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24th March 2011 Archive

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  • Judge to music industry: 'Worth trillions? Forget it'

    LimeWire’s crime won't cost the Earth

    The music industry is sticking to a self-valuation that has been rejected by various courts and has now been described as “absurd” by a New York judge. Judge Kimba Wood has handed down an opinion in the LimeWire damages case that challenges the industry’s belief it could be owed more than the entire global GDP for one year. …

    Music and Media 24 Mar 02:54

  • Intel and HP defend honor of Itanium

    HP, it's time to buy EnterpriseDB. Before Larry does

    Intel, the maker of the Itanium family of server processors, and Hewlett-Packard, the main customer for the chips, have fired back at an Oracle announcement late yesterday that it was stopping software development on the Itanium chip. The PR folks at Intel rousted Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief executive officer, …

    Servers 24 Mar 03:00

  • iiNet against the world: final round draws near(ish)

    Film studios seek leave to apeal [sic*]

    The Federal Court of Australia judges were wrong, according to AFACT, and it’s off to the High Court for the movie studios and iiNet. In particular, the studios will seek leave to appeal their loss to the High Court. The studios – Village Roadshow “and others” from the original case – want the High Court to overturn the …

    Law 24 Mar 03:20

  • Red Hat: The first $1-billion-a-year open source outfit (almost)

    2011 is the year

    The money just keeps rolling in at Red Hat, and it looks like this year will be even better as the company is poised to become the first open source software company to break through the $1bn mark. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ended on February 28, the commercial Linux and middleware distributor posted $209.3m in …

    Financial News 24 Mar 04:00

  • Apple Mac OS X: ten years old today

    A decade of Ten

    Mac OS X is - formally - ten years old today. The first full release, then simply codenamed 'Cheetah' - only later did the cat branding become part of Apple's marketing drive - was made available to Mac users on 24 March 2001, six months after the operating system made an appearance in public beta test form. Cheetah for real …

    reghardware 24 Mar 07:00

  • Slow Shutter Cam

    iOS App of the Week Slow-mo mojo

    I’m not the best photographer in the world, so I’ve tended to eye the many photographic apps for iDevices with wary suspicion.    Slow Shutter Cam is so easy to use However, Slow Shutter Cam is both cheap and simple enough for my limited skills to cope with - and that simplicity is the reason I prefer it to the very similar …

    reghardware 24 Mar 09:00

  • Government shells out £2m for ID card compo

    Home Office details payouts to Thales and others

    The government has released details of how it is paying suppliers £2.253m to compensate them for the cancellation of contracts connected to the scrapped plans for identity card. In a letter to Labour MP Meg Hillier, immigration minister Damian Green said that the government had paid £2.002m to Thales, £183,000 to 3M and £68, …

    Government 24 Mar 09:39

  • Spurned nonagenarian lets rip with semi-automatic

    Hell hath no fury like a granny scorned

    A 92-year-old Florida woman refused a kiss by her 53-year-old neighbour responded by pumping four rounds from a semi-automatic pistol into his house. Helen Staudinger (pictured) of Fort McCoy took a bit of a shine to Dwight Bettner after he moved into a rented pad six months ago. He said: "I've taken her trash out for her, …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 09:51

  • Asda slashes Samsung tablet price

    Discount 'droid

    Will Samsung clear the way for its new, much more svelte 8.9in and 10.1 Galaxy Tabs by selling off the original, 7in model cheap? If it won't, retailer Asda will. It is now offering the Android 2.2 Froyo tablet for a mere 300 quid, down, it says, from £437. Samsung has never made clear the Tab's base price. Amazon, for …

    reghardware 24 Mar 10:04

  • Russian jailed for 6 years for smutty billboard stunt

    Serious sentence for stoner silliness

    A Russian man has been jailed for six years for putting smut on a streetside video billboard. Igor Blinnikov, 41, hacked into the systems of an ad agency 3StarsMedia in January 2010 in order to stream images of hardcore muck onto a billboard on the busy Garden Ring road, close to the Interior Ministry building in central …

    Crime 24 Mar 10:26

  • Dell opens Exanet-based R&D centre

    Wanting Israeli smarts

    Dell has opened an Israeli research and development centre, based on its Exanet acquisition, to focus on developing storage technologies and cloud computing. Exanet was an Israeli startup developing scale-out NAS technology which crashed and burned; its assets were acquired by Dell for $12m in February last year. It's kind of …

    Servers 24 Mar 10:28

  • Quantum shoots down SpectraLogic product claims

    Says it was first with integrated data integrity validation

    SpectraLogic recently claimed it is the first tape library vendor to have integrated data integrity validation. But competitor Quantum says it introduced this last year. Quantum's spokesperson said: First to market with data integrity software was Quantum, which launched iLayer Media Data Integrity Analysis (MeDIA) with its …

    Storage 24 Mar 10:41

  • Mobile Bing comes over all HTML5

    iPhone owners get some Microsoft love

    Microsoft has revamped its mobile search offering, dropping location-based and iTunes app searching into HTML5 layouts. On an iPhone the new version of m.bing.com includes Google-style swipe-navigation of images, with pretty zoom effects, along with a shopping interface organised by category. It's also tied into the Apple …

    Applications 24 Mar 10:52

  • BAA promises to get its Heathrow act together

    £50m investment to prevent further snow chaos

    Heathrow operator BAA has promised to spend £50m at the airport to prevent a repetition of last December's anarchy, which saw the "wrong amount of snow" stranding thousands of passengers. The Heathrow Winter Resilience Enquiry report (PDF/2.1MB here) into the fiasco summarises that the effect of the weather "was not fully …

    Financial News 24 Mar 10:54

  • Help - my desktop in the cloud has evaporated!

    Desktop You don't want to do it like that

    If everything is in the cloud, desktop and apps, then what does support do for a living and what are the new set of challenges this presents? On the face of it, cloud computing solves a lot of problems. Centralised computing, ease of management and update, a managed service approach that reduces the need for in-house expertise …

    Desktop Strategy 24 Mar 11:00

  • Apple should grant TV makers licence to stream

    AirPlay video coming to your telly?

    Apple wants TV makers to build its AirPlay media-sharing protocol into their sets - if a claim that it's pondering licensing the technology is true. Apple already allows hi-fi manufacturers - Denon and Altec Lansing offer kit, for example - to incorporate AirPlay to pick up audio streams from iTunes running on Macs and Windows …

    reghardware 24 Mar 11:05

  • The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

    Comment What’s next: Maybe a backlash?  

    When I saw the news on Wednesday morning, I thought I had picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Or maybe Oracle did. Either way, Oracle’s announcement that it is halting development on HP-UX/Itanium versions of its products touched off a firestorm of phone calls, emails and tweets that just won’t let up. TPM covered …

    HPC Blog 24 Mar 11:42

  • iPhone 4 SURVIVES plunge from plane

    Geeeerrrronimo...

    The iPhone 4 is indestructible. There, I said it. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but if one can survive a 1000-foot drop from an aircraft without a parachute, then it certainly takes the notion of rugged to a whole new level. US Air Force Combat Controller Ron Walker, who works as a skydiving Jump Master, told website …

    reghardware 24 Mar 11:44

  • HDS and its awfully good VMware integration

    Cloud a bit cloudy though

    I'm here sitting at the second Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) blogger's day with a bunch of other bloggers to hear about the company's vision and strategy. My company was an HDS partner in the past and I remember very well its Closed - the capitalised C isn't a typo - point of view about storage and the rest of the world. But now …

    Blocks and Files 24 Mar 11:49

  • Visualisation into action

    Broadcast See your data, make better decisions

    There’s a whole lot of data chugging around your organisation and most of you won’t be making the best use of it. That picture that can only worsen as more information gets digitised and your business creates more data. When you visualise your data, you can use it to make better decisions. We're going to show you how. …

    Data Visualisation 24 Mar 12:00

  • Microsoft skills up IT pros for jobs in the cloud

    Cloud security guys kick off in UK

    You can tell that cloud computing is huge by the number of certifications and training programmes and user groups setting out their stalls. We have spotted two this week, a vendor training initiative, and a strong-arm grouping for IT security practitioners. Say hello to the Microsoft Virtual Academy, a free training facility …

    Cloud 24 Mar 12:00

  • Ofcom gives shonky Sitefinder Google Maps boost

    T-Mobe and Orange still won't play, so inaccuracies multiply

    Ofcom has finally overhauled its Sitefinder database, overlaying the data on Google Maps and saving a fortune - though that data is getting less complete and more inaccurate every day. The new version of Sitefinder was launched last week, proving a welcome relief from its previous archaic interface which some suspected was …

    Mobile 24 Mar 12:07

  • Apple bashes 'gay cure' app

    Gays 1, fundies 0

    Apple appears to have bowed to pressure from gay rights groups, and withdrawn a controversial "gay cure" app sponsored by Exodus International, an evangelical Christian group claiming to be "the world’s largest ministry to individuals and families impacted by homosexuality". This followed a battle between competing petitions, …

    Applications 24 Mar 12:09

  • ProStor's InfiniVault sells slowly

    Less than one customer per channel partner

    ProStor has announced that just 200 customers have bought its multi-disk InfiniVault archive whereas there are 250,000 customers for the single slot RDX removable disk product. The quarter of a million customers have bought more than 1 million RDX disk cartridges, totalling 200PB of capacity. The InfiniVault multi-disk …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 12:10

  • Landlocked Bolivia seeks legal route to Pacific

    Chileans unimpressed with sabre-rattling Morales

    Bolivian president Evo Morales has pledged that his landlocked nation will reclaim access to the sea, 132 years after it lost its coastline to Chile. Speaking on the "Day of the Sea", marking the War of the Pacific which ended with a defeated Bolivia cut off from the Pacific, Morales rattled a legal sabre at Chile over the " …

    Bootnotes 24 Mar 12:24

  • BBC, British Library empires expand under Tory 'growth plan'

    Eh?

    Every time Conservatives come to power, they promise to invigorate fusty old state institutions. They vow to set them free of the mediocre, the time-markers and the empire-builders they've acquired over the years, and renew them with competition and fresh thinking. But by the time the Tories leave office, these gravy trains …

    Government 24 Mar 12:30

  • EU admits deep impact cyberattack in run-up to key summit

    Internal docs suggest longer-term problem

    The EU has admitted to having been hit by a deep, penetrating cyber-attack. The admission comes days before an EU summit on economic strategies and the conflict in Libya are due to top the agenda. Official details on the attack are scant. Eurocrats would only say that the Commission and External Action Service had been hit by …

    Malware 24 Mar 12:34

  • Ten... on-ear headphones

    Product Round-up Kicking cans

    Here we go again with another headphone roundup. This month we're looking at on-ear models, your everyday portable friends that cover the lugs and don't get coated in wax by sitting inside them. That could mean flat-panel heaphones, or ones with small cups that don't completely enclose the ears. These guys are generally built …

    reghardware 24 Mar 13:00

  • Duke Nukem Forever DELAYED

    Here we go again

    Here's something that will make you chuckle: Duke Nukem Forever has been postponed… again. But only by a month, supposedly. Given the task of breaking the news gently was head of developer Gearbox, Randy Picthford, who did so in amusing fashion in a YouTube vid. Here it is. The anticipated title, which was scheduled for …

    reghardware 24 Mar 13:41

  • Securing the virtual desktop

    All in the planning

    Securing the endpoint has always been a headache for IT administrators. The less managed those endpoints are, the worse the headache is. In a virtualised desktop environment, where those operating systems and applications are more managed, does the problem go away? Ostensibly, security is less of a problem in a virtual desktop …

    Desktop Virtualisation 24 Mar 14:02

  • Microsoft spends $7.5m on IP addresses

    Domain names positively cheapo by comparison

    It’s official, IP addresses are now more expensive than domain names. Nortel Networks, the bankrupt networking hardware vendor, has sold 666,624 IPv4 addresses to Microsoft for $7.5m, according to Delaware bankruptcy court documents (pdf). That’s $11.25 per address, more than you’d expect to pay for a .com domain name. …

    Financial News 24 Mar 14:30

  • Hackers make off with TripAdvisor's membership list

    Can't recommend it

    Travel site TripAdvisor has warned subscribers to expect more spam following the theft of its member database. The travel review and information website said that an unspecified vulnerability allowed miscreants to make off with a portion of its email database. TripAdvisor does not collect members' credit card or financial …

    Enterprise Security 24 Mar 14:35

  • Five jailed for £140m VAT scam

    Nearly 40 years' chokey for revenue cheats

    Five men have been jailed for their roles in a huge missing-trader fraud which netted £140m. The men were sentenced to 37 and a half years in prison in total. HMRC said the five were motivated by pure greed. They were convicted of various counts of cheating the Revenue contrary to Common Law. Andrew Hart (40) of Cricklewood …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 14:38

  • BlackBerry bans drink-drive apps

    But iPhone users keep boozing

    Responding to complaints from four US senators, RIM has expelled two applications that warn users when they're approaching a police checkpoint, though Apple has yet to do the same. The applications don't just show checkpoints looking for drunk drivers – they also list speed traps, enforcement cameras and other road hazards – …

    Applications 24 Mar 14:53

  • Timeless principles of sales

    Workshop And how modern technology can optimise classic techniques

    When I first moved into software sales about 20 years ago, my then boss gave me a book to read called How I raised myself from failure to success in selling. It was written by Frank Bettger, a former baseball player who had quit the sport due to injury and found a new career as an insurance salesman. It could have been really …

    Doing Better Business 24 Mar 15:00

  • Tintri flashes unique VMware storage credentials

    Talks virtual disks instead of files and LUNs

    US startup Tintri aims to put every other storage array vendor on the back foot with the first dedicated VMware storage appliance using VMware storage abstractions instead of generalised files and LUNs. The idea is that virtualised server storage operations are faster and more efficient with a storage stack designed for VMware …

    Storage 24 Mar 16:19

  • NASA's Stardust set to 'burn to depletion'

    Comet hunter's career ends with a bang whoosh

    The career of NASA's Stardust spacecraft comes to an end this evening when it performs a final firing of its engines, shuts down its transmitters and floats off into history. The veteran comet-hunter launched in February 1999 on its primary mission to collect dust from Comet Wild 2. That proved a success, with samples …

    Space 24 Mar 16:49

  • Nokia launches new corporate font

    Strategy Boutique 'As little design as possible'

    Nokia hasn't got much in the way of exciting and desirable new phones to show you - alas, the old management really buggered things up. The first Windows Phone won't be here until 2012. But here's the next best thing: a new corporate font will be unveiled in trendy Hoxton, the spiritual home of the web2.0 mediaslut. The font …

    Mobile 24 Mar 17:14

  • Google open sources MapReduce compression

    In the name of speed

    Google has open sourced the compression library used across its backend infrastructure, including MapReduce, its distributed number-crunching platform, and BigTable, its distributed database. Available at Google Code under an Apache 2.0 license, the library is called Snappy, but Google says this is the same library that was …

    Software 24 Mar 17:47

  • Oracle to HP: 'Liar, liar, pants on fire'

    Intel will kill Itanium, says Ellison and Co.

    The tit-for-tat between Oracle and Itanium chip partners Intel and Hewlett-Packard rolls on. Oracle has released a statement saying that contrary to claims from Intel and HP, its decision to halt Itanium software development is not putting enterprises and governments at risk. "Just the opposite is true," Oracle said with its …

    Software 24 Mar 19:04

  • Google faces possible antitrust probes in two other states

    The EU and Texas. Maybe Ohio and Wisconsin

    Google is facing a possible antitrust probe in the state of Ohio, and according to a report citing a person familiar with the matter, Wisconsin is weighing a Google antitrust probe of its own. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that both states were considering investigations of the web giant. Speaking with The Register, Dan …

    Business 24 Mar 19:05

  • Microsoft's Novell patent pals return to SuSE's homeland

    Back in business

    The Microsoft-led consortium of tech companies trying to hoover up nearly 1,000 of Novell's patents is back in business. CPTN Holdings re-registered with German authorities on Wednesday, according to the website of the German Federal Cartel Office. Plans to create CPTN as a German entity were withdrawn in December 2010. CPTN …

    Channel Register 24 Mar 20:00

  • RSA won't talk? Assume SecurID is broken

    Comment No news is bad news for two-factor logins

    It's been a week since RSA dropped a vaguely worded bombshell on 30,000 customers that the soundness of the SecurID system they used to secure their corporate and governmental networks was compromised after hackers stole confidential information concerning the two-factor authentication product. For seven days, reporters, …

    Enterprise Security 24 Mar 20:25

  • Oz gov kicks off censorship review

    A lot has changed in 20 years

    For the first time in 20 years, the Australian Federal Government looks intent on updating the National Classification Scheme. Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced that the review would be conducted by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), which will conduct a widespread public consultation across the community …

    Law 24 Mar 21:42

  • Oracle cash grows on new licenses, hardware

    Exadata 'selling itself'

    It looks like Larry Ellison's net worth is set to go up some more. And maybe yours too, if you own Oracle stock. The software giant and recent hardware company turned in its numbers for its third quarter of fiscal 2011 today, and the numbers were solid. Oracle said that overall revenues in the quarter ended February 28 rose by …

    Software 24 Mar 22:14

  • Steve Jobs vindicated: Google Android is not open

    Android for fondleslabs closed shut

    If you needed further proof that Android is not an "open platform", Google just supplied it. On Thursday, the company said that as its select partners release the first tablets based on Android "Honeycomb" – the latest version of its mobile operating system – it will not open source the Honeycomb code. As first reported by …

    Developer 24 Mar 23:26