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24th June 2010 Archive

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  • Mozilla: Our browser will not run native code

    Velocity Firefox 4 beta due 'within days'

    Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5. …

    Developer 24 Jun 04:02

  • VMware springs into frameworks with imminent acquisitions

    Structure 2010 Portability and fear of missing out

    VMware is committed to buying more software companies specializing in frameworks to provide application portability – and to keep up with coders. On Wednesday, company chief executive and president Paul Maritz promised "you will see us expand our repertoire over the next few quarters." Speaking at the Structure 2010 …

    Developer 24 Jun 05:09

  • Red Hat turns the crank of KVM enterprise virt

    Tuning up for Cisco's blades

    Cloud infrastructure wannabe and Linux juggernaut Red Hat has announced the next rev of its Enterprise Virtualization commercial-grade KVM hypervisor, saying it has qualified it to scale further and also adding the ability to support desktop images as well as server images. At the Red Hat Summit today in Boston, the company …

    Virtualization 24 Jun 05:21

  • Femto World Summit is all smiles (mostly)

    Deployments doubled since November. Yay

    The femtocell industry's third annual event in London is taking place, and the sector's rapid shift from interesting concept to real world commercial market is highlighted by the wide range of vendors and carriers pledging support. Global femtocell deployments have more than doubled in the past nine months, according to a …

    Telecoms 24 Jun 06:02

  • 3D TVs

    Group Test Fad - or the future?

    It’s been hard to escape the 3D frenzy that was kicked off when Avatar took the box office by storm last Christmas. The recent remakes of Clash of the Titans and Alice In Wonderland got hasty 3D makeovers in order to cash in on the craze, and you can’t open a newspaper or a web browser without being deluged by headlines …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • Buyer's Guide: 3D TVs

    Group Test Nice kit - but where's the content?

    The good news, as a Panasonic spokesman told me a couple of months ago, is that “there will be no format war” for 3D TV. It’s true that there are actually two different types of 3D television, but both types can play 3D TV broadcasts and films on 3D Blu-ray Discs, so you don’t have to worry about buying the wrong type of 3D TV …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • LG 47LD950

    Review The passive approach

    LG is the only manufacturer to release a ‘passive’ 3D TV that uses inexpensive polarised glasses, rather than the costly active-shutter specs used by all its rivals - although it is planning to release a number of active-shutter TVs as well, including the super-slimline LX9900 that I was also able to see recently. Currently …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • Samsung UE40C7000

    Review Great telly - that also does 3D

    Samsung has gone seriously gung-ho for 3D. It was the first company to ship a 3D TV in the UK – I even know someone who’s bought one – and it has released no less than three separate ranges that include both plasma and LCD models. The most affordable model is the 40in C7000, which costs about £1800. The C7000 is striking to …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • Sony Bravia KDL-HX803

    Review Future proof

    Sony is entering the 3D market this month with the HX803, which is available in both 40in and 46in versions. I took a look at the 40in model, which costs around £1800, although Sony is planning to release a number of additional models during the summer, going up to £3500 for the 60in, top-of-the-range LX903. Sony describes the …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • Panasonic Viera TX-P50VT20B

    Review Big-screen magic

    Panasonic were kind enough to film the French Open in 3D for me so that I could sample the delights of its 50in VT20 display, and I have to admit that I was duly impressed. You could really get a sense that you were sitting in the stands overlooking the courts, and close-up action shots were extremely effective. It makes you …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • 3D TVs Best Buys

    Group Test What's best for early adopters?

    Manufacturers may have plans to release a fair few 3D TVs this year, but for the moment the range is limited, typically to a single product line for each supplier split into one or more screen sizes. Here are the TVs I've looked at in this initial round-up, but Reg Hardware will reviewing more as these manufacturers release …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • LG 47LX9900

    Review Gadget packed

    Somewhat bizarrely, the top-of-the-range LX9900 comes in at about the same price as LG’s "affordable" passive LD950: around £2500 for the 47in model. The design and specification of the LX9900 are on a whole different level, though. It looks great, as it’s one of LG’s "frameless" models - the glass panel isn’t set within a …

    reghardware 24 Jun 07:02

  • Dixons renames itself Dixons

    Everyone loves the name right?

    DSGi shares are up slightly this morning after the retail group posted results for the year at the top end of expectations. In the year ended 31 May 2010 DSGi, owner of PC World and Currys, made sales of £8,531.6m, up four per cent on last year or two per cent like-for-like. Pre-tax profit was up 61 per cent to £90.5m. In the …

    reghardware 24 Jun 08:11

  • Redback spiders provoke BAE lock-down

    'Big, tough men were yelling with fear'

    Shaken BAE Systems staff have recalled the "horror film" moment when they discovered a pack of deadly Oz Redback spiders in a parts crate shipped in from the Lucky Country. According to the Sun, the eight-legged invaders provoked a lock-down of the area at Warton Aerodrome, near Preston, as specialist anti-arachnid operatives …

    Bootnotes 24 Jun 08:49

  • Virtual Instruments gets hooks into SANs

    From hardware to VMware

    Virtual Instruments (VI) reckons it has the broadest and deepest way to monitor and manage end-to-end SAN traffic, from the application in a virtual machine right down to Fibre Channel cable into an array. It's announced VirtualWisdom 2.0 and says the product is all about optimising virtual infrastructures and enabling the …

    Virtualization 24 Jun 09:27

  • US energy-weapon project going well

    Raygun only inflicts 2x as much harm on self as on enemy

    A US military tech project aimed at developing portable, functional battlefield energy weapons has successfully achieved initial goals and is now moving on towards "weapons-class performance levels". The project in question is the optimistically-named Revolution In Fiber Lasers (RIFL), ultimately intended to deliver war-grade …

    Science 24 Jun 09:41

  • Scotland Yard cuffs teens for role in cybercrime forum

    65,000 stolen credit card numbers recovered

    Two teenagers have been arrested for their alleged involvement in the world's largest English-language cybercrime forum. The pair were detained by appointment in central London on Wednesday by the Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), a national unit based at Scotland Yard. An eight-month investigation into the forum, which …

    Crime 24 Jun 09:41

  • Want to leave work early? Torch a filing cabinet

    But read this cautionary Florida tale first

    A Florida woman who started a fire in her office so she could get off work early has been jailed for nine months, the St Petersburg Times reports. Michelle Perrino, 40, of New Port Richey, executed her cunning plan on 12 May 2009, at Bayonet Point Oxygen. However, she subsequently blew it when she "mentioned the fire's origin …

    Bootnotes 24 Jun 09:45

  • Android phones invade the world

    Google activates 160,000 a day

    Google is activating 160,000 Android-OS phones a day - up from 100,000 a day in the third week of May. Android apps are also growing at a lick, with about 65,000 available, compared with 50,000 a month ago. The figures come from Google chief exec Eric Schmidt, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian. How long before …

    reghardware 24 Jun 10:00

  • Group policy for Unix

    Blog Quality Unix-based GPO support shock

    I was raised in the Red Hat world of Linux, starting with Red Hat 2, moving to Mandrake, and returning to Red Hat once more. Since then I have been using it through every iteration and have dabbled in Debian and Gentoo based distributions as well. Each camp has evangelical believers, but I tend to stick with Red Hat not because …

    Desktop Mgmt Blog 24 Jun 10:02

  • Aus politicians puppeted by hackers

    Hearty endorsements of net censorship carpet Christian message board

    Red faces all round at the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) after a posse of seriously unchristian hackers overloaded its shiny new message board with spoof messages, and the ACL blog toppled over. The story begins with one sharp-eyed Reg reader, who drew to our attention a large number of highly impolitic comments apparently …

    Government 24 Jun 10:02

  • Production problems push back white iPhone 4 release

    Harder to make than expected, says Apple

    Apple has put back the release of the white iPhone 4 by a month or more. It claimed that making these boys had "proven more challenging to manufacture than expected". The upshot: they won't be out until "the second half of July". Apple's iPhone 4 went on sale this morning, though some people who ordered the handset in advance …

    reghardware 24 Jun 10:07

  • iPhone 4 Day: pre-orders and pregnancy cut no ice with 02

    There can be only one

    Today the iPhone 4 went on sale in the UK. Reg reader Miles Cheverton reports from the frontline, in his case the O2 store in Brighton. All reports and pics welcome! As a bit of a rabid Apple fanboy, I wanted to get an iPhone 4 on day of release. I know I know. As my wife and I have iPhones already, and both contracts have …

    reghardware 24 Jun 10:18

  • iPhone 4: Perfect for everyone, except humans

    The non-touchy feely iPhone?

    Apple's new iPhone doesn't seem to like being touched much, and the beautiful (if easily discoloured) screen scratches too. Dear dear. To be fair, the scratching issue only affects the more-clumsy user, and there are only a couple of reports about discolouration in the corner of the screen, but it seems that the majority of …

    Mobile 24 Jun 10:21

  • Oracle updates free web RAD tool

    APEX 4 brings snazzy web apps

    If you have to knock up a web front-end to an Oracle database in a hurry, you might appreciate the newly-released version 4 of Oracle Application Express – or APEX, as it's known to its mates. Version 4 has been a while coming – it's been in preview since December and the last version, 3.2, came out in March last year. …

    Developer 24 Jun 10:49

  • Bluetooth: wireless wonder or digital dead end?

    Heads or Fails Have your say on how history will judge

    Bluetooth, once hailed as the future basis for all local wireless communications, is now ubiquitous. Computers have it, ditto phones, portable media players, games consoles, cars and a host of other devices. But how many owners of the millions and millions of Bluetooth-enabled gadgets that are sold every year actually make use …

    reghardware 24 Jun 11:00

  • Adobe's second AIR defies Jobs' Flash iPhobia

    Review Evolutionary RIA step for PC, Linux - and Mac

    Thanks to Steve Jobs, attention on Adobe Systems' Flash this year has mostly been on mobile a fact Adobe helped compound by recently releasing its AIR runtime - based on Flash - for Android partners. Adobe's progress with AIR for mobile has been slow, while Apple's iPhone and iPad Flash ban has damaged Adobe's cross-platform …

    Developer 24 Jun 11:02

  • Pillar and Xiotech whip Exchange competition

    Complete Microsoft tests handily

    Pillar Data and Xiotech are much better at providing storage for 8,000 Exchange 2007 users than the competition in terms of drive spindle needs and response latency. Microsoft has encouraged its storage partners to run benchmarks at varying levels of Exchange user populations for both Exchange 2007 and 2010. We looked at the …

    Storage 24 Jun 11:13

  • Want Olympic tickets? Better get a VisaCard then

    No place on the podium for MasterCard

    The Office of Fair Trading and European regulators are discussing whether any action is needed after it emerged that only Visa credit or debit cards will be accepted for tickets or in shops at Olympic venues. The online Olympics 2012 shop, where from next month you'll be able to buy rubbish models of rubbish mascots Wenlock …

    Financial News 24 Jun 11:20

  • Nokia woos developers with cheaper listing

    €50 to you guv, and I'll throw in a signature too

    Nokia has been making itself pretty for developers – launching a new SDK for Qt applications, dropping the cost of Ovi listing to €50 and signing applications for free. Not only that, but the Finns reckon they can get the average signing time for applications down to two weeks, along with making the whole process a lot cheaper …

    Developer 24 Jun 11:23

  • Orange gazes into 2050 Glastoball

    Futuristic festival of the future with Wi-Fi in your wellies and that

    Orange is celebrating 40 years of Glastonbury by imagining what it's going to look like in another 40 years (pdf). Wi-Fi already blankets almost all the UK's music festivals, with some even allowing punters access to the internet from their sleeping bags, but Orange foresee greater leaps in tent-connectedness. It's strange …

    Mobile 24 Jun 11:38

  • Crucial intros low cost, low capacity fast SSD

    Ultra-quick boot drive, anyone?

    Crucial has rolled out a 64GB version of its RealSSD C300 6Gb/s Sata solid-state drive line. With the company's existing 128GB and 256GB C300's retailing for, respectively, £309 and £540, the 64GB model provides a taste of SSD goodness for a more cost-effective £121. The C300 uses the laptop-oriented 2.5in form-factor, but …

    reghardware 24 Jun 11:42

  • Diary of a somebody - life in iPhone 4 land

    The story of a sales monkey at a phone shop

    Our correspondent works at a phone store somewhere in the UK. We can't tell you which, because if we do he'll probably lose his job. What we can tell you is that it's one of the ones without any iPhones... June 23rd 08:00 Arrived in work to wait on the delivery. The new iPhone is due out tomorrow so it should hopefully be chock …

    Mobile 24 Jun 11:56

  • iPhone 4 operator contracts compared

    Which network has the best deals?

    With Apple's iPhone 4 officially going on sale today, Reg Hardware thinks it's perfect time to compare network pre-pay tariffs to see how Orange, Vodafone et al match up. We've compiled the cheapest and most expensive deals each network has to offer into the following tables. 12-Month Contracts 18-Month Contracts 24-Month …

    reghardware 24 Jun 11:58

  • FarmVille moooves onto iPhone

    I'm so sorry about that headline

    FarmVille, the game enjoyed by millions to the bemusement of everyone else, is in the iTunes app store – for those who can't bear to be separated from their crops. The free download promises all the pointless monotony and social climbing of the Facebook version, though not using Flash obviously. When the iPad was announced …

    Mobile 24 Jun 12:04

  • Unix beardies vs. clean shaven DBAs

    Join the Great Beard debate

    Two Reg readers David Wood and Simon Painter, a commentard who goes by the handle THE VOCIFEROUS TIME WASTER - want you to join their latest charity stunt for Barnardos. Yes, it's the Great Beard Debate. Click on this link and join in. Dave and Simon have "long disagreed on the merits of Dave's ginger face fuzz and have …

    Developer 24 Jun 12:34

  • The Reg guide to Linux, part 3

    Media playback and the no.1 thing to remember

    Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It's approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and …

    Operating Systems 24 Jun 12:41

  • 3 offers best iPhone deal

    But no one has any stock

    So now we know - there is to be no price war over the iPhone 4. But operator 3, which became the latest UK network to unveil its pricing, has opted for much more generous bundles than the competition – and a significantly lower upfront Apple tax. The drawbacks? Well, 3 won't bundle public Wi-Fi hotspot access in its deals, …

    Mobile 24 Jun 12:56

  • UK arms industry 'same as striking coal miners' - Army head

    Interview We need Maggie back to deal with them, says general

    Blighty's top general - hotly tipped as the next head of the armed forces - has hinted strongly that the British defence industry can no longer expect to rely on sweetheart deals from the Ministry of Defence (MoD). He adds that modern warfare has now left the tank behind as surely as it has the horse. General Sir David …

    Government 24 Jun 12:57

  • Future quantum computers could be made of... silicon?

    Retro flavour in latest undead moggy-chip trials

    In a slightly retro move, a top Blighto-Dutch boffinry alliance has declared yet another method of creating a practical "qubit" - a building block of the postulated weird yet puissant quantum computers of the future. This time the tiny piece of unknowable information is contained, not in some exotic new ultra-substance, but …

    PCs & Chips 24 Jun 13:11

  • .XXX to get ICANN nod

    Porno lobby screwed by expected decision

    ICANN plans to give conditional approval to .xxx, the controversial top-level internet domain just for porn, 10 years after it was first proposed. During a public forum at ICANN's meeting in Brussels today, general counsel John Jeffrey revealed that ICANN's board of directors will likely approve the domain tomorrow. The …

    Telecoms 24 Jun 14:12

  • Nokia dumps Symbian on N-series

    MeeGo all the way

    The Nokia N8, to be released later this year, will be the last N-Series handset running Symbian. From then on it's MeeGo all the way. That's not to say that Nokia will be dropping Symbian entirely, but the Finns have long seen it as the perfect OS for spreading the smart phone joy into the less well-off demographic, so it …

    Mobile 24 Jun 14:47

  • Watch where you're treading

    Workshop It could cost you

    When we asked Reg readers to tell us about their experiences with mobile roaming, quite a few of you came back with some interesting insights. And you're not happy. In the world of always available, always connected, where we’re increasingly tapping into websites and servers while on the move at home and abroad, it’s not …

    Mobile Workshop 24 Jun 15:08

  • Horse-headed human trots through Street View

    Amazing equihominid hybrid wows internetosphere

    The BBC has been getting a good few hits today as a result of its "horse-boy" revelation, the amazing tale of a horse-human hybrid spotted trotting through Street View in Aberdeen: Horse boy has reportedly been spotted in the real world as far away as Germany and Norway, according to Beeb readers. In which case, the old …

    Bootnotes 24 Jun 15:09

  • Ofcom opens Neutrality debate with 'hands off' warning

    We've got enough daft laws already, thanks

    Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Baseball. McCarthyism. Net neutrality. Not all US cultural exports succeed abroad, and the latter has landed with a dull thud in Europe. Ofcom today opened a consultation on net neutrality, but its preferred stance is likely to disappoint the Tin Foil Hat brigade of web activists who created …

    Telecoms 24 Jun 15:27

  • Samsung dev day goes app-tastic

    It's a Bada ting

    If you weren’t at Samsung’s developer event in London on 18 June, and don’t say we didn’t warn you, then you missed the inside track from Justin Hong, the lead for the bada development platform, who popped in from Korea. We report significant excitement in the audience as he announced that the operating system might soon be …

    Mobile 24 Jun 15:56

  • Neon to take mainframe complaints to Europe

    More legal headaches for IBM

    It looks like some more lawyers are going to make some more money off IBM's mainframe business. Neon Enterprise Software, the company that created the zPrime tool for shifting mainframe workloads to lower-cost zIIP and zAAP specialty engines on IBM's System z servers, announced today that it intends to file a compliant with …

    Servers 24 Jun 16:13

  • Skype targets 100 million PCs with SkypeKit SDK

    CEO unfazed by Google Voice

    Skype is releasing an SDK to enable makers of mobile and desktop devices to embed its internet-telephony tech into globally distributed systems at low cost. According to CEO Josh Silverman, the goal is to have Skype preloaded onto 100 million PCs in 2011. Silverman also said that competition from Google Voice, which went into …

    Developer 24 Jun 17:19

  • Twitter reaches settlement with feds over privacy lapses

    Password sins absolved

    Twitter has agreed to overhaul its data-security practices to settle federal charges that shoddy password policies and other lapses at the microblogging site exposed its users' private information. Under a tentative settlement reached with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter must establish a comprehensive information- …

    ID 24 Jun 17:25

  • Motorola punts mega huge Droid phone

    Are you macho enough?

    Motorola has released its latest Android offering, the Droid X, and it's one chunky, funky monkey. Which is a good thing. By chunky, we mean not only its size — big — but also all the tasty bits it contains: a snappy 1GHz TI OMAP3630 processor, hefty 1540 mAh battery, versatile 8-megapixel auto-focus camera with dual-LED flash …

    Mobile 24 Jun 19:19

  • Yahoo!'s 'interwebs MySQL' crunches four years of Twitter

    Velocity Ask the InfoChimp

    Yahoo! has plugged its YQL web query language into a third-party API that lets developers access and analyze a sea of Twitter data dating back to 2006. "This is the real strength of YQL," Yahoo! technical evangelist Tom Hughes-Croucher told The Reg this morning at the net-infrastructure-obsessed Velocity conference in Santa …

    Developer 24 Jun 19:51

  • Survival instinct drives Salesforce's Java embrace

    Structure 2010 Sweating with VMware

    There's trouble at the top for Salesforce.com - and software developers are to blame. Once riding the bow-wave of Silicon Valley's trends with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the company's opening it's proprietary heart to keep pace with the latest big new thing: cloud computing. Chief executive Marc Benioff told Structure 2010 …

    Developer 24 Jun 21:37

  • Organofunctional silane Z-6011 gives iPhone 4 bad rap

    Spot on, spot off

    A chemical compound we're willing to bet most Reg readers have never heard of may be responsible for one new-release niggle burning up the intertubes about Apple's new iPhone 4: screen discoloration. As we reported earlier today, some otherwise-happy new owners of new iPhones are newly disturbed by the new revelation that …

    Mobile 24 Jun 22:31

  • Google vanishes Android apps from citizen phones

    'Kill switch' in action

    Google has reached out over the airwaves and removed a pair of applications from users' Android phones, saying the two apps violated its terms of service. Like Apple, Google has a "kill switch" that allows it to remotely remove mobile apps that have already been installed by end users. The tool is mentioned in the terms and …

    Developer 24 Jun 22:37

  • VeriSign SSL certs open to tampering, competitor warns

    Bank of America attacks made easy

    VeriSign and one of its partners have come under fire for publicly exposing webpages used to process customer security certificates, a practice a competitor claims puts some of the biggest names on the web at risk of serious targeted attacks. According to Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of internet security firm Comodo, publicly …

    Enterprise Security 24 Jun 22:45

  • Oracle uses Sun as springboard in Q4

    More hardware appliances on way

    The first post-Sun-acquisition financial results are in for Oracle, and the software maker has turned a profit on its Sun business. But it's an operating profit, not a net profit with real black on the bottom line, and that does not take into account restructuring charges from layoffs and other tweaks to the Sun business. If not …

    Financial News 24 Jun 22:48

  • Intel preps x86 Android for summer release

    There is no joy in Redmond

    Microsoft got some more bad news today: Intel is porting Android 2.2, née Froyo, to the x86 architecture. "Our expectation is that [native x86 Android] will be based on the Froyo release and will be available this summer to developers," no lesser light than Renee James, Intel's software and services head honchette, told APC on …

    Developer 24 Jun 23:50