31st August 2010 Archive

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Gmail inbox experiment auto sorts 'important' messages

But Viagra is important

Google has battled back against the dreaded "information overload" with an experimental revamp of the Gmail inbox. Trumpeted Monday on the Google Enterprise blog, Priority Inbox is an alternative view of your Gmail inbox designed to focus your attention on "your most important messages." The beta offers filtering algorithms …

Software 31 Aug 05:27
Apple Magic Trackpad

Review Let your fingers do the working

You've got to hand it to Apple. While it may not be the innovator it likes to think it is, it does have a knack for re-inventing old ideas and coming up with something better. Music players, small form-factor computers, tablet PCs - it's taken existing concepts and given them a major makeover. Apple's Magic Trackpad: actually …

reghardware 31 Aug 07:02
HP pays to end fraud probe

And starts buy-back scheme

HP is paying $55m to end an investigation into government procurement which suggested the ink giant was paying kickbacks to its channel partners in order to get government contracts. HP said it was paying to end the investigation earlier this month, without admitting any guilt. Assistant US Attorney General Tony West said: " …

PCs & Chips 31 Aug 08:24
BlueArc goes for deduplication

Permabit is the lucky guy

Fast filer supplier BlueArc is going to embed Permabit's Albireo deduplication software into its products, enabling more data to be stored in the same disk capacity. BlueArc's Titan and Mercury filers use hardware acceleration to deliver faster access to data. Permabit has developed its Albireo software to deduplicate data …

Storage 31 Aug 08:51
Scotch tape maker buys biometric tech firm

Updated Wrap up

Industrial conglomerate 3M has agree to buy biometric security firm Cogent Systems in a deal valued at $943m. Cogent markets fingerprint, iris and facial biometric technologies to governments and businesses. 3M said its technology will allow it to sell login systems to corporates while its sales team and channel will help its …

Enterprise Security 31 Aug 08:53
NASA snaps touch down on Flickr

Your comments invited on vintage images

NASA is inviting the public to peruse some of of its best snaps on Flickr archive photo section The Commons, and has posted a few choice examples, including the first space shuttle launch back in 1981: Those of you who can remember when it was all fields round here will of course recall that Columbia's STS-1 mission was to …

Space 31 Aug 08:54
Quantum soups up midrange DXi

DXi6700 gets Fibre Channel

Quantum has added Fibre Channel access to its DXi6500 mid-range to make the DXi6700 with a 3.5TB/hour data rate. The DXi6700, which Quantum says uses the latest processor cores, has 24-56TB of usable capacity, in 8TB increments, and comes with four 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports - two for the hosts and two for the direct path to …

Storage 31 Aug 09:01
Underweight passport pic left traveller stuck in Amsterdam

That's heavy, man

Putting on weight can be bad for your health: it may also cause you difficulties when trying to enter the United Kingdom. That was the unfortunate experience of a Mr Derrick Agyeman, for whom weight gain led to an enforced stay in the Netherlands, and litigation that is still making its ponderous way through the UK courts some …

Law 31 Aug 09:16
Your genes determine whether you will respond to surveys

Surveys indicate people think this is a good thing

Humanity is in general genetically predisposed not to take surveys, according to new research. However there exists a proportion of mutant freaks whose genes make them want to respond to surveys. The amazing news comes as part of a new study by profs in America and Singapore. This involved the cunning sending out of a survey …

Biology 31 Aug 09:31
Isilon adds iSCSI

Of course …. and what about FCoE?

Isilon is adding iSCSI block data access to its OneFS operating system, meaning its scale-out filer product is now a scale-out, unified storage product. There is a VMworld angle to this, with Isilon ferreting out a user, John Welter, technology VP at the North West Group, who said that with Isilon, "we can power our block …

Blocks and Files 31 Aug 09:41
India gives BlackBerry reprieve, eyeballs Google, Skype

60 days to prove lack of security

The Indian government has granted BlackBerry users a two-month stay of execution, while it evaluates RIM's latest interception facility and serves notice to Google and Skype. It's far from clear what RIM has promised the Indian government - neither party is prepared to provide details - but it's obviously enough for the …

Mobile 31 Aug 09:58
Viewsonic intros £350 7in Android tablet

Not just a tablet, it's a phone too

Viewsonic has introduced its 7in Android 2.2-based tablet, as expected. It claimed the gadget is a world first - thanks to the device's "phone functionality". Dubbed the ViewPad 7, the tablet's full specs have still to be published, but Viewsonic did say the device will sport front (0.3Mp) and rear (3Mp) cameras; have Wi-Fi, …

reghardware 31 Aug 10:14
Physicists, biologists pick ScaleMP to manage memory

Blog Bigger is better

ScaleMP made some HPC news lately by announcing that the Bielefeld University Physics Department has selected ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation software. This comes on the heels of another announcement, a few days earlier, that the University of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research made the same decision. Both …

HPC Blog 31 Aug 10:20
OED goes the way of all ~~flesh~~ paper

Internet does for weighty print version?

The Oxford University Press is apparently planning to can the full-fat Oxford English Dictionary - the 20-volume, 22,000-page linguistic epic which weighs in at 150lb. Yes indeed, it's black armbands all round down at the Daily Mail, which reckons that the next edition - OED3 - will only be available online. Currently, …

Bootnotes 31 Aug 10:28
Google strikes AP deal to ensure re-heated news

All the news that's fit to ear

Google has renewed its deal with AP for news content. The agreement means the ad giant can continue to use AP news stories on Google News or elsewhere. AP said it would also work with Google "to improve discovery and distribution of news". The news agency once led the charge against news aggregators and unlicensed users of …

Music and Media 31 Aug 10:48
Microsoft ~~wins~~ wants right to appeal Word patent ruling

Supreme Court next step

Microsoft has won asked for* the right to appeal a recently-lost patent case brought by Canadian firm i4i. The company didn't get much credit for its claim to own Word patents until it won an injunction against Microsoft sales of Office 2007 and forced the software giant to patch the product before it could be legally sold. …

Applications 31 Aug 10:52
Sony Ericsson: X10 Android 2.1 update out next month

Ahead of schedule, maybe...

Sony Ericsson has Tweeted its followers to tell them the Android 2.1 update for the Xperia X10 - reviewed here - will be out before the end of September. That, at any rate, is the plan, according to the company's Twitter page. This timetable is a small improvement on the previous forecast, made in May and which said the …

reghardware 31 Aug 10:53
Crooks said swiped church funds were for sex crime victims

It was simply resting in their account

Scammers who made off with $600,000 after breaking into the bank account of a Catholic diocese claim the funds have been earmarked for the victims of paedophile priests. Around a dozen money mules were used to loot the funds from an online bank account maintained by the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa earlier last month. …

Crime 31 Aug 10:55
Skype pulls up socks for corporate service

Doing the business for businesses

Skype has moved its connect service out of beta and is pitching it at businesses as speculation grows about the VoIP pioneer's future. Skype Connect is a box that Skype-enables business communications, plugging into a PBX to provide Skype prices and quality from the comfort of an office desk. The service has been in beta for …

Telecoms 31 Aug 11:08
Brits to get off lightly when Xbox Live prices rise

New tariffs from November

Some British Xbox Live Gold users will be paying more for their online gaming pleasure from 1 November onwards. On that date, the price of one month's Gold access will rise from £5 to £6. Neither the three-month nor the annual price will go up, Microsoft pledged. Actually, Brits have fared fairly well. US-based users will not …

reghardware 31 Aug 11:08
MS hits refresh on Windows 7 SP1 for select few

Build 7601.17077 takes partners by the hand

Microsoft pumped out fresh beta builds of its first service packs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 late last week. The company released Windows SP1 public betas for the firm’s current operating system at its annual partner shindig in July this year. Last Friday it hit refresh on the beta by spinning out build 7601. …

Operating Systems 31 Aug 11:11
LG to show 31in OLED 3D TV at IFA

But acronym-tastic telly not out until 2011?

LG will be showing off a 31in ultra-slim OLED TV at the IFA show in Berlin later this week. The 2.9mm-thick set is capable of displaying 3D content, though LG hasn't said whether the screen requires activer-shutter or passive 3D specs - the former, we suspect. The set's resolution has not been made public, which probably …

reghardware 31 Aug 11:58
VMware floats into developer cloud services

VMworld Three-way fluffing promised

VMware is floating a Microsoft Azure-like developer cloud for coders building apps on SpringSource's middleware, but the news is carefully wrapped in a fluffy statement on "branding". Today, at VMworld, in San Francisco, California, the company will announce something called vFabric. vFabric consists of integrated versions of …

Developer 31 Aug 12:02
VMware blows vCloud across skies public and private

VMworld Project Redwood is go

VMware has officially lifted the curtain on Project Redwood, its long-expected platform for building so-called infrastructure clouds. Now known as vCloud Director, the platform underpins Amazon EC2-like public clouds from VMware partners such as Verizon, but it's also a means of building similar services inside private data …

Virtualization 31 Aug 12:02
Microsoft divorces Live Mesh from kitchen Sync drama

Just let me keep my name, goddammit

Microsoft has yet again renamed its Live Sync service which will now be dubbed Windows Live Mesh when it is released this autumn. The company confirmed the moniker switcheroo in a blog post on Friday. But the name change could confuse customers as Live Sync, which Microsoft is currently testing, is made up of two existing …

Applications 31 Aug 12:06
Boffins baffled by mysterious Martian crater

Likeliest explanation: Alien spacecraft prang

New photos gleaned by the Mars Express spacecraft in orbit about the red planet have failed to shed any light on the origins of an "enigmatic" elongated crater named Orcus Patera. Interstellar alien spaceship prang skidmark? Orcus Patera lies on the border of Mars' Elysium and Amazonis plains, between the colossal volcanoes …

Space 31 Aug 12:10
Fake TweetDeck update lures prompt password resets

Are UK hackers behind Trojan horse attack?

Compromised Twitter accounts have been used to post links to an exploit portal that poses as a download site for an update to TweetDeck, the popular micro-blogging client software package. Malware lures pose as messages such as "Critical tweetdeck update Bank Holiday", a reference to a national holiday in the UK that may …

Spam 31 Aug 12:26
Report recommends UN climate panel shakeup

Rearrange the chairs please

An enquiry into the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, has recommended administrative changes, including a full-time chief executive. It found the IPCC had "assigned high confidence to statements for which there is very little evidence", had failed to acknowledge criticism, or follow its own guidelines. The InterAcademy Council, …

Environment 31 Aug 12:37
Project Horizon: VMware's plan to restitch the desktop

VMworld Your cloud identity

VMware has released new versions of its View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and its ThinApp application streaming software, while promising some sort of consumer "cloud identity" offering sometime next year. View 4.5 offers support for the FIPS 140-2 security protocol required by the US government for protecting …

Virtualization 31 Aug 13:02
Little black dress with SIM card slot offered for 2011

Now, a way to look even barmier in public

A mobile phone built into a black dress? Marvellous. And with pictures too? Hold the science page for this one, but don't look too closely. CuteCircuit has announced a little black dress with a built-in mobile phone. It's all controlled with a wave of the arm and good to look at too. But while one might assume the announcement …

Mobile 31 Aug 13:48
Lady vicar tells Anglicans to learn from Black Sabbath

Jesus is metal

A Church of England vicar has told the Anglican community that it could do worse than learning to relax and taking a few cues from heavy metal. The Reverend Rachel Mann writes in the Church Times that the outpourings of Black Sabbath and their musical descendants demonstrated a "liberative theology of darkness" enabling …

Bootnotes 31 Aug 13:56
Sony Oz mod chip dongle ban hearing delayed

Defeat will set 'dangerous precedent', says co-defendant

The ban granted to Sony against three Australian companies who had been offering PSJailbreak, a USB dongle that lets PS3 owners play ripped game discs, has been extended. The defendants - mod chip sellers OzModChips, Mod Supplier and Quantronics - were today due their opportunity to challenge the temporary injunction ordered …

reghardware 31 Aug 14:20
Hannspree outs £329 10.1in Android tablet

Tegra 2 in its tank

Hot on the heels of Viewsonic's ViewPad 7 Android tablet comes an altogether more exciting - we have more of the spec, in other words - 10in model from Chinese electronics maker Hannspree. The unnamed tablet has a ARM A9 dual-core processor clocked to 1GHz and an Nvidia low-power, 1080p-capable GPU, the company reveals - so …

reghardware 31 Aug 14:53
Diesels greener than battery cars, says Swiss gov report

Get a TDi estate not an EV, and save the planet!

Swiss boffins have mounted an investigation into the largely unknown environmental burdens of electric cars using lithium-ion batteries, and say that the manufacturing and disposal of batteries presents no insurmountable barriers to electric motoring. However, their analysis reveals that modern diesel cars are actually better …

Environment 31 Aug 14:57
Philips shows Android handheld media player

Touch too much?

Philips has unwrapped what its "first" Android-based media player. The GoGear Connect sports a 3.2in touchscreen and contains 16GB of content storage - you can add more by inserting a Micro SD card. The 113 x 13 x 59mm, 128g player has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and can stream music and share files, Philips said. There's even a …

reghardware 31 Aug 15:12
IT engineer fights spider with improvised flamethrower

Can of deodorant + lighter = hospital

An IT engineer who attempted to dispatch a spider with an improvised flamethrower ended up on the wrong end of his own can of deodorant, the Sun reports. Dad-of-two Chris Welding, of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, explained: "It was about 10.30pm last night. My wife was getting ready for bed and suddenly she let out a scream. She said …

Hardware 31 Aug 15:25
NHS Online consult service to live on: Calls go to 111

Free gov phone-a-lonely-nurse service dropped

The Department of Health has said there are no immediate plans to drop the NHS Direct web service, despite signalling the end of telephone consultations. It has issued a statement saying that the site, which provides a first stop for medical advice, will remain in operation while the government reviews the wider use of …

Government 31 Aug 15:34
German judge chides Google over YouTube freeloading

Teutonic songwriters' case kicks off

A German judge thinks Google should do more to detect illegal uploads to its YouTube video service. He was ruling on a case last week brought by an alliance of composers and songwriters' performance rights societies led by Germany's GEMA. GEMA and the other societies were in negotiations with Google that broke down in May. The …

Music and Media 31 Aug 15:46
Bye-bye to bizarro bye-laws, says UK.gov

Local laws, for local people

If you have plans to fry fish in Gloucester or beat your carpet along Blackpool promenade or transport a dead horse through Hammersmith and Fulham, you should know all these activities are still subject to local bye-laws. But this may be about to change, with the announcement today by Local Government Minister Grant Shapps of …

Law 31 Aug 15:55
Ruby on Rails 3.0 ~~sets sail~~ ~~gets off ground~~ oh, chuff chuff

'Never struggle with user pastes from MS Word again!'

The Ruby on Rails creator has released version 3.0 of the open source web framework, following a two-year project involving more than 1,600 contributors to the code. David Heinemeier announced the third generation release of the software – which has been designed to work with Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.9.2, and JRuby 1.5.2+ – on …

Applications 31 Aug 16:01
EMC embraces benchmarks

Celerra gateway excels

EMC has started getting enthusiastic about benchmarks, the latest being SPECsfs2008-nfs v3. It submitted a Celerra VG8 Gateway system - that's a NAS head sitting atop either Symmetrix VMAX or CLARiiON Fibre Channel storage. This VG8 is a bit of a monster with up to eight data movers, called X-Blades, which contain 6-core Xeon …

Blocks and Files 31 Aug 16:55
Yahoo! begins ad handover to Microsoft

Bingification to end in October — maybe

The Bingification of Yahoo! took another step forward Tuesday, when the transition of advertisers' search-based campaigns from Yahoo! Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter got underway. "A combined Bing and Yahoo! will provide advertisers with a competitive alternative in search advertising, enabling advertisers to reach more …

Music and Media 31 Aug 17:50
VMware eats two companies at once

VMworld Integrien and TriCipher munched

VMware has agreed to acquire Integrien, an outfit that offers "real-time" analytics software for monitoring application and infrastructure performance, and TriCipher, a company that handles access management and security for net-based applications. The virtualization giant announced the news this morning during the keynote at …

Business 31 Aug 17:52
Hitachi GST IPO may be coming

Reuters saying - so it isn't spin

Via Aaron Rakers of Stifel Nicolaus I'm hearing Hitachi GST may be being prepped for an IPO. He cites a Reuters report which mentions an IPO is one alternative and others include an outright sale by Hitachi of all or part of its disk drive operation. Likely buyers if a sale is consider have to be the existing HDD …

Blocks and Files 31 Aug 17:53
Microsoft douses VMware with cold cloud shower

'We have the apps you trust'

Microsoft has told users they've got "nothing to lose" by checking out the company's Azure cloud and hosted applications before committing to a deal with archrival VMware. In an open letter in the national news comic USA Today on Tuesday, Microsoft claimed a three-year contract with VMware would tie customers into a deal with …

Virtualization 31 Aug 18:36
Game-addicted man scores rare win over software lawyers

Lineage II and the unenforceable EULA

A Hawaii man who sued a company over his crippling addiction to the computer game Lineage II has gone where few litigants have managed to go, defeating the end-user agreement that said he had no right to bring the case to begin with. Craig Smallwood sued Lineage II maker NC Interactive late last year, claiming that his …

Law 31 Aug 18:52
VMware boss: we rise as Windows falls

VMworld The OS sets in the west

Update: This story has been updated with additional statements from Maritz and additional commentary to flesh out and clarify Maritz's comments. VMware CEO Paul Maritz has questioned the relevance of the operating system. According to data lifted from research outfit IDC, more applications were deployed on virtual servers …

Virtualization 31 Aug 19:55
Big Blue finally punts an Opteron 6100 server

One System x rack only, no blades

It only took five months, but on Tuesday it finally happened: IBM announced its first — and what could very well end up being its only — System x or BladeCenter server fitted with AMD's "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100 processors. With IBM being an early and somewhat enthusiastic supporter of Opteron server chips back when the 64- …

Servers 31 Aug 21:22
Judge bashes warrantless cellphone tracking

Tower data protected by Fourth Amendment

A federal magistrate has ruled that information pulled from cellphone towers provides such an intimate portrait of a customer's life that government investigators must get a warrant before obtaining it. The ruling by Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the US District Court for Eastern New York is a major victory for civil …

Law 31 Aug 21:33
Xsigo rejiggers virtual I/O director for Ethernet

Adapter cards given the boot, too

Xsigo Systems, one of the pioneers of virtual I/O for server networks and their links to storage, is beside itself with excitement at the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza in San Francisco now that it has finally brought a product to market that is designed for enthusiastic uptake by IT shops that like their Ethernet …

Servers 31 Aug 21:59
Mexican telco exec: iPhone 4 antenna fix imminent

¡iCaramba!

According to a Mexican telco exec, Apple will release an iPhone 4 with an upgrade to its problematic antenna after its "free case" giveaway ends on September 30. "A partir del 30 de septiembre estarán disponibles ... los nuevos dispositivos que no tienen el desperfecto de la recepción," Marco Quatorze of Mexican wireless …

Mobile 31 Aug 22:39
CarderPlanet founder charged in $9.4m RBS WorldPay hack

And then there were nine

A man accused of being one of the most prolific sellers of credit-card data has been charged with participating in the brazen hack of RBS WorldPay in 2008 that funneled about $9.4m out of the payment processor in just 12 hours. Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, was already in the custody of French police following his …

Crime 31 Aug 23:55