29th April 2011 Archive

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Apple tops Microsoft market cap, revenue, and profits

Redmond still wins on crap phone updates

Microsoft's quarterly profits leapt 31 per cent during its third quarter. But that wasn't enough to stop a world of Apple fanbois from pointing towards Redmond and laughing. After surpassing Microsoft's market capitalization and its quarterly revenues, Apple has now surpassed its quarterly profits. In the Apple quarter ending …

Financial News 29 Apr 00:12
Natty Narwahl: Ubuntu marine mammal not fully evolved

Review One day, Unity will grow legs

Canonical has released Ubuntu 11.04, née Natty Narwhal. But this release is not your ordinary update with a handful of new features in the same basic Ubuntu you know and love. No, this marine mammal is an entirely new beast, with the Unity shell replacing everything familiar about the Ubuntu desktop. After a bumpy ride with …

Operating Systems 29 Apr 00:14
Problems with primary data cloud storage

Blocks and Files Something doesn't add up

Cirtas is cutting back its cloud storage activities as it finds businesses are not taking to storing primary data in the public cloud as ducks might take to water. Think about it. I'm a business and I'm being besieged by suppliers telling me I need to cut the latency applications endure when reading or writing primary data, …

Storage 29 Apr 06:00
Fujifilm Finepix X100 APS-C camera

Review Old school values revisited

The Fuji FinePix X100 is, of course, a camera for those with more money than sense. Just look at it. Finished in wildly ostentatious silver magnesium alloy with splashes of leather on the grip, the retro viewfinder styling and chunky shutter speed dial evoke the rangefinders of the 1960s and 1970s. Grand design: Fujifilm's …

reghardware 29 Apr 07:00
Royal Weddings, PCs and Cameron's brass balls

Putting public service at the mercy of the market

Wedding to wedding, Osborne to Osborne: not a lot seems to have changed over the past 30 years, does it? Di and Charlie did the aisle tango back in 1981 and now their son is about to follow suit. We all get a day off and well, ho hum, not much seems to change in Britain, does it? But it is also the 30th anniversary of both the …

Government 29 Apr 08:00
Fairlight: The Rolls Royce of synthesizers

We salute the big beige monster of the 80s

Synthesizers and Royal Weddings were everywhere in the early Eighties, but the real Rolls Royce of electronic music was the Fairlight. An Australian-made music production system based on the Motorola 6800 processor, the Fairlight was - at well over £20,000 – a stupendously pricey piece of kit. Officially named the Fairlight …

PCs & Chips 29 Apr 09:00
Mortal Kombat

Review Goremongers

Like Frankenstein’s Monster, Mortal Kombat has ever been the lumbering chimera, an amalgamation of individual parts thrown together, somehow brought to life much to the despondency of nature’s will. Two girls, one mug Take the series’ visuals, for example: ever shifting from one trend to another, as the graphical trend of …

reghardware 29 Apr 11:00
Yahoo! Hadoop! brain! spin-off! doomed! to! fail!

Open...and Shut The brains already left

The once dominant Yahoo is apparently keen to compete with one of today's hottest startups, Cloudera, to own the affections of data plumbers everywhere. According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is actively considering spinning out its Apache Hadoop engineering team into a startup, possibly backed by Benchmark Capital. The …

Software 29 Apr 12:00
Yandex seeks kopeks in Nasdaq IPO

Roubles good, Greenbacks better

Yandex, the search engine that claims 64 percent of the market in Russia, is seeking as much as US$1 billion in an IPO put together by Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs*. According to Reuters, new shares will be issued by Yandex’s parent company, and its existing owners will cash out some of their shares. The …

Financial News 29 Apr 13:00
Amazon cloud fell from sky after botched network upgrade

'Catholic penance' awards 10 days of credit

Amazon has apologized for the extended outage that hit its AWS infrastructure cloud late last week, providing an extensive explanation for the problem and extending 10 days of credit to customers who were using data stores in the portion of the service where the problem originated. The outage was sparked, the company said, …

Infrastructure 29 Apr 18:42
Did PlayStation Network hackers plan supercomputer botnet?

Sony 'arrogance' fuels Doomsday scenario

The dearth of details from Sony about a criminal intrusion into its PlayStation Network is fomenting plenty of speculation about the methods and motives behind the attackers, and some of it isn't pretty. The most dire scenario is that attackers gained, or tried to gain, control of the part of Sony's network that issues updates …

Security 29 Apr 18:58
NASA scrubs final space shuttle Endeavour launch

At least 72 hour delay

NASA has postponed the final launch of space shuttle Endeavour by about 72 hours or more. The launch had been set for 3:47pm Eastern time on Friday, but it has now been delayed until at least 2:33pm on Monday. Shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach scrubbed the launch as Endeavour engineers investigate the failure with one of …

Space 29 Apr 19:27
Mozilla ships first security update for Firefox 4

ASLR compilation cockup uncocked

Mozilla has issued the first ever security update for Firefox 4.0, including a fix for two chunks of code that allowed attackers to override a key security protection baked in to recent versions of the Windows operating system. The slip up in the two WebGLES graphics libraries, which Mozilla added to the latest version of the …

Security 29 Apr 21:30
Oracle wins round one in bare-knuckle Android patent suit

Judge shuns Google on Java patent terms

Oracle has won an early round in what is sure to be an epic battle against Google over Android's use of Java. This week, Judge William Alsup issued a "claims construction" order in which he sided with Oracle on the definition of four out of five patent terms that will help determine outcome of the company's lawsuit against …

Developer 29 Apr 21:50
Apple floats iCloud for 'email, music, and beyond'

~~iTools~~ ~~.Mac~~ ~~MobileMe~~ iCloud

Apple is preparing beta versions of iOS 5.0 and Mac OS X Lion that hook into a service called iCloud, which will let users store and synchronize a wide range of data on Apple servers, according to report citing people familiar with the matter. Earlier this week, a separate report said that Apple had recently purchased the …

Music and Media 29 Apr 23:03
Legal goons threaten researcher for reporting security bug

When vuln disclosures are outlawed...

A German software company has threatened legal action against a security researcher who privately reported a critical vulnerability in one of its programs, Dark Reading reports. Legal goons from Magix AG sent a nasty gram to a researcher who goes by “Acidgen” after he reported the stack buffer overflow in the company's Music …

Security 29 Apr 23:12