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5th June 2012 Archive

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  • Earth bathed in high-energy radiation from colossal mystery blast

    Around 1,200 years ago, that is

    Sometime between 1,237 and 1,238 years ago, the earth was inundated by a massive blast of high-energy radiation greater than any known to have occurred either before or since – but no one knows its source. This startling fact was uncovered by tree-ring analysis – the same technique that has proved so useful to climate …

    Space 5 Jun 00:14

  • Oracle verdict double plus good for Linux movement

    Open Invention Network: Industry unification terminates trolls

    The recent verdict against Oracle in its patent case against Google over Java use in Android is good news for the Linux community – and in more ways than one, according to Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN). The OIN was set up in 2005 to build a defensive patent-portfolio pot that could be shared royalty- …

    Developer 5 Jun 01:00

  • Google renames developer groups to scare away punters

    GTUGs become GDGs and no, they won't teach you Gmail

    Google has renamed its developers groups and says, through SpokesGooglers on both sides of the Pacific, that it has no particular reason for the change. But the Chocolate Factory has let it be known that the old name, Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs), appealed to average non-coding punters. “We’ve gotten lots of feedback …

    Developer 5 Jun 01:08

  • HP rolls out Hadoop AppSystem stack

    Lashes elephants to Autonomy, Vertica

    Everybody wants to get a piece of the Hadoop elephant in the room, and luckily for Hewlett-Packard the mad scramble to make sense of big data is just at the beginning of its hype cycle and there's time enough to get some choice cuts. As part of its Discover customer and partner extravaganza in Las Vegas this week, HP has …

    Platform 5 Jun 01:32

  • SwaggSec claims China Telecom data breach

    Hacktivists not happy with China 'screwin with the Pentagon'

    Hacktivist group SwaggSec is claiming the scalps of China Telecom and Warner Brothers after apparently taking advantage of poor security to infiltrate their networks and steal a sizeable booty of sensitive data. The group, which broke onto the hacking scene in February after hitting electronics giant Foxconn, announced the …

    Security 5 Jun 03:30

  • Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

    Follow protocol, would ya?

    Today, Wednesday 6 June, may seem like any other day to you, but a group of network operators, kit-makers and websites have called it “World IPv6 launch day”. The Internet Society, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Comcast, Akamai, AT&T, Cisco and other tech heavyweights are all aboard the IPv6 launch day bandwagon, and …

    Networks 5 Jun 05:03

  • Dual-screen, detachable and Windows 8 star at Computex

    Acer and Asus battle with tablets, laptops and all-in-ones

    Taiwanese computing giants Acer and Asus faced off ahead of the start of Asia’s biggest IT expo, Computex, today with a slew of new Windows 8 products including dual-screen laptops, notebook-tablet hybrids and even an all-in-one PC which can be used as a giant tablet. Acer continued its attempts to prove it can build desirable …

    Data Centre 5 Jun 05:27

  • OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD

    Review So long, SATA

    One wonders if, after ratifying the SATA 6Gb/s standard, the people at the SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization) gave themselves a pat on the back to say job well done, that’s that future-proofed for a while, we can relax now. Scorchio: OCZ's RevoDrive 3 X2 After all, you could hardly blame them for that, as the …

    reghardware 5 Jun 06:00

  • Lard-busting specs trick snack-happy Japanese

    Boffins use augmented reality to fool fatties

    Japanese boffins are using augmented reality and other hi-tech trickery in a series of experiments designed to induce people to find ways to eat less. University of Tokyo researchers have built one particular device which features a pair of cyber goggles – whereby a video image taken by a small camera mounted on the front of …

    Science 5 Jun 06:15

  • Council builds £2.8m shared database of vulnerable kids

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Derbyshire county council has announced plans to improve outcomes and reduce costs by installing a new £2.8m single database. The system will allow a range of partner agencies, including the police, NHS and schools to share information on children and young adults at risk. Derbyshire, which employs 16,675 employees, currently …

    Government 5 Jun 08:29

  • Ultrabooks adopt Chipzilla's vPro

    Lenovo, Fujitsu first out of the gates with highly-manageable third-gen silicon

    Intel has shown off kit galore using the third generation of its Core-i-series PC silicon in Australia, but used the press event at which it did so the emphasise that the new kit is imbued with its vPro management toolkit it aims at enterprise customers with fleets of PCs. The inclusion of vPro in the new silicon makes it …

    PCs & Chips 5 Jun 08:36

  • Telefonica chooses stable of young ones to make it money in London

    I pay the rent, baby, now bring me some sugar

    Telefonica's desks-for-shareholding deal, Wayra, has picked the lucky sixteen startups who'll benefit from central London office space, logistics support and business development, in exchange for percentage holding in the resulting business. In exchange for ten per cent of the company the selected sixteen get get an average …

    Small Biz 5 Jun 10:00

  • NetApp completes low-end revamp

    Adds FlashPools; boosts channel

    After revamping the big model of its entry-level FAS 2000 arrays last November NetApp has boosted the smaller model and introduced combined flash-disk storage volumes. The FAS2220 slots in under the 2240 and its 432TB capacity, storing up to 180TB and starting at less than $8,000. It runs on the latest version of Data ONTAP, …

    Storage 5 Jun 11:00

  • How to give your applications a long and happy life

    From cradle to grave in the Cloud

    Are your applications well managed? Many companies get it right for part of an application’s lifecycle but few excel at all of it. Putting an application into a private cloud can help you to manage it more consistently from cradle to grave. Software applications need different resources at four main stages: development, …

    SaaS 5 Jun 11:20

  • Dell storage sales drooping while others thrust up

    Compellent sales could be down

    Dell's storage sales are down, reflecting lost EMC storage revenues and selling issues. Aaron Rakers, a Dell-tracking financial analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, has looked at Dell's quarterly 10-Q statement to the SEC and uncovered a drooping sales trajectory in storage. Dell's storage revenue for its latest quarter was $444 …

    Storage 5 Jun 13:00

  • HP 3PAR flattens the SAN

    Virtualised I/O for BladeSystem servers

    HP announced a direct Fibre Channel connection at its Discover event in Las Vegas on Monday, between a 3PAR array and BladeSystem servers using Virtual Connect. This simplifies the storage area network (SAN) fabric enormously and saves a ton of cash. A BladeSystem is up to 16 servers in an enclosure that plug into a high-speed …

    Storage 5 Jun 13:00

  • Exabyte era nigh for Nexenta

    Big data - right?

    The exabyte era is hurrying closer for ZFS storage supplier Nexenta, which hopes to have its partners ship more storage boxes than NetApp in five years time. We were briefed by CEO Evan Powell following a Nexenta customer and partner shindig in Amsterdam. He said Nexenta was running at around $500 million a year in partner …

    Storage 5 Jun 16:00

  • Kobe University gets a prime cut of K super

    Like a really big workstation

    If you have built the largest supercomputer in the world, which the Japanese government has (once again) done with the 10.5 petaflops K supercomputer, the one thing you can't do is have it sitting there being idle. So Fujitsu, which built the K machine, has been making the rounds of the Japanese universities and is peddling …

    HPC 5 Jun 16:15

  • Is HP pulling a fast one on deduplication?

    EMC demands recount

    Is HP pulling the deduplication wool over our eyes by claiming its dedupe box can run at 100TB/hour while EMC's best rate is 31TB/hour? Should a 4-pool dedupe system realistically be compared to single pool design? Yesterday at the HP Discover event in Las Vegas, the company announced its Store Once Catalyst software and B6200 …

    Storage 5 Jun 16:30

  • Dell adds crowdsourced regression tests to Boomi

    Integration cloud gets ETL boost, Hadoop connector

    Dell has announced a new service for its fully buzzword-compliant "cloud integration platform", Boomi, which taps the power of the crowd to help tap the power of the cloud. When you rely on cloudy applications that are tweaked and run by a third party, you are on their release cycle and you are not in control of when things …

    Platform 5 Jun 17:12

  • US military gives NASA two better-than-Hubble telescopes

    Double Hubble budget bubble trouble

    In a surprise reminder that NASA is not the only US space program – nor likely the best-funded one – the US Department of Defense's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is giving the perennially underfunded space administration two better-than-Hubble-class space telescopes, prosaically named Telescope One and Telescope Two. …

    Space 5 Jun 19:27

  • Napster duo launch Airtime to reinvent videoconferencing

    Matching Chatroulette with Facebook

    Shaun Fanning and Sean Parker have reunited to launch Airtime, a videoconferencing system that links in with Facebook to hopefully eliminate one handed users. Airtime is an application designed to work with Facebook users to let people videoconference with people who share similar interests. At a star-studded launch in New …

    Applications 5 Jun 20:00

  • Cloudera herds new bacon-saving Hadoop stack

    CDH4 makes elephants chew data quicker

    In advance of the Cloud Expo in New York next week, commercial Hadoop distributor Cloudera got the jump on its rivals HortonWorks and MapR Technologies by kicking out a new release of its Cloudera Distribution for Apache Hadoop – CDH for short – and the related Cloudera Manager tool for making the Hadoop elephant, er, stand on a …

    Infrastructure 5 Jun 21:55

  • VMware's Asian new biz Veep jumps to VCE

    Japan, Singapore, Oz, next on joint venture’s hit lists

    Paul Harapin, VMware’s vice president for business development and cloud across Asia Pacific and Japan, has left the company, The Reg can reveal. His new post is heading up VCE, the private cloud joint venture formed by EMC, Cisco, Intel and VMware. Harapin was VMware’s first leader in Australia, having previously set up …

    Business 5 Jun 22:48

  • Transit of Venus, live-ish from Australia

    Clouds mess things up, in physical and computing senses of the word

    To Reg readers hoping for a quick peek of today's transit of Venus from Sydney, where the whole thing was visible for hours, we're sorry to disappoint, on two counts. One is our utterly unprepared state for the event: Sydney sold out of solar filters for cameras and telescopes about a week ago. Even tatty cardboard glasses …

    Science 5 Jun 23:27

  • Facebook testing "announce important post" feature

    UPDATE: Facebook confirms Reg reader's "make sure friends see this" find

    Facebook has confirmed it is trialling a feature that would allow users to shove posts into friends' faces make sure their posts are seen by all their friends. Reports of a similar feature emerged last May, when Facebook trialled a paid post-highlighting service in New Zealand. Reg reader Andrew N Green from Adelaide has just …

    Networks 5 Jun 23:56