12th December 2011 Archive

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Dell XPS 14z 14in Core i5 notebook

Review Shiny, shiny

Don’t worry, the XPS 14z may be one of Dell’s new "thin and powerful" range, but it doesn’t fit into the superslim Ultrabook category so there’s absolutely no need whatsoever for a gratuitous comparison with Apple's MacBook Air. It’s certainly a more stylish affair than the businesslike hardware I’m used to seeing from Dell. …

reghardware 12 Dec 07:00
REVEALED: People write things on Twitter, Media

'This is Bob Journo, reporting from up my own backside. It's dark'

If a tree falls over and no-one tweets about it, will it get picked up by the mainstream media or not? This is the sort of BIG question that media intelligence service Precise have tackled head-on in their research paper "The Year of the Perfect Twitter Storm". A STORM, like a Twitter storm but not on Twitter Their Twitter …

Music and Media 12 Dec 08:01
NAS door gives drag-n-drop access to linear tape vault

Head transplant for the tape monster

With StrongBox Crossroads has built a NAS head for tape libraries that combines disk access speed with tape's low-cost and longevity, and can cut file storage costs by 90 per cent. That's Crossroads' boast, although the NAS head is our term, and Rob Sims, Crossroads' president and CEO clarified it by saying: "It's a NAS head …

Storage 12 Dec 08:29
Hitachi GST unzips to reveal hard internal 4TB whopper

On sale on Tokyo's streets

Hitachi GST has a 4TB desktop disk drive on sale in Tokyo, although no product announcement has been made. This would be the world's first 4TB internal drive. As reported by Xbit Labs, the Deskstar 5K4000 is a 4TB drive with a 32MB cache and 6Gbit/s SATA interface. It features Advanced Format and Coolspin technology, spinning …

Channel Register 12 Dec 09:03
Concerns over plan to boost pharma by releasing NHS data

Voices join chorus of disquiet

Earlier this week the Government announced proposals (40-page / 2.1MB PDF) to change the NHS Constitution so that information stored about patients would be automatically shared with life sciences researchers via a new anonymised database unless patients elect for their details not to be included. While welcomed by the life …

ID 12 Dec 09:17
Gov websites' value not at all clear despite trimming

Beancounters unconvinced on greatness of cyber-Whitehall

The government has failed to routinely measure the benefits of its main portals - the Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov - which together have cost £90.3m over the past three years, says the National Audit Office (NAO). In its report titled Digital Britain One: Shared infrastructure and services for government …

Government 12 Dec 09:38
Philips Fidelio AS851 speaker

Geek Treat of the Week At last, a dock for your Android phone

Philips’ Fidelio speakers for iOS - such as the DS9 - have gotten a big thumbs-up from us in the past, and now Philips has released a new range specifically designed for Android devices. I got my hands on the top-of-the-range Fidelio AS851, which comes in at £200, but there’s also a smaller model called the AS351 priced at £ …

reghardware 12 Dec 10:00
iPad 3 out in March/April say part maker moles

Evidence pointing to production ramp-up?

The next iPad will be out in three to four months' time after going into production in January. Component makers are already shipping parts. So say a variety of moles in Asia, by way of DigiTimes. Their timeline puts the iPad 3's release in March or April 2012 - a year on from the shipment of the iPad 2, and two years on from …

reghardware 12 Dec 10:00
Floods? What floods? Seagate to open new Thai disk fab

Pumps $33m to soak up drive demand

Despite the devastating and deadly floods in Thailand, Seagate will spend $30m (£19.1m) to finish building a new disk read-write head plant in the south-east Asian nation. The 29,800m2 plant will be in Nakhon Ratchasima province in the country's north east. This region has been hit twice by severe flooding, once in October …

Channel Register 12 Dec 10:19
Elon Musk's private Dragon ship to dock with ISS in Feb

Then descend for splashdown, unlike European ATVs

NASA has announced that - all being well - the first mission to the International Space Station by a privately built and operated spacecraft will lift off on February 7. The craft will be a Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, both made and handled by techbiz visionary Elon Musk's new company SpaceX. The highest, …

Space 12 Dec 10:42
Global BlackBerry web filter vow to block child abuse sites

RIM proxy bypasses IWF list, telcos' firewalls

RIM's proxy-style web delivery is bypassing mobile network operators' filters on internet filth, including the thoroughly illegal sites listed by the Internet Watch Foundation, much to the delight disgust of the Daily Mail. RIM admits that it isn't implementing a block on sites identified by the IWF as hosts of banned material …

Mobile 12 Dec 11:02
Vote for the year's best computing kit

Reg Hardware Awards 2011 Choose 2011's best consumer IT items - and the worst

Ladies and gentlemen, the annual Reg Hardware Awards are here and, once again, we need your help finding the best - and the worst - consumer electronics and infotech products of 2011. This week, we're calling for your nominations for our Computing category, which gathers together our Laptop of the Year, Tablet of the Year, …

reghardware 12 Dec 11:09
Chinese strike hits Hitachi GST ahead of WD buy

Workers down tools in contracts row

More than 1,000 workers at a Hitachi GST-owned disk drive plant are striking over severance pay connected to the Western Digital acquisition. The strike, reported in various Chinese papers, is at the Shenzhen Hailiang Storage Product Co. This company was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 and makes head gimbal assemblies (HGA) for …

Channel Register 12 Dec 11:19
O2 rents out latest iPhones to tease panting fanbois

Keep 'em coming back for more ... every 12 months

O2 reckons it’s the first UK operator to lease smartphones to small businesses, providing annual upgrades and free insurance, but no phone at the end of the day. O2 Lease can be used to get iPhone 4Ses, or whatever tech-candy the executive staff are demanding, on a lease deal, from £55 a month with the usual bundle of call …

Small Biz 12 Dec 11:44
O2 calls for consumers to lease iPhones

Spreads out upfront costs but takes phones back

O2 claims to have become the first UK network operating to offer a leasing programme for smartphones. Customers will be able to rent iPhones for a year, eliminating the need for long-term commitment and large upfront costs. For £55 a month, O2 Lease offers folk an insured 16GB iPhone 4S, with 750 minutes' call time, unlimited …

reghardware 12 Dec 11:44
Sony ships 3G Android tablet

Wedge hardware connectivity upgraded

The 3G-enabled version of Sony's wedge-shaped Tablet S has surfaced at last. Launched in October, the 9.4in Tablet S runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb. It was initially offered only with Wi-Fi network access, but Sony promised a 3G version too. Not available back then, the Sony Tablet S 16GB 3G is now on sale, priced at £449 - £100 …

reghardware 12 Dec 11:55
2011's Best... Smartphones

Xmas Gift Guide Your portable internet companion

The modern smartphone is the true Swiss Army knife of gadgets. Want to listen to music? Watch a video? Browse the web? Read a book? Keep up with your friends? Take a picture? Make a video? A smartphone can do all those things, with ever increasing competence. In 2011, the smartphone just got better and better, with the arrival …

reghardware 12 Dec 12:00
Web scam-busting trio thwarted by mystery DDoS rocket

Updated Backhanded compliment for fraud alert sites

A bunch of anti-scam sites was knocked offline last week by fierce and apparently well-organised distributed denial of service attacks. The sites - 419eater.com, scamwarners.com and aa419.org (Artists Against 419) - were swamped with junk traffic for several days. During the attack the sites' administrators turned to blogs, …

ID 12 Dec 12:03
Smarter Networking for a smarter data centre

On demand Your DC's weak link?

We think a lot about the network that connects the client to the server room, but maybe not enough about the network inside the data centre. At least, until now. Our Reg poll shows that the problems of network consolidation, distributed apps and all that spaghetti stuff sticking out the back of your servers is beginning to worry …

Network Futures 12 Dec 12:12
NotW didn't delete Milly Dowler 'false hope' voicemail

Messages removed automatically, say cops

New evidence has emerged that shows that the News of the World was not responsible for deleting voicemail messages on murder victim Milly Dowler's phone, a move that gave her family false hope that the schoolgirl might still be alive. Scotland Yard officers working on Operation Weeting discovered phone logs that showed that …

Policing 12 Dec 12:29
Churlish gadget cusses those who use it

NSFW Periodic Table of Swearing on show

Cult comic collective Modern Toss is holding an exhibition this week, showcasing its 2011 catalogue of work, which includes the outfit's mannerless machine, the Interactive Periodic Table of Swearing. The smutty surface, which raised eyebrows when it debuted earlier this year, does exactly what it says on the tin, throwing …

reghardware 12 Dec 12:37
Greenland 'lurched upward' in 2010 as 100bn tons of ice melted

Maybe not time to panic just yet, though

Parts of southern Greenland apparently lurched upwards by as much as 20mm as glaciers melted and ran off into the sea during 2010, according to scientists. It's thought that as much as 100 billion tons more ice than usual may have vanished from the island's ice sheet that year. Professor Michael Bevis outlined his findings in …

Environment 12 Dec 12:43
Microsoft beaten down 16pc on software sales to NHS

UK.gov lifts ban after cost-cutting crunch talks

The UK's Cabinet Office has lifted the embargo on NHS Trusts buying Microsoft software after negotiating a double-digit discount on current pricing, according to sources familiar with the deal. As revealed by El Reg in the summer, Crown representative Stephen Kelly told trusts to freeze all but essential product spending with …

Channel Register 12 Dec 12:57
Amazon preps major update for Kindle Fire UI

Software out over the air within two weeks

Amazon will roll out a major update for its Kindle Fire firmware before Christmas, the online retail giant has promised. A company spokesman said the over-the-air update will improve the 7in tablet's performance, enhance navigation and provide owners with the option to adjust what appears in the UI's central 'recently accessed …

reghardware 12 Dec 13:08
Google execs eye NASA's Hangar One to park their air fleet

Dirigible aircraft-carrier dock to house web-lord jets

Google's co-founders are on a mission to save NASA's Hangar One, which once housed the US Navy's airships at Moffett Field but has latterly been rented by the Chocolate Factory's top brass to provide a shelter for - among other things - a fighter jet. Mountain View's troika of execs - Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt …

Bootnotes 12 Dec 13:18
Desktop virt used to cope with Starbucks workforce security

CIOs fear users roaming in public with backdoors exposed

The trend for mobile working has fuelled demand for desktop virtualisation, says a survey by Citrix as employers want to know that their out-of-office workforce are on secure machines. As employees increasingly work from home, or Starbucks, companies want ways to keep their devices and data secure. Desktop virtualisation is …

Virtualization 12 Dec 13:38
Durban failed: Relax, everyone

Analysis Only agreement is to keep going to conferences

The United Nations Organisation's COP17 climate conference has finished - and if you're a concerned energy user in IT manufacturing, an investor, or simply taxpayer, there shouldn't be anything the draft agreement to worry you. Not any more than you have to worry about already. The two-week long gathering of 15,000 was …

Environment 12 Dec 13:57
Brazil, China trample UK in virtualization gold rush

Western clouds befouled by legacy systems

Mexico, China and other rising economies are quicker at employing new technologies than the UK, meaning that Britain is lagging behind in the shift to server virtualisation, according to a survey by Dell and Intel. "The virtualisation rates are lowest where there are the highest legacy systems," said Bryan Jones, director of …

Virtualization 12 Dec 14:18
Meet the boffin who gave GPUs a bigger bang for the Buck

SC2011 Kudos to CUDA's pioneer Ian Buck

One of the presentations I caught at SC11 was by GPU computing pioneer Ian Buck - which is a good name for a pioneer, I think. Buck’s Stanford PhD thesis, Stream Computing on Graphics Hardware, capped his research into using GPUs as computing resources and his work to develop Brook, one of the earliest programming languages …

HPC Blog 12 Dec 14:43
Fake anti-virus victims in line for slice of $8m payout pie

Scareware swindlers' ill-gotten gains shared out by FTC

US watchdogs plan to refund victims of scareware scams using seized assets from fake anti-virus peddler Innovative Marketing. More than 300,000 consumers, taken in by a scam that warned them they needed to purchase dodgy software to get rid of non-existent security threats, are in line to get a slice of $8 million forfeited by …

Crime 12 Dec 15:04
BT fibre rollout reaches Scotland, Wales

178 exchanges earmarked

BT's Openreach wing plans to deploy its fibre technology to a further 178 exchanges, the national telco confirmed today. It said that the majority of those exchanges would be upgraded in 2012. Once that work is complete, around 1.8 million homes and businesses will have access to BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet or fibre-to-the- …

Telecoms 12 Dec 15:21
Disk fab floods rinse $1bn off Intel's Q4 revenue

Drive shortage chips away at CPU demand

Chip maker Intel has slashed its final quarter outlook, admitting it will fall short of the company's previous forecast due to a hard drive supply shortage - sparked by flooding in Thai disk factories. The vendor said it now expects to bank Q4 revenue of about $13.7bn (£8.7bn), compared to an earlier prediction of $14.7bn for …

Channel Register 12 Dec 15:42
EU stalls Googorola anti-competition probe

Rivals invited to have their say first

The EU has temporarily suspended its probe into Google's planned buyout of Motorola Mobility because it wants more information, including comments from Google's competitors. The antitrust authority has been reviewing Google's merger with Motorola Mobility for breaches of European competition law. The EU Competition Commission …

Business 12 Dec 16:10
Royalty-free web vid spec sets sail with Apple's help

Updated MPEG-DASH rides choppy seas of patents and bad networks

A proposed standard to stream video online smoothly, regardless of network conditions, has been pushed forward with some rather unexpected patent-holder help. MPEG-DASH was approved in a vote by ISO national member bodies as a way to stream media over HTTP. Publication of the standard is expected "shortly". MPEG-DASH could …

Developer 12 Dec 16:41
Call of Duty is hottest selling entertainment product ever

Quicker to cash $1bn than Avatar

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has exploded past James Cameron's 3D blockbuster, Avatar, to became the fastest entertainment offering of any kind to achieve $1bn in sales. The game arrived at the milestone 16 days after its release on 8 November - one day less than Avatar took on its release in 2009. Explosive revenue Then …

reghardware 12 Dec 17:01
Microsoft and Amazon soar above other Clouds

If you can't say anything nice don't say anything - Nasuni

Cloud storage gateway supplier Nasuni has ranked the clouds its gateway hooks up to and reckons six are good and ten are crap (our term). Nasuni ranked the cloud service providers (CSPs) in terms of performance, stability, availability and scalability, by applying a sequence of tests over time: - API Integration, to ensure …

Cloud Business 12 Dec 18:03
Microsoft updates Azure with SDK and Hadoop preview

SQL improvements and open source support included

Microsoft has updated Azure in time for Christmas, with new tools for developers, reduced storage and operation costs for SQL, and Redmond’s promised integration with Hadoop as a limited preview for those who’ve been not naughty but nice. For developers, Azure now has access to libraries for .NET, Java, and Node.js, hosted on …

Cloud 12 Dec 18:54
Japan launches, orbits radar spy satellite

Fingers crossed that this one can snoop Norks

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully put a radar satellite into orbit, ready to watch over its own shores and keep an eye on North Korea. While Japan already has three operational optical satellites, it hasn’t had an awful lot of luck with radar systems, which are essential to penetrate cloud cover …

Space 12 Dec 20:12
Malicious apps infiltrate Google's Android Market

Bogus games purged after more than 10,000 downloads

Google security crews have tossed at least a dozen smartphone games out of the Android Market after discovering they contained secret code that caused owners to accrue expensive charges for text messages sent to premium numbers. The malicious apps, uploaded to the Google-hosted service by a developer named Logastrod, …

Malware 12 Dec 20:16
Kaspersky DLP spin-off buys German security firm

Cynapspro purchase to target small, medium-sized firms

Russian data loss prevention firm InfoWatch has bought German software firm cynapspro. InfoWatch, a spin-off of Kaspersky Lab, said the deal will help to sell its technology to more customers in western Europe, particularly small and medium-sized businesses. cynapspro offers a range of enterprise security products including …

Financial News 12 Dec 20:24
Cambridge puts Isaac Newton's notes online

A free peek at the original ~~Apple~~ apple genius

If you're looking for a bit of light reading this holiday season, Cambridge University is here to help: they've digitized and made available online over 4,000 pages of the pioneering scientist and mathemetician Sir Isaac Newton's most important works. Principia title page (click to enlarge) "Anyone, wherever they are, can …

Physics 12 Dec 21:10
Flight Centre settles $US14m legal battle with web supplier

Service tender leads to two-year stoush

Australian discount airline booker Flight Centre has settled a two year legal stoush against its former web services supplier Dublin-based Datalex. In an ASX statement Flight Centre said, “FLT and Datalex have negotiated in good faith and resolved the proceedings to their mutual satisfaction.” The settlement covers Flight …

Business 12 Dec 21:54
Martians lived underground, say Oz boffins

Water and energy available but not on the surface

A group of Australian scientists have created a “whole of planet” model that suggests large parts of Mars are capable of supporting life – as long as it doesn’t mind living underground. Instead of the piecemeal approach followed by most astrobiologists – which, it must be said, is fair enough since the various probes sent to …

Space 12 Dec 22:30
Oracle and IBM fight for the heavy workload

Seconds out

IBM and Oracle agree about little these days, and they are coming at it from different angles, but both IT giants believe that some companies don't want general-purpose machines; they want machines tuned to run a specific stack of software for a particular kind of workload. IBM calls them "workload optimised systems" and …

Data Warehousing 12 Dec 22:45
FOI request turns up Carrier IQ surprise

G-men slurping snooped smartphone data?

The Carrier IQ scandal is a gift that just keeps giving: a US FOI report suggests that the FBI is using data captured by the creepy smartphone snooping app. The discovery was made by FOI blog MuckRock, which asked for “manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or …

Malware 12 Dec 23:01
Bullseye gets marked by STW

Takes 51 per cent, stake moves into Asia

Australian marketing giant STW has added digital services and technology provider Bullseye to its portfolio. Co-founded by Australian telecommunications stalwart Jim McKerlie in 2000, offering dotcom-era-style integrated digital marketing and technology services to Australian businesses, Bullseye now has a 51 per cent …

Business 12 Dec 23:30
Espionage hack attack preys on chemical firms

Spotted in the wild: Nitro Part II

More than two months after the discovery of an organized malware campaign targeting dozens of companies in the defense and chemical industries, the espionage hack attack shows no signs of letting up. According to a blog post published on Monday, the same group that targeted at least 38 companies between July and September is …

Malware 12 Dec 23:44