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18th April 2012 Archive

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  • Aus mobile stalwart sets up HQ in US

    Retriever puts on its cowboy boots

    Australian mobile enterprise services provider Retriever Communications has expanded to the US, setting up a HQ in Sugar Land, Texas. Retriever, was set up in 1997 before mobile ‘broke’ in the enterprise market, offering a solution for field service management point solutions. The technology which has been developed by an …

    Business 18 Apr 00:25

  • Prince of Persia author releases 1980s source code

    Lucky find a glimpse into game history

    Retro games fans will be heading over to Github, where Jordan Mechner has posted the source code to his original classic, Prince of Persia. The posting follows the discovery in March of the original software in “a carton at the back of a closet”, as Mechner explains in this blog post. To recover the data, Mechner called on the …

    Software 18 Apr 00:25

  • Twitter poses patent non-aggression treaty to unblock industry

    No first-use patent pledge to stem legal madness

    Twitter is trying a new tactic to slow or stop the increasing use of legal action over patents as a tactic in the technology industry. It has proposed an Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which states that its patents will only be used in legal cases as a defensive tactic, unless the employee who created the patent agrees …

    Public Sector 18 Apr 00:43

  • Oracle considered entering smartphone market

    “Project Java Phone” kicked off in 2009, also thought of buying RIM, Palm

    Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has told the US Federal Court that his company assembled a team to contemplate entering the smartphone market, as he wanted to compete with Apple and Androind. The team formed in 2009, as Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun. Ellison's latest testimony in the Battle of the Larries, the case in …

    Software 18 Apr 01:59

  • Amazon Web services revamps partner program

    New Partner Network offers tech and sales support for cloudy companions

    Amazon Web Services' has built a new base camp on its route into the heart of enterprise IT, in the form of a new Partner Network the company says provides “technical information and sales and marketing support they need to accelerate their business on AWS.” In a blog post announcing the new Network, AWS Technology Evangelist …

    Cloud 18 Apr 03:02

  • Google updates Chrome for Android

    More languages, no flash, still in beta

    Google has upgraded Chrome for Android. The browser is now available in 31 languages, all of which lack Flash support. The may be because the browser is still in Beta, but it nonetheless has new features that allow users to : Request the desktop version of a website if the mobile version isn't what you want to see; Add …

    Software 18 Apr 03:33

  • Notebook makers hit hard in pre-Ivy Bridge lull

    April is the cruellest month ... for ODMs

    Taiwanese ODMs which produce notebooks for some of the world’s biggest brands including Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo are set to see shipments fall by up to 20 per cent in April as the transition to Intel’s much anticipated Ivy Bridge platform takes hold. The new chips are set to land later in the month, but large scale shipments …

    Hardware 18 Apr 04:40

  • Ten... smartphone survival accessories

    Product round-up Protect and deploy

    As the weather starts to improve and the knobbly knees of British sun seekers start gracing the public eye, weekends away untangling guy-ropes and blowing up inflatable mattresses draws close. But the organic world of planet Earth is no safe place for a man of modern comfort, and taking a survival kit with you specifically for …

    reghardware 18 Apr 06:00

  • Singapore most 'liveable' Asian city for ex-pat IT pros

    Hong Kong needs to clean up its act.

    Ex-pat IT professionals looking for a better quality of life abroad could do worse than try Singapore, the Japanese city of Kobe or Hong Kong – the top three most liveable cities in Asia according to new research from HR information provider ECA International. The firm’s annual Location Ratings system is designed to help firms …

    Jobs 18 Apr 06:33

  • French perfume house bottles 'Eau de new MacBook'

    Whoever smelt it dealt it

    The scent of an unopened MacBook has been captured by a French perfume house which claims to have created a fragrance reminiscent of that accompanying the unboxing of an Apple gadget. No, it's not for commercial use; Apple has surely patented the smell of its products anyway. It's for an art project, but considerable effort …

    Small Biz 18 Apr 07:02

  • Indonesian ID card will deduct fines from bank accounts

    Police plan to merge data with national identity database

    Indonesians are being asked to adopt two identity cards, both of which will store their personal details in government-controlled databases, after the nation's National Police Criminal Investigation Division announce a sign-up drive for the Indonesia Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (INAFIS). Indonesians are already …

    Public Sector 18 Apr 07:05

  • Quantum brandishes LTFS tool for cheap-as-chips tape

    Low-cost storage for media types

    Quantum has launched an LTFS tape file system appliance and hopes to popularise low-cost, high-capacity tape use for accessing large video files. LTFS is the Linear Tape File System. It was devised by IBM, using a partitioning feature of the LTO-5 tape standard, and presents a file/folder system interface to tape drives, …

    Storage 18 Apr 07:31

  • Tosh UK rewards competition hopefuls by exposing their privates

    ICO slaps wrist after URL twiddling leaked personal info

    Toshiba Information Systems UK breached the Data Protection Act, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has ruled. The company published the personal details of 20 competition entrants on its website, which were compromised by a security gaffe, the watchdog growled. "A security fault with the incremental numbering of the …

    Enterprise Security 18 Apr 08:03

  • Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

    Comment Chattering classes go mad for gap-year angle brackets

    The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the heavier kids to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands. I have no idea if …

    Developer 18 Apr 08:32

  • Chinese and US military square off for cyber war games

    Tensions mount as APT attacks continue

    The United States and Chinese military have been locking horns in secret cyber warfare exercises designed to help prevent the outbreak of real war between the two. The Guardian revealed that two so-called war games were carried out last year through intermediary and Washington think-tank the Center for Strategic and …

    Malware 18 Apr 08:58

  • Microsoft bigs up open source, then stuffs it under the sofa

    Open ... and Shut Big Blue got it right, why can't Redmond?

    Microsoft's new Open Technologies subsidiary may be many things, but one thing it's not is "further demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities", as Microsoft has positioned it. While it's true that Microsoft's self-interest has …

    CIO 18 Apr 09:19

  • Computacenter UK biz hit by spending 'freeze' in banks

    Continental operations lift group numbers

    Computacenter's UK profits and kit sales were dampened by a capital expenditure "freeze" among banking customers, but this was more than offset at group level by a stronger turnout in Europe. In a trading update to the LSE, Computacenter (CC) said group revenues for the first calendar quarter were up 9 per cent year-on-year, …

    Channel Register 18 Apr 09:28

  • Tunbridge Wells' car park bonking offered new NFC logo

    N-Marks the spot

    The NFC Forum is hoping a more laid-back approach to licensing will encourage use of its N-Mark logo, but those deploying NFC are still playing fast and loose with branding. Since admitting it had failed to protect the term "NFC" and the long form "Near Field Communications", which are both now generic terms, the NFC Forum has …

    Wireless 18 Apr 09:39

  • Microsoft, Intel reportedly partner to crush Apple

    Want iPad market share to plunge below 50% next year

    We don't need "industry sources" to tell us Intel and Microsoft are actively encouraging computer makers to offer Windows 8 tablets - or that there will be a host of these machines announced before the year is up. Intel, in particular, needs to promote its chippery, especially now that rival processor platform, ARM, owns …

    reghardware 18 Apr 09:39

  • Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

    POP3, IMAP users can engage smugmode

    Google admitted that an outage last night to its Gmail service affected around 10 per cent of its userbase - in other words, around 30 million people were unable to access their email online. The downtime, according to the Chocolate Factory, lasted up to two hours for some punters. However, reports trickling into The Register …

    Applications 18 Apr 09:58

  • 10x power boost for Freeview as London analogue signal cut

    Retune your telly

    London's analogue TV signal was silenced at midnight yesterday, paving the way for 4G mobile data networks in the nation's capital. The analogue signal was transmitted from the Crystal Palace station now owned by Arqiva, which runs the UK's terrestrial broadcasting system after a previous government flogged it off. Crystal …

    reghardware 18 Apr 10:00

  • O2 declares 4G trial success... with 1000 users

    Rhetoric ramp-up ahead of Ofcom auction

    London is switching off analogue TV today, so O2 is crowing about how marvellously its 4G trials have gone, despite the two things being at opposite ends of the spectrum. O2's LTE trial involves 25 base stations, a couple down in Docklands to cover the O2 Arena (aka The Millennium Dome) and the rest covering most of the West …

    Wireless 18 Apr 10:13

  • Wasteland sequel given $3m green light

    Classic RPG follow-up Kickstarted into action

    Plans to bring back the post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland will go ahead after a Kickstarter project mustered more than enough funds to give the project the green light. A team headed by Interplay founder and famed games developer Brian Fargo sought financial backing of at least $1m (£625,400) for the PC version of the game, and …

    reghardware 18 Apr 10:20

  • Vodafone fights India's retrospective tax grab

    Law change may force telco to cough up

    Vodafone is asking for international arbitration on its claim that the Indian government's attempt to retrospectively apply changes in tax law is illegal. The law concerned would, if it were retrospectively applied, cost Vodafone dearly as it managed to avoid paying capital gains tax of £1.4bn on its acquisition of Hutchison …

    Financial News 18 Apr 10:32

  • JCB builds Android blower for brickies

    Construction gets tough

    JCB has dabbled with mobile phones before, generally offering rugged handsets with limited capabilities. But with the world cementing interest in smartphones, the company has finally chiselled its first Android blower, the Toughphone Pro-Smart. While the digger maker did team with Motorola for a JCB version of the Defy Plus, …

    reghardware 18 Apr 10:38

  • Zuckerberg blew $1bn on Instagram 'without telling Facebook board'

    No bankers or lawyers in sofa-based deal, says report

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left his board out of the loop as he personally hammered out a $1bn deal with Instagram for its colour-changing photo software in three days of negotiations in his house in Palo Alto, culminating in the deal on Sunday 8 April, a report in the Wall Street Journal claims. Citing a person familiar …

    CIO 18 Apr 10:44

  • Hunters 2

    iGamer Stand-up fight - or another bug hunt?

    Turn-based tactical role-playing games seem ideally suited to touchscreens. Their top-down or isometric graphics go easy on mobile processors, their measured, methodical gameplay never asks too much of limited control inputs and, perhaps most importantly, their short challenge and reward cycles provide instant dopamine …

    reghardware 18 Apr 11:00

  • BT's 'unbeatable' Infinity broadband ads banned by ASA

    Not to Infinity and beyond, actually

    BT has been collared by Blighty's advertising regulator, the ASA, which upheld four complaints brought against the telco giant. It ruled that BT's Infinity ads as shown on telly, published in the press and run online were misleading. The watchdog added that none of the commercials should appear in their current form again. …

    Music and Media 18 Apr 11:13

  • Dell recruits storage guru to get cozy with resellers

    Mark Hiley will push hard on infrastructure kit

    Dell has hauled in a storage veteran Mark Hiley as UK channel development manager in a bid to drive reseller sales of infrastructure kit. Hiley spent 10 years as UK and Ireland country manager at CLARiiON Storage until 1999 and then moved to LSI Corporation as the area director for Northern EMEA. The Texan tech titan said …

    Channel Register 18 Apr 11:16

  • Rare! Yahoo! revenue! growth! spotted! in! Q1!

    It's alive! It's alive!

    Yahoo! has reported a slight uptick in revenue and income in the first quarter of this year - the first time it's had any sales growth in the last three years. Revenue lifted from $1.214bn (£759m) in the first quarter of 2011 to $1.221bn (£766m) in the same period this year, while net income grew from $225m (£140m) to $287m (£ …

    Financial News 18 Apr 11:27

  • Public sector IT buyers 'hogtied by mess of red tape'

    Purchasing rules overlap sparks channel handwringing

    Blighty's public sector IT bean counters face a bewildering mess of overlapping tech purchasing bureaucracy, channel sources have warned. Three wide-reaching frameworks that direct government tech spending will end up running in parallel into next spring, potentially confusing purse holders. Of the three schemes, one is the £ …

    Channel Register 18 Apr 11:44

  • Canon suspends EOS 5D Mk III shipments

    Undesirable exposure

    Canon has temporarily halted shipping of its latest DSLR, the 5D Mark III, after customers reported a fault with the LCD display that leads to exposure issues. Punters complained online that the camera's exposure value can change when shooting in dark conditions, a fault the company acknowledged in a statement today. "Canon …

    reghardware 18 Apr 11:59

  • US judge orders Apple, Samsung CEOs to get a room

    Patent battle ideally needs to end before heat death of universe

    A US court has sent Apple and Samsung CEOs into settlement talks to sort out their patent disputes or at least limit the number of wrangles. The two mobile tech rivals said in a joint court filing that they were both willing to participate in the peace summit, where chief executives Tim Cook and Choi Gee-sung, along with their …

    CIO 18 Apr 12:02

  • PLANET-SWAP shock: Stars grabbed dirtballs from other clusters

    Galaxy was young then, explain boffins

    Space boffins have suggested that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured roaming rogue planets as they tootle through the cosmos. Artist's impression of a rogue planet tootling through the universe. Credit: Christine Pulliam (CfA) The rogue planets, which can be ejected from their own star's system by interaction …

    Space 18 Apr 12:19

  • NAO: Gov open data policy disorganised and costly

    Calls for cost-benefit analysis

    The government’s open-data policy has no proven benefits and could actually be costing taxpayers more than it’s worth. That’s the message from a National Audit Office report that tells Whitehall it’s time for some proper cost analysis on the policy of unloading vast data sets on the public. In the absence of such analysis …

    Government 18 Apr 12:38

  • Berners-Lee: Net snoop law tosses human rights into the shredder

    Web grandfather slams UK.gov's online surveillance plan

    Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned the Tory-led Coalition not to push through a bill to legislate plans to massively increase surveillance of the internet. In an interview with the Guardian, the world wide web inventor and "open data" advisor to the government urged the Home Office to drop the proposed law, which Theresa May …

    ID 18 Apr 13:01

  • Oakley: 'smart' sunglasses ready to shine

    Shade us the way

    Sunglasses manufacturer Oakley reckons the time is ripe for 'smart glasses', and has revealed its own R&D efforts in specs technology, which could see it compete with Google's Project Glass in the not-too-distant future. "As an organisation, we’ve been chasing this beast since 1997,” said Oakley CEO Colin Baden in an interview …

    reghardware 18 Apr 13:18

  • Unlock the business value of your information

    On demand Information management initiatives that work for you

    What are the benefits and costs involved in unlocking the business value of the information held within your organisation? In Jon Collins and a panel of experts set out to explore this question in a lovely little Regcast. Unlock the business value of your information is now available on demand. This is what the panel …

    Site News 18 Apr 13:30

  • Channel wild-child Cisco vows to be more predictable partner

    Dangles tempting rebates over resellers

    Cisco is trying to fire up resellers' engines by doing what it does best: launching a bunch of channel programmes. The networking lynchpin will consolidate 47 services programmes into one global scheme and introduce a compensation model based on a "discount plus pay-for-performance rebate". Nick Earle, senior veep for …

    Channel Register 18 Apr 13:31

  • Unemployed offered money to watch grass grow

    Indolent 'Automatic Lawnmower Supervisor' sought

    Those among you who believe it's your human right to be paid to "read, tweet, surf the internet, check your email and sunbathe" should get your lazy arses into this job, which is offering hard cash to someone to do just that. For those of you not au fait with the Spanish lingo, Husqvarna is looking for a Madrid-based " …

    Bootnotes 18 Apr 13:47

  • Phone-hack saga: Prosecutors mull charges for 11 suspects

    Four hacks, one cop and six citizens on CPS dartboard so far...

    Four journalists and one cop have been pinpointed by the UK's Crown Prosecution Service over alleged offences relating to phone hacking, it emerged today. The CPS confirmed to The Register that 11 suspects could face prosecution over misdeeds that led to the scandal that rocked Rupert Murdoch's media empire and damaged the …

    Policing 18 Apr 13:59

  • RIP Ceefax: Digital switchover kills off last teletext service

    How are we going to impress Americans now?

    Over a decade ago the majority of UK holidays were booked by TV, but today London lost Ceefax – and by the end of the year teletext as we know it will disappear entirely. Ceefax is the BBC's teletext service, as opposed to the eponymous Teletext Limited, which produced text services for the other channels from 1993 to 2010, …

    Music and Media 18 Apr 14:27

  • Reg readers tell us why implementing change is so hard

    Reg Research Unravelling symptom and cause

    Readers have provided some great feedback during our latest workshop on a topic that has turned out to be close to many of your hearts – how best to manage an increasingly virtualised IT infrastructure. As part of the exercise, we ran one of our famous Freeform Dynamics polls so you could tell us how things currently stand in …

    Service Assurance 18 Apr 15:00

  • Sony whips out new optical mass storage format

    Hirai's bid for glory looks a lot like Blu-ray...

    Sony has seen commercial optical data archiving systems fail one after the other: from Blu-ray to DVD and HD DVD. But the firm is either learning from its mistakes or readying itself to make new ones as it launches yet another new proprietary optical disk archiving product and format. The announcement was made at NAB, the big …

    Storage 18 Apr 15:02

  • PR mag: Let promoters edit clients' Wikipedia entries

    Public relations bods found 'errors' there, natch...

    PRs feel that they are excluded from making edits to Wikipedia even when they are trying to correct factual errors, a survey by the journal of the Public Relations Society of America has found. Twenty-three per cent of the 1,284 public relations professionals interviewed found making changes to Wikipedia "almost impossible". …

    Music and Media 18 Apr 15:34

  • Spy tech exports from Europe face tighter scrutiny

    Strasbourg mulls new rules on surveillance software by 2013

    The EU could soon introduce rules to monitor the deployment of internet censorship technology in autocratic regimes including China and Saudi Arabia. The European Parliament is proposing a resolution to strengthen the accountability of countries that export gear used to block websites and eavesdrop on mobile communications. " …

    Enterprise Security 18 Apr 15:58

  • NHS IT fiasco workers threaten lunch-hour revolt over job cuts

    Updated Union to form picnic line over CSC redundancies

    IT bods working on the car-crash NHS patient records project will stage a protest during Thursday lunchtime over compulsory redundancies at their employer, CSC. As Computer Sciences Corporation's contract with Blighty's health service grinds to a messy end, the Virginia-based firm announced it will axe 500 jobs in the UK - 30 …

    Government 18 Apr 16:17

  • Morphlabs forges OpenStack cloud rack

    Ready to run virty machines

    Morphlabs has been moving into physical hardware over the past two years and is now rolling out a converged system called mCloud Rack Enterprise. The system welds together Dell cloudy servers packed with solid state storage, Nexenta storage software, Arista Networks switches, and the new "Essex" commercial-grade OpenStack cloud …

    Infrastructure 18 Apr 16:44

  • Sergey Brin REALLY ADMIRES Apple, Facebook

    But net's biggest gatekeeper not a fan of other gatekeepers...

    Open is a word so overused and abused that it is now impossible not to switch off when yet another tech titan or politico comes along with their very own interpretation of what the term should actually mean. But it's also a word that Google seems unable to resist repeating. Sergey Brin, co-founder of the Chocolate Factory, …

    CIO 18 Apr 17:01

  • Caringo greases up CAStor product, slips out VM versions

    File access to objects

    Object storage startup Caringo has introduced virtual machine editions of its CAStor object storage product along with standard file protocol access to CAStor, broaching the question whether object storage will just become file storage under another name. Both CAStor and Caringo's Content File Server (CFS) come as virtual …

    Storage 18 Apr 17:32

  • Techie stages 'strip down' protest at TSA 'harassment'

    Naked but unstressed man does 'something with internet'

    An Oregon man who "does something with the internet" stripped stark naked at Portland airport on Tuesday in a protest at TSA screening policies. John E Brennan, 50, turned up to board a flight San Jose yesterday, according to reports, but took umbrage at the TSA's screening procedures. KATU News reports that Brennan said he …

    Bootnotes 18 Apr 18:21

  • Microsoft retunes Intune for full Android, iOS app integration

    But did spirit of Steve Jobs scotches iPhone demo?

    Microsoft has been showing off updates to Intune and System Center Config Manager which allow BYOD users to download and manage company-approved iOS and Android applications or run them via VDI. For his closing keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the …

    Platform 18 Apr 18:28

  • HDS to launch unified storage systems

    HUS replaces AMS

    Hitachi Data Systems is replacing its mid-range AMS storage arrays with a new HDS Unified Storage (HUS) array. We know this not because of any type of release or announcement from HDS or Hitachi, but rather because Avnet Belgium has spilled the beans. Have a look at this Avnet Belgium website. The webpage text says: Hitachi …

    Storage 18 Apr 19:02

  • White House issues privacy warning on CISPA-style laws

    Even Berners-Lee and the EFF weigh in

    The White House has struck a pro-privacy stance on online security legislation such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which comes up for vote in the US House of Representatives next week. "The nation’s critical infrastructure cyber vulnerabilities will not be addressed by information sharing alone …

    Government 18 Apr 20:49

  • VMware still shines in a Facebook world

    Executive shuffle as CFO departs for Workday

    It's tough for VMware to compete for mindshare in a world where Facebook is getting ready to go public and social media is so much more graspable for the masses compared to the virtual infrastructure that VMware sells. But VMware's finances are still impressive enough to warrant some love for infrastructure, with revenues up 25 …

    Virtualization 18 Apr 22:17

  • CSIRO orders 2,144 core, 174,720 GPU upgrade

    Xenon Systems signed to deliver 120-teraflop supercomputer

    The CSIRO has announced an upgrade to its GPU cluster to a hefty 134 nodes powered by 268 Intel E5-2650 processors and 390 NVidia Tesla 2050 GPU cards. The 2,144 CPU core, 174,720 GPU core thumper will, according to the science agency’s head of Computation and Simulation Sciences Dr John Taylor, deliver up to 120 Teraflops of …

    HPC 18 Apr 23:00

  • Boffins tout solar efficiency boost

    Sydney Uni scientists catch low-energy photons

    A joint project between Sydney University and Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Energy claims to offer a low-cost boost to solar cell efficiency. The efficiency question for solar cell developers is how to capture more energy from more photons, since “wasted” photons merely get turned into heat. That’s harder than …

    Energy 18 Apr 23:30

  • Larry Page has painful day on stand in Oracle Java case

    Deploys James Murdoch defense over smoking email

    Google CEO Larry Page has had an uncomfortable day in court facing allegations that he knew the company was infringing on Java's intellectual property when Android was being developed. One of Oracle's prime exhibits on the third day of the Oracle-Google patent trial was an email from Google engineer Tim Lindholm, who had been …

    Financial News 18 Apr 23:43

  • Intel: Chinese server market second only to US

    More Xeon E5s 'in the not-too-distant future'

    Intel's earnings call yesterday left server watchers wondering when China will outstrip the US as the world's biggest consumer of server chips. Intel's server business was not immune to shrinkage in the first quarter of 2012, and it would be easy to blame it on the delayed ramp of the Xeon E5-2600 processor for two-socket …

    Servers 18 Apr 23:54