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29th March 2012 Archive

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  • Amazon boss finds Apollo 11 engines on seabed

    Plans to salvage historic rockets for display

    Jeff Bezos, Amazon's adventurous CEO, says his organization has found the F-1 rockets used briefly by Apollo 11 and he wants to salvage them for American museums. "A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind's mission to …

    Space 29 Mar 01:00

  • PM launches Oz network three-year 3.5m premises rollout

    Don't mention Huawei

    The first large-scale rollout of Australia’s National Broadband Network has been announced, with the government and NBN Co announcing that 3.5 million premises (including homes, businesses, schools and hospitals) are to receive their connections by 2015. In a press conference only partly sidetracked by the federal government’s …

    Networks 29 Mar 03:36

  • Tim Cook, Chinese vice PM agree IP pact

    Apple boss presses the flesh at Zhongnanhai

    Apple boss Tim Cook met Chinese vice premier Li Keqiang during his visit to the People’s Republic this week and reportedly managed to come away with a commitment from the future prime minister to strengthen intellectual property protection for it and other firms in the country. News broke earlier this week that Cook was in …

    Business 29 Mar 04:35

  • Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

    New homonin fossil discovered

    The statement from the abstract is as prosaic as it gets: “A newly discovered partial hominin foot skeleton from eastern Africa indicates the presence of more than one hominin locomotor adaptation at the beginning of the Late Pliocene epoch.” The implication, however, is profound: potentially a new species of hominin has been …

    Science 29 Mar 04:55

  • Microsoft says scale-out storage not needed for big data

    SQL Server guru also thinks data scientists also have limited role … for now

    Infrastructure vendors’ vision of big data rigs based on scale-out NAS won’t come to fruition, according to the Microsoft executive heading the company’s big data push for SQL Server 2012. David Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow in the Data & Storage Platform Group claims personal responsibility for Microsoft’s adoption …

    CIO 29 Mar 04:59

  • Acer set to unleash 15in fibreglass MONSTER

    Taiwanese hardware maker to expand Ultrabook range

    Taiwanese hardware giant Acer is set to continue with its plans to target Intel’s super-skinny laptop segment with the launch of a new 15in fibreglass Ultrabook in the next couple of months. Unnamed Taiwanese supply chain makers revealed to Digitimes that ODM Pegatron has been producing the machines since mid-March, and is …

    Hardware 29 Mar 05:01

  • Digitech iPB-10 guitar effects pedalboard for iPad

    Review Kerrang!

    When the Digitech iPB-10 arrived, I duly dispatched an e-mail to a muso mate with a link to this ultimate iPad guitar pedalboard. The wag replied: Nice machine you're reviewing, but I don't know whether 87 pedals, 54 amps and 26 cabinets is quite enough for me... Heavy metal: Digitech's iPB-10 features a cast alloy build to …

    reghardware 29 Mar 06:00

  • With this ring, I thee frag

    Marriage proposal in Team Fortress 2 after Valve helps with free virtual bling

    A female employee of Australian internet service provider Internode has used the February 29th loophole that says women can propose to men to pop the question – inside Team Fortress 2 (TF2). Internode tells that employee Taryn Hicks dropped a line to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell to ask about a virtual ring that would be sold …

    Odds and Sods 29 Mar 06:28

  • ZTE profits crash 37 per cent in 2011

    Chinese telecoms kit maker getting squeezed

    Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE has had a mixed 2011, with revenue surging by almost a quarter to 86.3bn yuan (£8.6bn), but profits were down by a whopping 36.6 per cent and concerns linger over its links to Iran. The world’s fourth largest handset maker reported a revenue increase of 23.4 per cent from 2010, with a …

    Business 29 Mar 06:29

  • Chinese to burn iPads in upcoming celebrations

    Fondleslabs go up in smoke in honour of ancestors

    Chinese people will burn paper replicas of iPads next week at an annual ceremony called the tomb-sweeping ritual during the Qingming (Pure Brightness) Festival, which celebrates the dead. During the tomb sweeping ritual, which falls on 4 April this year, Chinese people honour their ancestors by burning paper replicas of …

    PCs & Chips 29 Mar 07:01

  • Gov IT contractors hire staff in India to work on benefits system

    But we're not moving existing UK jobs, these are new ones

    Hundreds of computer technicians in India are being hired to help develop an IT system for the government's universal credit welfare programme, work potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds, despite promises that large data projects would remain in the UK. Workers in Bangalore and Mumbai are being hired by the …

    Government 29 Mar 07:32

  • Gridiron keeps DRAM tight lid on boxes of flash chips

    No details on million-plus IOPS kit, nothing on current gear either

    Blocks and Files Gridiron, the flash array startup that announced a million IOPS from its coming box of MLC flash chips, won't give us any flash details of its existing TurboCharger appliance, keeping its basic capacity and IOPS ratings to itself. We asked VP of Marketing Prasad Pammidimukkala the questions. El Reg: I managed …

    Storage 29 Mar 08:03

  • Everything you thought you knew about cybercrims is WRONG

    Forget teen hackers, they're aging gangsters with off-the-shelf web weapons

    Assumptions about cyber-criminals are all wrong, according to a study that argues many fraudsters are middle aged and possess only rudimentary IT skills - contrary to the elite bedroom teen hackers portrayed in movies. The research, led by criminologist Dr Michael McGuire of The John Grieve Centre for Policing and Security at …

    Enterprise Security 29 Mar 08:34

  • A million TVs to go dark across London

    Analogue switch-off is coming

    Next week analogue TV will be switched off across London, knocking out an estimated one million TV screens which haven't made the jump to digital yet. The estimate comes from Digital TV, the body appointed by the government to hold our hands through the transition, and most of them will be in back rooms and bedrooms as almost …

    Music and Media 29 Mar 09:01

  • Raspberry Pi supplier coughs to ship date delay glitch

    CE testing demand holding up supply

    A "system auto-generated error" left hundreds of eager would-be Raspberry Pi owners fuming yesterday after they were told their prized micro-computer boards wouldn't arrive until the summer. The notification was made by Element 14, one of Raspberry Pi's two suppliers. Punters access the firm's website to check on the status …

    reghardware 29 Mar 09:05

  • NSA's top spook blames China for RSA hack

    Says People's Republic trousers loads of US military IP

    The director of the US National Security Agency has named China as the country behind last year's high profile hack against RSA that resulted in the extraction of data related to SecurID tokens. The information extracted in the March 2011 hack was later used in an unsuccessful attack against Lockheed Martin. Other US defence …

    Enterprise Security 29 Mar 09:18

  • Third European supply podule docks with space station

    'Smooth, gentle' mating at 28,000 kph

    Europe's ATV cargo ship Edoardo Amaldi successfully docked with the International Space Station last night, marking the third ATV mission to restock the ISS. The totally automated space freighter hooked up with the Russian Zvezda module's docking cone smoothly at around 22:30 GMT last night. The ATV was monitored from the …

    Space 29 Mar 09:36

  • Warner, Sony commit to UltraViolet in UK

    Buy a disc, stream it for free

    Warner Home Entertainment has revealed that all its future Blu-ray Discs will tap into Hollywood's UltraViolet cloud-based movie locker to provide punters with downloadable copies of films they buy. Warner said it will make UV the standard for double- and triple-play BDs that offer a digital copy. Sony said it will offer …

    reghardware 29 Mar 09:42

  • Behold! Or rather, don't: Bendy see-through DRAM

    You like windows, you like bendy things, you like memory

    Boffins at Rice uni in the States have devised bendy transparent memory chips using pure silicon crystals. James Tour, a polymath chemist at the university working at the Tour Lab - he is also a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science, as well as Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in …

    Storage 29 Mar 09:58

  • London ambulances on second try with CommandPoint 999 software

    'Lessons learned' after last year's eggface debut

    The London Ambulance Service has quietly phased in its CommandPoint 999 dispatch system. The service began using the package, built by US defence giant Northrop Grumman, at 3am on 27 March. The introduction follows three live tests in the past few weeks and decommissioning of the previous in-house ambulance dispatch software …

    Government 29 Mar 10:14

  • New Google tool lets you PROBE YOURSELF

    'I had no idea what a pervert I was until now'

    Google may want to silently worm its way into everything people do online: but it's now offering a tool that allows users of its services to see some of what Google sees about them. The giant advertising company said in a blog post that it will now give users the opportunity to access detailed analysis of, for example, how …

    Cloud Business 29 Mar 10:28

  • HP offers contractors a choice: 5 per cent pay cut ... or 100 per cent

    Not fooling about April Fool's Day cost slash

    HP has told some IT contractors to expect at least a five per cent pay cut as it looks to eke out cost savings across the organisation. A letter sent out by IT employment agency Advanced Resource Managers (ARM) IT Ltd last week to the behemoth's field of techies confirmed HP's intent to end-of-life its existing Enterprise …

    Channel Register 29 Mar 10:43

  • TopWrite

    iOS App of the Week Messaging made (really) easy

    There’s no end of messaging apps available for the iPhone and iPad, not to mention the built-in email and SMS/IM apps included in iOS itself. But that over-abundance of apps can actually be something of a problem: you can often find yourself fiddling with multiple apps and services when all you want to do is fire off a quick …

    reghardware 29 Mar 11:00

  • Wags unroll Twitter toilet paper

    From blog to bog

    A startup has crapped-in on the social network fad, offering toilet paper custom-printed with the Twitter feed of your choice. Yes, the aptly named Shitter service takes a stream of Tweets from a Twitter account and reproduces them in bog roll form. A trending bathroom accessory, perhaps? The Tweet sheets can be based on …

    reghardware 29 Mar 11:20

  • Adobe auto-update eases Flash update chore - on Windows only

    Backdoors plugged without lifting a finger

    Adobe has introduced an auto-updater for its Flash software packages that reduces the chore of updating the widely-used application by automating the process for all supported browsers on Windows machines. Previously users had to apply individual updates to Chrome, Firefox and IE add-ons and plug-ins, a process that often went …

    Enterprise Security 29 Mar 11:32

  • PlayStation 4 'Orbis' pegged for 2013 release

    4K by 2K gaming, anyone?

    Details of Sony's next-gen console flooded the web today, with the PlayStation 4 - apparently codenamed Orbis - set for a Q4 2013 release, it has been claimed. While Microsoft insists there will be no talk of next-gen consoles at E3 2012, gamers' attentions have switched towards its Japanese rival. And now "reliable" insiders …

    reghardware 29 Mar 11:39

  • Facebook to halt secondary market trading ahead of IPO - report

    Let's sell this bubble before it bursts ... bitch

    Facebook is reportedly set to freeze secondary market trading next week ahead of its plan to take the company public in May. The world's biggest social network will temporarily stop the sale of its shares as part of its preparation to table its initial public offering, regulatory filings for which first landed in February this …

    Cloud Business 29 Mar 11:42

  • Nintendo DSi sends child abuser to the slammer

    Photo evidence yields confession

    A paedophile has been jailed after his victim used her Nintendo DSi to covertly photograph his assault. John Fisher, 46, confessed to his crime after being arrested by police and shown the images taken by the girl, who is too young to name. She used her handheld games console to snap a picture of the paedophile's hand groping …

    reghardware 29 Mar 11:53

  • Microsoft: Keep Moto vid codec patent fight in US, not Germany

    Pleads for meaningful relief, offers $300m

    Microsoft has filed a motion in the US to stop Motorola Mobility from enforcing an injunction it may win in a German court next month. The software behemoth asked a stateside judge to "preserve the status quo" in the market pending the outcome of a separate Microsoft-Motorola patent face-off in a Washington court. Microsoft …

    Financial News 29 Mar 11:58

  • Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

    He deleted most of the source code – the little @£$%%...

    You can't take it with you... There is a tradition of “off-site backups” for handy bits of code and data that you’ve worked with at your current employer. At most firms you could fit every line of source code together with a complete customer list on the free USB stick you got at a conference. This is a really dumb thing to do …

    Jobs 29 Mar 12:40

  • NDS says Beeb's Panorama emails were 'manipulated'

    Look! They moved the 'To' line up one!

    TV crypto company NDS says the BBC misled viewers in a Panorama investigation broadcast on Monday. The former Murdoch company, which was acquired by Cisco earlier this month, has released what it says are the original emails. The Beeb alleged that NDS gave a "hacker honeypot" website named Thoic access codes that could be used …

    Music and Media 29 Mar 12:58

  • Ukrainian cops silence old-skool virus tinkerers' playground

    'It's not a game any more, chummy'

    Ukrainian cops have shut down a long-running malware exchange website frequented by old-school virus writers. A message on the front page of the VX Heavens website announces that the site has been forced to shut up shop after the plods seized its servers last Friday as part of a criminal investigation. According to the …

    Malware 29 Mar 13:29

  • UK government says no to turbo e-bike

    No speed please, we're British

    The government today confirmed that an electrically powered bicycle, may not be sold in this country because its top speed exceeds legal limits. The Turbo e-cycle's US-based creator, Specialized, was all set to peddle its first battery-equipped bike in coming months across the EU. But with a top assisted speed of 28mph, it …

    reghardware 29 Mar 13:38

  • World IT sales up 15 per cent in Q4 ... er, 5 if you remove Apple

    Giant rollneck-clad fatty scoffs all the growth

    The tech sector fared well in Q4 largely due to channel bullyboy Apple's unstoppable sales juggernaut - but IT distributors are missing out on this boom. According to the Tech Titan Index by beancounter Canalys, the combined sales growth of Cisco, Dell, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Lexmark, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Apple was …

    Channel Register 29 Mar 13:57

  • Dot-word TLD registration closes tonight, maybe for many years

    Last chance to buy a thing that might be useless!

    Today is the last chance for organisations that want to own their own top-level internet domain names to register their interest with ICANN. If you want to run a dot-brand (.pepsi, .nike, .pampers) or a dot-city (.london, .paris, .rome) or a generic keyword gTLD (.music, .web, .blog), 29 March marks your final opportunity to …

    Hosting 29 Mar 14:24

  • Osborne+ and Schmidt+ say 'the internet' = 8.3 per cent of UK GDP

    Chancellor can't tell advertising from technology

    The UK's part-time Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne+ has again drawn attention to the Conservative leadership's cosy ties with the predatory American advertising giant Google. Yesterday, the Financial Times ran an op-ed piece jointly-bylined to Osborne+ and Google chairman Eric Schmidt+. It's highly unusual for a …

    Cloud Business 29 Mar 14:50

  • Brush up your Microsoft skills, win date with Ferrari

    Compo And chance to win a Nokia Lumia 800

    Microsoft is offering you the chance to cruise the streets of Britain in a Ferrari and all you have to do is get more tech skills. Oooooooooh. Nice. The Microsoft Virtual Academy, where Microsoft houses its tech training materials, is running the prize draw for UK residents. To enter you must visit the MVA UK website, here …

    Jobs 29 Mar 14:56

  • 'Half baked' Brussels data law fails to thrill

    'Regrettable level of ambition', sniff advisors

    Viviane Reding's proposed overhaul of Europe's 1995 data protection law needs clarification and improvement, an independent advisory group urged today. The Article 29 Working Party, which is vice-chaired by the UK's Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, said it "regrets the European Commission's level of ambition" on …

    Law 29 Mar 14:58

  • Dell blows Clouds of love into the channel

    Choking fog of vendor vapours thickens

    Dell is belatedly lifting the covers off a cloud services and solutions certification track for channel partners from mid-April. The scheme has three strands: Cloud Builder slanted for firms that design and develop a cloud infrastructure; Cloud Providers that sell IaaS, PaaS or Saas; and Cloud Service Enablers that broker or …

    Cloud 29 Mar 15:13

  • Kelihos zombies erupt from mass graves after botnet massacre

    Pumping spam, entering backdoors again almost right away

    Security researchers have warned that the resurrected Kelihos botnet blasted off the face of the web yesterday is still alive. Experts not involved in the blasting say the miscreants behind the network of compromised Windows computers are working on their comeback. The zombie PC army was walloped offline in September, they say …

    Malware 29 Mar 15:29

  • ALL Visa cards blab punters' names - not just Barclaycards

    Wireless Pay-by-bonk fraud risk widens

    Channel 4 News has been bothering contactless bank cards again, and managed to wirelessly extract the customer's name from ANY Visa-branded card within a few centimetres. Previously the programme had only demonstrated the technique on Visa cards issued by Barclays, and not all of those. However ViaForensics (the company hired …

    ID 29 Mar 15:44

  • This interactive wind map is a Big Data lava lamp

    And you thought Big Data wasn't really that useful!

    If you're reading El Reg you're obviously taking a little break from your workday [au contraire - you're enriching your portfolio of business-critical knowledge in a fashion which your boss would heartily endorse - Ed]. And if you want to amuse yourself with how a big data set with proper visualization can not only change your …

    Bootnotes 29 Mar 16:01

  • Panasas kingpin: What's the solid state state of play?

    Interview Garth Gibson on HPC - buffering the brute-force burst

    What can NAND flash do now for high-performance computing (HPC) storage and how will it evolve? Garth Gibson, the co-founder and chief technology officer for Panasas, the (HPC) storage provider, has definite views on it. Here's a snapshot of them. El Reg: How can solid state technology benefit HPC in general? Garth Gibson: …

    Storage 29 Mar 16:28

  • EXTREME weather blown away from unexpected direction

    Comment Give us back our doom, plead hippies

    Allegations of a "surge" in "extreme" weather events has been quashed by a surprising source - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change," writes the IPCC in …

    Science 29 Mar 17:28

  • Apple's Cook tops Page, Otellini in 'Favorite Boss' survey

    Microsoft's Ballmer? Unloved and sinking

    Apple CEO Tim Cook ranked number one among US CEOs in employee esteem, according to voluntary responses to a survey which asked the simple question, "Do you approve of the way this person is handling the job of leading this company?" "What makes this list important is it's based on feedback from the CEOs' own employees," a …

    Jobs 29 Mar 18:38

  • Munich's mayor claims €4m savings from Linux switch

    Lower costs and fewer support calls than Windows

    Christian Ude, the mayor of Munich and occasional political cabaret artist, is trumpeting the cost savings made by switching from Windows to Linux, claiming his city has saved over €4m over the last year alone. Ude claims that Munich's IT department saved about a third of their total budget last year by dumping Windows and …

    Operating Systems 29 Mar 19:24

  • Apple slapped with second Siri senility lawsuit

    False advertising claim against bungled 'breakthrough'

    Apple has been slapped with a second class-action lawsuit alleging that its ads for the iPhone 4S's Siri voice-activated search feature constitute false advertising. "Through its nationwide multimedia marketing campaign, Apple disseminates false and deceptive representations regarding the functionality of the Siri Feature," …

    Mobile 29 Mar 19:51

  • West Australian WiFi mesh sniffs out bushfires

    Edith Cowan University team re-write MAC protocol to build meshed sensors

    A team of researchers from Edith Cowan University's (ECU’s) Centre for Communications Engineering Research (CCER) has built sensors which can sniff out a forest fire, then use WiFi to tell the world. Professor Daryoush Habibi, Dr Iftekhar Ahmad and Mr Amro Qandour wrote their own mesh networking software to pull off the feat. …

    Networks 29 Mar 20:59

  • Intel: Xeon E5s to surf impending server upgrade wave

    Chipzilla's data center queen gives peek into internal IT

    You could say that Diane Bryant, the new general manager of Intel's Data Center and Connected Systems group, which makes server, storage, and networking chips and the platforms that employ them, was lucky in that she took over the job just as the chip giant was getting ready to launch its Xeon E5-2600 workhorse processors for …

    Servers 29 Mar 21:31

  • Apple fires up Antennagate settlement payout

    You may be due a princely $15 – get on it!

    If you bought an iPhone 4 – the model that sparked the now famous "You're holding it wrong" Antennagate dust-up – and you didn't accept Apple's free wraparound Bumper, it's now time to collect your fifteen bucks from Cupertino. That less-than-massive payout is the result of a class-action settlement reached between Apple and a …

    Mobile 29 Mar 22:05

  • Harvard bio-boffins build gut-on-a-chip

    Micromachine for medicine research

    Engineers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have built an experimental synthetic intestine using currently available chip technology. The gut-on-a-chip is about the same size as a USB stick and consists of a central tube that is lined with a single layer of human intestinal epithelial cells to …

    Biology 29 Mar 22:15

  • Obama gets the big data bug

    Swings swags of simoleons at science

    Six US federal government agencies are putting more than $US200 million to try and wrap their heads around the dizzying world of “big data”. The big-ticket buzzword hunt is being led by the White House Office of Science and Technology, along with the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, the Department …

    Infrastructure 29 Mar 22:24

  • Tweet to the archive

    Victoria state government proposes social media as public records

    Victoria’s Public Records Office (PROV) flew this one mostly under the radar: it’s seeking comment on a policy covering the archiving of public employees’ use of social media. The proposed Social Media Recordkeeping Policy would, however, only cover posts created as part of their business. In this discussion paper, PROV notes …

    Public Sector 29 Mar 23:30

  • Balsillie bails as RIM reports terrible quarter

    $125m loss prompts (another) management reshuffle

    Former co-CEO of RIM Jim Balsillie is to leave RIM's board of directors, along with two other senior executives, after the company reported a thumping $125m loss for the last quarter. "As I complete my retirement from RIM, I'm grateful for this remarkable experience and for the opportunity to have worked with outstanding …

    Financial News 29 Mar 23:44