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30th March 2011 Archive

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  • Firefox fans get IE-happy AJAX testing tools

    Microsoft is not the only browser maker

    JavaScript coders targeting Firefox can now test their apps with free tools that started life serving the developers on Microsoft's once mighty Internet Explorer. dynaTrace Software has released AJAX Edition 3 that adds support for Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 to its AJAX performance management tool. Earlier versions had only tested …

    Developer 30 Mar 04:00

  • Labour MP debuts fondleslab-assisted Parliament oratory

    Twitter Tsar upgraded to iPad Princess

    Labour MP and doyenne of all things digital Kerry McCarthy inadvertently made history Monday evening by becoming the first British politician to read a speech from an iPad in Parliament. "I did have a printed version, but was called so late I started playing around with speech on iPad so read it from there," McCarthy told the …

    Government 30 Mar 04:59

  • Nokia deal to 'rocket Windows Phone 7 past iPhone'

    Dart thrower sees 50% smartphone sales surge

    By 2015, Windows Phone 7 will power 37 per cent more smartphones than Apple's iPhone, according to the prognosticators at International Data Corporation (IDC). "Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing …

    Mobile 30 Mar 05:00

  • Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin Air speakers

    Review iPod dock with AirPlay for high flyers

    From a company whose flagship speakers will set you back £18k, but at least you get two of them, B&W’s first iPod dock was met with high expectations when it was released back in 2008. Indeed, the Zeppelin quickly established itself as the model to beat in terms of distinctive styling and sound quality. The latest model is …

    reghardware 30 Mar 06:00

  • Data centres gripped by power struggle

    Cloud Waste not, want not,

    Data centre efficiency is a constant struggle. Choosing the right system for your required tasks is one challenge. Upgrade cycles cause power and heat issues. Existing techniques are continually refined. Combined with emerging technologies, optimal efficiency is a moving target. Space constraints are where the challenges of …

    Enterprise Tech 30 Mar 07:57

  • Dixons whacked by profit warning

    Blames the miserable British consumer

    Dixons shares took a tumble this morning after the UK's favourite electrical retailer warned markets it was unlikely to hit profit targets for the year. The company said sales were down 11 per cent in the UK and Ireland and had fallen 7 per cent across the group. It expects profits for the full year of around £85m. Market …

    Channel Register 30 Mar 07:59

  • Twittering NASA 'naut's Moon snap honoured

    Shorty Award for Doug Wheelock

    NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock has been honoured for his contribution to the Twitterverse with a Shorty Award for the "best Real-Time Photo of the Year". Flight engineer Wheelock arrived aboard the International Space Station in June last year, and shortly after posted this fine snap on his Twitter account: The spaceman said …

    Space 30 Mar 08:50

  • Network failure closed hospitals to ambulance admissions

    UCLH launches investigation after a network glitch

    University College London hospitals trust (UCLH) has launched an investigation after a network glitch led to the closure of A&E to blue light traffic. The problem also led to cancellations of operations. The trust was last month forced to halt a number of services, including the cancellation of 50 per cent of its operations, …

    Data Networking 30 Mar 09:03

  • Air NZ safety vid provokes terror in the skies

    'You're a giraffe!' wails prancing fitness guru

    Those of you of a nervous disposition are advised to put your head between your hands, lean forward and brace yourselves on the seat in front of you, because Air New Zealand has decided that naked cabin crew simply weren't getting the attention of the self-loading cargo: Yes, you're a giraffe, enthuses Richard Simmons – …

    Bootnotes 30 Mar 09:23

  • Watch amazed as we turn data into Visualisation

    Broadcast See your data, make better decisions

    Today at 15:00BST we’ll be in our studio exploring the visualisation techniques available and looking at how they should be applied in your business - from basic applications to highly sophisticated mapping techniques that can revolutionise the understanding of your business. You can watch it right here. There’s a whole lot of …

    Data Visualisation 30 Mar 09:33

  • Permabit looks to Linux dedupers

    Mainstream OEMs signed up or shut off

    OEM deduplication software supplier Permabit has built an Albireo version for Linux vendors to use, as the mainstream storage OEM market for its technology is saturated. Albireo is a software deduplication technology that storage OEMs can use for primary as well as secondary deduplication since its use does not add delay to …

    Storage 30 Mar 09:54

  • BP loses personal details on spill victims

    Leaky leaks from lost laptop

    Infamously leaky oil company BP has lost a laptop containing personal information, social security numbers and other details on 13,000 people claiming compensation for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The laptop was password-protected but not encrypted. It was lost 1 March by a travelling BP exec. BP said the lappy contained a …

    CIO 30 Mar 09:55

  • George Lucas 'very happy' with 3D Phantom Menace

    So far so good, reckons Star Wars supremo

    George Lucas has announced his satisfaction with the efforts to date to convert The Phantom Menace to 3D. The job of adding an extra dimension to Jar Jar Binks has been handed to Prime Focus, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The firm previously used its "proprietary View-D 2D-to-3D process" on Clash of the Titans, …

    Entertainment 30 Mar 09:57

  • Jesus Phone brings the DEAD back to LIFE

    Get me an iPhone and 20cc of adrenaline, stat!

    When doctors are attempting to save the life of someone who has suffered a heart attack, they do a better job if they use a free iPhone app developed to brief them through procedures and drug dosages, according to a recent trial. "Every year approximately 30,000 people in the UK have an unexpected cardiac arrest in hospital …

    Mobile 30 Mar 10:10

  • Gemalto launches NFC software - world sees hardware

    Blogosphere getting over-excited again

    Gemalto's new software platform can handle NFC payments on the SIM and is approved for MasterCard's PayPass - but that's less than half the NFC story no matter what you read elsewhere. The new platform runs on Gemalto SIM chips, allowing a network operator to host a PayPass application on its SIM. Once such a SIM is inserted …

    Mobile 30 Mar 10:11

  • Coalition to float prototype for single government web domain

    Fate of Directgov in doubt

    UK.gov is once again fiddling with the idea that a single government web domain will save cash and improve its shoddy IT strategy record. The Cabinet Office set out plans for the government's IT strategy this morning, in which it claimed it would reduce costs, offer better support to smaller tech firms and commit to "mandatory …

    Government 30 Mar 10:17

  • Berlusconi calls George Clooney to his defence

    Sex trial witness request 'odd', admits Hollywood star

    Silvio Berlusconi has named George Clooney as a defence witness in his forthcoming trial for sleeping with an under-aged prostitute, Reuters reports. The lively Italian PM is accused of bedding 17-year-old Moroccan night-club dancer Karima el Mahroug, aka "Ruby the Heartstealer", at a "bunga bunga" party at his villa near …

    Bootnotes 30 Mar 10:17

  • Game stocks shops with Tesco 3DS consoles

    Pre-owned, never pwned

    As pre-owned 3DS consoles line the shelves of Game, customers could be forgiven for thinking Nintendo gamers were unsatisfied with their purchase. While this may be true in some cases – with complaints emerging about the 3DS effect causing eyestrain – it turns out the retailer has actually had its staff queueing up to purchase …

    reghardware 30 Mar 10:23

  • Nokia: Keep codin' for Symbian and Qt!

    Why leave a sinking ship?

    Is Nokia wobbling over its commitment to Windows? Or just stringing along the Symbian and Qt faithful? The cell-phone giant has published a lengthy open letter pleading with coders to keep building apps for phones running Symbian and Qt - at least in the short term. Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Nokia's community …

    Developer 30 Mar 11:00

  • NASA systems dangerously at risk from cyberattack

    Network security is not rocket science

    An official audit of NASA's network has concluded that the space agency faces a high risk of cyberattack. Experts from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) paint a grim picture of the state of the space agency's server infrastructure, warning that vulnerabilities in its systems leave it open to defacement, denial of …

    Enterprise Security 30 Mar 11:00

  • Five ways your customers say they are unhappy

    'R' is for relationship

    In some sectors – mobile networks or car insurance, for example – customer churn is a way of life. Most businesses like to hang onto their customers, but sometimes, although wooed with expensive marketing campaigns and introductory discounts, customers don’t leave a note on the kitchen table or phone for a tearful it’s-not-you- …

    Doing Better Business 30 Mar 11:30

  • BBC explains hour-long website outage

    Aggregation and routes had a little lie-down, man

    The BBC's entire web estate fell offline last night for around an hour, following what the Corporation described as "a major network incident". Readers of the site complained about the late night outage on Twitter, with many pumping out various conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong. Some solemnly suggested that Auntie …

    Data Networking 30 Mar 11:33

  • Human heart could power an iPod

    Pump up the volume

    Scientists have developed the first commercially viable nanogenerator, which could pave the way for the human heart to become a charger for our electrical gizmos. The nanogenerator device is a flexible chip with millions of zinc oxide nanowires that when flexed induce a piezoelectric effect, delivering a tiny amount of …

    reghardware 30 Mar 11:41

  • Dell, Rackspace, and Equinix float free OpenStack test cloud

    No charge for heavenly tire kicking

    Dell, Rackspace and Equinix have teamed up to offer you a few free dates with OpenStack, the nine-month-old open source "infrastructure cloud" platform. If you decide to tie the knot, you can then pay the trio to help with that too. On Wednesday, the three companies announced what they call an OpenStack "cloud demonstration …

    Cloud 30 Mar 12:00

  • Irish cop child abuse image plan attracts data protection ire

    Maimed, stark and misshapen...

    An initiative to combat child abuse images by the Irish Police has fallen foul of the Data Protection Commissioner. The plan by An Garda Siochana was intended to reduce the availability of child abuse material online, but has been referred to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on the grounds that it raises significant …

    Government 30 Mar 12:07

  • Corporate hospitality is OK, says new Bribery Act guidance

    *pop*

    The Bribery Act will not lead to a large number of prosecutions and will not outlaw corporate hospitality, the Government has said in long-awaited guidance on last year's Bribery Act. The guidance also makes it clear that small companies could communicate their anti-bribery policies orally and still meet the requirements of …

    Small Biz 30 Mar 12:09

  • The workload challenge

    Broadcast Integrating the mainframe into today's IT

    The mainframe was there first, but is it the dinosaur that many people assume? For some workloads, it has never been bettered: many of today's business web sites store a production database on a mainframe host, for example. For applications that rely on large-scale transaction processing, that support thousands of users, …

    HPC 30 Mar 12:12

  • FBI asks for help to crack mystery code in 12-year-old murder case

    Cryptoanalysts ask those with mad code-breaking skillz to help decipher notes

    FBI experts are seeking the help of the public to make sense of two encrypted notes found on a murder victim that have stumped detectives for years. Ricky McCormick, 41, was found dead in a field in St Louis, Missouri, back in June 1999. Two encrypted notes found in his pockets have defied the best efforts of detectives and …

    Crime 30 Mar 12:20

  • Crysis 2

    Review Shoots onto consoles

    Where Crysis shifted the paradigm of photorealism for a lucky monster-rig owning few – while power slamming the nail into the coffin of my creaking 9800 Pro – Crysis 2 is a far more forgiving beast. Rocket salad The near-identical performance of the PC and console versions might not please PC gamers, but the shift to …

    reghardware 30 Mar 12:39

  • Three UK finally turns a profit

    Eight years on, with a little help from its friends

    Three UK has finally turned a profit in the UK in its eighth year of operation – with some help from a network-sharing agreement with Everything Everywhere, after parent company Hutchison Whampoa reported its annual results. The figures gain from a one-time substantial benefit of £500m, which sees Three UK gain the use of 3, …

    Mobile 30 Mar 12:59

  • Cisco dispenses Nexus rack switch for speed freaks

    FCoE all around, and a 'Westmere-EX' server preview

    The product update drum keeps beating out its time at Cisco Systems, with new Nexus converged switches coming out the factory door. Cisco, which fancies itself a server maker these days, is also getting the jump on its peers in talking about the servers it plans to put in the field using Intel's future "Westmere-EX" Xeon E7 high …

    Servers 30 Mar 13:04

  • Messenger delivers first Mercury orbital snap

    NASA team 'thrilled' with spacecraft's performance

    NASA's Messenger has returned the first photograph taken by a spacecraft circling Mercury, a tad under two weeks after it went into orbit around the solar system's innermost planet. The agency explains* that the snap was taken at 09:20 GMT on 29 March, and over the next six hours, Messenger grabbed a further 363 images. The …

    Space 30 Mar 13:06

  • Cisco fleshes out FCoE offering

    End-to-end across the fabric

    Cisco has fleshed out is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) offering with an end-to-end-capability from servers to storage arrays and back again via Nexus and MDS9500 switches. FCoE involves the transmission of Fibre Channel protocol messages along Ethernet links. Because Fibre Channel relies on a deterministic network that …

    Storage 30 Mar 13:08

  • German Green extracts tracking info from mobile operator

    Makes map of own movements

    A German Green Party member has successfully extracted the tracking information stored by his mobile operator, and created a map that shows his every movement over a six month period. The map uses the 35,000 instances when the cellphone owned by Malte Spitz registered with the local cell tower, all of which were stored by T- …

    Mobile 30 Mar 13:58

  • Tesla Motors sues BBC for defamation

    Petrolhead pundit sparks electric storm

    Tesla Motors has filed libel a suit against the BBC, accusing Top Gear of defamation. Back in 2008, we reported how in comparison tests between the electric Tesla Roadster and a Lotus Elise, Jeremy Clarkson and co. falsely declared the Tesla ran out of juice and had to be pushed home. The programme later said it was only …

    reghardware 30 Mar 14:06

  • Comodo admits 2 more resellers pwned in SSL cert hack

    How deep does the rabbit hole go?

    Comodo has admitted a further two registration authorities tied to the digital certificates firm were hit by a high-profile forged digital certificate attack earlier this month. No forged certificates were issued as a result of the assault on victims two and three of the attack, but confirmation that multiple resellers in the …

    Enterprise Security 30 Mar 14:27

  • Oracle and the Attack of the Killer Stack

    Comment The gravitational pull of convergence

    Oracle will have to look more like HP and HP will have to look more like Oracle. The other converged or unified IT stack system vendors will have to look more like HP and Oracle too, or get left behind. How do I justify this view? Distributed processing was like seeing centrifugal force in action as the various parts of IT, …

    Data Networking 30 Mar 14:50

  • Stop sexing up IT and give Civil Servants Macs, says gov tech boss

    Ex New gov CIO lashes Labour's tech wastage

    The man in charge of the government's IT efficiency drive has told MPs that Whitehall should use more Apple Macs while castigating the previous government for trying to sex-up IT projects. Ian Watmore, COO of the Efficiency and Reform Group, told the public administration committee that Labour had poured cash into computer …

    Government 30 Mar 15:06

  • Cloud music lockers: who fricking cares?

    Amazon launches solution looking for a problem

    I have seen amazing music services that never launched because of music company collywobbles. No one would call Amazon's Cloud Drive locker, launched yesterday, an amazing music service. Or even a quite good one. To be honest, it barely deserves to be called a "service" – it's really more of an afterthought. The music locker …

    Music and Media 30 Mar 15:22

  • Gartner raises 2011 IT spending prognostications

    Falling US dollar, fondleslabs save the day!

    The wizards at market researcher Gartner have spent the past few weeks polishing their crystal balls, and now think the IT spending environment will be a bit better than they had originally expected. The amount that Gartner has tweaked up its estimates for spending on enterprise hardware, software, services, and telecom is …

    Channel Register 30 Mar 15:26

  • Google gets biennial privacy audit after Buzz blunder

    Mountain View Chocolate Factory in settlement with FTC

    Google has agreed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to undergo regular privacy audits for the next 20 years, after bolting its ill-conceived Buzz social network on to Gmail in early 2010 without first seeking the consent of its users. "When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honour them," said FTC chairman …

    Government 30 Mar 15:35

  • Carrier-sold iPad 2 Sim locks snag unwary buyers

    Caveat bites emptor

    Buying an iPad 2 from a network operator - or one of its third-party resellers - comes at a price beyond the cost of the data contract and the hardware, it seems: the 'magical... again' gadgets are Sim-locked. So says Reg Hardware reader Ryan who, having tracked down an iPad 2 at his local Phones4U - he had to stump up for the …

    reghardware 30 Mar 15:59

  • VMware corks hypervisor security hole

    ESXi, ESX, and vCenter not affected

    Server and PC virtualization juggernaut VMware has issued a patch for the Workstation hypervisor that plugs a privilege-escalation hole on machines that use Linux as the host environment for the hypervisor. Machines that use Windows as a host environment for the Workstation hypervisor are not affected by the local privilege- …

    Virtualization 30 Mar 17:21

  • Microsoft cofounder Allen unloads on Gates

    In money as in code: unforgiving

    St. Bill Gates, latter-day savior of philanthropy, has been recast as an alpha geek in a memoir penned by fellow Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Gates was always reputed to be a tough and driven boss, demanding of his employees and unforgiving of bad code. According to Allen's forthcoming book, though, Gates played hardball …

    Software 30 Mar 17:56

  • Vote compass unmasks Canadian political opinion

    Testing, testing

    Canada is gearing up for another federal election and The CBC – Canada’s state-owned broadcaster – has released an online tool to help the undecided. Called the “vote compass”, the application was created by an advisory panel of top political scientists. The tool is a flash application consisting of 30 questions. The results …

    Government 30 Mar 18:00

  • Harvey Norman warms to etail

    Gerry's 'heart beats strongly' at the thought of digital pennies

    Australian retail Luddite Gerry Harvey has reversed his anti etailing stance, and has announced that he will launch an online retail store. Harvey had previously been a key agitator against online retailing, leading bigger retailers to lobby the government to enforce Australia's 10 per cent goods and services tax (GST) on all …

    Music and Media 30 Mar 18:36

  • Mobile ads wither in January

    iPhone still the best bet

    Australian smartphone adoption is booming, yet the mobile ad market took a serious dive in January. According to a report from global ad network InMobi, Australian mobile ad impressions dropped by 18 per cent in January compared to October 2010. Globally, the InMobi mobile advertising network served 31.6 billion impressions in …

    Mobile 30 Mar 18:37

  • Microsoft: IE9 not yet 'broadly' available

    Have ye heard o' the interwebs, laddie?

    With Internet Explorer 9 having lost the early download PR war to Firefox 4.0, Microsoft now claims the numbers are unimportant and that it's the "long game" that counts. Senior director of IE business and marketing Ryan Gavin has blogged that IE9 will be "broadly rolled out" through Windows Update at the "end of June" – that' …

    Applications 30 Mar 19:29

  • Verizon boosts 'selected' US backbones to 100G

    Drops E, bE, b/s, b/sec overhead from its Gigabit

    Verizon has announced that it will be the first service provider to pump "selected segments" of its US long-haul backbone to 100 Gigabit Ethernet speeds, using Juniper Networks routers and Ciena coherent optical-processing gear. "We've already successfully deployed 100G on a portion of our European network, and now we're …

    Telecoms 30 Mar 19:32

  • Gloves off on Australia's NBN: Turnbull articulates policy

    Clarity at last, we think

    Telecommunications policy-watchers in Australia have a clear articulation of the federal opposition’s position and plans, after communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull addressed a Sydney conference on Wednesday. While part of the policy – to "demolish" the government's National Broadband Network (NBN), or at very least to …

    Networks 30 Mar 21:00

  • Google to NASA: Open source will not kill you

    'Time to blow up some robots'

    Google open source guru Chris DiBona has called on NASA to use more open source code in its aerospace program, urging the government agency to test free software in unmanned flights and "blow-up some robots." "I've heard people say: 'We don't want to endanger flights. We don't want to endanger lives. Open source software comes …

    Developer 30 Mar 22:02

  • Is Samsung imitating Sony?

    Researcher's claim: 'I logged your logger'
    Updated: denied by Samsung

    If this is true, it could be the stupidest thing any laptop manufacturer has ever done: NetworkWorld is reporting the discovery of keyloggers on brand-new Samsung laptops. In an incident that holds echos of Sony’s famous rootkit embarrassment, a NetSec Consulting researcher says he spotted the StarLogger installed on two new …

    Security 30 Mar 22:57

  • Dell, HP badmouth Apple's iPad

    'Just absurd' (much like Dell's math)

    A top Dell marketeer says that Apple's "magical and revolutionary" fondleslab is doomed to enterprise irrelevancy, and an HP senior vice president blasted Apple's partner policies as being "just absurd." My, how novel: competitors bashing a front-runner. In other news, Pope Benedict XVI has been revealed to be a Roman Catholic …

    Music and Media 30 Mar 23:03

  • Google unleashes (another) Facebook knock-off

    'Tell us what you like. Just like you tell Zuckerberg'

    Google has unveiled its latest answer to Facebook, and as it turns out, the long-rumored Google +1 project is a shameless knock-off of the Facebook "Like" button. Mountain View unveiled Google +1 with a blog post on Wednesday, describing it as a way for Google search users to recommend links to others. "We’re ... enabling you …

    Music and Media 30 Mar 23:17