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23rd October 2012 Archive

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  • Telerik uncloaks Icenium cloudy mobile app dev suite

    Build iOS apps with no SDKs and no Mac

    Tools vendor Telerik has unveiled a new, cloud-enhanced development environment aimed at making it possible for coders to build cross-platform mobile apps without juggling multiple software development kits (SDKs) and build environments. Called Icenium, the new tool allows developers to build sophisticated mobile app UIs using …

    Developer 23 Oct 01:26

  • Mayer wants Yahoo! to be the world's mobile portal of habit

    Company still unfocused with user data

    Marissa Mayer gave a confident performance at her first full quarterly results call, laying out her plan to make Yahoo! the site of habit for tomorrow's internet users. "We're committed to going back to our roots as a consumer internet company focused on user experience," Mayer told analysts on Monday. "The excitement and …

    Business 23 Oct 01:31

  • Hong Kong's lucky mobile number hawkers revealed

    Superstitious Chinese snap up auspicious digits

    It takes just a few minutes and a handful of metro stops to travel from Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon neighbourhood Sham Shui Po (SSP), but the journey takes you to a different world. Hong Kong Island is a shining consumer paradise. SSP offers a bustling market where Hong Kong's entrepreneurial streak has collided with …

    Business 23 Oct 02:27

  • AMD uncloaks 4GHz-and-up FX Series 'enthusiast' chippery

    All unlocked for your overclocking pleasure

    AMD has unveiled its latest FX Series processers, aimed squarely at the enthusiasts' market – the hardcore gamers and other speed demons who want the snappiest possible performance but don't want to spend an arm and a leg on their systems. "We're looking at users who are spending over a hundred dollars on a graphics card," AMD …

    Hardware 23 Oct 04:01

  • Oldest unreadable alphabet yields to 'tablet' computer

    Translation breakthrough close, thanks to camera-in-LED-dome boffinry

    A new apparatus called the Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts developed by the University of Southampton has brought Oxford boffins closer to deciphering the world's oldest unreadable alphabet. Described in this paper (PDF), the RTI machine comprises an off-the-shelf Nikon D3X …

    Science 23 Oct 04:13

  • Man rummaging for lost laptop in skip gets tipped into garbage truck

    Escapes DEATH BY TRASH COMPACTOR after screams heard

    A man in Perth, the capital of West Australia, has survived a spell in the back of a garbage truck after trying to find his laptop in a bin. The West Australian and WA Today both report the man was looking for a lost laptop in a skip bin when a garbage truck tipped the bin into its fetid maw. At this point, as you would, the …

    Bootnotes 23 Oct 04:48

  • LG Vu 5in Android phone-tablet review

    Samsung's Galaxy Note 2 meets its Tegra 3-powered match

    Mercedes vs BMW, Boeing vs Airbus, Asda vs Tesco: the world is full of directly competing commercial entities locked in a bitter struggle for market share. In Korea, Samsung and LG go head-to-head in much the same way, so it's no surprise that LG has cooked up a rival to Samsung’s Galaxy Note. The LG Vu doesn't seem so odd at …

    reghardware 23 Oct 07:00

  • A hundred Brit IT bods' jobs under threat at Direct Line

    Exclusive Outsourcing on the agenda, says Reg source

    Insurance group Direct Line is considering cutting up to 100 IT jobs in its plan to save £100m a year, some of which may go to outsourced employees. The Direct Line Group confirmed to The Register that 100 jobs are in the middle of a 90-day consultation period that started on 5 September and that outsourcing in general was an …

    Jobs 23 Oct 07:28

  • Brazilians strip Google News bare: News barons decide to pull out

    Google News 'presence' in Brazil is 'small'

    Members of the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ) have decided to stop Google from displaying snippets of their content on the internet giant's 'News' service. ANJ, which represents publishers making up approximately 90 per cent of the newspaper circulation market in Brazil, said that the appearance of its …

    Media 23 Oct 08:01

  • 'Looming menace' of evil browser extensions to be demo'd this week

    The way you'll get pwned next

    A security researcher has developed a proof-of-concept browser botnet extension to illustrate the perils of what he describes as a "looming menace". Zoltan Balazs of Deloitte Hungary developed the code to illustrate the risk from malicious browser add-ons, which he argues anti-virus vendors are ill-equipped to defend against …

    Security 23 Oct 08:27

  • Microsoft: Welcome back to PCs, ARM. Sorry about the 1990s

    Analysis Come in from the cold, we've got Windows RT tabs to flog

    More than two decades after the alliance of Intel and Microsoft drove ARM from the battleground of personal computing, Microsoft is warmly embracing the low-power processor designer for Windows 8. ARM was squeezed out of the then emerging and subsequently dominant platform of the time, the desktop PC, as computer makers …

    Windows 8 23 Oct 09:00

  • BBC pulls plug Ceefax ahead of analogue TV's end tonight

    Teletext service's final page number dialled

    Ceefax, the BBC’s Teletext service, is no more. First broadcast on 23 September 1974 following its announcement two years previously, Ceefax comprised pages of text and crude block graphics transmitted as codes embedded in unused, off-the-screen lines of the 625-line PAL TV signal. Some 30 pages were provided at first, each …

    reghardware 23 Oct 09:14

  • WD blames hard drive woes on dominant mobile gear, feeble PCs

    Platter patter foretells a bleak midwinter

    Western Digital's disk sales slumped in its last quarter, leading to lower revenue and profit than in the previous three months. Its next quarter is going to be even worse. Revenues in WD's Q1 of fiscal 2013, ended 28 September, amounted to $4bn, 17 per cent less than the $4.8bn a quarter before. And Q1 was the first quarter …

    Storage 23 Oct 09:27

  • Arduino barebones board upgraded with 32-bit ARM

    Eying the Pi in the sky?

    Arduino, the microcontroller-based board for DIY electronics fans, has become dipped its finger into the ARM Pi. The group behind the board has announced the Arduino Due - pronounced ‘doo-ay’, the Italian for ‘two’ - which has an Atmel 32-bit ARM-based CPU in place of the original board’s ATmega microcontroller, also from …

    reghardware 23 Oct 09:37

  • Five go wild with the Administration Tools Pack

    Stob Nobody owns the Linuxes, Julian

    As you have surely heard, it’s Alan Turing’s centenary this year, and the Bletchley Park museum is celebrating by releasing a game of Monopoly themed on the life of that mathematical genius. I’ll pause for a sentence or two here, while you let your boggle levels equalise, because, given Turing’s life story, this is a quite a …

    Verity Stob 23 Oct 10:00

  • Natwest biz banking service goes titsup overnight

    'Upgrade' biffs customers out of accounts

    Natwest's business banking site Bankline went down last night after undergoing "maintenance" for a little longer than expected. The service that helps businesses manage their finances bobbed back up circa 10.20am this morning. The consumer facing side of the site displayed this message: One biz customer was told "an upgrade …

    Business 23 Oct 10:18

  • Everything Everywhere prices up UK 4G

    Big-ticket speeding

    Everything Everywhere has announced what it will charge for 4G mobile broadband today. Prices for the snappy connection starting at £36 a month. Unfortunately, that'll only feed punters 500MB of data a month, which could be gobbled quickly on a connection with download speeds ten times that of HSPA 3G. That allowance can be …

    reghardware 23 Oct 10:32

  • Music streaming service Rara slips off cloak, jumps into ring with Spotify

    Subscription music services for squares

    Stealth streaming service Rara is slightly less stealthy today. The Omnifone-backed brand launched 10 months ago and operates in 20 countries. Today it’s adding iPhone, iPad and Windows 8 MetroNotro apps, and beginning to market itself in the UK and Europe, as well as expanding into Latin America. Mexico and Brazil will get Rara …

    Media 23 Oct 10:38

  • Windows 8: An awful lot of change for a single release

    Windows 1.0, Windows 95, Windows NT - the road to Windows 8

    Microsoft released Windows 1.0 on 20 November, 1985, a year later than first promised. Now, nearly 27 years on, Windows 8 is on the shelves. The operating system was chugging away full-steam ahead as Windows XP established itself - then it jumped the tracks at Vista. Where is Microsoft's OS going now and where did it come from …

    Windows 8 23 Oct 11:00

  • Hero police robot back on duty after 'unstable man' blasts it with shotgun

    Tin cop 'did its job', laughs off leaden hail from 12-bore

    A heroic police robot has returned to duty with a Nebraska force after being put out of action by an "unstable man" who blasted it repeatedly with a 12-bore* shotgun at point blank range during a tense siege this summer. The story begins in Bellvue, Nebraska, on August 10. Ordinary fleshy plods responded to reports of an " …

    Bootnotes 23 Oct 11:17

  • Big labels try for ISP blocking on 3 more 'pirate' sites

    BPI wants Fenopy, Kickass and H33T on blocked pirate list

    Blighty's internet providers have been asked to voluntarily block another three sites accused of piracy by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). The BPI, which represents major UK record companies, has asked the ISPs to stop people accessing Fenopy, Kickass Torrents and H33T. “Like The Pirate Bay, these websites are …

    Media 23 Oct 11:37

  • Nokia flings low-end Lumia at developing world

    WinPho 7.5 for all

    Nokia has officially unveiled the Lumia 510, a budget Windows Phone handset unlikely to excite enthusiasts of the latest tech. With us Westerners distracted by incoming Windows Phone 8 kit, the Finnish firm today set its sights on flooding the developing market with more of yesterday's tech. And after the company pulled the …

    reghardware 23 Oct 11:49

  • MapR simplifies and extends HBase for Hadoop

    Hadoop World And clones Google's Dremel to drill into big data

    Back before the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) came out of stealth mode in May 2011, Hadoop distie MapR Technologies didn't like the way it worked, so it rejigged it to look more like a Unix file system from the outside and beefed up its availability. Now, MapR is taking aim at Hadoop's HBase distributed database layer, …

    Servers 23 Oct 12:05

  • Mighty Acer still weaving after 2011's knockdown punch

    Bells still ringing for PC titan

    The once unstoppable sales juggernaut Acer still hasn't regained the momentum that carried it close to the top of the PC market, certainly if its Q3 prelims are anything to go by. Revenues for the calendar third quarter slid 5.6 per cent to NT$104.4bn (£2.22bn), down 11.4 per cent on the same period a year ago. The problem is …

    The Channel 23 Oct 12:27

  • WHITE WHALE spent 4 years trying to tell us something, then stopped

    Startled diver 'given orders in English,' say boffins

    A young Beluga whale spent four years apparently trying to speak English recently, according to scientists in California. The cetacean's enunciation was apparently clear enough that it was actually discovered when the creature ordered a startled diver to get out of the water. “The whale’s vocalizations often sounded as if …

    Science 23 Oct 12:49

  • Ubisoft forgets to ship activation codes for music game

    Cock-up stops rock-up

    Whoops. Ubisoft has shipped a number of European copies of Rocksmith for PC without activation codes. The omission was, of course, a blunder. However, gamers affected by the codes' absence have still been struck by Ubi's strict security and asked to provide a clear digital image of purchase receipts. Hordes of affected …

    reghardware 23 Oct 12:53

  • Riverbed Cascade appliances peek into VDI, SDN, CIFS

    No more finger pointing between server and net admins

    Riverbed Technology's Cascade network monitoring appliances, which come in physical and virtual form, have been flying a bit blind on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and software-defined networks (SDN), but with the Cascade 10.0 software stack, the network busybody is being tweaked so it can peer inside of the protocols …

    Virtualization 23 Oct 13:00

  • 'Deceptive' web tracker settles with FTC over personal data slurp

    Compete had been charged with sneakily grabbing names, credit card numbers

    Web analytics firm Compete has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that it was slurping users' personal data without permission and wasn't adequately protecting that information. The company tracks the browsing habits of people who download its software and then sells that data to clients so they can improve …

    Security 23 Oct 13:31

  • Black hole spews out 2-million-light-year-long stream of WTF

    Boffins spot X-ray blasting, star-stopping cosmic jet

    Astronomers have spotted a supersonic cosmic jet blasting two million light years from the centre of a distant galaxy's supermassive black hole. The jet, which looks like the afterburner of a fighter plane, is moving at nearly the speed of light and its origins and composition are a mystery. A picture snapped by the CSIRO- …

    Science 23 Oct 14:08

  • iPad Mini: Why is Apple SO SCARED of the Kindle?

    Analysis Pocket stroker device may be cursed by Jobs' ghost

    It's a small, cheap plastic device that people use to download Jane Austen and spanking porn. Why would Apple be scared of it? If we wanted to, we could see the iPad Mini as a product that Apple always wanted to make, a revolutionary resolutionary device, a magic original product that will change the world. "Boom! Boom!", as …

    Hardware 23 Oct 14:36

  • BBC's Incurious George vows to 'calibrate systems' after Savile affair

    Strangely uninquisitive 'for a journalist'

    The BBC's new director general provoked derision from MPs today after spending most of two hours explaining why he had failed to follow up information, as well as having to answer questions about BBC decisions. Entwistle came across a polite man, but no leader, and the picture of the BBC that emerged was more surreally …

    Media 23 Oct 14:53

  • 'Petrified' insurers slam wallets shut as more resellers go titsup

    Channel insolvencies edge up in Q3

    The small sequential rise in reseller insolvencies in Q3 - in line with seasonality - will do nothing to calm credit insurers' general uneasiness about the IT sector. Data from credit reference agency Graydon UK, shows 75 channel firms bit the dust during the summer quarter, up from 64 in Q2 but dramatically lower than the 93 …

    The Channel 23 Oct 15:17

  • Save hefty Dr Who and Bond girl 'Flossie', pleads vintage computer man

    5-ton ICT1301 boasts 1 MHz clock speed, 2kB RAM

    Engineer and vintage computer enthusiast Ron Brown is struggling to save Flossie, one of the world's oldest working computer mainframes and a bonafide movie star, from extinction. The '60s era ICT 1301, which was a prominent feature in Scaramanga's lair in Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun, is currently being housed in a …

    Hardware 23 Oct 15:45

  • FISH IN SPAAACE: New 'nauts and piscine pals head for Xmas on ISS

    Baikonur blastoff boosts Soyuz to station

    The latest crew of 'nauts are on their way to join their crewmates on the International Space Station after the Soyuz TMA-06M blasted off safely this morning. The Soyuz capsule set off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10.15am BST, carrying flight engineers Kevin Ford, Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin. The NASA and …

    Science 23 Oct 16:04

  • US patent office prepares to kill off Apple's bounce-back patent

    'Tentatively' declared invalid

    The US Patent Office (USPTO) appears to have provisionally invalidated one of the major patents that Apple was using against Samsung... And it's possible that large parts of the case will go “kablooie” as a result. Given that it's not Friday afternoon yet, everyone will remember that the Cupertinians were most insistent that …

    Law 23 Oct 16:23

  • Apple to live-stream Tuesday's 'a little more' event

    One catch: avalable only on Macs, iOS devices, and Apple TV

    In a break with recent practice, Apple will provide a live video stream of its "a little more" event to be held Tuesday morning at 10am Pacific Time at San José's California Theater. As world+dog must know by now, the event is widely expected to feature the debut of the oft-rumored iPad mini. Other candidates for announcement …

    Hardware 23 Oct 16:27

  • Greenplum opens up Big Data control freak: Chorus for all of us

    Hadoop World Ties up with Kaggle to head hunt algorithm geeks

    As promised, the Greenplum Big Data subsidiary of IT conglomerate EMC is opening up the Chorus control freak that it created to span the Greenplum data warehousing database and its two implementations of the Hadoop Big Data muncher. At the Hadoop World extravaganza in New York, Greenplum is taking the wraps off the OpenChorus …

    Datacenter 23 Oct 17:01

  • Cisco: Data centers are getting their cloudy acts together

    Mobile networks – not so much

    When you are trying to take over the data center moving out from the switch and into servers, as Cisco Systems is trying to do, you have to try to figure out the lay of the land so you can pick your targets and start shooting. That, in a nutshell, is why Cisco has put together its latest Global Cloud Index, complete with lots of …

    Data Networking 23 Oct 19:05

  • Apple adds Fusion Drive IO to iMac

    Cupertino gets behind hybrid drives

    Apple's new and thinner iMac has a Fusion Drive combining flash speed and disk capacity. At a launch event today introducing a roster of new Apple products, there was an iMac refresh featuring the deletion of the optical drive and the addition of a Fusion Drive; a twin drive configuration with 128GB of flash storage and a 1TB …

    Storage 23 Oct 19:09

  • Apple unveils iPad mini, upgrades its big brother

    No, it's not cheap – it's from Cupertino, remember?

    Yes, it's called the iPad mini – and that was one of the few heretofore unknown facts about the new iPad that Apple rolled out at its "a lttle more" event on Tuesday in San José, California. That and its price: $329 for the entry-level, Wi-Fi model. Pre-announcement speculation was somewhere in the $299 range, with some overly …

    Hardware 23 Oct 19:14

  • Rackspace to ride Hortonworks elephant into the clouds

    Hadoop World Yahoo! should! buy! back! Hadoop! spinout!

    Rackspace Hosting has spent the past two years helping craft the OpenStack cloud control freak and getting it running its public and private cloud services. And now, to get more of the IT wallet, Rackspace wants to peddle more services atop OpenStack, whether it is humming in your shop or in its own glass houses. And one of the …

    Servers 23 Oct 20:29

  • Apple's iPad Mini mishap: scratching out the retina screen

    Analysis 1024 x 768 may be handy for developers, but it's no good for readers

    Apple will undoubtedly sell more than enough iPad Minis to keep its shareholders happy. Its fans might be less impressed with the diminutive tablet. Sure, the new, small slate looks smart, but Apple seems to have taken little account of the competitive landscape. It’s true, in most respects its 9.7in iPad is well ahead of the …

    reghardware 23 Oct 20:41

  • Windows RT OEMs unveil pricing for Surface wannabes

    Analysis Don't expect to save much money

    With the ARM-based version of Microsoft's Surface tablets due to launch in less than three days, rival PC makers are only now beginning to unveil details of their own Windows RT devices. If you were hoping Microsoft's partner OEMs would rise to the occasion and beat Redmond at its own game, prepare to be disappointed. On …

    Hardware 23 Oct 21:01

  • Apple's skinny new iMac line: Farewell, optical drives

    Adds 'Ivy Bridge' processors; removes built-in CD, DVD spinners

    The new 7.85 7.9-inch iPad mini and the upgraded fourth-generation iPad weren't the only bits of kit featured during Apple's "a little more" event this Tuesday in San José, California. Also announced was Apple's new eighth-generation iMac lineup. Sadly, the event also signaled the end of the presence of optical drives built …

    Hardware 23 Oct 21:15

  • New Mac mini: Business in the front, party at the back

    Still cute, and with upgraded insides and extra ports

    Remember the Mac mini? That cute li'l system that found its way into everything from server closets to DeLoreans? Well, Apple remembers it as well, and at Tuesday's "a little more" event, Cupertino gave the little fellow its first upgrade in well over a year. The new Mac mini desktop model is available in two versions, one …

    Hardware 23 Oct 22:32

  • Judge says PSN hack can't spark class action

    They never promised you a rose garden

    The notorious Sony PlayStation Network hack, which saw millions of accounts compromised in May 2011, doesn’t give grounds for a class action, according to a US judge. The ruling, available from Courthouse News, dismisses most of the grounds for the lawsuit against Sony, which was first filed in June last year. The judge, …

    Law 23 Oct 22:57

  • FTC issues guidelines on facial recognition technology

    Watching them, watching you

    The Federal Trade Commission has issued a staff report on best practices for companies using facial recognition technology in their businesses. "Fortunately, the commercial use of facial recognition technologies is still young," the report states. "This creates a unique opportunity to ensure that as this industry grows, it …

    Security 23 Oct 23:28

  • VMware profits pinched in Q3, but not as pinchy as expected

    New CEO Gelsinger gets a new CFO to match

    Despite the fact that the economic conditions in Europe and Australia weakened in the third quarter and that the company didn't launch its updated virtualization and cloud software until late August, VMware turned in numbers that more or less met expectations. Just the same, profits were down 11.7 per cent to $156.8m against a …

    Financial News 23 Oct 23:42