25th April 2011 Archive

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Introducing the biggest storage company you've never heard of

Comment UIT leaps Great Wall of China

Another Chinese storage supplier is stepping over the great Wall of China into our western world. UIT, or United Information Technology, is the second largest indigenous storage supplier in China after Huawei, and it's now coming out of China to sell into the western storage world. The company was founded by three Chinese …

Storage 25 Apr 2011, 03:00
Apple seals $66bn in Jobsian wallet

Brother, can you spare a dividend?

File this under "problems you'll never have": Apple's corporate wallet is stuffed with nearly $66 billion. And as that nest egg grows, so do questions about what Jobs & Co. plans to do with all that ready mazuma. Announcing its financial results for its second fiscal 2011 quarter, Apple said that its cash plus short-term and …

Financial News 25 Apr 2011, 04:00
How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

An upgrader writes ...

When, last year, the price of decent SSD drives veered towards £1-a-gigabyte, I decided this was no longer the enviable domain of the hot-rodder. Concerns about data integrity were enough to keep me hesitant. But finally, I took the plunge. It was a revelation. Currently an upgrade for most laptops, SSDs are destined to …

Hardware 25 Apr 2011, 07:00
That's the frequency, Kenneth

Compo answers, and some form of explanation

Last November we kicked off a competition to identify the radio frequencies used by various bits of kit around the modern home, and now we have a winner, and some explanatory notes. No one managed a clean sheet – of the 18 questions the maximum score was 16 and only a handful of readers managed that. But from the random hat we …

Broadband 25 Apr 2011, 09:00
Cyberwarriors on the Eastern Front: In the line of ~~fire~~ packet floods

Interview Former senior Estonian defence official talks cyberwar

Estonian government ministers and officials deep in a crisis meeting about riots on the street in April 2007 were nonplussed when a press officer interrupted them to say that he was unable to post a press release. The initial reaction was "why are you bothering us with this" Lauri Almann, permanent undersecretary at the …

Security 25 Apr 2011, 09:00
Nintendo confirms Wii 'successor'

Out next year

Nintendo's next home console will be out in 2012, the videogames pioneer has revealed, though the 'Wii 2' - or whatever the machine will be called - is expected to be shown off at the E3 games industry show in June. The Japanese company posted its latest financial data, for its 2011 fiscal year, which ended on 31 March, this …

Games 25 Apr 2011, 13:01
Amax moves from HPC clusters to cloud stacks

Half-rack private cloud for SMBs

Small and medium businesses want to build private compute clouds as much as the larger enterprises that the top-tier server makers are focused on. But many of the pre-integrated cloud stacks coming out of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and the Acadia partnership – Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware – are overkill for SMBs. And so Amax …

Cloud 25 Apr 2011, 16:00
WikiLeaks releases classified files on Guantánamo Bay

Secret docs on 779 prisoners

WikiLeaks has released over 100 military dossiers detailing prisoners at the US prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, promising to release more than 600 additional classified documents over the next month. More than 750 files have already been shared with The New York Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio (NPR), and The …

Government 25 Apr 2011, 17:08
White iPhone 4 spotted, 'shipped to Apple stores'

Fanbois eye smooth creamy flesh

Apple's ever-elusive white iPhone 4 has been spotted in the wild. Separately, Apple Insider reports that the elusive Caucasian iPhone has already been shipped to Apple retail stores in the US. According to source sharing snaps with BRG, née Boy Genius Report, this is a white iPhone: We thank BGR tipster "Will" for his snaps …

Phones 25 Apr 2011, 17:22
Iron Mountain caves in to investors

Stockholders appeased

Iron Mountain's returning CEO has moved quickly to reach an accommodation with activist investor Elliot Management, being willing to sell-off the digital business, close unprofitable international operations, return cash to shareholders, and evaluate becoming a REIT. Scenting that stockholder opinion was in line with that of …

Financial News 25 Apr 2011, 17:37
Apple component lock-ups jump 40%

$11bn in commitments leave a mere $55bn to play with

Apple has made commitments to spend $11bn in manufacturing and component expenditures, a new record for the company and a sign that Cupertino is working to lock up components in an increasingly competitive market. "As of March 26, 2011," reads Apple's 10-Q filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commssion, "the Company had …

Hardware 25 Apr 2011, 18:04
Son of AV tycoon rescued following 'stupid' kidnapping

Ivan Kaspersky safe and sound

The kidnapped son of Kaspersky Lab's CEO was freed over the weekend following blunders by his captors that led to the arrest of five people accused of abducting him and charging €3 million in ransom. Russian authorities freed 20-year-old Ivan Kaspersky after storming the Moscow home where he was being held, The Moscow Times …

Security 25 Apr 2011, 18:05
HP ProLiant power supplies 'may die when dormant'

Failover conundrum

Power supplies used by HP ProLiant DL380 G5 rack-mounted servers may fail if they're left dormant for long periods time in certain environments, according to the experience of one customer and comments from HP. This could be a problem for servers that are only powered up for failovers and failover testing. A reader of The …

Servers 25 Apr 2011, 18:57
NetApp not hiring European Engenio staff

Unwanted staff left with LSI

Although it's buying Engenio from LSI, NetApp is not taking on the European LSI Engenio sales team who all face losing their jobs. NetApp agreed to buy LSI's Engenio storage business for $480m in March. That business earned $705m in 2010 and NetApp's buy price is only a fraction of that. "NetApp gains a proven OEM-based …

Storage 25 Apr 2011, 19:01
Vodafone AU falls on Easter Sunday

Network down, carrier crucified

Australian Vodafone customers enjoyed a unique Easter Sunday gift from their network provider of choice as a network glitch prevented users from sending or receiving text messages. The unexplained seven hour outage caused customers to vent their rage across all social media channels available with the term ‘Vodafail’ maintaining …

Mobile 25 Apr 2011, 20:00
Iran says it was attacked by second computer worm

'Espionage virus' targets country's networks

A senior Iranian commander said his country has been targeted by a second malware attack in addition to the Stuxnet worm that was designed to disrupt nuclear operations. Iranian security personnel are still in the process of investigating the Stars computer worm, Brigadier General Gholam-Reza Jalali, told Iran's Mehr News …

Security 25 Apr 2011, 20:30
Apple sued over iPhone location tracking

'We don't track anyone,' says alleged Jobs email

A lawsuit has been filed against Apple in the ongoing dust-up over its alleged tracking of the whereabouts of users of iPhones and iPads. "Irreparable injury has resulted and continues to result from Apple's unauthorized tracking of millions of Americans," alleges the lawsuit, filed on Monday in the US District Court for the …

Security 25 Apr 2011, 20:37
Amazon gets 'F' for communication amidst cloud outage

CTO's distributed computing pal analyzes EC2 failure

Thorsten von Eicken – a former academic colleague of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and the brains behind RightScale, one of the organizations best positioned to comment on the Amazon "cloud" – has heavily criticized Vogels and company for providing so little information about the massive outage that hit their service last week and …

Cloud 25 Apr 2011, 20:38
Sony unsure if PlayStation Network user data was stolen

'External intrusion' probed as outage enters day 5

Sony has yet to determine if customers' personal information and credit card details have been stolen as part of an external intrusion into its system that has left PSN, the PlayStation network, inaccessible for five days. “Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network …

Games 25 Apr 2011, 21:22
Cirtas dumps staff and retreats

Cloud storage supplier faces storm

In January, we asked if cloud storage start-up Cirtas would be a rainmaker. Now its very survival is in doubt as funding is withdrawn and 21 staff are dismissed. The news came from a senior engineer at Cirtas, Dave Graham, through his Twitter feed. "Well, the waiting is over. as of 3pm TODAY, i, along with 20 others are no …

Cloud 25 Apr 2011, 21:25
Google and friends wrap open video codec in patent shield

Sixteen un-Jobsians join WebM fight

Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack. On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other's patents related to the format …

Developer 25 Apr 2011, 22:42
Stingy Uncle Sam dumps a Q1 loss on Unisys

ClearPath mainframes on the rise

Uncle Sam slapped Unisys around during the server and service provider's first fiscal quarter of 2011. The delay by Congress and President Obama in delivering a Federal budget and a lost contract with the Transportation Security Agency combined to subtract around $50m from the company's books, yielding a loss of $39.4m – …

Financial News 25 Apr 2011, 23:24