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15th May 2012 Archive

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  • Yellow Pages targets zombie survivalist market

    There’ll be an app for that after competition concludes

    Australia’s Yellow Pages will hand out A$2500 to the developer whose app best assists users to survive a zombie invasion and/or apocalypse … with the aid of the popular business directory. The reason for the prize is the API that Sensis, publisher of the Yellow Pages in Australia, offers developers who wish to link to dredge …

    Business 15 May 00:04

  • iCloud blows away 15 million users for 90 minutes

    Normal service has been restored, photo-sharing on the way

    Apple’s iCloud service crashed for ninety minutes on Monday, US time, leaving 12% of users – about 15 million people - possibly “unable to access iCloud mail.” Apple issued a system status update confirming the outage, which took place from 8:00AM to 9:30AM, Pacific Daylight time. The reason for the outage is not known, but …

    Platform 15 May 00:49

  • Indian government to buy in tech for social good

    Acquisition fund could start on farming tech next year

    The Indian government has revealed ambitious plans to set-up a Technology Acquisition Fund designed to facilitate the purchase of technologies from across the globe in order that they may be modified and commercialised domestically to benefit the whole of Indian society. Renu Swarup, an advisor to the country’s science and …

    Public Sector 15 May 03:52

  • ESA seeks doctor for Antarctic spaceflight sim

    13 months of cold, dark, cramped quarters a "very interesting analogue"

    The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to interview “doctors who are not afraid of the dark” for a spaceflight research gig at one of the coldest, darkest places on earth. The location in question is Concordia Station (location pictured below), a research facility perched at 3200m on the high Antarctic plateau. The station goes …

    Jobs 15 May 04:09

  • Thailand dries off and ramps up IT spending

    Smartphones and services set to propel country to second in SE Asia

    Thailand is back on the scene and spending like there’s no tomorrow, according to new IDC stats which show the country is set to complete its rehabilitation from the devastating floods last year and jump to number two spot in IT spending in Southeast Asia. The analyst’s latest IT spending forecast predicted Thailand will …

    Business 15 May 04:17

  • Game goes titsup in Australia

    Administrator installed

    Competition from online retailers has claimed another casualty in the high street with the demise of the australian incarnation of chain store retailer, Game. PricewaterhouseCoopers was yesterday appointed voluntary administrator of the UK-owned gaming company, which has over 500 Australian employees and 92 stores nationally …

    Business 15 May 04:53

  • 125,000 Ubuntu PCs to land in Pakistani students' laps

    Education booster or vote-buyer?

    As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers. Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board, Umar Saif …

    Public Sector 15 May 04:58

  • AMD: New Trinity laptop chips out-juice Intel graphics

    'Ultrabook? Fuggedaboutit. Ultrathin is in'

    Laptop manufacturers hoping to flog ultrabooks – or, as Intel has trademarked them, Ultrabooks™ – may be able to shave their prices a bit now that AMD has released its second-generation A-Series accelerated processing units (APUs), code-named "Trinity". AMD promises that its new 32-nanometer, high-k metal gate CPU-GPU mashups …

    PCs & Chips 15 May 05:00

  • HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook

    Review Shiny slab of laptop lusciousness

    The test unit I reviewed was forwarded on to me from the Harrods press office. That alone should tell you a lot about the HP Envy 14 Spectre. For you, Harrods may conjure images of oil sheiks browsing bling, affectatious middle classes buying ham and feeble-minded tourists ogling Saint Diana's soiled crockery, but Harrods makes …

    reghardware 15 May 06:00

  • West Midlands plods get mobile fingerprint tech

    Portable mobile dab-slabs lead to Brummie collars felt

    West Midlands police is to introduce fingerprint scanning devices, which allow officers to find out if a person is wanted by police or the courts. The force said it plans to roll out 70 hand-held MobileID devices following a successful pilot of the technology. The devices are satellite-linked to a national fingerprint database …

    Policing 15 May 07:01

  • Flashy mutant Ultrabooks to shove pure SSD chaps off cliff

    Ultrabook makers will embrace hybrid trend

    Storage industry research firm TrendFocus says Ultrabooks will increasingly use hybrid disk drives for their near-SSD speed, HDD capacity and ability to undercut pure SSD Ultrabook prices. Seagate thinks hybrid drives will eventually enter every part of its product portfolio. According to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers, …

    Storage 15 May 07:29

  • Google compressed-filth legal battle with smut site ended in US

    Miniature nudies aren't porno piracy

    A publisher of adult photos can no longer raise claims that Google infringed its copyright in the US following a stipulation by a district court in California. The court said Perfect 10's claims that Google infringed its rights had been "voluntarily dismissed with prejudice", and that the publisher could not appeal against the …

    Law 15 May 08:01

  • Spy under your car bonnet 'worth billions by 2016'

    Break the speed limit, break the bank with your insurance quote

    Technology that allows cars to snoop on motorists and tell insurers about their bad driving will form a worldwide market worth $14.4bn (£8.95bn) by 2016, analysts reckon. A new report from Juniper Research suggests intelligent vehicles chock-full of gear for navigating, recording info for insurance purposes, and telling the AA …

    Applications 15 May 08:32

  • Fastest-ever hydrocarb scramjet hits Mach 8, doesn't explode

    HIFire 2 engine successfully lights match in a hurricane

    The successful test launch of the hydrocarbon-fuelled scramjet HIFire 2 by the US brings mankind a step closer to practical travel at over five times the speed of sound. Reliable hypersonic transportation could revolutionise trips to space and across the globe, but sustained flight at such speed is difficult: several test …

    Physics 15 May 09:01

  • IBM smashes Flash out of Wimbledon, serves up HTML5 app

    Adobe's double fault: too snazzy and doesn't work on Apple kit

    Next month’s Wimbledon tennis championship in London will serve up more player data than ever before and, for the first time, deliver live video to game fans over the web. SPSS software from IBM will be deployed at all 19 courts and to capture information, draw up competitors’ stats and evaluate their performance. The kit is …

    Developer 15 May 09:19

  • US-Russian trio blast off to space station in Soyuz launch

    Spacemen get ready for Elon Musk's Dragon docking

    Three new crew members blasted off in the wee hours of this morning for a two-day flight aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. While Elon Musk is still dreaming of carrying people into space in his Dragon craft, and NASA's Shuttles rumble off into retirement, the Soyuz spacecraft is still the only …

    Science 15 May 09:38

  • Sony to add full HD display to 15in Ivy Bridge laptop

    Budget Vaios outed too

    Two laptop lines were refreshed by Sony this morning: the Vaio E and S. The existing 14in E gains a new "wrap-around" look and 15.5in and 17.3in siblings. The bigger machines go on sale early in June, Sony said, but neither qualifies for Ivy Bridge chippery. Instead we have a Core i5-2450M backed by 6GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 …

    reghardware 15 May 09:44

  • Nokia outs budget phone pair

    Two-Sim simple handset

    Nokia has unwrapped a couple of budget phones this morning, pitching the 110 and 112 as internet devices despite their - by modern standards - tiny 1.8in, 128 x 160 screens. The two dual-band handsets can take two Sims, mind, handy for mixing business and pleasure.   New Nokias: 110 (left) and 112 There's a variant of the …

    reghardware 15 May 10:17

  • London's Oyster card website still down after 12-hour outage

    Transport for London: We did this on purpose

    Transport for London's Oyster card website jumped the tracks and fell offline for 12 hours, leaving anyone wanting to top-up, cancel or renew their card online unable to do so. Since at least 8pm yesterday visitors to the Oyster page, when accessed through the main TFL site, were faced with this error message: Some tweets …

    Public Sector 15 May 10:22

  • NHS 'pays up to THREE times over the odds' for IT gear

    Health bosses told to stop blowing taxpayers' cash

    The NHS is paying double or even triple normal prices for trivial tech gear including printer parts, cables and optical mice, according to a poll of IT bosses. Here's just one example of how the Department of Health is cutting deals that are worse than what other wholesale buyers are getting - and worse than what average …

    Channel Register 15 May 10:31

  • Steve Jobs' death could clear way for more open Apple - Woz

    But don't sacrifice the shininess

    Apple could be more open and just as successful - but don’t take it from us. That’s from company co-founder and computing idealist Steve Wozniak. While on a tour of Australia, Woz rekindled memories of the mid-1970s and his dream behind the first Apple computers he built with Steve Jobs. Woz was inspired to speak out after …

    CIO 15 May 10:42

  • HTC fires up latest Desire

    Budget Ice Cream Sarnie phone

    HTC would like you to know about the Desire C, a Beats Audio-equipped phone running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Pitched a the lower reaches of the smartphone segment - T-Mobile will be selling the C for £180 on PAYG, for example, or free on a £15.50 per month contract - the handset is based around a 3.5in, 320 x 480 …

    reghardware 15 May 10:42

  • HP plonks newcomer into hot seat for EMEA Enterprise Group

    But future role for HP EMEA MD unconfirmed in shakeup

    HP has shuffled the management deck in EMEA in a restructure that's bagged big cheese Peter Ryan the top job at the Enterprise Group. The vendor confirmed in March it was stitching together the PC and printer divisions and merging the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) and Global Accounts and Technology Services …

    Channel Register 15 May 10:56

  • Apple's Siri nominates Nokia as best phone maker

    You cannot be Siri-ous

    Who'd've thunk it? Apple's voice-assistant, Siri, has suggested Nokia's Lumia 900 as the lead candidate to be the best cell phone ever. Someone put that very question to Siri, and here, courtesy of fansite WMPowerUser, is the result: Source: WMPowerUser Siri interrogates Wolfram's Alpha database for answer to punters' …

    reghardware 15 May 10:56

  • IMDb

    Android App of the Week Film fan's feast

    If you're a fan of the movies then this app should be right up your aisle. Not only can IMDb tell you just about everything you could ever wish to know about just about every film ever made, but it has all the information you need to plan your movie-going night out too. Film opening dates, show times, the location and contact …

    reghardware 15 May 11:00

  • Apple scrubs old Leopards of Flashback Trojan infections

    Security airdrop saves legacy fanbois from nasties

    Apple has released patches that defend users of its older Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system against security threats. Monday's security fixes help defend Mac users stuck on the two-year-old operating system against assaults by the infamous Flashback Trojan. Users of the newer Snow Leopard (10.6) and Lion (10.7) operating …

    Malware 15 May 11:22

  • Virgin straps on phone masts for the flying upper classes

    'HELLO? Hello darling, I'm on a Virgin- What? No..'

    Flyers heading to New York on Virgin Atlantic will be able to make calls from the plane, thanks to a mobile mobile base station and a satellite uplink, but expect to pay through the nose for a service which hasn't proved popular elsewhere. Only customers of O2 and Vodafone will be able to connect at all, and those will be …

    Mobile 15 May 11:39

  • World+Dog as likely to view vids on PC as TV

    But viewing figures down

    Folks, you're as likely to watch video content on your computer as your TV, if stats collated by asking tens of thousands of web-surfing consumers around the world is anything to go by. Nielsen, a US market research firm, asked 28,000 or so people in 56 countries how often they watch video content on a computer, on a TV or on …

    reghardware 15 May 11:42

  • IT products give energy giant DCC relief from icy hot patch

    Distribution makes up for pleasant winter, British biz MicroP hauls in bucks

    DCC gained some cheer from its IT distribution business over the last year, after an unusually mild winter put a chill on its energy distribution business. Overall revenues at the Irish conglomerate came in at €10.7bn for the year ending 31 March, up 23.2 per cent. Pre-tax income was €155.8m, compared to €203.8m in the …

    Channel Register 15 May 11:58

  • Inside the Skynet ghost town built by bunker-based boffins

    Analysis Brainiacs beaver beneath barren burg called CITE

    It's an empty city in the middle of the New Mexico desert ringed by a security perimeter. The wind will blow down barren streets, whisper through a vacant school, round high-rise offices cleared of commuters and out through lonely houses in suburbia. Unseen boffins will beaver away in underground bunkers. But this is not the …

    Rise of the Machines 15 May 12:02

  • Facebook ups IPO shares to $38, edges towards $104bn value

    You want some stocks? Pay more... bitch!

    Facebook has reportedly raised the price range on its IPO shares from the $28-$35 range to $34-$38 each, as the growing interest of investors has boosted the valuation of the firm to up to an eye-watering $104bn. By the end of last week, reports abounded that the initial public offering was oversubscribed, and the demand for …

    Financial News 15 May 12:18

  • VMware puts on new vFabric suite, takes your database on a date

    Virty giant gets flirty with PostgreSQL

    VMware pretty much owns the virtualization layer on X86 iron inside of enterprises, but it has a long way to go to get the same kind of uptake for its vFabric application framework. Just as it did when it turned the bare-metal ESX Server hypervisor into a server virtualization stack and then a cloudy infrastructure ubertool, …

    Virtualization 15 May 12:37

  • Siri subtly shifts smartphone allegiance

    No longer nominates Nokia kit

    Conspiracy theorists and Apple haters, rejoice! Siri, Cupertino's iPhone 4S voice assistant, is no longer suggesting the Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho handset might be the best cellphone. As we reported earlier, that's the recommendation that Siri has been making of late. Siri checks Wolfram's Alpha database for the information, and …

    reghardware 15 May 12:40

  • Red Hat hits 10-year, $1bn Enterprise Linux birthday

    How a Unix killer crawled from the dot-com bust

    Making a Linux distribution is easy, and lots of people have done it and continue to do it. All you have to do is get the source code and integrate the pieces you like and slap your logo on it. Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, …

    Operating Systems 15 May 13:01

  • Lenovo intros carbon-fibre ThinkPad Ultrabook

    Dozens of other black laptops launched too

    It's ThinkPads a-go-go at Lenovo, with dozens of the black-clad laptops announced today in four families: the T, X, L and W series. ThinkPad X1 Carbon The highlight is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, built around a carbon-fibre chassis and intended to be the lightest pro-oriented Ultrabook there is. It's a 1.4kg, 14-incher with on …

    reghardware 15 May 13:04

  • UK's '£1.2bn software pirates' mostly 'blokes under 34'

    Tougher laws needed to stem dodgy downloads, says BSA

    The BSA is again bemoaning the lack of deterrents for software piracy after the commercial worth of unlicensed programs in the UK for 2011 remained at £1.2bn, unchanged on the previous year. This equates to a piracy rate of 26 per cent as more than one in four applications installed on users' machines was illegal, the software …

    Channel Register 15 May 13:27

  • 'IT is no place for the little ladies', says Dell mouthpiece

    It's called box shifting for a reason

    Texan tech titan Dell has been forced to assert its commitment to equal rights in the workplace after a Danish funnyman hosting its channel event in Copenhagen rattled off a string of sexist jokes. The channel and indeed the tech industry is known for being male dominated, a point that - if we are being charitable - outspoken …

    Channel Register 15 May 13:39

  • ICO blasted offline by DDoS cannon in Leveson protest

    Anonymous-linked hacktivists shell site for days

    The UK's Information Commissioner's Office website has been blown offline by a distributed-denial-of-service attack that appears to be a hacktivist protest over the Leveson Inquiry. The ICO spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement that access to the site had been disrupted over the past few days by the DDoS …

    Public Sector 15 May 14:01

  • Bitcoin bank Bitcoinica still titsup after cyberheist

    More than $90k in tokens snatched

    Bitcoin exchange Bitcoinica remains offline following a hack against its systems last week that resulted in the theft of digital currency valued at approximately $90,000 (£56k). The digital currency exchange took its servers offline on Friday following the discovery of a breach on Friday, as a statement on Bitcoinica's website …

    Crime 15 May 14:18

  • Coupon-spaffer Groupon starts to sniff actual profits

    And those marketing costs are way down

    Groupon significantly reduced the amount of money it lost in the first quarter of this year, only ending up with a net loss of $11.7m compared to a loss of $146.5m in the same quarter of 2011. The daily deals site actually managed to make its first ever operating profit, claiming $39.6m on its coupons, but interest and taxes …

    Financial News 15 May 14:37

  • The key questions you must ask to save your virty desktop dream

    Sysadmin blog Shifting to stateless? Don't turn it into a nightmare

    What is required for a successful stateless desktop deployment? Planning. Every implementation will be different, and experience has taught me that there are very few hard and fast rules. Stateless desktops are non-persistent, meaning that they get destroyed every time the user logs off and returned to a known setup. Proper …

    Sysadmin blog 15 May 15:03

  • Mole sheds light on incoming illuminated Amazon Kindle

    No colour reader, though

    The E Ink display in Amazon's Kindles may be great for reading in bright sunshine, but it's pants on gloomy days and totally useless in the dark. But that may soon change: Amazon is said to be preparing a front-lit version of the popular e-book reader. Citing a source who claims to have seen the prototype, Reuters reports the …

    reghardware 15 May 15:23

  • Kepler chip drought leaves Nvidia gasping for moolah

    Profit halved in Q1, everyone wants a piece of TSMC

    Supply shortages for 28 nanometer GPUs from fab partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp adversely impacted GPU chip and coprocessor maker Nvidia once again in its most recent quarter. Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended in April came in at the high end of the company's guidance, but nonetheless fell by …

    Financial News 15 May 15:29

  • Bubble 2.0 startups will crash out before they cash out

    Open ... and Shut Why Facebook and Amazon won't come a callin'

    It's possible your next startup idea will earn you $1bn, but don't count on it. While there are some stand-out success stories in Silicon Valley, there is also a raft of startups pushing product features masquerading as companies. Some of these will be acquired by the likes of Zynga and Amazon, and some will go public. But …

    CIO 15 May 15:58

  • US dope farmer in Walmart rattlesnake chomp shock

    Mulch shopping trip ends in 'six bags of anti-venom'

    A Walmart customer required the urgent administration of "six bags of anti-venom" after a rattlesnake sank its fangs into him at a Washington state tentacle of the retail monolith. Mica Craig, 47, was in the store in Clarkston, innocently shopping for some mulch with which to nourish his cannabis plants, which he's "licensed …

    Bootnotes 15 May 16:34

  • Scammers exploit wannabe demon-slayers hyped by Diablo III

    Go straight to hell

    Cybercrooks latched onto the release of Diablo III on Monday with a run of scams themed around the widely anticipated video game. Blizzard's games systems collapsed due to the higher than expected demand for the demon-slaying game, The Guardian reports. The software company is attempting to stop pirates from nicking the new …

    Entertainment 15 May 17:03

  • EMC rolls new VMAX bundle for cloud pushers

    Array plus SW plus services platform

    It just sits there and rakes in money for you as users get provisioned, use the space and get billed: that's the message EMC is pushing to cloud service providers with a new VMAX bundle of array, software and services. VMAX SP – for service providers – is a VMAX array packaged with software and services at four levels to help …

    Infrastructure 15 May 18:02

  • US Supremes hammer final nail into Psystar coffin

    The fat lady croons doom tune over hackintosher's corpse

    The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher's request to review an appeals court's September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones. "We are …

    PCs & Chips 15 May 18:22

  • Nvidia's Kepler pushes parallelism up to eleven

    GTC 2012 Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism make GPUs sweat

    When Nvidia did a preview of its next-generation "Kepler" GPU chips back in March, the company's top brass said that they were saving some of the goodies in the Kepler design for the big event at Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference in San Jose, which runs this week. And true to its word, the Kepler GPUs do have some goodies that …

    HPC 15 May 19:00

  • Cheques not checking out just yet

    Electronic payments surge in Oz, but don't bounce paper rivals

    Electronic payments surging, but cheques not about to bounce Electronic payments are replacing the humble cheque, but not so fast that the descendants of the promisory note are irrelevant or should be hustled towards a hastened retirement. That’s the conclusion of the Australian Payments Clearing Association’s (APCA’s) new …

    Business 15 May 20:00

  • Greenpeace targets Apple with 10-foot Pod stunt

    Fanbois drool over prospect of iOS-based home

    Silicon Valley cops arrested two Greenpeace activists who sealed themselves into a huge (i)Pod outside Apple HQ today, but chose not to cuff another bunch of activists who were dressed as giant iPhones. Greenpeace has been chastising the Mac and iOS firm for the last few years for not exactly being the freewheeling, earth- …

    Energy 15 May 20:29

  • Baidu touts mobe with 100GB web drive

    $158 cloud-backed smartphone from 'China's Google'

    Baidu, the company which dominates China's search business as Google dominates elsewhere, has launched a smartphone using the company's cloud platform to reduce the price and keep the users loyal. The snappily titled Changhong H5019 will sell for less than RMB1,000 (about £98/$158) and offers a three-and-a-half inch …

    Mobile 15 May 21:01

  • New Apple keyboard patent may spell trouble for Android

    Threat level hinges on lawyers' cunning

    The US Patent and Trademark Office has handed Apple's legal team what may turn out to be a powerful weapon in their ongoing battles against anyone with the temerity to launch products competitive with the iPhone and iPad: a patent on soft keyboards that modify their keys with the tap of an on-screen button. Granted on Tuesday …

    Mobile 15 May 21:57