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27th August 2012 Archive

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  • Rackspace, MacTel snipe in the cloud

    Patriot Act does/does not apply, take your pick

    Rackspace’s arrival in Australia last week – complete with a swipe at local player Macquarie Telecom – has brought a response back from MacTel. Rackspace announced that it will take a hall in a Digital Realty facility in the Sydney suburb of Erskine Park. As noted by The Register at the time of launch, Rackespace’s decision …

    Cloud 27 Aug 00:30

  • UK kids' charity lobbies hard for 'opt-in' web smut access

    Parenting fail or p0rn0 too easily available? Esther Rantzen says it's the latter

    The founder of British charity ChildLine is calling on the government to take a hardline approach against what some consider to be hardcore pornography online - by enforcing an opt-in system for adults to protect kids from being traumatised by the images. Esther Rantzen said in an opinion piece published in the Daily Mail - …

    Government 27 Aug 08:02

  • Big Data bites back: How to handle those unwieldy digits

    When you can't just cram it into tables

    Data is easy. It comes in tables that store facts and figures about particular items – say, people. The columns define the data to be stored about each item (such as FirstName, LastName) and there is one row for each person. Most tabular database engines are relational and we use SQL for querying. So this "Big Data" thang must …

    Storage 27 Aug 09:02

  • It's Lego's 80th birthday party, but only the boys are invited

    Comment Girls get pink-boxed dollhouses, boys get to build

    Imagination-fostering Lego is 80 years old this month and far from its roots as a creativity-inspiring construction toy for girls and boys. Way back in 1932, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a Danish joiner and carpenter, found he wasn't making enough money from carpentry anymore and decided to try making and selling wooden toys instead …

    Media 27 Aug 10:06

  • China Mobile to roll-out 16GB MEGA-cloud platform

    Store your data in China. We dare you

    The world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, China Mobile, is finally jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon with its own iCloud rival, which will also be available to internet users outside the People’s Republic. The ‘Mcloud’ service is currently being tested and will be ready before the end of the year, offering …

    Cloud 27 Aug 12:47

  • Huawei, ZTE hit with ITC patent probe

    US authorities heed patent trolls' throaty call for action

    Chinese mobile comms giants Huawei and ZTE are in trouble with the US authorities again, this time as part of a wider patent investigation by the ITC which could result in some of their mobile device models being banned in the States. The investigation, which includes 11 other big name tech companies including Acer, HTC, …

    Policy 27 Aug 14:00

  • AMD engineering another Opteron-like leap

    VMworld 2012 A future of APUs and dense-packed servers

    It is not as much fun to be in the server part of Advanced Micro Devices these days, with Intel surging in the server racket and expanding out to switching and storage with its Xeon processors and Intel more or less counting the substantial innovations that AMD's engineers crafted for the Opterons a decade ago. The good news if …

    Servers 27 Aug 14:54

  • HyTrust goes ballistic with virty compliance appliance

    VMworld 2012 Locks down Vblock clouds

    The US Air Force doesn't let a single operator of a missile site launch a nuke all by his or her lonesome, and HyTrust, a maker of policy management and access control software for VMware virtual infrastructure, thinks IT shops should adopt the secondary approval rule for a lot of things that go on inside of the ESXi hypervisor …

    Virtualization 27 Aug 15:38

  • Broadcom launches Trident II switch chip

    Blasting over 100 10GE ports into the clouds

    All of those apps you run on your smartphones and tablets and the surfing you do from PCs and other devices ultimately ends up whacking some data center network somewhere in the world. The appetite for bandwidth and low latency continues apace, and switch and adapter chip maker Broadcom aims to keep up with that demand with its …

    Servers 27 Aug 15:42

  • Dropbox joins the security two-step party

    Spamming stimulates the system

    Dropbox has followed through on an earlier promise and is rolling out two-factor authentication for its Windows, Mac, and Linux users. In July, the company pledged to the move after a bunch of its customers had their accounts hijacked and used to send vast quantities of spam for gambling websites. Dropbox blamed the security …

    Security 27 Aug 18:10

  • Samsung fights to stay on US shelves as Apple calls for ban

    Updated Injunction hearing scheduled for September

    Now that the jury in the landmark Apple-Samsung patent trial has returned a $1bn verdict in Apple's favor, the next step will be to decide just which of Samsung's mobile phones will be permitted to be sold in the US. Judge Lucy Koh has set a hearing on September 20 to discuss Apple's request to bar sales of Samsung products, …

    Business 27 Aug 19:25

  • VMware offers cloud construction mind meld as a service

    VMworld 2012 'New Operating Model for the Cloud Era' to mutate sysadmin jobs

    Everything you and the world's greatest process wonks know about building and operating data centres is wrong if you're assembling a private cloud, says VMware, and only its new Cloud Ops offering - billed as a "New Operating Model for the Cloud Era" - can help you do it right. That's the message from VMworld 2012 in San …

    Cloud 27 Aug 20:00

  • Curiosity rover hijacked by will.i.am to debut science song

    Audio pollution of two worlds

    On Tuesday NASA is pimping out its Curiosity rover to silly-named songster will.i.am so that he can use it to premiere his latest song Reach for the Stars. The song, which NASA says is "a new composition about the singer's passion for science, technology, and space exploration," will be uploaded by the rover and sent back to …

    Science 27 Aug 20:33

  • VMware kills vRAM memory tax with vSphere 5.1 server virt

    VMworld 2012 Stretching VMs, and taking on Microsoft

    The most important new feature of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and its related vSphere 5.1 tools that made their debut at the VMworld virtualization extravaganza today is not a feed or speed, but the fact that VMware has dropped the much-hated vRAM memory tax that came out last year with vSphere 5.0. With the vRAM memory tax, …

    Virtualization 27 Aug 20:36

  • Office 2013 to offer one-off apps on demand

    Close your file and the application vanishes

    As part of its ongoing bid to convince Office customers to switch to a subscription-based pricing model, Microsoft has announced that Office 2013 subscribers will be able to access temporary copies of the desktop Office applications on any computer, delivered via internet streaming technology. Office 365 subscribers already …

    Applications 27 Aug 21:29

  • NBN zealotry in the ultra-high definition age

    Do anti-FTTP NBN arguments stack up against the reality of UHDTV and Terabit Ethernet?

    Australia’s Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently declared the IT media includes a number of “zealots” who won’t, such is their/my fanaticism, report fairly on his alternative National Broadband Network (NBN) plans. One of his chief beefs was that the press corps are collectively ignoring the fact that fibre …

    Broadband 27 Aug 22:00

  • Google gets hands on 'glove-cam' patent

    Chocolate Factory gets the finger

    The next territory in the Great Patent Land-Grab is at the end of your arms: in a patent granted last year that’s just hit publication, the Chocolate Factory gets its hands on using gloves as a user interface. US patent 8,009,151 plants the Google flag on “methods and systems for gathering and conveying information, for …

    Hardware 27 Aug 22:24

  • EMC shows off XtremIO's Project X box

    VMworld 2012 Enters the million-IOPS club with all-flash array

    EMC has shown off an early version of the all-flash array it acquired when hoovering up XtremIO earlier this year. Project X, as the array is known for now, has been revealed as a 4U tall beast that packs not one but two controllers, described by re-badged XtremIO-ers as “basically Intel servers”. Each packs a pair of un-named …

    Storage 27 Aug 22:43

  • VMware rolls up an integrated cloudy control freak

    VMworld 2012 How vCloud Suite it is

    VMware wants to make it simpler for its customers to make the jump from virtualized servers running its ESXi hypervisor to full-on clouds complete with all of the automation, disaster recovery, and other control freakage. And to that end, in conjunction with the launch of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and add-on vSphere …

    Virtualization 27 Aug 22:54

  • Disable Java NOW, users told, as 0-day exploit hits web

    All operating systems, browsers vulnerable

    A new browser-based exploit for a Java vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on client systems has been spotted in the wild – and because of Oracle's Java patch schedule, it may be some time before a fix becomes widely available. The vulnerability is present in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version …

    Security 27 Aug 23:42