit announced at the January Consumer …

reghardware 23 Jun 11:25
Darkstar One: Broken Alliance

Review Outer space for this one

A long time ago, in an arcade far, far, away, cabinets reverberated with the bleeps and pops of 80s space combat. Pretty fly ride OK, so the arcade was in Aldershot, not Alderaan, but the fight against evil galactic empires was no less keenly waged by me and my 10p pieces. Space was the dominant theme in gaming whether in …

reghardware 23 Jun 11:34
I'm lost without Google Wi-Fi snoop

Andrew's Mailbag Don't touch that router

Is it the sudden outbreak of sunshine? Is it write something silly to Andrew week? A reader we shall call John sends me this: I just tried the new me.com Find my iPhone app. I live in a rural setting and own a 3GS which had WiFi turned off (to save the battery up the wirelessless pub last night). The app was out by …

Letters 23 Jun 11:35
Sozzled Oz bozos in reciprocal literal ass-cap-pop

Beer + air rifle = hospital

Two 34-year-old Oz men ended up in hospital after drunkenly deciding it would be a wheeze to shoot each other in the arse with an air rifle. According to Sky News, a police spokesman explained: "The men were sharing a few beers on Sunday evening when they thought it would be interesting to see if they shot one another with an …

Bootnotes 23 Jun 11:40
Apple flogs 3m iPads in 3 months

Think marketing

Apple has shifted three million iPads in 80 days - having sold its three millionth device on Monday. Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, gushed: “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month.” The "magical product" goes on sale in …

Mobile 23 Jun 11:47
Fans fall in to await iPhone 4 arrival

We speak to the first four in the queue

The wait has begun. With the iPhone 4 going on sale from 8am tomorrow - 24 June - morning, a few early birds have already nestled down in front of Apple UK's flagship store on London's Regent Street. Canadian Apple fan Alex Lee actually began queueing with his sister at midnight. Facing a 36-hour wait, he claimed that websites …

reghardware 23 Jun 12:00
Getting the most out of Gmail

Multiple accounts in one inbox, online backups and more

So long as you don't mind the company indexing all of your mail and keeping it forever – plus the odd, easily-ignorable advert - Gmail is one of Google's handiest services. It's got probably the best interface of any webmail system, it scales down well onto smartphones and so on, but it does rather more besides. You can use it …

Applications 23 Jun 12:02
Dyson Air Multiplier desktop cooler

Review Fan-boys' delight?

Dyson, famous for its innovative vacuum cleaners and industrial hand dryers, has seemingly combined the two designs to create its first desk fan, the Dyson Air Multiplier. Cock-a-hoop: Dyson's Air Multiplier Being Dyson, impressive aesthetics are to be expected and this unique design doesn’t disappoint. Despite looking like …

reghardware 23 Jun 12:02
Data roaming megabill clampdown starts next week

Roaming pornmeisters beware

From next week travellers using mobile data in Europe will be cut off from the internet if they hit a €50 bill limit. New EU regulations designed to prevent huge surprise bills come into force on 1 July. Mobile operators will be required to warn customers when they reach 80 per cent of the bill ceiling. Those who want to …

Telecoms 23 Jun 12:07
Garage card scammer jailed

35,000 card details snaffled

Theogenes De Montford, 29, of Blandford Way, Hayes has been sentenced to four and a half years for his role in one of the UK's biggest chip and pin scams. The gang put card cloning equipment on pin entry handsets at petrol stations around the country. De Montford was caught with 35,000 card details when arrested. An amazing 7 …

Crime 23 Jun 12:37
Nokia seeks distant parents to test Story Visit

A demographic that wants video calling?

Nokia is looking for parents interested in testing its Story Visit service, which aims to enable parents separated by distance to share the reading experience with their kids. We might not want to make video calls from our mobile phones, but parents do seem to like seeing their kids as well as just talking to them. Now Nokia …

Mobile 23 Jun 12:39
Heavyweight Helios crushes Eclipse's past

Packages in motion

Hard on the heels of Oracle's NetBeans 6.9 comes the traditionally bigger annual update to its time-honored nemesis Eclipse - and this year, it's bigger still. The Eclipse Foundation has announced delivery of its 2010 release train codenamed Helios, its largest ever coordinated update of developer and runtime projects. Helios …

Developer 23 Jun 13:02
O2 apologises for iPhone 4 glitch

Pre-order invites go Pete Tong

O2 has apologised to the small number of customers who suffered a service outage this morning. The network invited its "highest spending" customers the chance to pre-order iPhone 4's ahead of the official launch. But an upset Reg reader woke this morning to find no service on his iPhone. He had been contacted by O2 with an …

Mobile 23 Jun 13:15
Android apps: Shifty little bleeders

Bit malwarey here and there

A fifth of Android applications aren't playing fair, according to SMobile Systems which reckons that mobile application marketplaces are rife with malware. SMobile ran though more than 48,000 applications on the Android Marketplace (about three quarters of the whole marketplace) collecting details of the permissions the …

Enterprise Security 23 Jun 13:36
Scotland Yard mulls Google Wi-Fi slurp

Privacy International alleges RIPA offence

Police are considering whether to investigate Google's Wi-Fi data harvesting operation. The Met received a complaint from Privacy International but has not yet decided whether to formally launch an investigation, a police spokesman said today. Officers may speak to Google staff before making a decision. The pressure group …

Policing 23 Jun 13:47
Nokia, Heroes writer team up for immersive eco D&D fun

Meet Swampy

Nokia is to launch a lavish "alternative reality" promotion in partnership with Heroes creator Tim Kring. The phone giant touts 'Conspiracy For Good' as a "multi platform narrative" that's "an immersive experience" - users will be able to play free online games but these blur with real life events, staged and paid for by Nokia …

Bootnotes 23 Jun 13:58
Dell Streak Android tablet phone

Review Mistaken identity?

With all the hoopla surrounding the launch of the iPad, it's easy to forget that Apple wasn't the first with the idea, and it certainly won't be the last. Following hard on the iPad's elegantly designed tail is the Dell Streak, though its claim to be an iPad challenger is more than a little disingenuous – with its 5in screen, it …

reghardware 23 Jun 14:02
US cyber-combat Top Gun training details emerge

Best 15% creamed off for real-life Operation Screaming Fist

Details are emerging of the training programme that will produce the US military's new elite corps of cyberwarfare operatives. According to a Department of Defense statement, the undergraduate cyber training course for career field 17DX "cyber operations officers" in the US Air Force was launched last week at Keesler airforce …

Government 23 Jun 14:02
Avro Vulcan - The Owners' Workshop Manual

Handy Haynes guide for V-bomber operators

DIY vehicle fixers' favourite Haynes has added a new title to its roster of vintage aircraft guides: the Avro Vulcan Owners' Workshop Manual. The blurb explains: "The awesome Avro Vulcan is an enduring image of the Cold War era when the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. For many years the RAF’s delta-wing jet …

Science 23 Jun 14:26
MS preps Xbox Live for families

Goes all Good Housekeeping

Microsoft has announced a new Xbox Live pack as it gears up to attempt to attract families away from the Wii to its own platform with its upcoming Kinect controller. Out in November - a clue to the Kinect's UK release, no doubt - the Xbox Live Gold Family Pack bundles four memberships for £70. In addition to the usual …

reghardware 23 Jun 14:36
Dell primes storage bombshell with Ocarina support

Comment What do they mean?

Dell could be rethinking its deduplication strategy, changing to Ocarina technology and putting existing deals with CommVault and Symantec at risk. It may also have a longer term impact on the EMC Data Domain reselling agreeement. Ocarina's announcement about its embedded deduplication code contains this statement: " …

Storage 23 Jun 15:02
SD body brands up ultra-high speed cards

Faster writers

SD Cards are to get yet another tiny decal, this time signalling the memory card's ability to handle 104MB/s data transfers. Actually, it's a bit more than that: the new UHS (Ultra High Speed) symbol also denotes the use of a new card pin-out that's incompatible with the previous one. Devices that support UHS cards can also …

reghardware 23 Jun 15:05
N8 flicks budget-price spitballs at iPhone

Nokia takes cues from HTC, Samsung to wind up Apple

Nokia has already unveiled its first smartphone running the upcoming Symbian^3 operating system, the N8, but will not ship it until later in the summer. It is keeping interest high, though, by making its most aggressive ever move against the iPhone, pricing the N8 well below the Apple icon and touting all the added value that …

Mobile 23 Jun 15:24
No secret to stopping XSS and SQL injection attacks

Read, test, communicate, repeat

SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting exploits just won't die. The most recent and high-profile incident was a mass webpage attack on more than 100,000 pages, which included victims as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, TomTom, and the UK's Strathclyde police. There was a teetering stack of exploits involved in this …

Developer 23 Jun 17:02
iPhone 4 vivisected in 'first legal teardown'

Inside the Fourth Coming

The intrepid tinkerers at iFixIt now bring us what they refer to as "the first legal teardown of the iPhone 4." And being first wasn't easy. They first went to the other side of the earth to obtain an iPhone 4 before anyone else in the States. As they explained in an email: "[CEO] Kyle [Wiens] flew to Japan, expecting to take …

Mobile 23 Jun 17:06
Facebook gamers drop great membase on open sourcers

Very sophisticated users sought

The NoSQL database that powers Facebook's popular FarmVille and Café World games is being released as a public open-source project. Zynga (the games' creator), NoSQL start-up NorthScale, and Korean games portal NHN have announced the membase open-source project at Membase.org, under an Apache 2.0 license. All three have …

Developer 23 Jun 18:02
Apple accuses HTC of iPhone tech theft (again)

Scorched earth policy still smoldering

Apple is pressing on with its scorched earth patent offensive against HTC, adding at least one new technology to its list of patents allegedly being infringed by the mobile phone manufacturer. In a complaint filed Monday, Apple accused HTC of infringing Patent Nos. 6,282,646 and 7,380,116. Although they are two separate …

Mobile 23 Jun 18:22
Google's Android market needs Jobsian strongman

Comment Tough iPhone love

One of the most hyped technologies of the last year or two is Google's Android. Based on a modified Linux kernel, Android has been heralded as the future of everything from tablets to TVs – and as a release from the stranglehold that Apple's iPhone has on hearts, minds, and wallets of people everywhere. Progress since Android …

Developer 23 Jun 19:02
Google seeks interwebs speed boost with TCP tweak

Velocity 10 lines of code deliver '12 per cent jolt'

Google vice president of engineering Urs Hölzle has warned that unless we update the internet's underlying protocols, any improvements to network bandwidth will be wasted. "It's very clear that the network speed itself will increase," Hölzle said today during a keynote speech at the internet-infrastructure obsessed Velocity …

Networks 23 Jun 19:22
Google to relieve AdSense webpage drag

Velocity Scripts a future free from browser hang

Google has admitted that its AdSense text ads can account for 12 per cent of a webpage's load time, but the company is testing a revamped script designed to minimize the amount of time Google ads spend blocking pages. Speaking this morning at the internet-infrastructure obsessed Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California, …

Music and Media 23 Jun 20:38
Ex-Sun cloud CTO named chief Cisco fluffer

Structure 2010 'Make the network more programmable'

Cisco Systems has appointed Sun Microsysems' former cloud computing CTO to unify and lead a push into the clouds. Lew Tucker has been hired to become Cisco's own first ever cloud computing chief technology officer, with a remit of evolving the network giant's strategy by working across "different functions". Tucker said he …

Virtualization 23 Jun 20:42
IBM sued over failed virtual PC server projects

Big Blue denies alleged 'ponzi scheme'

IBM's Systems and Technology Group finds itself at the center of controversy again, this time as it is being sued by one of its Big Blue's partners, Devon IT, for allegedly running what the thin client maker calls "a wide-spread Ponzi scheme" over a period of five years. In the complaint, which you can read here and which was …

Servers 23 Jun 21:03
Google scores major victory in copyright fight with Viacom

Judge: DMCA means what it says

Google scored a major victory Wednesday when a federal judge dismissed Viacom's $1bn copyright infringement lawsuit accusing the internet giant of turning a blind eye to rampant piracy on its YouTube video site. The landmark decision is a huge win for other internet companies as well because it said they are shielded from …

Music and Media 23 Jun 23:01
Microsoft releases accelerated, canvas-ized IE9 preview

Publicly embarrasses Firefox and Chrome

Microsoft rolled out its Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3 today, and, yes, it does include the HTML5 canvas element, and yes, that element is hardware accelerated, and yes, Redmond is still saying that performance and compatibility share "job one" status. Platform Preview 3 obsoletes the earlier versions, the first …

Developer 23 Jun 23:38