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5th October 2011 Archive

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  • Lack of data holds up Exadata deployments

    OpenWorld User group takes initiative on training

    Lack of training and information on Oracle’s Exadata platform is proving a headache among some users, and the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) is moving to address concerns over the next 18 months. Speaking to The Register, IOUG president Andy Flower explained that while the industry was certainly interested in the …

    Servers 5 Oct 00:35

  • Oracle tweaks MySQL with milestone update

    OpenWorld NoSQL ain’t the only story in town

    While the news about NoSQL has garnered much attention, Oracle has quietly published a development milestone release (DMR) for MySQL. The MySQL 5.6.3 DMR includes a major revision of the software’s optimizer, which the company claims will make file-sort optimizations up to three times faster by searching more intelligently and …

    Software 5 Oct 00:37

  • IBM open sources Blue Spruce to aid medical research

    Doctors get help on cause and effect

    IBM has open sourced part of its Blue Spruce web collaboration suite for use by doctors studying the features and genetic origins of illness. Big Blue has passed the code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), where it is already being used in a National Institutes of Health funded study of …

    Software 5 Oct 00:40

  • The iPhone 4S in depth: More than just a vestigial 'S'

    Fanbois, shake off your 'No iPhone 5' anguish

    As marketing headman Phil Schiller ate up more and more minutes of Apple's "Let's talk iPhone" event, waxing rhapsodically about the new iPhone 4S, it became increasingly clear to those in attendance that the iPhone 5 wasn't going to make an appearance. Not that The Reg was there to take the pulse of the crowd. For reasons …

    Hardware 5 Oct 00:53

  • Ten... Androids to outshine the iPhone 4S

    Product Round-up The smart (phone) choice

    Yes folks, it’s that time again when across the land otherwise rational and even sensible adults feel the need to whip themselves into a frenzy over the pending arrival of the latest iPhone. To be honest, I find the whole charade rather entertaining and have taken to sauntering over to the Trafford Centre come launch day, …

    reghardware 5 Oct 07:00

  • NASA to recruit fresh batch of astronauts

    Fancy going into space once every ten years?

    Ever wanted to get into space, armed with your three PhDs or test pilot's licence, but nothing suitable comes up in the Jobcentre search? Well luckily for you, NASA is hunting for a new class of astronauts - but, be warned, new recruits may wait a long time to get into space. NASA is seeking astronaut candidates who will …

    Space 5 Oct 07:57

  • Security by obscurity not so bad after all, argues prof

    Game theory suggests secrecy has some uses

    Security by obscurity may not be so bad after all, according to a provocative new research paper that questions long-held security maxims. The Kerckhoffs' Principle holds that withholding information on how a system works is no security defence. A second accepted principle is that a defender has to defend against all possible …

    Security 5 Oct 08:24

  • Judge cracks down on Bayesian stats dodginess in court

    Analysis Terry Pratchett effect angers beak

    A judge in a (sadly unnamed) British case has decided that Bayes' Theorem - a formula used in court to calculate the odds of whodunnit - shouldn't be used in criminal trials. Or at least, it shouldn't be relied upon as it has been in recent years: according to the judge, before any expert witness plugs data into the theorem to …

    Law 5 Oct 09:00

  • Samsung seeks bans on the iPhone 4S

    Korean giant gunning for Jesus-mobe in latest battle of patent war

    Samsung is making good on its promise to block the iPhone 5, even though it's now an iPhone 4S, announcing on its blog that it will be filing for preliminary injunctions in Paris and Milan against the new Jesus-mobe iteration today. The Korean electronics giant is citing two patent infringements related to the WCDMA standard …

    Business 5 Oct 09:17

  • Dell, HP Ultrabooks out Q1 2012

    'Ivy Bridge' inside?

    Acer may have rushed to introduce skinny laptops based on Intel's Ultrabook specification - it debuted the Aspire S3 at the IFA show in September - but fellow top-three PC vendors Dell and HP haven't. Clearly heeding Intel's warning that much better Ultrabook-centric chippery - its next-gen 'Ivy Bridge' platform, essentially …

    reghardware 5 Oct 09:22

  • Belgian telcos ordered to blockade Pirate Bay

    Court rules ISPs must cut access to torrent site

    The Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (BAF) has urged all Belgian ISPs to block freetard site The Pirate Bay after a higher Antwerp court ordered Belgian cable company Telenet and telco Belgacom to make the site inaccessible to their subscribers. The banning order comes after an Antwerp Commercial Court last year believed such a …

    Crime 5 Oct 09:36

  • Oracle OpenWorld snub fails to put off Salesforce CEO

    Ticked-off Benioff sets up speech at nearby hotel

    Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has managed to turn an Oracle slight into a nice little piece of publicity, vowing that his scheduled keynote at the OpenWorld conference would go ahead in a nearby hotel. Not content with stirring up trouble with IBM, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison also decided to annoy Benioff by cancelling his slot …

    Software 5 Oct 09:50

  • Five... great iPhone racers

    iGamer Motor-vation

    If there was any doubt about the suitability of the iPhone or iPad as a platform for racing games, the sheer variety, number and quality of those now available on the App Store has surely killed it stone dead. So many, in fact, that picking a decent one can seem daunting. Here's a helping hand: what I think are the five best …

    reghardware 5 Oct 10:00

  • Symantec fends off VMware for data centre throne

    Symantec Vision Virtualisation and clouds targeted

    Symantec is fortifying its Storage and Availability Management software (SAMG) for the virtualised cloud world with the release of version 6. The company is pushing its multi-vendor credentials and aims to bolster its software's role in security, availability and storage management in data centres. However, it faces two …

    Hardware 5 Oct 10:14

  • Boffins place living creature under control of brain chip

    Hooray! Monkey butlers at last! Well, rodent butlers

    Boffins at Tel Aviv University have successfully implanted an artificial cerebellum into the skull of a rat with brain damage and restored its ability to move. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that coordinates movements and it has a relatively straightforward neuronal architecture, which is why the researchers chose it …

    Biology 5 Oct 10:29

  • Bulgarian airbag saves Russian in knife attack

    Blade stuck in 'huge' jub implant

    A Moscow woman emerged pretty much unscathed from a vicious knife attack at the hands of her husband after the blade wedged in one of her silicone breast implants. According to Pravda, the unnamed 40-year-old had a boob job five years ago, in which she received "size four" enhancements. During a row, her hubby grabbed a knife …

    Odds and Sods 5 Oct 10:41

  • Bletchley Park lands £4.6m restoration bonanza

    Codebreaking centre still needs private donations

    Wartime codebreakers HQ Bletchley Park has won a grant of £4.6m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The much-needed funds will be used to build a visitor centre at the historic WWII number-crunching centre as well as carrying out restoration work on other buildings at the facility - once matched funding of £1.7m from private- …

    Security 5 Oct 10:52

  • Sony Ericsson: 'We dropped the ball on iPhone'

    No, really? Good god

    Sony Ericsson's CEO has admitted the company should have cottoned on earlier to the iPhone's success, though as he wasn't in the chair at the time it's not his fault. Talking to the Wall Street Journal, current CEO Bert Nordberg admits the company should have taken the iPhone more seriously back in 2007, although the same …

    Networks 5 Oct 11:01

  • Europe to launch bold Sun swoop mission

    And dark energy space 'scope will probe universe's growth

    The European Space Agency hopes to blast into space a probe that will get closer to the Sun than any other craft has managed. Artist's impression of Solar Orbiter. Photo by European Space Agency The ESA said on Tuesday it aims to launch the Solar Orbiter from Cape Canaveral on a NASA-provided Atlas rocket in 2017 in the …

    Science 5 Oct 11:16

  • Unite calls off strikes at Fujitsu

    Keeps quiet on pay deal for members

    Trade union Unite has halted strike action at Fujitsu UK after negotiating an eleventh-hour deal with management over pay. However, unlike the Public and Commercial (PCS) Services union, Unite stopped short of publicly discussing the deal it had brokered for members. Industrial action has been due to take place in Manchester …

    Channel Register 5 Oct 11:21

  • Americans offered sleep-monitoring datatouch card

    What next? NFC incontinence pants?

    T-Mobile USA is pushing out SleepTrak, a card which accumulates data on the user's sleeping habits and uploads it to a Nokia C7 for analysis. The card has been around for a few months, but the company told NFC Times it has only sold a few hundred units prior to the new endorsement from the carrier which reckons hypochondriac …

    Wireless 5 Oct 11:29

  • Can a user really do BI from the desktop?

    Commentards, tell us what you think.

    Analysts at Gartner (and Forrester, and elsewhere) have predicted that 2011 will be the year of self service business intelligence, as users demand tools to help them access and understand company data. The users’ motives are easy to understand: identifying and responding quickly to trends and patterns in business data is vital …

    Applications 5 Oct 11:46

  • Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman

    Review Last shot for the not-so-smart music phone?

    Recent figures may show that smartphones are now outselling no-so-smart mobiles in Europe, but that’s not to say ordinary handsets are dead and buried. New to their ranks is Sony Ericsson’s Mix Walkman, which attempts to put some life into the old dog by exploiting Sony’s music player branding. The Mix is rather chunky - it's …

    reghardware 5 Oct 12:00

  • What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

    Apple plays it safe on radio tech, Paypal et al sigh with relief

    No 4G radio and no NFC payment technology: the only new radio on the iPhone 4S is a CDMA connection for travellers that, it turns out, most travellers won't be able to use. We know Cupertino has been looking into Near Field Communications for a year or two, and presumably decided that the technology was still too immature to …

    Networks 5 Oct 12:08

  • Google+ inertia sets in at Chocolate Factory

    Googly elite uninspired by Googly service

    Google+ – unlike Buzz and other failed Chocolate Factory experiments – may have graduated from the soon-to-be-defunct Labs wing of the ad broker's web estate, but questions remain about the company's plans to make it THE social network platform online. It doesn't help that many of the top bosses at Google are struggling to …

    Software 5 Oct 12:14

  • The $35 android tablet, a snip at $50

    UK designed, Indian built

    The Indian government has unveiled its $35 android tablet, and admitted that with shipping, boxes and manuals it will ultimately cost $50, but government subsidies will make up the difference. The Aakash is designed and built by UK firm Datawind, known for their cheapo web-browsing kit. It features a resistive screen, a 366MHz …

    Networks 5 Oct 12:29

  • Apple predicted AI assistant for tablets in 1987

    You can not be Siri-us

    At Apple's iPhone event yesterday, the company talked-up its voice-activated AI assistant, Siri - a feature of iOS 5 that'll first see beta release on the iPhone 4S. This concept is nothing new, though. In fact, Apple predicted a virtual assistant would hit tablet-like devices back in the 1980s, when Steve Jobs was busy with …

    reghardware 5 Oct 12:36

  • UK firms splash even more cash on online ads

    Videos and search adverts do well despite downturn

    Despite eurozone woes, volatile markets and double-dip recession fears, online advertising continues to climb in the UK, according to a report on the first half of 2011. The UK's online ad spend grew 13.5 per cent to £2.26bn, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) said, adding that digital advertising now accounted for a record …

    Business 5 Oct 12:44

  • The security mistakes users make

    Live broadcast Because you can't always be there for them

    Social networks, local admins, unpatched software, missing USBs: the causes of security problems in your business are often not just the big stuff that tries to get inside the firewall, it's the little problems that are already on the inside. On October 13th at 16:00 BST/11:00 EDT, our latest live Regcast questions- Could …

    Enterprise Security 5 Oct 13:00

  • I/O holds up the traffic in virtual systems

    Clearing the bottlenecks

    We can now host 512 virtual machines on a single physical server. That's a lot of virtual machines trying to squeeze a lot of I/O out of a single server's networking interfaces. Meanwhile, vSphere 5 is out. It arrived with an indeterminately large quantity of truly outstanding features that were completely overshadowed by a …

    Enterprise Tech 5 Oct 13:00

  • EMC snaps up database optimiser for $10m

    Zettapoint was founded with just $1.5m

    EMC is buying database optimisation company Zettapoint for a reported $10m. Privately held Zettapoint was founded in 2008, and funded by Jerusalem Venture Partners with just $1.5m. The company says its DBclassify software "provides unparalleled usage-based classification for optimising Oracle databases and their associated …

    SaaS 5 Oct 13:14

  • Chinese comedians in Samsung hybrid drive con

    Clever trick ...

    Read this and laugh out loud. The Jitbit blog reports that a Russian IT repair shop near the Chinese border had a customer come in with a real-looking Samsung disk drive which only played five minutes of a stored movie. The reason was that it wasn't a Samsung disk drive at all. Instead it was a phoney, with a small flash …

    Odds and Sods 5 Oct 13:29

  • Channel giant SCH sales up, profit down

    Tax bill, crappy economy pulled down bottom line

    Specialist Computer Holdings – parent of reseller SCC and distributor SDG – pushed up sales in the year ended 31 March 2011, but the biting economy and the payment of a disputed tax bill dampened profits. Group sales at the channel behemoth went up 11 per cent to £2.48bn but operating profits fell 2.1 per cent to £22.9m, while …

    Channel Register 5 Oct 13:42

  • Hitachi Data Systems on the acquisition trail again

    Shoden buy to create make mega data-systems beast

    Hitachi Data Systems has announced its intention to buy Shoden Data Systems. Data systems companies have to stick together, right? Shoden, a systems integration supplier to data centres, is based in South Africa and has a UK operation as well as others across sub-Saharan Africa. It has been an HDS partner for 11 years, …

    Storage 5 Oct 14:00

  • Crooks beat anti-fraud cops with old-school bank scams

    Fraud losses fell overall

    Payment card and banking fraud losses fell this year against a rise in cash pilfered through old-school cheque and telephone banking fraud, according to figures released today for the UK. Total fraudulent losses dropped to £169.8m between January and June 2011, down 9 per cent from £187m in the same period last year. Losses …

    Security 5 Oct 14:29

  • When Ellison goes, will he go gracefully?

    Comment Alpha Oracle CEO may never be ready to be replaced...

    Graceful CEO exits are rare: the driven man with his hands on the corporate steering wheel finds it hard to sit in a rear seat and let someone else drive. More often they want to be the satnav. As far as they're concerned, it's their way or an abrupt turn onto the highway. How will Larry Ellison leave Oracle? Will he do a Dan …

    Financial News 5 Oct 15:01

  • IBM woos Oracle punters smarting from price hikes

    Stop, think, turn to Big Blue

    IBM is trying to exploit a series of Oracle software and hardware price hikes in recent years to woo firms into using its database appliances. Following an OpenWorld week that has seen Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fire a couple of salvos at rivals, IBM has lifted the covers off a Stop, Think and Save migration programme. "The …

    Channel Register 5 Oct 15:29

  • iPhone 5: Apple 4S, pundits 0

    Comment Hacks, bloggers cover asses, as Apple readies right kit

    Hell hath no fury like a hack spurned. Don't agree? Then look at the huge numbers of column inches being devoted today to Apple's "failure" to come up to journalist expectations and announce the iPhone 5. Journalists being journalists, there's no hint of an apology that all their breathless prose devoted to iPhone 5 rumours …

    reghardware 5 Oct 15:35

  • Disney's animated back-catalog gets re-released in 3D

    Dizzy yet?

    Following last month's successful 3D re-release of The Lion King, Disney has announced four more animated classics from its extensive collection are set for the extra-dimensional polish-up too. Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and The Little Mermaid are all to be re-released in 3D starting from January next …

    reghardware 5 Oct 15:54

  • Mobile industry fights San Fran 'carcinogen' labelling

    Coffee shops don't have it, they're equally dangerous

    The ongoing battle against product labelling in San Francisco has now hit the courts, with the cellular industry fighting the City of San Francisco for the right to avoid mandatory labelling. The court action, filed with the Northern District of California, argues that the City ordinance requiring mobile phone retailers to …

    Networks 5 Oct 16:01

  • Mozilla to Firefox users: Ditch crashtastic McAfee plugin

    Security FAIL... but is it Mozilla's or McAfee's?

    Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable a McAfee plugin that the open-source browser supplier blames for a high volume of crashes. McAfee's ScriptScan software causes "stability or security problems", according to Firefox. Users of the software are confronted with a message stating the plugin has been "blocked for your …

    Security 5 Oct 16:29

  • HP uncloaks 10GbE top-of-racker, IPv6 guidance

    Interop 2011 A day of HP sanity: no Apotheker, Whitman, or clueless board

    HP is polishing up some new switches and gussying up some others, following up on a broad set of announcements that it made back in May. The company is also trotting out some services to help customers make the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. With all the Sturm und Drang going on at HP these days, a calm and reasonable product …

    Data Networking 5 Oct 16:47

  • Water like that of Earth's oceans found in comet

    The seas may have arrived from the sky

    Ice found in a comet supports the theory that the earth's oceans were delivered to the planet in the form of crashing comets. It is thought that the Earth's oceans formed about 8 million years after the planet did, and scientists have long suggested comets as a cause. Many comets contain ice - unlike asteroids which are …

    Space 5 Oct 17:00

  • Cisco CEO: The future of communications is video

    OpenWorld John Chambers gets into prediction industry

    Cisco CEO John Chambers predicts that video is the future of global communications – and, coincidentally, his company can sell you the hardware to deliver it. “You may not agree, but I believe video will be the basis of all communication going forward,” he told attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. “It …

    Data Networking 5 Oct 17:14

  • Meltemi is real – Nokia’s skunkworks Linux

    You can still p-p-p-pick up a Penguin

    Sources tell us that Nokia is developing a Linux-based replacement for its S40 phones, called Meltemi. The news was leaked, accurately, by the Wall Street Journal last week. Now we can confirm it. The codename turned up in an internal communication we saw in April, referring to opportunities for redundant Meego staff “in the …

    Operating Systems 5 Oct 17:25

  • Rackspace spins up OpenStack Foundation

    Exclusive Will hand over trademarks and copyrights to independent group

    Rackspace is letting go of key components of the OpenStack Linux-for-the-cloud initiative it is helping to lead, with the creation of an OpenStack Foundation, The Reg has learned. The company has told a small number of OpenStackers, via a confidential email seen by The Reg, that it is in the process of creating the OpenStack …

    Infrastructure 5 Oct 17:29

  • Teradata adds hardware compression to data warehouses

    Compress this, Larry

    Teradata invented the data warehousing market and is not about to let Larry Ellison take it over without a fight. At this week's Partners Conference in San Diego, which is where Teradata Labs does the development of some of the hardware and software that goes into its various data warehousing appliances, the company is …

    Servers 5 Oct 18:53

  • Netflix on global spree

    Look at what people steal to find out what they want

    Netflix is bullish about its international expansion strategy and will be aggressively rolling out the platform to more territories and acquiring rights for global content, according to chief content officer Ted Sarandos. “We have been in Canada over a year and have now surpassed BitTorrent as the biggest carrier of digital …

    Music and Media 5 Oct 20:58

  • Oracle previews RHEL-ish 2 Linux kernel

    OpenWorld Lawrence Torvalds

    As part of the OpenWorld extravaganza being hosted by Oracle in San Francisco this week, Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at the software giant and the guy who is responsible for the company's Linux and Xen hypervisor variants, gave a brief preview of the next iteration of Oracle's homegrown Linux kernel. Oracle Linux …

    Operating Systems 5 Oct 21:54

  • Patent troll lawsuits may be on thin ice

    Is Innovatio trying an end run around new laws?

    Innovatio’s strategy of suing Wi-Fi end users might already be on uncertain ground, according to an American IP lawyer. Brad Pedersen, a partner at Patterson Thuente Christensen Pedersen and chair of the firm’s patent practice group, told The Register the form of the filings makes it clear that Innovatio is trying to work …

    Business 5 Oct 22:00

  • Salesforce.com CEO savages Ellison for OpenWorld tactics

    OpenWorld Guerrilla marketing and faux demo a PR disaster for Oracle

    There was not one but two demonstrations being held in San Francisco Wednesday; a real one carried out in support of Occupy Wall Street and a fake one outside the St Regis hotel staged by Salesforce.com. While the first demonstration is inspired by corporate greed, the second was sparked after Oracle refused Salesforce.com use …

    Software 5 Oct 22:28

  • Infraserve goes with CA while Ninefold looks to open source world

    Clouds at both ends of the pitch

    CA is celebrating another win in the Australian cloud market, with Verb Group company Infraserve adding AppLogic-based platform-as-a-service offerings to its cloud portfolio. Infraserve had previously concentrated on the cloud infrastructure market, owning and operating its own data centre hosting HP pods with Cisco networking …

    Cloud 5 Oct 23:00