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27th April 2011 Archive

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  • VMware inhales SlideRocket for its cloudy presentationware

    Next, a heavenly word processor and spreadsheet?

    Server-virtualization juggernaut and cloudy-infrastructure wannabe VMware has snapped up another component that it believes will lead it to cloud domination: SlideRocket. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. SlideRocket was founded in 2007 and burst out of stealth mode in October 2008, delivering its Internet- …

    Business 27 Apr 00:04

  • Windows phones send user location to Microsoft

    All there in the fine print

    Add Microsoft Windows Phone 7 to the list of mobile operating systems that silently transmit the precise physical location of the device back to a central database. CNET reported the location tracking on Monday, almost a week after reports of similar tracking in Apple's iPhone and Google's Android mobile OS raised concerns that …

    ID 27 Apr 00:19

  • Google moves to extract more from Apps

    Free isn’t forever

    Hard on the heels of its disappointing earnings announcement. Google will no longer offer free Google Apps to businesses with more than 10 users. In an announcement posted on the Google Enterprise Blog, the company included the news in a post describing how it was making its apps “easier to adopt and manage” for small …

    Applications 27 Apr 04:00

  • Sony hack revives Oz disclosure debate

    Calls for disclosure laws and security guidelines

    The Sony PlayStation network breach has revived Australia’s dormant security disclosure debate. Rob Forsyth, A/NZ managing director of Sophos, says the government must legislate for mandatory disclosure, noting that it has been proposed in a large number of privacy recommendations. If personally identifiable information is …

    Security 27 Apr 04:11

  • Smartfish Whirl Laser Mouse

    Review Rocking rodent

    Smartfish reckons our mice, and other peripherals, don't have enough life of their own, so it has successfully produced a mouse that wobbles in the interests of reducing RSI. Twisted thinking: the Smartfish Whirl Laser Mouse The premise of Smartfish's "Ergomotion" technology is that the static nature of our wrists is what …

    reghardware 27 Apr 06:00

  • Teens who spend time online not dorks after all – study

    Get more sex, drink more. Don't wear seatbelts either

    News today which upsets the stereotype of teenagers who spend a lot of time online or otherwise fooling with computers: rather than being lonely dorks with poor social skills who seldom leave their bedrooms, such kids are in fact more likely to get squiffy, have sex and even to take drugs than their less tech-savvy peers. The …

    Biology 27 Apr 08:32

  • Council forks out £160m: The last of the schools deal cash

    Last BSF dosh doled out to construction and ICT supplier

    A north-west council has awarded one of the last contracts under the BSF school building programme. The contract includes ICT services. Halton Borough Council has awarded a 15-year Building Schools for the Future (BSF) contract to HTP LEP for work including computer-related services and the installation of telecommunications …

    Government 27 Apr 08:38

  • MySpace bids expected this week

    Six line up for knackered social network

    Rupert Murdoch is hoping for bids this week for his undead social network MySpace. News Corp has been trying to get shot of the site, or work out what to do with it since soon after buying it. The media giant bought the social networking and music site at the height of its popularity as part of the takeover of Intermix in …

    Financial News 27 Apr 08:39

  • Sky to show FA Cup match in 3D

    Man C, Man C, Man C vs Stoke, Stoke, Stoke

    Sky will broadcast this year's FA Cup final, between Manchester City and Stoke City, live in 3D on 14 May - without ad breaks to spoil the effect, apparently. Sky World subscribers with a Sky+ HD box and a 3D TV will be able to watch the match at home in 3D. Every other footie fan will have to visit one of the 1500-odd pubs …

    reghardware 27 Apr 08:48

  • Sony shows MacBook Air-like Vaio notebook

    Eee Pad Slider-style netbook-cum-tablet too

    Sony's announcement that it is bringing a pair of Android 3.0 tablets to market this autumn was accompanied - quietly, on the side - by a sneak peek at how it envisages its next slimline notebooks and netbooks will look. The Japanese giant didn't say much about the machines' specs - it did nothing, in fact, beyond flash …

    reghardware 27 Apr 09:13

  • London Olympics ticket grab ends with website wobbles

    'Darling, what's this £926 on my Visa card?'

    Organisers of the London 2012 Olympic Games were forced to extend their ticket application deadline by an hour last night, after last-minute demand from wannabe customers led to delays online. The website had a few wobbles at around 10.30pm last night, just over an hour before the ticket applications for next year's Games were …

    Networks 27 Apr 09:21

  • Toshiba readies über-thin 7in touchscreen

    Tap tech integrated into LCD

    Seven-inch tablets may soon become rather thinner than they currently are. Toshiba has taken the wraps off a 7in, 1024 x 600 touchscreen that's a mere millimetre thick. The so-called "low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) TFT LCD" panel incorporates capacitive touchscreen tech right into the LCD structure. Touchscreen devices …

    reghardware 27 Apr 09:31

  • Silver Lake and SMART Modular: The Privening

    Hefty Flash'n'RAM firm to vanish off stock market

    Publicly-owned RAM and SSD supplier SMART Modular is turning to private ownership via a $645m deal with Silver Lake. SMART was identified as the fifth largest supplier of SSD products by Gartner in 2009. It builds the XceedIOPS SSD using MLC or enterprise-grade MLC NAND coupled with Sandforce controllers. The product has a …

    Storage 27 Apr 09:39

  • ARM jingling with cash as its chips get everywhere

    Fondle-slabs, jabber-slablets, TVs - just not computers

    Cambridge-based ARM holdings is celebrating a fine start to 2011, with more money coming in from more markets as its chip designs continue to fill everything that is not a desktop computer. The first three months of 2011 saw revenue up by almost 30 per cent (to £116m) leading to an operating profit of more than £50m - a margin …

    PCs & Chips 27 Apr 09:58

  • Accounting software gets better at languages

    Workshop Found in translation

    Businesses have become accustomed to software products like MS Office which can be switched between languages (although Word's US English can be stickier than a handful of superglue when you want to select another language). But when it comes to the financials modules in enterprise resource planning (ERP), the multi-lingual …

    Doing Better Business 27 Apr 10:00

  • Memo gives full details of Nokia staff cull and closures

    Exclusive 7,000 axed, many closures in Elopocalypse

    Nokia announced the largest cuts in the company's history today, with significant cuts in the UK and globally. Seven thousand jobs will go across the board, with 4,000 in R&D. Office closures will follow in Denmark, the UK and Finland, and 3,000 Symbian jobs will transfer to consulting firm Accenture, the first 300 this year …

    Financial News 27 Apr 10:17

  • Love Bug malware-inspired film gets big screen premiere

    Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy writes virus ...

    A film inspired by the infamous Love Bug computer worm is due to premiere on Friday. The Love Bug (AKA I love you or LoveLetter) clogged up inboxes and email servers worldwide as it spread rapidly in May 2000. The virus, which came packed in a malicious attachment with the subject line "I love you", overwrote multimedia on …

    Entertainment 27 Apr 10:21

  • Nintendo blames puzzled public for 3DS sales shortfall

    Punters not getting it, apparently

    Nintendo has cited public confusion as the reason why 3DS sales fell short of its expectations. The company forecasted sales of 4m 3DS units before the end of March 2011. In the end, just 3.61m consoles were shipped. Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata this week blamed the public for a lack of understanding the console's value, …

    reghardware 27 Apr 10:43

  • Save the planet: Stop the Greens

    Comment Climate change is a serious problem, but the solutions are a joke

    I find myself in an uncomfortable position over this climate change thing. I've no problem with the existence of man-made climate change, no problem with the idea that we ought to do something about it. But what we are actually trying to do about it seems bonkers, counter-productive even. So how did we get into this mess? To …

    Environment 27 Apr 11:23

  • US Senate weighs in on phone tracking

    Stern letters dispatched

    The House Energy and Commerce Committee has asked the bigger phone platforms to explain their policy on tracking customers, ahead of hearings on the subject scheduled for 10 May. The Committee has written to Microsoft, Nokia, RIM and HP as well as Apple and Google, but only the latter two have been asked to attend the hearings …

    Mobile 27 Apr 11:29

  • Cops hunt man who befouled drugstore's cough drop stash

    P*ss artist leaves foul taste in cops' mouths

    Florida police are hunting a man who took a slash over a drugstore's stock of cough drops before trying, unsuccessfully, to get a prescription filled. The "hefty" individual walked into a branch of Walgreens in Sanford, Florida at 10.30pm last Thursday, the Orlando Sentinel reports. CCTV showed him roaming the aisles before …

    Bootnotes 27 Apr 11:35

  • Vote now for the best sci-fi film never made

    Reader poll 50 classics vie for cinematic glory

    Note: The poll is now closed. Thanks to all of you who voted, and you can see the final result here. Well, the time has come to vote for the best sci-fi movie never made from the list of 50 heavyweight contenders nominated by you, our beloved readers. Before getting down to it, we'd like to point out that we're fully aware a …

    Entertainment 27 Apr 11:39

  • China sets out space-station plan, asks public to name it

    Orbital heavenly palace to get ISS-style robo supply pods

    The People's Republic of China will go it alone to assemble a small manned space station in orbit this decade, according to plans announced by officials yesterday. The China Daily reports on a news conference held by the PRC's Manned Space Engineering Office, the arm of the People's Liberation Army* responsible for Chinese …

    Space 27 Apr 11:40

  • Free and subdomain hosting lets phishing sites live longer

    Chinese now cop flak as well as PayPal, Western banks

    A growing numbers of phishers are using free domains and subdomain to register net fraud sites, a move that seem to have allowed phishing sites to stay online longer. Official figures from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) records that around 11 percent of all phishing attacks took advantage of either the free .TK domain …

    Enterprise Security 27 Apr 11:59

  • Acer Iconia Tab W500

    Review Function-before-form fondleslab

    Aimed squarely at those of us who simply don’t see the point of Android or iOS, Acer’s Iconia Tab W500 is a Windows 7 Home Premium slate complete with decent graphics, a handy detachable keyboard, a sizeable chunk of storage and a realistic, if not cheap, price tag of £520. Acer's Iconia W500: use it as a tablet... …

    reghardware 27 Apr 12:00

  • Sky in surprise duct-and-pole-sharing trial with BT

    'Price only indicative', so watch this space

    Sky has become the first major ISP to sign up to a duct-and-pole-sharing trial with telecoms giant BT. The move appears to signal Sky's plans to deploy its own fibre atop BT's existing network of ducts and poles, access to which was made available following an agreement with UK communications watchdog Ofcom in March 2010. BT …

    Telecoms 27 Apr 12:46

  • Apple confirms white iPhone 4 on sale tomorrow

    Fanboys all a-quiver

    It's official: the white iPhone will be with us tomorrow, Apple said today. “The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful,” gushed Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief in the way only marketing chiefs can. “We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right," he added …

    reghardware 27 Apr 12:48

  • VMware takes a new direction

    Comment Promises PPT presentations everywhere...

    VMware is buying SlideRocket, a service that offers presentations-as-a-service, cloud-style. Your slide deck is held on VMware servers and you can edit it or play it from a variety of internet-accessing devices, from smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktops. Terrific, yet more mind-numbing presentation decks coming my …

    Cloud 27 Apr 13:19

  • OCZ shares trashed by short seller's research note

    I did bad stuff, but I also built a company with no venture capital, says CEO...

    OCZ stock went into freefall last week after serious allegations were published about its technology and its chief executive. According to a research note, the company was alleged to have hidden CEO Ryan Petersen's youthful misdeeds from investors during the recent secondary capital-raising. This was later discovered to be …

    Storage 27 Apr 13:31

  • MIT Media Lab appoints college drop-out, socialite

    Can you learn physics by intuition?

    Now that's what I call "convergence". MIT has appointed a new director of its Media Lab: a blogger and networker who found computer science boring, and dropped out of higher education completely after discovering that he couldn't learn physics "intuitively". But since it's actually MIT's Media Lab we're talking about, the …

    Music and Media 27 Apr 13:46

  • Supermarkets trounce telcos on mobile services

    Happy shoppers

    Supermarkets have taken over the grocery industry, DVD rental services and even the car insurance business, so it should come as little surprise they now dominate the mobile phone market too. In fact, supermarkets offer a better mobile phone service than the more established telcos, it seems. According to a survey conducted by …

    reghardware 27 Apr 14:07

  • Apple breaks location-storing silence

    Admits underestimating stupidity of its users*

    Apple has clarified that it does not store location data on handsets, and that it does, and that it's going to stop soon... only it isn't... and it's nothing to worry about anyway. Apple takes full responsibility for the fuss: the company apparently failed to educate us properly about what it was doing. Apple's statement then …

    Mobile 27 Apr 14:15

  • CenturyLink borgs Savvis for $3.2bn

    Rural telco morphs to cloudy IT provider

    CenturyLink, which only a few years back was a rural telephone service provider, is now one of the major players in cloud computing thanks to its $3.2bn acquisition of Savvis. The company, which was formerly known as CenturyTel, hails from Louisiana and has expanded its network through the $11.6bn acquisition of Embarq, the …

    Cloud 27 Apr 15:13

  • Duke celebrates royal nuptials with pugnacious portrait

    Hail to the King - and not the next but one

    With the royal wedding round the corner, it's only fitting that the Duke dress in suitable attire and pose for a portrait, right? This Duke causes much offence with un-PC remarks and chauvinist misogyny. Since we're not talking about Prince Philip, we can only be referring to one man. Yep, the Duke is back again with more …

    reghardware 27 Apr 15:41

  • Amazon fine print limits potential credits for cloud outage

    Rackspace CTO talks EC2 failure

    Amazon's EC2 contract promises its infrastructure cloud will provide 99.95 per cent "uptime" over the course of a year. But that doesn't mean the company will dish out credits in the wake of the outage that affected some users for as many as four days, if not more. Though the EC2 service level agreement says users will be …

    Cloud 27 Apr 18:36

  • Barnes & Noble answers Microsoft's anti-Android suit

    Cites 'exorbitant' fees, 'absurd' restrictions

    Bookseller and Nook e-reader vendor Barnes & Noble has lashed out at Microsoft in response to Redmond's recent lawsuit against the company and its Nook manufacturing partners Foxconn and Inventec. Microsoft's lawsuit, filed on March 21, alleges that the Nook's Android operating system infringes upon patents held by Redmond, …

    Music and Media 27 Apr 19:08

  • Friendster wipes data slate clean

    Rebirth or slow friendless death?

    Social networking pioneer Friendster has been suspiciously quiet since being acquired by Malaysia's MOL Global in 2009 for around US$40 million, but users will at least be paying attention on May 31 when their data will be erased. The site, which launched in 2002 and was hot in Asia until Facebook stole its thunder, has told …

    Music and Media 27 Apr 19:33

  • Feds move to uninstall bot that hit banks, airports, cops

    Drainage of Coreflood continues

    The notorious Coreflood botnet has penetrated a veritable who's who of sensitive organizations, including banks, state and local governments, airports, defense contractors, and a police department, an FBI agent said in sworn testimony. An executive of one compromised hospital healthcare network found that 2,000 of its 14,000 …

    Malware 27 Apr 19:57

  • Dell borgs CIT financing partnerships in Canada, Europe

    Dude, you're going to get a Dell ... banker

    Being an IT giant, as Dell wants to be, means controlling your own leasing and financing arm. And so Dell is taking control of the financing arms that it ran in conjunction with CIT Group in Canada, and of Dell-related assets for CIT Group's operations in Europe. CIT Group's Vendor Finance operation is one of the big names in …

    Business 27 Apr 20:11

  • Google Docs app lands on Android

    Offline access not included

    Google has released a new Google Docs application for its Android mobile operating system, hoping to facilitate both the editing and sharing of documents via its online word processing service. Now available from the Android Market, the app lets you search for and open files stored across your Google account, and it offers …

    Applications 27 Apr 21:42

  • Citrix profits fluffed by XenDesktop, NetScaler

    Q1 better than expected, 2011 targets raised

    Business was better than expected at Citrix Systems in its first quarter of 2011, with revenues up 18.5 percent to $490.9m and net income rocketing up 54.9 per cent to $73.5m. Thanks to its expanding business, Citrix raised its revenue guidance for the full year by $30m, and now expects 2011 sales to come in at between $2.14bn …

    Financial News 27 Apr 22:25

  • TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops

    'Anonymous' info used to set speed traps

    Navigation device maker TomTom has apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists. The data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps, Dutch newspaper AD reported here, with a …

    ID 27 Apr 23:02

  • Cisco aims network code at 'Linux kernel for the cloud'

    Ex-Sun man goes OpenStack

    Lew Tucker – Cisco's chief technology officer for cloud computing – says that the networking giant has joined the OpenStack project because "a lot" of its customers are running the open source platform and it hopes to "learn" from the project. "We need to be able to contribute, and we need to be able to learn," Tucker said …

    Cloud 27 Apr 23:11