20th September 2010 Archive

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Podgy Googlers get shrunken plates

Data lords put staff on subliminal diet

In a calculated effort to halt the expansion of its staff, Google has shrunk the size of its plates. The data-obsessed search colossus recently ran a study that showed its employees would eat less if it gave them smaller plates. So it gave them smaller plates. Google's on-campus eateries are inordinately famous for serving …

Odds and Sods 20 Sep 00:00
HP tunes blades for Oracle apps

Pits Matrix against Ellison stack

No matter who gets the top job at Hewlett-Packard – and whether or not former HP top exec Mark Hurd gets to keep his job as co-president at Oracle – these two companies are going to have to partner and compete. HP is the dominant supplier of servers in the world, and Oracle is the dominant supplier of databases and middleware …

Servers 20 Sep 02:30
How Ellison could fight Google's Android - without lawyers

Lessons from Java's painful past

First, the good news. Java on mobile phones has been a palpable success. Installed on eleven billion mobile phones worldwide, Java ME is one of the most widely available software development platforms - ever. Its APIs are powerful and a pleasure to program with (as long as you're targeting a single device, of course). Also, …

Software 20 Sep 05:00
Oracle pledges MySQL community love

OpenWorld The enterprise. Have you heard of it?

Oracle has promised to continue developing the community edition of MySQL. But you'd better like the architecture and customers that Oracle is targeting. On Sunday, the database giant's chief architect, Edward Screven, committed Oracle to making not only the enterprise edition of MySQL better but also the community version …

Applications 20 Sep 05:07
Acer Aspire 5741

Review Pared back for price:performance

The Aspire 5741 follows Acer's tried and true formula of extracting the maximum value from the core hardware without wasting money by adding extra features. The fact of the matter is that the Intel Core i3's combination of CPU and graphics isn't especially exciting but it does a very fair job of work and offers good value for …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
Dell Inspiron 15R

Review Attractive

I'm used to seeing Dell laptops and PCs that are as dull as mud, so the rather attractive-looking Inspiron 15R sample came as a shock. The lid comes in a choice of red, pink, blue or black while the deck of the chassis surrounding the keyboard is chromed. The power button and activity lights use subdued white LEDs and really …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
HP Pavilion dv6

Review Entertainment hub

HP describes the Pavilion dv6-3085EA as an "entertainment notebook PC" which shows a shocking lack of imagination as this laptop has a list of interesting features that merit close examination. For starters, this particular version of the dv6 stands out in a world of Intel laptops as it uses an AMD CPU which is allied with an …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge

Review Pricey but nicey

Lenovo offers its ThinkPad Edge in a massive number of permutations but they are all rather expensive and start north of £1000. My review sample was a relatively basic model that came without the 3G mobile broadband option and with the 4GB of memory installed in two modules, leaving no scope for an upgrade in that department …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
Sony Vaio EB2

Review Not enough notebook for your money?

The Sony Vaio EB2 is available in a choice of brown, black or pink. Presumably Sony mistook your reviewer for a teenage girl as they sent me the pink version, which was a nasty shock. More importantly I got a pre-production sample with a Pentium P6000 CPU which runs at 1.87GHz and does not support HyperThreading, unlike the …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
Toshiba Satellite Pro C650

Review Basic offering

Toshiba has built its Satellite Pro C650 into a chassis that feels rather cheap and not especially cheerful. The deck around the keyboard has a curious textured finish that shows greasy fingerprint marks horribly. Furthermore, the layout of the hardware appears to be guided by the price rather than by good engineering. The …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:05
Buyer's Guide: 15in Notebooks

Group Test How to select the machine that's right for you

In this group test I'm comparing six models that have a 15.6in screen with a decent, 1366 x 768 resolution that supports HD video - look for an HDMI port if you want to hook it up to a telly. A mid-size 15.6-inch chassis gives you free rein to choose either a dual-core or quad-core CPU. Intel rules the roost with its Core i3 …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:06
15in Notebooks: Best Buys

Group Test The ones to choose

Choosing a winner from this group of 15.6in laptops was a tricky matter as they have a great deal in common. Apart from sharing the same size screen and 1366 x 768 resolution, they all come with 802.11n Wi-Fi and have a tray-loading multi-format DVD writer. So relatively small differences count for a lot. The HP Pavilion dv6 …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:07
Back-to-college 15in Notebooks

Group Test Desktop replacements for your digs

So the kids are off to university and you want to pack junior off with a decent machine for his or her studies - not to mention all the social facetweeting stuff the young uns like to do these days. Or maybe you've got your loan through and you want to splash out on the machine Dad didn't buy you. What better then than a mid …

reghardware 20 Sep 07:10
Apple, Google may end wage-capping case

We won't poach from you, or raise our staff's salaries

The Department of Justice is close to ending an investigation into several Silicon Valley giants accused of colluding to hold down staff salaries and stop recruiters calling each others' staff. Apple and Google allegedly had an unwritten agreement not to poach each other's staff - recruitment agencies were told not to cold …

Law 20 Sep 08:21
Quantum falls for RDX

Last main OEM prospect ticked off

Quantum has signed up with ProStor to OEM its RDX removable disk drive, giving ProStor a virtual monopoly of the disk-based removable storage market for small and medium businesses. Quantum's history is that of a tape storage vendor that used to develop and maintain its own proprietary DLT format but has had to adopt the all- …

Storage 20 Sep 09:06
LG's CEO hangs up

Mobile crash

The curse of the iPhone continues. A week after Nokia dispensed with its CEO, so has LG Electronics. Nam Young has resigned to make way for Koo Boon-joon, a member of LG's founding family and younger brother of LG Chairman Koo Bon-moo. LG is the third largest mobile phone company, but profits have changed to steep losses over …

Mobile 20 Sep 09:07
'Unicorn' captured in remote Laos mountain forests

Incredibly rare species now even rarer

A unfeasibly rare two-horned "unicorn" has been sighted for the first time in ten years in the remote mountain forests of the Far East. Unfortunately the creature was captured by local villagers and died before international unicorn boffins could reach the scene. The rare animal in question is the saola, a type of two-horned …

Biology 20 Sep 09:20
4chan launches DDoS against entertainment industry

Payback for torrent tracker attack

The denizens of 4chan launched a series of distributed denial of service attacks against entertainment industry websites over the weekend, protesting legal actions against torrent tracker website the Pirate Bay. Packet floods knocked websites maintained by the MPAA and RIAA intermittently offline over the weekend. Later …

Enterprise Security 20 Sep 09:21
HP and Oracle avoid blows over disgraced Hurd

OpenWorld Livermore: think what's at stake, Larry

Hewlett-Packard and Oracle have sidestepped their feud over disgraced CEO Mark Hurd on the opening of the database giant's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. HP enterprise business executive vice president Ann Livermore opened OpenWorld in a Sunday evening keynote that emphasized how much business her company …

Software 20 Sep 09:30
Fanboys flabbergasted by 'Apple TV runs iOS' revelation

Did none of 'em read the specs page?

Why is everyone so amazed that the Apple TV runs iOS? True, Apple itself has never said as much, but anyone who has looked at the product's tech specs on the Apple website - posted almost immediately after the device's announcement - will see that it's based on Apple's A4 CPU. The A4 is, of course, the ARM-based system-on-a- …

reghardware 20 Sep 09:40
Oracle spins own Linux for mega hardware

OpenWorld Red-Hat compatibility holds us back

Oracle has given up on copying Red Hat and is delivering its own Linux to squeeze the last ounce of performance from new cloud-in-a-box and OLTP server giants. Four years after Larry Ellison announced Oracle's Red Hat-compatible Unbreakable Linux distro, intended to sink Red Hat, he has dropped any pretence to compatibility …

Operating Systems 20 Sep 09:50
Diligent co-founder's second gig

Blog Secretive startup

Diligent co-founder Doron Kempel has started up a new company; SimpliVT. Kempel and Moshe Yanai started up Diligent to develop the ProtecTIER deduplication product and sold the company to IBM in 2008 for up to $200m. According to an SEC filing SimpliVT was started up in 2008, the year of the Diligent sale, and originally …

Blocks and Files 20 Sep 10:13
Swedish far-right party defaced on eve of general election

Birthday cake and Still Alive

The website of a Swedish far-right party was hacked on Saturday, the day before national elections which resulted in its first ever electoral success. Instead of the usual political content, visitors to the homepage of the Sweden Democrats were treated to a picture of a birthday cake with a rendition of Ellen McLain's Still …

Enterprise Security 20 Sep 10:17
Giveaway WIN Sony EX300SL noise-blocking earphones

Unsatisfied with your iPod earphones? Then fill in the form below for your chance to win a pair of Sony MDR-EX300SL in-your-ear noise-blocking boys. Sony promises the 'phones will "reproduce vocal and instrumental sound with vivid clarity" thanks to their Neodymium 13.5mm drivers. The pair comes with a storage case, extra …

reghardware 20 Sep 10:41
T-Mobile sued for censoring weed service

Very, very unwise words, man

T-Mobile USA is being sued for cutting off a message service offering guidance to those seeking legal access to cannabis, despite the service purging itself of references to the evil weed. The company concerned, EZ Texting, is now taking T-Mobile to court on the grounds that a network operator isn't allowed to make moral …

Mobile 20 Sep 11:11
Swedish Pirate Party suffers embarrassing general election flop

No salty bums on Riksdag seats

The Swedish Pirate Party failed to secure a parliamentary seat in Sweden's general election yesterday, after it pulled in less than 1.4 per cent of the vote. Swedish electocrats have yet to confirm exactly how many votes the Pirate Party garnered on Sunday as they are still counting, but an exit poll suggested the outfit …

Government 20 Sep 11:19
Oracle promises fresh approach to storage

Analysis: Say goodbye to SANs

First impression: Oracle's version of the Vblock, the Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, takes a distinctively different approach to storage. Oracle's Exalogic box is a standard 19-inch rack (42U) configuration containing an integrated set of hardware and software components for running, Oracle says (pdf), "applications of all …

Storage 20 Sep 11:24
Boffins riot as Hadron Collider upgrade is delayed

So far no threat to destroy world if demands not met

Budget cuts are forcing international science alliance CERN to postpone upgrades to the most potent particle-punisher currently operated by the human race - the subterranean Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva. CERN has also been compelled to temporarily shut down other accelerators, and has seen "protests" from boffins …

Physics 20 Sep 11:25
LaCie takes on Time Capsule

Wireless hard drive 'n' router to rival Apple product

LaCie has introduced its take on Apple's Time Capsule. The French firm's offering is the 2TB Wireless Space, an black-clad 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi base-station with built-in hard drive. In addition to handling router duties, the Wireless Space has a UPnP/DLNA and iTunes servers. It's also compatible with Mac OS X's Time Machine …

reghardware 20 Sep 11:32
Sony readies compact music, video Walkman

Compact

There's a new Sony Walkman out next month: the S750. The 55g movie and music player sports a 2in glossy LCD and a choice of 8GB or 16GB of storage. If the screen's too wee for your videos - and with a resolution of just 240 x 320 it might well be - the S750 can be connected to a telly. The snag: its output resolution is …

reghardware 20 Sep 11:52
Webmin's virtual twin

Sysadmin blog Linux server admin kin in win-win

More Mins: Virtualmin is an open core extension to Webmin. It allows a systems administrator to manage all the elements to provide shared hosting to multiple customers from one Linux server. Unlike Webmin, in which you configure all of the elements on a per-application basis, Virtualmin approaches configuration domain by domain …

Server Mgmt Blog 20 Sep 12:06
Facebook fone? Feh, says Facebook

But net, blogosphere know better, apparently

Facebook has been busy denying rumours that it's planning to manufacture its own mobile phone, though not everyone is convinced. The story stared with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who reported the secret project to create a phone with an integrated Facebook experience. The report mentions staff assigned to the project, and …

Mobile 20 Sep 12:23
Mozilla Labs pops out JavaScript language tool for coders

Two heads are better than one. Just ask Beeblebrox

Mozilla has released a JavaScript engine strictly for testing purposes to allow web developers to gain deeper access to – and better understanding of – the code underpinning its browser. The Narcissus engine and Zaphod script look-up tool have been added to Mozilla Labs to help the open source outfit develop new ideas for the …

Developer 20 Sep 12:34
ZoneAlarm slammed for scarewarey marketing

Warning! Er, buy this anti-virus

ZoneAlarm has run into criticism from its customers for using scary pop-up warnings as a marketing tactic designed to persuade users to purchase the paid-for version of its personal firewall. Users of the free version of the ZoneAlarm firewall are confronted with a "Global Virus Alert" about "ZeuS.Zbot.aoaq" containing a link …

Malware 20 Sep 12:40
Super-tough wireless sensors 'to be dropped into volcanoes'

Anakin Skywalker? Big girls' blouse

Topflight engineers based in Newcastle have hit upon a radical plan for warning of volcanic eruptions. They intend to build a heatproof sensor unit which can be dropped into a volcano's caldera and wirelessly transmit data to monitoring stations despite being possibly immersed in molten rock. "At the moment we have no way of …

Physics 20 Sep 12:42
Florida cops left ~~stoned~~ stunned by pot-filled SUV

Looking for suspect and a really big pizza

A Florida Road Ranger was left holding his nose last week when an unconscious driver turned out to be packing 100lbs of pot plant. The ranger apparently spotted the Chevy Tahoe pulled over on the median of the Pametto Expressway in Doral last Thursday, MSNBC reported. As he approached the car he noticed that the driver …

Bootnotes 20 Sep 13:13
IBM ponies up $1.7bn for data warehouse maker

Your move, NEC or Dell

If Japanese server maker NEC wanted to build a dataware housing business based on Netezza's database and field programmable gate array accelerators, then it is going to shell out a couple billion dollars. Because server rival IBM just bought Netezza for $1.7bn, fleshing out its data warehousing and analytics portfolio as it …

Servers 20 Sep 13:33
Taxman rejects 'lie detector' tech

'Nonsense' ahead of Clegg speech

The government has denied claims it will extend use of telephone "lie detector" tests to the tax system. Proponents of such software - known as voice risk analysis (VRA) - say it is able to calculate the probability someone is lying over the phone by measuring variations in their voice. Scientists charge it is no better at …

Government 20 Sep 13:34
GOG.com closes

DRM-less download site downed

Games download site GOG.com shut down last night without warning. The service, which launched in 2008 to make old PC games available in DRM-free form, "cannot remain in its current form", its founders said last night following the sudden, unexpected closure. GOG - short for Good Old Games - leaves many customers with games …

reghardware 20 Sep 13:54
Steve Jobs chops student hack down to size

'Leave us alone' - sent from my iPhone

Steve Jobs may not be a ninja, but when an over-enthusiastic journalism student had the temerity to email him to complain about Apple's less than helpful press office last week, he quickly chopped her down to size. The Guardian splendidly reports that Chelsea Isaacs, a journalism student at Long Island University was tasked …

Bootnotes 20 Sep 14:09
Ofcom lifts shutters on Strategy Boutique

New Boots and Pantones!

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act Request we now know vital information about how the UK's telco and media regulator goes about its business. Last month Ofcom disclosed how much its logo had cost, and how it should be used. As ever, Ofcom's visual style usage guide makes for riveting reading. You'll learn that all the …

Bootnotes 20 Sep 14:22
Europe pushes TV spectrum sell-off

Mandatory sale to boost broadband

The European Commission has proposed requiring member countries to sell off TV frequencies by 2013, and allow wireless broadband elsewhere by 2012. The proposal is based on Europe's commitment to broadband for all by 2013, and 30Mb/s by 2020. It serves to prod countries lagging behind on that schedule, which could be backed up …

Wireless 20 Sep 14:27
Morgan Chase blames Oracle for online bank crash

EMC innocent

JP Morgan Chase online banking services crashed in New York last week, and the outage has been laid at Oracle's door. The bank's online services were unavailable for Monday night and Tuesday, with service restored very early on Wednesday. The crash prevented the bank's 16.5 million online customers carrying out online banking …

Storage 20 Sep 14:34
Defence Minister 'to big up electropulse threat' - report

Mmm, pork... sweet, sweet pork

New UK defence minister Liam Fox has fallen into the clutches of fearmongering armsbiz lobbyists, according to reports. The Telegraph reports on a behind-closed-doors speech by Dr Fox at an event today organised by Avi Schnurr, a lobbyist known for pushing the idea that various expensive defence technologies should be …

Security 20 Sep 15:10
Phone hacking probe cops 'got law wrong' - were too lenient

Jails should be bursting with NotW hacker-hacks

The claim by London's Metropolitan Police that the interception of messages is only illegal when the message has not been listened to, read or collected by the recipient has been challenged by a privacy law expert. The Met's Assistant Commissioner John Yates told MPs that the police force's legal advice was that it was not …

Security 20 Sep 15:46
Cabinet Office agrees GCSx local council access terms

I should CoCo

The Cabinet Office has reached an agreement with local government organisations about security standards for connection to its GCSx network. The Society of IT Management (Socitm), which helped negotiate the terms, said that the agreement included cost reductions in connecting to the Government Secure Extranet (GCSx). It also …

Government 20 Sep 16:00
Violin plays 40TB MLC fiddle

Another string to its bow

Violin Memory has introduced a 40TB capacity flash memory array for enterprises that uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND and costs less than $16 per GB. MLC flash, which uses 2-bits per cell in this application, is slower and cheaper than the single-level cell (SLC) flash used in most enterprise flash drives, such as those from …

Blocks and Files 20 Sep 16:26
Xiotech adopts Permabit de-dupe

Second Permabit OEM after BlueArc

Wow; Xiotech is OEMing Permabit's Albireo deduplication technology, following closely on the heels of BlueArc. This second OEM endorsement is terrific news for Permabit, which makes a point of saying that its software adds no performance penalty either in deduplication or rehydrating (un-deduplicating) deduplicated data. …

Blocks and Files 20 Sep 16:29
Intel trials downloadable CPU upgrades

Want HyperThreading enabled? There's an app for that...

Intel is trialling a processor that can be made to run faster - if you cough up extra cash. The chip is the little known Pentium G6951. It's currently being offered to a "limited number" system builders in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and Spain on a "pilot" basis, but presumably Intel will widen availability if the scheme …

reghardware 20 Sep 16:55
Lily Allen sues Apple over hacked Macbook

Day in a life of a pop star

Lily Allen, the British pop star, has issued a writ against Apple, in an attempt to find out who hacked into her Macbook. So says the Sun, which reports the pregnant songstress (25) is taking action after Apple told her it would co-operate only if ordered to by a court. We doubt that she will get anywhere, but you never know …

reghardware 20 Sep 17:35
Google Apps tap mobiles for beefier log-in security

Cell phone as security token

Google is tapping user cell phones to provide an extra level of sign-in security for Google Apps, its suite of online business applications. On Monday, the company announced that it's now offering what it calls two-step verification. When the new tool is turned on and you log in to your Google Apps account, it requires not …

Applications 20 Sep 17:46
Microsoft gives temporary fix for info leak in ASP.Net

'Padding oracle' muzzled

Microsoft has issued a temporary fix for a cryptographic weakness in widely used web development software that allows attackers to read password files and other sensitive data. The workaround issued late Friday addresses what is known as a “cryptographic padding oracle” in ASP.Net, a series of web development programs that run …

Enterprise Security 20 Sep 17:47
Ellison fluffs Amazon with Oracle cloud love

OpenWorld Certification, support, AMIs

No wonder Larry Ellison was waxing lyrical on Sunday about how Amazon's model of elastic computing jived with Oracle's view of the cloud. On Monday, Oracle followed up by announcing its middleware, applications, virtual machine, database, and new Linux kernel have been certified to run on the toaster seller's EC2 …

Virtualization 20 Sep 18:07
Amazon loves LoveFilm (true)

Enough to buy out the company?

Amazon is mulling a £200 million bid for Lovefilm, the UK's answer to Netflix, the Sunday Times reports. Techcrunch UK's Mike Butcher is sceptical - he reckons The Sunday Times is often used as a stalking horse to help investors achieve a "liquidity event" - i.e. cash in some or all of their shares. Unlike Mike we cannot …

reghardware 20 Sep 18:35
Yahoo! 'owns several patents' on Google Instant

Exclusive 'Streaming search' all about cash, says ex-Google man

Yahoo! owns several patents covering Google's new Instant search engine, according to Shashi Seth, Yahoo!'s senior vice president of search and a former search product leader at Google. In 2005, Yahoo! rolled out a service remarkably similar to Google Instant at a site called AlltheWeb, a small search engine it had purchased a …

Music and Media 20 Sep 19:23
Interpol chief impersonated on Facebook

Scammers seek fugitive data

Scammers recently created two bogus Facebook accounts in the name of Interpol chief Ronald K. Noble in an attempt to obtain information about ongoing criminal investigations, the head of the international organization has revealed. “Just recently INTERPOL’s Information Security Incident Response Team discovered two Facebook …

ID 20 Sep 19:37
Blade Network adds top-of-racker

Beyond blades and 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Blade Network Technology has rolled out the RackSwitch G8052, a new addition to its top-of-rack switch lineup. Blade, the server networking spinout of the former Nortel Networks, got its start making switches for blade servers from IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and it has been expanding into rack switches because not everyone will …

Servers 20 Sep 19:44
Adobe patches critical Flash Player vuln under attack

One down, one to go

Adobe Systems has patched a critical vulnerability in its ubiquitous Flash Player that has been under active attack for at least a week. The company on Monday issued an update for Flash Player 10.1.82.76 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris, and Adobe Flash Player 10.1.92.10 for Android handsets. …

Enterprise Security 20 Sep 20:36
Larry Ellison's first Sparc chip and server

Over Rainbow Falls with a splash

Oracle has announced the Sparc T3 processor and its related Sparc T3 systems at the OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco, giving Solaris shops who had run out of headroom on the existing Sparc T2 and T2+ machines a little breathing room – and giving Oracle a chance to chase some entry and midrange Unix server sales against …

Servers 20 Sep 21:07
PARC turns 40: mice, money, and the new interwebs

A place whose time has come. Again

Mention "Xerox" and "PARC," and you'll likely be greeted by a rolling of the eyes or an off-hand comment like: "Didn't they invent the mouse and let Microsoft make all the money?" That happened to me more than once when I mentioned I was heading to the Palo Alto Research Center to interview a few folks for the iconic institution …

Science 20 Sep 21:45
Prosecutor won't resign over lewd texts to 'hot' crime victim

'You may be the tall young nymph, but I am a rich old lawyer'

A county prosecutor in Wisconsin has rebuffed calls to resign following revelations he sent a crime victim 30 racy text messages that among other things referred to her as a “tall, young, hot nymph.” The criticism was leveled at Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz, who pledged on Friday to seek individual psychotherapy …

Crime 20 Sep 22:10
Secret Apple deal hints at TV future

Is an Apple iVue in your future?

Secretive Apple has inked a secretive deal with a major entertainment-info supplier that has revived speculation that Cupertino is readying a living-room putsch push far more aggressive than its Jobsian hobby, the Apple TV. "We believe this announcement is further evidence that Apple is developing live TV and DVR features for …

Music and Media 20 Sep 22:27
Microsoft punts HPC Server 2008 R2

Third time indeed a charm

Microsoft used the High Performance Computing Financial Markets conference in New York as the launching pad for its much-awaited third release of its technical computing variant of its Windows server operating system, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. And the quants on Wall Street and around the financial markets are eager to get …

HPC 20 Sep 22:30
Google Docs is going mobile

Editing on Android — and the iPad, too

Google, while celebrating 30 million people having signed up to its cloudy documents service, has announced that editing will soon come to mobile users. First will come a new verification process that will reduce the reliance on passwords and increase the security of connections. But "in the next few weeks," document editing …

Applications 20 Sep 22:39
HP drops fight to block Hurd's Oracle hire

OpenWorld We were wrong, Larry can tell you what to do

Mark Hurd can officially work for Larry Ellison, now that HP has called off its lawyers. HP revealed Monday that it settled its legal action against Hurd on September 10, three days after filing suit in a Californian court to stop Hurd from spilling trade secrets to Ellison. Terms of the settlement are confidential, but HP …

Business 20 Sep 23:45