3rd November 2010 Archive

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Flash video comes to iPhone, iPad (kinda)

Steve Jobs workaround

Beginning this Thursday, owners of iOS devices — iPhone, iPad, iPod touch — will be able to view Flash video on the devices from which Apple CEO Steve Jobs has so vociferously banned Adobe's much maligned media-enabling software. No, Jobs did not have a change of heart. And yes, there's a catch — a number of catches, to be …

Tablets 3 Nov 2010, 02:34
Semi sales leap 26% from 2009

Future uncertain

Global chip sales hit $26.5bn in September, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a gain of 2.9 per cent compared to the prior month and up 26.2 per cent compared to a year ago. The SIA has not updated its annual forecast for chip sales in 2010, but says it will do so later this week. The association does three …

Financial News 3 Nov 2010, 03:53
Mac market share slips worldwide

Apple not infallible shocker

Although Apple may seem to be riding an unending wave of success after success, a new study shows that its worldwide market share is slipping. "Mac usage share globally has been in a slow decline over the past several months," say the analysts at NetMarketShare, "dropping below 5 per cent in October." Worldwide, Mac OS X …

Financial News 3 Nov 2010, 04:00
Nuke lab gets visual with GPU cluster

The yummy mummy of workstations

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the big nuke labs run by the US Department of Energy that is responsible for managing the American nuclear weapons stockpile and helping to design future nuclear weapons, has what amounts to a brand new frontal lobe for its myriad parallel supercomputers. The new machine, called …

HPC 3 Nov 2010, 05:00
Google man slings mud at Facebooked Bing

Microsoft! They're like Google!

Microsoft updated its new Facebook-powered Bing tools on Tuesday, and über-Googler Matt Cutts promptly splattered this Bingbook setup with another large handful of virtual mud. Cutts — the Delphic Oracle of Google SEO — doesn't like Facebook because he believes the "instant personalization" tools it offers up to Bing and other …

Applications 3 Nov 2010, 06:00
Shut up, Spock! – how Battlestar Galactica beat Trek babble

Interview TV science adviser talks Cylons with El Reg

No guns firing beams of light. No photon torpedoes. And, sorry, no aliens – menacing or otherwise. The "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica that concluded last year couldn't have been further from its 1970s namesake – or from what most of us think of as sci-fi. In fact, the science and technology in the award-winning show – the …

Science 3 Nov 2010, 06:54
CloudSleuth slaps dashboards on heavenly grids

Google performance anxiety cure

With more and more companies deploying real applications out there on public clouds, someone is going to have to deliver sophisticated performance monitoring and modeling tools that can span multiple clouds to not only help companies using cloudy infrastructure do their comparative shopping, but also to point their fingers at …

Servers 3 Nov 2010, 07:00
Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support

Love or money? Larry picks money...

Oracle has hiked up the price of MySQL, killing low-priced support options and more than doubling what it charges for the commercial versions of the database. A MySQL annual subscription on a server will now start at $2,000 for standard support, after Oracle's killed Sun Microsystems' basic and silver packages, which started …

Software 3 Nov 2010, 07:38
Philips Streamium MCi900 DVD and Wi-Fi Hi-Fi

Review Entertaining concept

If you're after rather more up-market multifunction home entertainment rig, then the Streamium MCi900 from Philips is aimed at you. For £999 you get combination of upscaling DVD player with a 160GB HDD along with an 802.11n wireless media streamer, RDS FM radio, 2 x 50W RMS amplifier, a 3.5in LCD screen and a couple of the …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 08:00
Volunteer biker gang foils Westminster CCTV car fleet

Unamused council watches cash trickle through fingers

A band of bikers have recently taken to helping motorists in Westminster identify the London borough's fleet of CCTV smart cars. The ominous grinding sound in the background is either the sound of gears being changed – or Westminster council welcoming the move from between gritted teeth. The present confrontation follows a …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 08:09
eBay Meg bitchslapped by Governor Moonbeam

Techy execs trounced in US election: Fiorina out too

Meg Whitman's expensive bid for the governorship of California has failed: she lost out to Jerry Brown - aka "Governor Moonbeam" - who last held the job in 1975. Democrat Brown, previously the youngest person to hold the state's top job, is now the oldest elected governor. He inherits a state with serious budget problems. And …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 08:59
DWP CTO predicts the end of Windows

But will cling on to Office

The Department for Work and Pensions' chief technology officer has said that the latest version of Microsoft Windows may be the last to be widely deployed. James Gardner said that he believes that Windows will no longer be as largely needed because there will be "fewer workloads" that require a "heavy desktop stack". "Today …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 09:46
Microsoft details small biz server release dates and prices

Three in a bed, little one said 'rollover'

Microsoft confirmed yesterday that its Aurora software will, as expected, be named Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011. The company will release three products via its server licensing house. Windows SBS 2011 Essentials, which carried the Aurora codename, is aimed at small businesses with up to 25 users and has been …

Small Biz 3 Nov 2010, 09:57
Oz journo pokes PARIS

Australo-Pom paper plane space race now inevitable?

We're delighted to report that the Oz press has picked up on last week's Paper Aircraft Released Into Space triumph, albeit to suggest that the future of paper-based aeronautical endeavour would be best served by a titanic clash between Blighty and the Lucky Country to determine just who's the mutt's nuts in high-altitude …

SPB 3 Nov 2010, 10:04
Haven for life found in Mars' Syrtis Major region

Boffins peer at Hesperian 'warm, wet spots'

Boffins sifting data from a survey craft in orbit above Mars say they have found evidence of "warm, wet spots" which would have been refuges for Martian life as the red planet changed from a hospitable world to a freezing desert billions of years ago. The joint was jumping back in the Hesperian era. The evidence comes in …

Science 3 Nov 2010, 10:08
Stealth Carbon 'efficiency' tax could close UK data centres

Idiot bureaucrats design scheme to export data centres and jobs offshore

Almost half of the UK's data centre operators believe the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) efficiency scheme tax could drive UK data centre investment offshore, with one-third saying it would send UK data centres overseas as well. The findings are from a survey of Britain's largest data centre operators by Datacenter …

Servers 3 Nov 2010, 10:27
Hitachi eyes Apple owners for skinny HDD

Too slow?

SuperSpeed USB may be here, but USB 2.0 remains the standard. Drive makers are still releasing USB 2.0 drives - the latest is Hitachi with its G-Drive Slim. The skinny 2.5-incher is being pitched at Mac owners as a compact - 129 x 82 x 10mm, 144g - 320GB backup drive. The Slim is pre-formatted for Mac use and is compatible …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 10:52
London Stock Exchange investigates IT 'sabotage'

'Suspicious' 2-hour outage probed

The London Stock Exchange is investigating a suspected sabotage after a trading platform was crippled for two hours. The outage hit the Turquoise system yesterday. "Investigations... have revealed that human error was to blame for the disruption that began at 0823am this morning," the LSE said in a statement. "Preliminary …

Financial News 3 Nov 2010, 11:02
Virgin Media readies 1TB TiVo set-top for Brits

Integrated broadband for internet TV

Virgin Media today said it is bring TiVo back to Blighty with a 1TB set-top box capable of grabbing HD and 3D content from the cable company. Virgin and TiVo announced a year ago that they were going to bring the DVR pioneer's technology to the UK. TiVo itself never set up shop here, though Thomson and BSkyB jointly offered …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 11:07
First Windows Phone 7 handsets sell out

Orange offering £20 for customer patience

The first Windows 7 handsets are flying out of shops faster than they can be supplied. Orange has started pre-booking for handsets, and is offering customers £20 HMV vouchers to help them cope with the wait while new stocks come in. Meanwhile, HTC and Samsung handsets are selling out as they fast as they can be shipped to the …

Phones 3 Nov 2010, 11:09
ICO U-turns on Street View

Lapdog growls

The Information Commissioner's Office has changed its mind about Google's Street View and decided that it is after all in breach of the Data Protection Act. The watchdog will require Google to sign a piece of paper promising not to break the law again. The ICO will also audit Google's privacy practices. Information …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 11:15
DARPA, NASA team on '100-Year Starship' project

Plan to invent Heinlein style miracle nonprofit first

Those like us here on the Reg astronautical desk who are occasionally a bit disappointed at the limited scope of humanity's space programmes may be overjoyed to learn that NASA has just begun work on an actual interstellar starship. Well, kind of. The news comes in a recent US government statement outlining the so-called "100- …

Science 3 Nov 2010, 11:19
BBC One HD to go live tonight

HD channel not all HD

BBC One HD goes live tonight at 7pm. The simulcast channel will replicate what goes out on BBC One - the London version, since the Corporation says it can't yet offer regional variations on the HD channel. And while the transmission will be HD, not all of the programming will be. Some shows will be upscaled from standard …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 11:31
Microsoft's IE 8 'most widely used browser', rules ASA

Blighty ad watchdog kicks out 'misleading' complaint

The UK’s advertising watchdog has ruled that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser is the most widely used web surfing tool, following an investigation of one of the company's ads. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) probed a complaint about an internet ad in which Microsoft said that Blighty surfers could “Download the …

Applications 3 Nov 2010, 11:34
Wi-Fi strikes alliance with mains networking tech

There's parts of the spectrum we're not polluting yet

The Wi-Fi Alliance has inked an agreement with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance to create interoperable kit, capable of annoying radio hams as never before. Power line telecommunications (PLT) kit sends networking signals around the home over mains wiring, and often competes with Wi-Fi, which uses radio to achieve the same …

Broadband 3 Nov 2010, 11:51
Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook

Review Oh, Tosh, what went wrong?

Toshiba is a quarter-century-old notebook veteran, and of late has been known more for solid reliability than elegance or innovation. The AC100 comes as a surprise: a beautifully designed, ultra-lightweight netbook with a 10.1in screen you would be proud to be seen using. Toshiba's AC100: smartbook And here is the …

Laptops 3 Nov 2010, 12:00
Gigabit WLAN tech to shoulder Wireless DisplayPort

WiGig gains Vesa approval

Vesa, the organisation behind DisplayPort, has selected the Wireless Gigabit Alliance's 60GHz networking technology as the basis for a future wireless version of the digital monitor cabling standard. Wireless Gigabit - aka WiGig - can provide data links of up to 7Gb/s over a 10m range. That's no sufficient bandwidth to deliver …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 12:01
How much is Facebook worth?

Comment What's on your mind? I've just realised who the mark is...

How much is Facebook worth? Hundreds of billions or spit? The answer to that question depends upon who you're asking: and indeed how you're doing the asking. “At what price would you buy Facebook stock?” will get you a very different answer than observing how many people are willing to dig into their wallets at that price. …

Financial News 3 Nov 2010, 12:08
Orange intros MiFi gadget, refreshes mobile data deals

Share your mobile broadband connection

Orange has rejigged its mobile broadband offerings. It has also introduced a Wi-Fi modem for punters who want to share an HSDPA 3G link among several gadgets. The modem is the Novatel Wireless 3352, a new model that launches today. It can share the 7.2Mb/s HSDPA connection between five devices. It also contains a Micro SD card …

Mobile 3 Nov 2010, 12:09
Hitachi GST going for IPO

Preparations for offering under way

It's an IPO: Hitachi is sending its wholly-owned disk drive making subsidiary, Hitachi GST, out into independence via an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Hitachi intends Hitachi GST to have a listing on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) in cooperation with …

Storage 3 Nov 2010, 12:13
Sexy Hustler honeys unlikely to corrupt Croydon yoof

Adults quite a different matter, rules ad regulator

The youth of Croydon is unlikely to be corrupted by adverts promising HUSTLER HONEYS IN THEIR STARS 'N' STRIPES GETTING ALL WET, the UK's advertising regulator has declared. However, adults confronted by the ad – punting Larry Flynt's Huster Club (Croydon branch) – were likely to be offended by the ads. Mr Flynt's haven for …

Media 3 Nov 2010, 13:11
Nominet to flog short domains

BA wannabes face auction scrap

More than 2,800 very short UK domain names are to be auctioned for the first time, starting next month. The sale will allow firms known by initials - such as BA - to acquire their most obvious .co.uk address. Nominet, the non-profit that runs the .uk registry, has dropped its policy of witholding very short domains, which …

Broadband 3 Nov 2010, 13:15
Symbian's Utopia - and why it was an impossible dream

Andrew's mailbag Cruel and unusual? No, merely misguided

This is a story of how a complicated and obscure technical detail shed light on the fate of an industry. The industry here is smartphones, and we begin with a hairy technical subject - memory management. But don't worry if you don't know what a malloc and sprintf mean - and according to Dominic Connor that's most CompSci …

Mobile 3 Nov 2010, 13:21
BT network goes titsup up north

Again

The BT network has failed for the second time in a few days, again cutting off users in and Scotland and northern England. The ongoing outage is also affecting third party ISPs who use resell access via the national telco. According to ADSL24, BT is blaming the latest problems on an unnamed hardware vendor. Andrews and …

Broadband 3 Nov 2010, 13:24
Shaping your next desktop upgrade

Video Big bang or baby steps

What's the next desktop upgrade going to be? A hardware refresh? A new version of Microsoft Office? Windows 7? Or an upgrade to all three at once? Is this mega-grade-upgrade a triple threat to the mental health of your users, or a once-in-a-decade opportunity to sort out their desktops for the better? Andrew Buss of Freeform …

Desktop Management 3 Nov 2010, 13:42
Testy Turkey re-blocks YouTube over naughty hotel romp clip

Make up your mind

Turkey has reinstated its block on YouTube – this time because it is showing a naughty clip of an opposition politician in a hotel bedroom with a female party member. Access to YouTube from Turkey was reinstated at the weekend after clips insulting the country's founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were removed on copyright grounds. …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 14:05
Chinese Kindles hop firewall to freedom

Reader and Amazon servers provide nifty browsing loophole

Kindle users in China are able to surf the internet unimpeded by the Great Firewall, as the authorities have yet to recognise the threat the e-book reader represents. The Kindle isn't officially available in China yet, though grey imports are bought and sold on local auction sites. Once activated, it has emerged, the Kindle's …

Government 3 Nov 2010, 14:30
ITC to side with Nokia against Apple

Insider claims evidence doesn't show patent infringement

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has reportedly found that Nokia hasn't infringed the patents that Apple claimed the Finnish phone giant had trodden all over. Or, rather, the evidence presented by Apple doesn't indicate infringement, an ITC insider said yesterday, Bloomberg reports. That's not to say Nokia didn't …

Phones 3 Nov 2010, 15:05
Oracle 7400 storage drags down cloud storage firm

Customers: We've been down for weeks. Supplier: No you haven't.

Utility IT service supplier Flexiant has blamed intermittently slow service over the past two weeks on slow accesses to disks on an Oracle ZFS-based 7400 storage array. There has been slow communication between virtual machines on the servers and the 7400 storage. It is being said that some customers' servers have effectively …

Storage 3 Nov 2010, 15:11
BT shields gentle customers from Min of Sound pirate raids

Won't turn over addresses

Music and club brand the Ministry of Sound has had to give up chasing 25,000 alleged file sharers – because BT has deleted their details. The Ministry of Sound started legal action in July to force ISPs to hand over customer details. The nightclub claimed these customers were guilty of infringing its copyright. Letters …

Law 3 Nov 2010, 15:16
James Bond returns to ~~movie~~ games screens

Secret agent is Wii Man

Activision has released two James Bond games, GoldenEye 007, a reworking of an earlier first-person shooter for the Wii and Nintendo DS and James Bond 007: Blood Stone, an "original, cinematic Bond experience" for XBox 360, PS3, PC and Nintendo DS. Which is nice as Blood Stone is the nearest you will get to a new cinematic …

Games 3 Nov 2010, 15:26
PARIS laid bare in intimate snaps

Our space plane mission's bumper photo album

We thought those of you who've been loyally following our "appallingly successful" Paper Aircraft Released Into Space project might enjoy a few behind-the-scenes views of our crack team and local Spanish support operatives as the historic attempt unfolded. For those of you seeking hires copies on Flickr, or video from YouTube, …

SPB 3 Nov 2010, 15:29
National Rail tweaks departure board API, 'orders' coder to kill site

Developer puzzled by 'licence has always been required' claim

A web and mobile apps developer has been told to stop using the live departure board (LDB) API by the UK’s Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC). Alex Hewson claimed on his blog that he had been ordered by National Rail (the brand name owned by ATOC) to shut down his free train times web app. This is after he used …

Developer 3 Nov 2010, 15:48
Apple to triple iTunes song sample length

But not for all tunes

Apple's CD-crushing, music industry–transforming iTunes music store will triple the length of many of its song samples from 30 to 90 seconds. This move, which has been rumored for weeks, was first reported by the Symphonic Distribution blog on Tuesday, then confirmed by Cnet that evening. The change was announced in a "Dear …

Media 3 Nov 2010, 16:07
Aircraft bombs may mean end to in-flight Wi-Fi, mobile

New detonation options

The ability to use Wi-Fi and cellphones on planes may be curtailed just as it was about to take off, following an aviation threat uncovered last week. Plastic explosives found in laser printer cartridges that traveled from Yemen to the UK and Dubai were connected to cellphone-based detonation circuits, prompting concerns that …

Mobile 3 Nov 2010, 16:09
Former Phones 4U boss injured in armed break-in

Raiders bash mobile billionaire with iron bar, say cops

John Caudwell, formerly the boss of Phones 4U, was injured during a raid on his Staffordshire home. A masked and armed gang broke into Broughton Hall on Monday evening. Caudwell was hit on the head with an iron bar, which left a one-inch gash. His partner Claire Johnson, 41, and a 22-year-old female member of staff were also …

The Channel 3 Nov 2010, 16:17
Marathon adds suspenders to virty server belts

Microsoft acquisition bait

Marathon Technologies is adding disaster-recovery capability to its everRun MX fault-tolerant code. Just last month, Marathon Technologies tweaked its updated everRun MX fault-tolerant clustering for virtual machine hypervisors, which allows for FT clustering of VMs that span more than one core. This is something that VMware …

Servers 3 Nov 2010, 16:24
Supremes poke Schwarzenegger's 'violent' game ban

Take Grimm view

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a case that pits Arnold Schwarzenegger and California lawmakers against what they call violent video games. In essence, the Supremes will decide whether to remove First Amendment protection from games that California lawmakers deem inappropriate for children. In 2005, …

Media 3 Nov 2010, 17:00
Best Buy opens UK online store

And two more megastores

You read the headline and that's about it, really. Except that online doors open at bestbuy.co.uk tomorrow, 4 November- and we are sure Best Buy will salt the site with plenty of launch promos. Best Buy is America's biggest electronics retailer and arrived in the UK this year, opening six mega stores so far, including Derby …

Hardware 3 Nov 2010, 17:53
Facebook unveils ~~Facebook Phone~~ mobile hooks

Single sign-on, location APIs, e-coupons on the go

Facebook has introduced a handful of mobile tools, including single sign-on for third-party apps, a new Facebook Places location write API, and a "Deals" platform, which allows local businesses to offer e-coupons to Facebookers who are nearby. The company is not building a phone. "There's this rumor out there that we're …

Mobile 3 Nov 2010, 17:57
Fedora 14: haven for Ubuntu's homeless GNOMEs

Review A real performer. But will it love you back?

Fedora 14, released Tuesday, has quite a bit of new stuff under the hood - things you probably won't notice most unless you're a systems admin or use Fedora for development. For Fedora this is business as usual and, many would argue, the way it should be. After all, the latest UI bling is useless if the underlying system isn't …

Operating Systems 3 Nov 2010, 18:00
Unpatched IE bug exploited in targeted attacks

'More than a few organizations' hit

Unknown attackers have been targeting a previously unknown vulnerability in Internet Explorer to take control of machines running the Microsoft browser, security watchers warned on Wednesday. The exploits were hosted on a page of an unidentified website that had been breached without the owner's knowledge, according to …

Security 3 Nov 2010, 18:06
Group slams airport naked body scanners

EPICally invasive and ineffective

An electronic privacy group has urged a federal appeals court to limit the use of full body scanners at US airports, arguing the machines are an unprecedented intrusion into the affairs of millions of Americans. In a 55-page brief filed on Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center accused the Department of Homeland …

Security 3 Nov 2010, 19:00
Zuckerberg: the iPad 'is not mobile'

Next question...bitch

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says the Apple iPad "is not mobile." Today, at Facebook HQ, as the company unveiled a handful of new mobile tools for developers and other partners, Zuckerberg was asked when the company would finally produce an iPad app. "So, the iPad has been out for a while. And this is a mobile event. Are …

Tablets 3 Nov 2010, 20:22
Google open sources Apache server speed mod

Googlenet mystery server bits?

Google has open sourced an Apache server module designed to speed website performance. Presumably, the module is based on the mystery Google Web Server the company uses to serve its own pages. Known as "mod_pagespeed," the Apache module speeds performance "on the fly" in 15 separate ways, which include optimizing page caching …

Developer 3 Nov 2010, 21:50
DDoS attacks take out Asian nation

Myanmar fades to black

Myanmar was severed from the internet on Tuesday following more than 10 days of distributed denial of service attacks that culminated in a massive data flood that overwhelmed the Southeast Asian country's infrastructure, a researcher said. The DDoS assault directed as much as 15 Gbps of junk data to Myanmar's main internet …

Security 3 Nov 2010, 22:26
SGI shrinks red ink with super sales

One day, profits

If you are in the supercomputer business, you can't get hung up on quarterly results because it is a low-volume business with high-ticket items and that makes revenues and profits choppy. You also need to have some cash on hand to pay for parts, build systems, and ship them to customers while you await acceptance from them …

Financial News 3 Nov 2010, 23:37
Silicon Valley wrestles self over public safety spectrum

Urgent communications throw-down

US public-safety officials are involved in a tug-of-war with commercial interests about who gets control over the coveted 10MHz "D-Block" — and here in The Reg's San Francisco territory, said public-safety folks are harming their own cause through bickering and infighting. And no, we're not talking about that D-Block, we're …

Broadband 3 Nov 2010, 23:56