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10th January 2012 Archive

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  • Intel ignores Steve Jobs, adds touchscreen to Ultrabook

    CES 2012 Research departments come to 180° conclusions

    Intel's research department has overruled Steve Jobs: touchscreens have been added to the next generation of Chipzilla's Ultrabook spec. "Touch skipped the notebook, skipped the Ultrabook. It was dedicated to phones, it was dedicated to tablets," Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel's PC Client Group told his audience on …

    PCs & Chips 10 Jan 00:37

  • Astronomers map largest ever zone of dark matter

    MegaCam maps 10 million galaxies

    An international research team has presented the largest ever map of dark matter at the 219th American Astronomical Society conference in Austin, Texas. The team used a 340 megapixel camera, dubbed MegaCam, to take one degree by one degree shots for five years from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHC) on Mauna Kea …

    Space 10 Jan 01:10

  • HD JuiceBox HDMI over Powerline kit

    Review High voltage hi-def

    Hey, guess what? There’s another way of routing hi-def around your house, in addition to unfeasibly long HDMI cable runs, wireless transmitters and Cat 5. You can actually send it via the ring main, using the HDJuice Box from JustHDMI. The cable guys: JustHDMI's HDJuiceBox Powerline distribution for video has been tried …

    reghardware 10 Jan 07:00

  • Bit-part actress slings sueball at IMDb over age gripe

    Work dried up, 40-year-old Junie Hoang claims

    An actress who claims work dried up after her age was revealed on movie compendium website IMDb is suing the Amazon-owned company. The identity of the minor TV star had remained anonymous until a lawsuit was filed last Friday revealing Huong Hoang from Texas was slinging a sueball at the site. The actress, whose stage name is …

    Music and Media 10 Jan 08:02

  • CES headman: 'Microsoft not gone, just on pause'

    CES 2012 Ballmer's final (?) keynote a crashing bore

    When Microsoft said in December that this year's Consumer Electronics show would be its last, it failed to convince the president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organization that produces CES. "I would be shocked if a Microsoft leader did not return to this stage again in the next few years," said the CEA …

    Developer 10 Jan 08:21

  • Vodafone using 'partners' to help it penetrate global markets

    Just friends with benefits...

    Vodafone is increasingly adopting local partners, rather than buying up local operators, to push its brand and services into new markets around the world. The company isn't new to partnerships; today marks 10 years since the company's creation of a special division for such agreements, and an increasing focus on partnerships …

    Mobile 10 Jan 09:01

  • French court fines Google $65k over search suggestion

    Did your $%&* algorithm just call me a crook?

    Google has been fined $65,000 by a French court after its search engine suggested the French word for 'crook' when users typed-in the name of an insurance company, according to reports. The court said Google had ignored requests to remove the suggestion from its 'autocomplete' search engine technology when users searched for …

    Law 10 Jan 09:31

  • Orange touts tropical tablet

    Own-brand Tahiti on sale today

    Orange has entered the 7in tablet market with its own, Honeycomb Android-based Tahiti. Priced at £70 - although you'll also need to take out a £25-a-month, two-year data contract - Tahiti has a dual-core Qualcomm 8260 CPU running at 1.2GHz. There's 512MB of Ram, 8GB of Flash storage and a Micro SD slot in the 11mm-thick body …

    reghardware 10 Jan 09:57

  • TV Guide UK

    Android App of the Week See what's on telly - quick

    I’ve not bought a TV guide for many a moon, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit in So, to keep abreast of what’s on the box, I depend on the tv24.co.uk app which is easy to understand, simple to use and, above all, fast. Open the app and you're presented with a clear and easy-to-read list of what’s on at the time, along with …

    reghardware 10 Jan 10:00

  • Samsung shows 55in OLED über-TV

    CES 2012 Dual-core, app-tastic and motion-controlled

    Samsung has followed fellow South Korean giant LG to unveil a 55in OLED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This one has motion and voice control. Naturally enough with showcase products like this, Samsung didn't discuss pricing, preferring to talk up the telly's panel specs in comparison with current flat panels. …

    reghardware 10 Jan 10:21

  • NASA halts 'naut flogging Apollo 13 notebook

    Jim Lovell put emergency checklist up for auction

    NASA has sparred with one of its most famous astronauts over the sale of a checklist of life-saving calculations. Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission, led the ruptured space vessel to a safe return landing on Earth in 1970 - but now the 83-year-old has right royally angered his old bosses by auctioning off the …

    Space 10 Jan 10:39

  • Samsung joins Ultrabook race

    CES 2012 Cues up 13.3in, 14in entrants

    Samsung took the wraps off its entry into the skinny laptop space last night, revealing the 13in and 14in models in its Series 5 Ultrabook 53OU range. Both machines are based around Intel Core i5-2567M processors running at 1.6GHz and come with 4GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 memory. The 13.3in model uses the CPU's GMA HD 3000 …

    reghardware 10 Jan 10:41

  • Siri's artificially intelligent news anchor sister bags $6.2m

    Funding found for DARPA-backed web sniffer Trapit

    Siri's little sister Trapit, an intelligent discovery engine that pumps individually curated digital content to users, has closed a $6.2m Series A round of venture funding led by Hong Kong’s Horizon Ventures. Trapit is the progeny of CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), the DARPA-commissioned artificial- …

    Cloud 10 Jan 11:01

  • Tesla 300-mile e-car UK debut set for 2013

    Detroit Motor Show With a 17in touchscreen on the dash

    The Model S – Tesla's new electric five-door family hatch – will arrive in the UK with the steering wheel in the correct place early in 2013. Deliveries to US customers will begin in April 2012, but the first 12 months' production run of 5000 cars is already sold out, Tesla said. From 2013, production will ramp up to 20, …

    reghardware 10 Jan 11:09

  • In Netflix vs Lovefilm, the winner (probably) takes nowt

    Analysis Video war kicks off. ZZzzz

    It isn't exactly your cliche of two bald men fighting over a comb, but victory in the battle royale between Netflix and Amazon's Lovefilm might not mean much to the eventual 'winner'. Both of these video-on-demand offerings have their roots in the DVD-by-post business; in fact, that's the service that Netflix pioneered in the …

    Cloud Business 10 Jan 11:19

  • HP unveils glass-cased Ultrabook

    CES 2012 The iPhone 4S of laptops

    Hewlett-Packard announced its next entry into the Ultrabook department at CES yesterday, lifting the veil on the Envy 14 Spectre, a laptop with a glass design and NFC capabilities. While the market is still relatively new for NFC uses, HP sees it as an important complementary feature, one that may come to prominence as …

    reghardware 10 Jan 11:29

  • Nokia sheds light on latest Lumia

    CES 2012 WinPho Tango calling

    Stephen Elop took the stage at CES last night to reveal the much-leaked Lumia 900, the next member of Nokia's Windows Phone range of handsets. While it bears a striking resemblance to its younger 800-branded sibling, the Lumia 800, the 900 bulks out the battery from 1450mAh to 1830mAh and ups the screen size from 3.7in to 4. …

    reghardware 10 Jan 11:49

  • German cops hacked in revenge for dad spying on daughter

    Payback after officer used cyber-bug at home

    An infiltration of a German federal security system last year has been traced back to a botched attempt by an unnamed security official to use a Trojan to monitor his daughter's internet usage, Der Spiegel reports. According to the report, a hacker friend of the young woman found the spyware on her machine before hacking into …

    Malware 10 Jan 11:49

  • HP Pavilion dv6 15.6in quad-core notebook

    Review Llano laptop, anyone?

    Choosing an HP notebook isn’t an easy task, not because they are hard to find - far from it - it’s just the bewildering choice of notebooks you can find in a range. Take the recently refreshed Pavilion dv6-6b series, for example. There are currently a staggering 16 different options in this family alone. Quad-core CPU and …

    reghardware 10 Jan 12:00

  • VW catches electric Beetle

    Detroit Motor Show Prototype two-seater unveiled

    Volkswagen has presented its latest take on the iconic Beetle at the North American International Motor Show in Detroit. Called the E-Bugster, the bodywork may look a tad 1950s retro thanks to the low roof line, but underneath everything is bang up to date thanks to an 85kW electric motor and 28.3kWh lithium-ion battery …

    reghardware 10 Jan 12:29

  • Think twice before moving to SaaS office

    Reg Reader Study Benefits available, but must do homework

    We all have enough scars to remember that when it comes to core email and office productivity capabilities, migrations are never as easy as they seem. So when SaaS vendors claim that they can magically make things cheaper and simpler we know that it may not be quite that smooth in practice. So what's the real deal when it comes …

    Small Biz 10 Jan 12:44

  • Sony goes inorganic for 'eye popping' OLED TV rival

    CES 2012 'Crystal' set contains 6m LEDs

    Sony is using the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to show off its answer to 55in OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. No, not another OLED, but a "crystal LED" set with a screen based on more traditional, inorganic LED tech. The 55in, 1920 x 1080 telly contains more than six million "ultrafine" LEDs, three each of red, green and …

    reghardware 10 Jan 12:52

  • Oracle mounts Cloudera's elephant for big data ride

    Cloud biz chosen for number-stomping Hadoop stack

    When Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison clambered onto his own Big Data elephant back in October as his company announced the Big Data Appliance, Oracle gave the impression that it would be rolling up its own implementation of the open-source Apache Hadoop data muncher. This turns out to be not true. In fact, Oracle …

    Cloud 10 Jan 13:01

  • Sony shows off NXT-generation smartphone

    CES 2012 Iconic identity inbound

    Sony has unveiled another member of its sans-Ericsson collection of smartphones, the Xperia S, marking the start of a next-generation in Sony blowers. Joining the Xperia Ion: the Xperia S, the first in Sony's NXT series of handsets. The Xperia S moseys into town with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor running Android 2.3 …

    reghardware 10 Jan 13:11

  • Profs call for harsh taxes on sweet carbonated beverages

    California moves toward tapwater-only lifestyle

    Medical scientists in San Francisco have sent a chill wind blowing through the IT industry as they issue a call for swingeing taxes on "soda, fruit punch, sweet tea, sports drinks, and other sweetened beverages". A collection of health profs and other researchers led by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (associate professor of medicine …

    Bootnotes 10 Jan 13:19

  • Opera's new store beams HTML5 apps into tellies

    CES 2012 Facebook and Vimeo squeezed into punters' TV time

    Opera Software is making a play for turning your TV into a window-on-the-web with the announcement of Opera TV Store. The browser maker's unveiled e-shop will flog HTML5 apps that you can use from your TV. The idea is to make it possible to access web content and apps using your existing HD-TV and remote controls, without …

    Cloud 10 Jan 13:41

  • Powerline Ethernet group posts 1Gb/s spec

    CES 2012 HomePlug AV2 ready for adopters' adapters

    Powerline Ethernet promoter the HomePlug Alliance has published its latest technology update, offering a peak data transfer speed of 1Gb/s. That's the maximum physical data speed. Error handling and other network protocols will reduce the effective data rate to 500Mb/s. The electrical environment in which the technology is …

    reghardware 10 Jan 13:54

  • Samsung: 'We'll nick Nokia's global mobe crown this year'

    CES 2012 Cocky S Korean biz bats aside Apple in race to the top

    Samsung is feeling confident that it can ship more handsets than Nokia this year, making it pretty much the top mobile phone company in the world. The South Korean firm has already surpassed Apple as the world's biggest smartphone maker, so if it can overtake Nokia in all handsets, it will take the lead in the competitive …

    CIO 10 Jan 14:03

  • Microsoft schedules Kinect for Windows launch

    CES 2012 Fresh motion control kit inbound

    While Microsoft's CES 2012 keynote may have had audiences fighting back the yawns, one piece of juicy Kinect news was revealed: the motion-sensor bar is finally coming to Windows in February. From next month, PC owners will be able to control their computers with gestures and interact with their machines like never before. …

    reghardware 10 Jan 14:11

  • Sprint tucks Google Wallet into new pay-by-tap phones

    Two 4G LTE phones, one wallet, no legacy networking

    Sprint's two newly announced 4G handsets both support Google Wallet, bringing an important boost to Google's aspirations, but they also hammer the death nail into WiMAX in the USA. Sprint's last 4G handset, the "Sprint Nexus S 4G", was a WiMAX device, but Sprint has admitted backing the wrong 4G horse and is now transitioning …

    Mobile 10 Jan 14:32

  • Panasonic pitches portable Skype screen

    CES 2012 Take up your PC videocall and walk

    Panasonic showed off a handheld Skype tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last night. It only exists as a prototype, and you might think that folks' smartphones and tablets will do the job of video calling equally well, but Panasonic thinks punters will want a Skype gadget they can set down anywhere in the home. …

    reghardware 10 Jan 14:44

  • Apple CEO Tim Cook has a massive package

    $376m in stocks for taking over from Jobs

    Apple CEO Tim Cook bagged a huge award when he took the helm at the fruity firm last year. Cook received one million restricted stock units (RSU), an award worth over $376m according to the closing share price for Apple on 24 August 2011, the date the stocks were signed over. However, he can't rush out and sell straight away …

    CIO 10 Jan 15:03

  • Michael Dell: PC profits plunge not down to tablets

    It was floods and the economy – anyway we're buying cloud startups now

    The sluggish demand for PCs that saw Dell's profit dive below Wall Street estimates in the last quarter is not due to tablets, Dell CEO Michael Dell said yesterday. Despite Dell's PC revenues falling 6 per cent in the third quarter of 2011, PCs are still selling better than tablets he told a conference in Bangalore, describing …

    Cloud Business 10 Jan 15:31

  • WD updates video streamer for Netflix, iPlayer

    CES 2012 Fresh firmware brings IPTV services aboard

    Western Digital has updated its WD TV Live set-top box firmware to support not only BBC iPlayer but also Netflix. Netflix kicked off its UK video streaming service yesterday. The jury is still out on whether it offers a better option than the likes of Amazon's Lovefilm and Tesco's Blinkbox. However, there can be few Brits …

    reghardware 10 Jan 16:01

  • Facebook obsessives overlook enterprise riches

    Open ... and Shut Big biz software is where all the cool kids are at

    It's not that enterprise software is boring. But let's face it: if you had the choice to tell your mom that your company makes it easy for 800 million people to talk to each other, or that your business makes it easier for companies like Chevron to do business more productively, the former is going to sound a heck of a lot …

    CIO 10 Jan 16:02

  • Pro-Israel hackers threaten tit for tat after credit card leak

    Saudi e-stores and Israeli diplomat's site nobbled in cyber-spat

    Pro-Israel hackers have reportedly breached Saudi shopping sites in retaliation for the publication of Israeli credit-card details by a pro-Palestinian "Saudi" hacker last weekend. A hacker called OxOmar, who claimed to be a member of Saudi hacking group Group-XP, leaked a series of lists supposedly containing the details of …

    Security 10 Jan 16:29

  • Android-powered goggles bring virtual reality closer

    CES 2012 Handy augmentation

    Sony's 3D head-mounted display, the HMZ-T1, may have lit up the CES floor last year, but in 2012 there's a new kid on the block: SmartGoggles. Sensics' Natalia, the company's first expedition using its SmartGoggles technology, is a fully-immersive pair of 3D goggles. Natalia packs a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and runs …

    reghardware 10 Jan 16:33

  • Foreign sabotage suspected in Phobos-Grunt meltdown

    Russian space chief doesn't want to point any fingers, but...

    The head of the Russian space agency has hinted that foreign sabotage might be to blame for the malfunction of the country's Martian space probe, Phobos-Grunt. Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin told Russian newspaper Izvestia (in Russian, translation by Google Translate) that he had no complete explanation for the frequent …

    Space 10 Jan 16:44

  • OCZ conquers Everest, flashes 3-bit NAND at world

    Next-gen MLC gets TLC

    OCZ is showing the first mainstream computer flash drive using 3-bit NAND at CES 2012. Flash comes in single-level cell (SLC) form, the fastest, longest-lived and most expensive, and also a 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) variant which is slower, has a shorter working life but is less expensive than SLC. TLC is an extension of …

    Storage 10 Jan 17:18

  • AT&T joins 'Linux for cloud', boosts HTML5 apps

    Smartphone, TV, web code-jockey play

    AT&T – one of America's largest internet, phone and TV service providers – is throwing up an open-source cloud running OpenStack to court application developers. The giant has announced AT&T Cloud Architect, a planned service of elastic public, private and bare metal servers wrapped with different storage, network and …

    Cloud 10 Jan 17:44

  • Hubble shows images from record-breaking 13.1 billion light-years

    Spots quintet of infant galaxies in formation

    The Hubble telescope has broken its own distance record, spotting a cluster of five galaxies 13.1billion light-years away. They were spotted as part of the Brightest Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey, which aims to scan the theoretical edges of the universe. In a paper to the American Astronomical Society meeting Michele …

    Space 10 Jan 18:44

  • IBM pumps out two Xeon rackers

    Cost-cutters ahead of the Sandy Bridge onslaught

    It may seem odd that IBM would update two x86 servers when Intel is prepping its "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors for launch in early 2012, but the cut-throat competition in the server racket waits for no chip launch. And thus, IBM is revving up two "value priced" Xeon-based servers to compete against Hewlett-Packard, Dell, …

    Servers 10 Jan 18:56

  • Juniper stalled by Q4 slowdown

    Anything Cisco can do. . . .

    Juniper Networks is having its Cisco moment, but it doesn't look like it is much to worry about. Yesterday afternoon, Juniper warned Wall Street that it would not meet its sales targets for the fourth quarter ended in December, echoing a similar slowdown that archrival Cisco Systems had in its Q4 of fiscal 2010 ended in July …

    Financial News 10 Jan 19:14

  • Google merging more personal data into search results

    Tighter Google+ and Picasa integration ahead

    Mountain View is rolling out much tighter integration of its Google+ network into search results with what it calls “Search plus your World.” In practice, this means an extension of the Google+ integration that started in August, with a new button in the top right of the page that adds data from the user’s social network that …

    Music and Media 10 Jan 20:57

  • Panasonic buys into JT's MySpace TV experiment

    Get social from your couch, potatoes

    Has Justin Timberlake just sounded the death knell for subscription TV? Timberlake and Specific Media, the new co-owners of Rupert Murdoch’s digital mischance MySpace, have unveiled a new platform with Panasonic which they claim that it will transform the television experience into a social one. Previewed at CES, MySpace TV …

    Music and Media 10 Jan 21:30

  • IBM helps GlobalFoundries ramp New York foundry

    How long before GloFo buys Big Blue's fabs?

    GlobalFoundries has begun baking chips at Fab 8 in upstate New York, and is doing so for none other than semiconductor process partner IBM. Fab 8, when it is fully ramped, will be able to kick out 60,000 wafers per month from its 300,000 square feet of space and etch them with 32 nanometer HKMG processes. That ramp is now …

    PCs & Chips 10 Jan 22:09

  • Vodafail riles ACMA again

    Rogue telemarketers won't toe the line

    The house of VHA is in trouble with authorities again, this time attracting the ire of the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching the ‘Do Not Call Register’ Act. VHA has submitted to an enforceable undertaking after a raft of consumer complaints emerged concerning rogue telemarketers spruiking the products …

    Telecoms 10 Jan 22:30

  • Boeing backs biofuel boffinry

    Growing our own jet fuel

    Boeing and the CSIRO have signed an agreement to look at whether Australia’s far north is a good place to grow biofuel feedstocks. While biofuels have been certified for aviation use, Boeing explains, scaling up production is a challenge (for example, biofuel critics blame ethanol subisidies for driving up food prices in …

    Environment 10 Jan 23:00

  • $18k for Aussie domain sets new record

    Fertile ground for domain trading

    The domain name creditcard.net.au has set a new sales record in the Australian market for a .net.au domain name, selling for $AU18,200 in a private trade. Domain consulting and SEO outfit Pacific Octane originally owned the domain, securing it September 2010 for $15,001.00, which was at the time the highest price for a domain …

    Business 10 Jan 23:30