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28th October 2011 Archive

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  • Murdoch’s Oz hacks to get special paywall discount

    Get your News at half price

    The News Limited paywall experiment in Australia which started on Monday has received a less-than-rapturous welcome among its journalists, who are being asked to pay to access the site. If New Matilda is correct, hacks at Holt Street found an e-mail in their in-box offering them accounts at half the price charged to the rest …

    Music and Media 28 Oct 00:30

  • Catch of the Day on track for $AU250m

    New group buying sites on way

    Investors may be turning off the group buying craze in the US – courtesy of Groupon - but in Australia the verve for online discounts continues to ka-ching. James Packer backed, CatchOfTheDay, the operator of Scoopon.com.au and online supermarket Groceryrun.com.au, has hit its fifth year of operation on track to deliver …

    Music and Media 28 Oct 01:00

  • Asia Pac networks filled with entertainment

    Netflix still hogs US bandwidth

    Asia-Pacific bandwidth is increasingly being consumed by users of ‘real-time entertainment’ according to the latest Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report. The category includes on demand content such as streamed or buffered audio and video via platforms such as YouTube, Google Video or Spotify. real-time entertainment is the …

    Music and Media 28 Oct 01:30

  • Hands on with Canon's EOS-1D X full-frame DSLR

    First look Shooting star

    Canon’s top-end DSLR range has long been a slightly confusing place. The EOS-5D, both Mark I and II cameras, were self evident – slower, very high-quality stills models for studio photographers on a budget. The high-end, featuring EOS-1D variants was baffling, though. Next year's model: Canon's EOS-1D X If you were a …

    reghardware 28 Oct 06:00

  • Hackers commandeer US government satellites

    Blame China

    Hackers interfered with two US government satellites on four separate occasions in 2007 and 2008, according to a report scheduled to be released next month by a congressional commission. In June 2008 and again in October of the same year, a Terra AM-1 earth observation satellite operated by NASA experienced interference at the …

    Security 28 Oct 07:03

  • LSI snaps up flash controller company

    Big news on the solid state front

    Flash industry consolidation took another step forward, with semiconductor company LSI buying flash controller startup SandForce to strengthen its server and storage array flash offerings for ultrabooks, notebooks, servers and storage arrays. The price is $322m cash plus taking on $48m of stock options and restricted shares …

    Storage 28 Oct 08:01

  • We like zombies… because we are zombies

    Social scientist sees humanity in their glazed, undead eyes

    We make zombies in our own image, says Durham University social scientist Dr Nick Pearce, and he reckons that the braindead machine-gun fodder zombies of today ain't a good sign. Dr Pearce will present his paper Can Zombies help us understand today's society? to "The Festival of Social Science" on 2 November. He thinks we need …

    Odds and Sods 28 Oct 08:18

  • Details of all internet traffic should be logged – MEP

    Politician claims data records will help ID paedos and predators

    A member of the European Parliament wants users' "traffic data", rather than the specific content of online communications, to be logged under expanded EU laws on data storage. This is according to a statement from the European People's Party (EPP) at the European Parliament. Tiziano Motti, an Italian MEP, wants to extend the …

    Law 28 Oct 08:31

  • Surc universal remote case

    Accessory of the Week Best way to control your AV kit with your iPhone?

    I’ve looked at a number of devices, including the Gear4 Unity and the ThinkFlood RedEye, that allow you to use an iOS device as a remote control for your TV, DVD player and other AV kit. The Surc is another. However, it takes a slightly different approach. Instead of using a plug-in dongle or a standalone IR transmitter, the …

    reghardware 28 Oct 09:00

  • HP has another crack at fondleslab market

    Meg strokes Windows 8, unsure about webOS

    HP will make another run at the fondleslab market. During a conference call regarding HP's astonishing decision to keep its PC biz after all, the company said it will bring out a Windows 8 tablet and is evaluating what to do with webOS, the TouchPad tablet operating system. Although ex-HP CEO Leo Apotheker killed off the …

    PCs & Chips 28 Oct 09:29

  • Ingram bemoans tough European retail market

    Operational hitches in Oz don't help Q3 numbers either

    Ingram Micro profits have tumbled by nearly two-thirds on the back of an ultra aggressive pricing market in Europe and the fall out from the botched ERP upgrade in Oz. The world's largest distie – which last week warned of the issues impacting results – recorded a 5 per cent year-on-year rise in sales to $8.9bn for calendar Q3 …

    Channel Register 28 Oct 09:47

  • Samsung making over half its cash from its mobes

    Apple won't be ousting these guys without a serious fight

    Samsung won't be leaving the mobe sector in a hurry, as it's now making more than half its money on smartphones, according to its third quarter results. If Apple was hoping the ongoing patent litigation could help push the Korean chaebol out of the market, it can think again, since Samsung is extremely unlikely to turn its …

    Mobile 28 Oct 10:02

  • Nokia: The first year of the Elopcalypse

    Analysis Timing is everything

    As the sun sets on Nokia World 2011, you have to pinch yourself to believe the transformation from a year ago. The last Nokia World in 2010 was addressed by an outgoing lame duck CEO, and his Number Two roared that "Nokia is Back!" before adding that he, too, was packing his suitcase and leaving. Symbian was still an unhappy …

    Mobile 28 Oct 10:22

  • UK CB radio crowd celebrates three decades of legality

    Thirty years since the bears stopped listening

    Breakers around the UK will have their ears on come 2 November, holding out for a copy to mark 30 years since Citizen's Band turned legit in the UK. It was 2 November 1981 when the inventor of CB, Al Gross, symbolically called 10-4 for a copy from Trafalgar Square without risking arrest. But he did so using an encoding system …

    Wireless 28 Oct 10:39

  • 'Social' TV app Zeebox goes live

    iPlayer guru's next big thing

    As of this morning anyone can try Zeebox, the new interactive TV venture from Anthony Rose. Rose rescued the BBC's iPlayer and was chief techie behind YouView, formerly Project Canvas – prior to that he was Kazaa's CTO. Zeebox works both as a TV remote control and a mobile app, providing a backchannel to live TV via the web. …

    Applications 28 Oct 10:59

  • Zimbabwean claims prostitute turned into donkey

    Novel excuse for making beast with six legs

    A Zimbabwean man collared having sex with a donkey sensationally claimed the object of his affections was actually a prostitute who mysteriously metamorphosed into a hot piece of ass. According to this report, 28-year-old Sunday Moyo was cuffed after a couple of cops found him making the beast with six legs in his yard in …

    Odds and Sods 28 Oct 11:14

  • Boss leaves robot in charge of office

    Judge droid

    When you manage an office of 25 staff members, working from home can be an impossible prospect. Not for entrepreneur Richard Garriott, though, chief of a games development company in Austin, Texas. Since July, he's apparently often been found directing the company from home, using a moving robot that wheels around the …

    reghardware 28 Oct 11:25

  • 'With great code comes great responsibility'

    QuotW Plus: Jobs on acid, 'a million cocks' for El Reg

    This was the week when hacking group Anonymous felt it was doing the world a favour by shutting down a child pornography site and outing its membership list, forgetting that the people whose actual job is dealing with this sort of thing (the police) might have liked to arrest the members and get some info out of them. It was …

    Bootnotes 28 Oct 11:29

  • Feds nab granny in moon rock sting

    74-year-old who tried to sell husband's pressie arrested

    A Californian grandmother was taken down in a sting operation by government agents when she tried to sell a tiny piece of moon rock dust she claims to have owned for nearly four decades. Moon rocks tend to be worth quite a lot, due to their scarcity and the difficulty in getting more of them, and estimates suggest this dust …

    Policing 28 Oct 11:44

  • Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

    Review Third time lucky

    Naughty Dog has created a monster; I remember when I first snapped up the original Uncharted, back when Sony was still looking for its first killer PS3 title. Resistance: Fall of Man had been mooted as such a title but ultimately disappointed, Motorstorm wowed us with its graphics but was limited by its genre, Heavenly Sword …

    reghardware 28 Oct 12:00

  • Internap joins OpenStack cloud race for 'first'

    Beefier, networkier, more availability

    OpenStack's produced its second "first" of the year, with managed service provider Internap claiming commercial availability of the first OpenStack cloud compute service. Internap has launched its Open Public Cloud compute service, which beefs up the core OpenStack compute code – Nova – with networking and high-availability …

    Platform 28 Oct 12:01

  • Server, disc glitches mar Battlefield 3 launch

    War goes bang

    Battlefield 3 shot onto shelves today and multiplayer functionality was immediately slaughtered by an army of problems. The keenly anticipated EA title was picked up by eager fans last night, who returned home to find the EA Online servers down. Many complaints on the official Battlelog forums prompted developer Dice to Tweet …

    reghardware 28 Oct 12:12

  • Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

    Macs are pretty digital handcuffs

    As if Richard Stallman's first pot shot at Steve Jobs didn't cause enough outrage, the founder of the Free Software Foundation has decided to clarify his stance – with some more criticism. Apple products digitally handcuff their users, Stallman observes. And the fact that they are pretty just makes it worse. According to the …

    PCs & Chips 28 Oct 12:15

  • Boffins teach old radios new channel-hopping tricks

    ITU Telecom World Smart comms for dumb tech

    Alongside self-congratulatory presentations on how telecommunications is improving life on Earth, ITU Telecom World also hosts detailed technical discussions about making use of new techniques, including the developing field of cognitive radio. Cognitive radios are supposed to be able to make use of spectrum that is fallow …

    Wireless 28 Oct 12:29

  • CTIA wins battle over cancer labelling on phones

    San Francisco down, but not out

    A California court has ruled that forcing phone retailers to display cancer warnings infringes their first amendment rights, unless said warnings also point out the FCC's scepticism over the threat. The Northern District Court agreed that there was no evidence that mobiles cause cancer, and that the flyer and poster the city …

    Mobile 28 Oct 12:45

  • Quantum claws its way back to profit

    Gets Standard & Poor upgrade...

    Quantum returned to profit after its unexpected loss last quarter and has expanded into SME filer storage and virtual server backup and dedupe. There was a $5m loss in its previous quarter the first in its fiscal 2012, on revenues of $154m, some of that put at the door of sales mis-execution. This time, in the quarter ending …

    Financial News 28 Oct 13:00

  • Steve Jobs: the Exclusive Biography

    Review A life less ordinary

    If you're looking for any fresh insight into the character of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, you won't get it from Walter Isaacson's biography. Likewise, if you hope that some real, private Jobs will rise from the pages to give the lie to the erratic, abusive, vehement control freak that was the CEO's public persona, you'll be …

    reghardware 28 Oct 13:02

  • Isilon on its separate scale-out reality

    Comment Why it's different from NetApp ...

    Isilon has said it has a NetApp differentiation problem with Sunnyvale's version of scale-out filing conflicting with its own. Meanwhile it is looking appreciatively at deduplication, server flash and running apps on its S-Series. El Reg was briefed by EMC Isilon's marketing VP Sam Grocott. He said Isilon "recorded around 60 …

    Storage 28 Oct 13:29

  • SeeSaw shut down

    Plug pulled

    UK video-on-demand service SeeSaw has closed down. Founder Arqiva, the company that owns and runs Britain's terrestrial digital TV transmission infrastructure, put SeeSaw up for sale in January 2011. Unable to find a buyer, it announced the service's closure would take place the following June. At the eleventh hour, Arqiva …

    reghardware 28 Oct 13:54

  • Nintendo reiterates plans for 2012 Wii U launch

    No 3DS repeats, insists president

    Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata has stated again that the Wii U will be released next year, promising a final build will be on show at E3 in June 2012. The announcement means we'll probably have to wait until the summer for an official Wii U launch, although we could be tapping our thumbs even longer as the company attempts …

    reghardware 28 Oct 13:54

  • Acer first PC vendor to confirm price hike

    Impact of Thai flooding on disk drives blamed

    Acer has become the first major PC vendor to confirm a price rise in response to flooding in Thailand, which it says has led to a 20 per cent hike in the cost of disk drives. This comes just days after Acer described the outlook for HDD supplies as uncertain, while rivals firms agreed drive component prices would head north, …

    Channel Register 28 Oct 14:01

  • Safe as Windows: Smartphones' security nightmare

    Open ... And Shut Apple, Android and the PC experience

    These days, smartphones are a bit like Dr Seuss' mythical "thneed," doing anything and everything – including (gasp!) making phone calls. Unless you're on AT&T, of course, with its penchant for dropping calls. Ironically, however, we're fast approaching the time when users may care far more about PC-era issues like viruses and …

    Mobile 28 Oct 14:19

  • Dell bundles Ubuntu Linux on PCs in China

    Hái méi for Ubuntu on PowerEdge servers

    Commercial Linux distributor Canonical and PC and server maker Dell are tag teaming to peddle Linux on PCs in China. According to a blog post, Dell and Canonical have announced a partnership to push Linux on consumer PCs in China through 220 retail stores operated by Dell in the country. Dell's Chinese PC stores sporting …

    Servers 28 Oct 14:40

  • Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 rockets, C devs still best paid

    Silicon Roundabout is hiring

    Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Adzuna. Adzuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are …

    Developer 28 Oct 15:01

  • HP UK PC team baying for rivals' blood

    Vendor back on the attack after landmark decision

    HP UK's PSG team is unsurprisingly eager to put to bed the disastrous events of the past few months and go on the offensive. CEO Meg Whitman vowed to make a decision on the future ownership of PSG by the end of this month, and that HP is keeping the unit is not a huge surprise, neither is the fact it will have another stab at …

    Channel Register 28 Oct 15:29

  • NetApp scores video benchmark wins

    But it's E-Series... not ONTAP 8.1

    NetApp says its Media Content Management (MCM) system has outperformed all previously ATTO-tested storage subsystems. This was with the Engenio-based E5460 array and StorNext, Quantum's virtualised file system manager, not with FAS storage arrays running Data ONTAP. NetApp's Media Content Management system is designed to …

    Storage 28 Oct 16:01

  • Fancy buying Brocade – again?

    It's in play

    Fibre Channel and Ethernet networking company Brocade may be shopping itself around again, the The Wall Street Journal reports – again. Two years after reporting that Brocade had hired investment banker Qatalyst to find a buyer, the WSJ is at it again. According to people familiar with the matter, Brocade is up for sale, with …

    Storage 28 Oct 16:29

  • RIM backdoor access for Indian probers

    Mumbai centre up and running since earlier this year

    RIM has opened a monitoring centre in Mumbai to help the Indian government sip data from Blackberry users there, said the Wall Street Journal today, quoting unnamed sources. The Canadian firm opened the small facility earlier this year to deal with requests from Indian intelligence agencies, the paper reports. RIM will hand …

    Wireless 28 Oct 17:01

  • ARM specs out first 64-bit RISC chips

    Punching Intel, AMD in the server jewels from below

    The ARM RISC processor is getting true 64-bit processing and memory addressing - removing the last practical barrier to seeing an army of ARM chips take a run at the desktops and servers that give Intel and AMD their moolah. At the ARM TechCon conference in Santa Clara on Thursday, the top brass at ARM Holdings, the company …

    PCs & Chips 28 Oct 18:16

  • Apple shifts Lossless Audio Codec to open source

    Audiophiles pleased at Cupertino’s belated move

    Cupertino has open sourced its Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), seven years after first introducing it. The ALAC can reduce the amount of storage needed for audio files by as much as 50 per cent, but without losing any of the fidelity of the original recording. This is unlike lossy formats like MP3 and AAC, which strip out …

    Music and Media 28 Oct 18:36

  • Tesla pre-sells all 2012 Model S output

    Don't worry – there'll be 20,000 more in 2013

    If you've been dithering about whether you should pre-order Tesla Motors' Model S sedan, you've dithered too long. "We've actually sold out of all of next year's production in advance," Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Bloomberg's Betty Liu in a video interview. That would be "over 6,500" of the Model S, which will start at $49,900 …

    Science 28 Oct 19:31

  • Miley Cyrus cracker: 'I'm too short for the slammer!'

    Looking to avoid painful stretch inside

    A Tennessee man, found guilty of cracking the Gmail account of Miley Cyrus and posting private photos of her online, has asked the sentencing judge to spare him prison because of his diminutive stature. A teenaged Josh Holly was arrested by federal investigators three years ago after he correctly guessed the security question …

    Crime 28 Oct 20:52

  • Applied Micro leaps ahead in ARM server race

    ARMed and extremely dangerous – to Intel, AMD

    Applied Micro Circuits, a company known for networking chips and for dabbling a bit in embedded PowerPC processors, has aimed a haymaker of an ARM server chip right at the cloudy jaws of Intel and AMD. What's more, the specs divulged by Applied Micro – if all works according to plan – suggest that the x86 chip makers might end …

    Servers 28 Oct 21:34

  • Google TV receives (much needed) upgrade

    If at first you don't succeed...

    Google has announced a major upgrade to a product that has fallen flat on its Googly face: Google TV. "The initial version of Google TV wasn't perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn," Google's VP of product management Mario Queiroz and director of engineering Vincent Dureau co-wrote in a blog post on Friday …

    Music and Media 28 Oct 22:35

  • Microsoft cuts Azure storage pricing

    Shaves one cent per gigabyte, with volume discounts

    Microsoft has announced a series of changes in the pricing of its Azure storage service, with a tiny cut for everyone and big discounts for volume customers. Redmond has announced a general price cut of one cent per gigabyte, from 15 to 14 cents per month for those storing under a terabyte of data. This drops to 12.5 cents for …

    Cloud 28 Oct 23:47