6th December 2012 Archive

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Long-distance robot makes landfall in Oz

James Gosling's swimmers were bound for ~~Botany~~ Hervey Bay

The first of four autonomous ocean-spanning robots with software brewed by Java creator James Gosling has arrived in Australia intact after more than 365 days at sea. Last March, the robots entered the Guinness Book of Records for the longest autonomous seafaring journey, when they passed the 5,150 km-mark on their journey. In …

Science 6 Dec 00:30
IDC: Windows tablets won't hit 10% market share until 2016

Less than 3% of fondleslab market for 2012

Analyst firm IDC sees Windows-based tablets winning significant market share away from both Android and iOS eventually, but says it won't happen for another several years yet. According to the latest figures from the company's Worldwide Tablet Tracker, sales of fondleslabs running Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows RT will only …

Hardware 6 Dec 00:46
Being responsible, creative and motivated means you aren’t

Your LinkedIn profile is not a beautiful or unique snowflake

If you try to stand out from the crowd by describing yourself as “creative”, “motivated” or “responsible”, you’re actually making yourself look like you lack creativity and aren’t motivated enough to take responsibility for your career by penning a cliché-free LinkedIn Profile. We make that assertion on the basis that LinkedIn …

Jobs 6 Dec 01:07
Optus tests new approach to New Years' Eve mobile woes

Trial will shift packet core onto blades to handle traffic spikes

Australian mobile carrier Optus, the local Singtel outpost, is trying to find a solution to the problem of mobile performance dips when crowds – think sporting events and New Years’ eve fireworks – clog the networks. The carrier is working with year-old Santa Clara outfit Connectem, which describes its technology as “software …

Networks 6 Dec 01:43
UK climate expert warns of 3-5 degree warmer world by 2100

50% species loss and dissolving reefs 'not unlikely'

The current goals for limiting climate change to a two-degree rise in global temperatures will not be met, and the planet should prepare for twice that rise in temperature and maybe more according to Sir Robert Watson, former head of the IPCC and former Chief Scientific Adviser for the UK's Department for Environment, Food and …

Science 6 Dec 02:00
Revealed: ITU's deep packet snooping standard leaks online

Updated Boring tech doc or INTERNET-EATING MONSTER?

A moment of inattention has allowed the ITU’s proposed deep packet inspection (DPI) standard to escape. The slip-up happened when an Australian CryptoParty activist Asher Wolf put out a public call on Twitter asking for a copy of the text. The ITU duly sent it by e-mail – only later realising its mistake and asking her to …

Security 6 Dec 03:53
Court ruling means Kim Dotcom can sue NZ spooks

Illegal surveillance on trial

Kim Dotcom has successfully applied to join New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau as a defendant in his litigation over illegal surveillance of his activities. Reg readers may recall that the Bureau tapped Dotcom's phones using powers that allow it to spy on foreigners. Dotcom, however, was a permanent …

Law 6 Dec 04:14
Russian iTunes offers smut video links

Freedom from pr0n … except in Russia

Apple's iTunes music store launched in Russia this week, complete with links to video smut. Russian blog iphones.ru reports (through Google Translate) that when local users access the iTunes Store and seek out "More films in different languages" they see links to services such as “Ladyboys.xxx”. The blog speculates the links …

Media 6 Dec 04:49
Sony and Tosh gobble chips to kick start recovery

Japanese giants set for massive outlay

Ailing Japanese electronics giants Sony and Toshiba are set to splurge a combined total of over $US14bn (£8.7bn) on chips next year to support a range of new products they hope will turn their fortunes around, according to market watcher IHS iSuppli. The analyst revealed in its IHS Semiconductor Spend Analysis report that Sony …

Business 6 Dec 05:05
Moon riven by colossal cracks

GRAIL mission's twin spacecraft reveal thin crust, no cheese

Ebb and Flow, the twin spacecraft that comprise NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, have created a gravity map and other analyses of the moon, and Lunar boffins have used the results to assert that our sole natural satellite is riven by deep cracks. Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of …

Science 6 Dec 05:53
Explosion of DANGEROUS IT GEAR injures and CRIPPLES MEDICS

Shocking 'effects of computer use on the human body'

It's not MRSA, radiation leaking from equipment nor the threat of being crushed like a paper cup beneath a tumbling obese patient which is threatening doctors at work: the fastest-rising danger to medics is computers and IT, according to a Cornell University study. A federal cash injection of $20bn into digitising the US …

Government 6 Dec 05:55
John McAfee blogs from Guatemalan jail, says coffee excellent

Report says fugitive arrested for illegal entry, deportation imminent

John McAfee has been arrested in Guatemala and says the nation's jails are far nicer than those in Belize. McAfee has blogged about his arrest, saying "I asked for a computer and one magically appeared. The coffee is also excellent." McAfee's post also says "Only time will tell what will happen. No one has a crystal ball. …

Law 6 Dec 06:05
Qualcomm aims its latest chips squarely at China

Enter the low cost, high volume Snapdragon...

US chip giant Qualcomm has taken the wraps off two new Snapdragon processors optimised for the huge Chinese smartphone market as it looks to expand its worldwide footprint and become a top-two player in the market. The MSM8226 and MSM8626 chipsets will expand the firm’s S4 range and feature the Adreno 305 GP, quad core CPUs, …

Hardware 6 Dec 06:35
Reform candidate gets CISSP tin star sheriff's job

Listen up, e-pilgrim

Reform candidate Dave Lewis has been elected to the (ISC)2 board of directors. The security certification body, which administers the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) qualification, has about 80,000 members worldwide. Four of the 13 seats on the (ISC)2 board were up for election this year; one of …

Security 6 Dec 07:06
Oracle bod: Tape not just for Xmas, it's for Hollywood and unis too

Interview Not only for mainframes, ask the BBC and Sony

Oracle loves a bit of flash and disk hardware, flogging compute-and-storage all-in-one Exalogic systems with software on top, but it's partial to tape, too. Not only does it supply tape, it's one of the top four manufacturers, alongside HP, IBM and SpectraLogic, of very high-end libraries. Like IBM, it has its own storage …

Storage 6 Dec 07:58
Brit software chef Sage unimpressed by French performance

Profit 'solid' after UK, Germany rescue European sales

Brit accountancy software biz Sage ground out a relatively decent set of fiscal 2012 financial results as it moves towards more cloud-based sales. Organic revenues from continuing operations went up two per cent year on year to £1.34bn and profit before tax edged up just one per cent to £334m. CEO Guy Berruyer described the …

The Channel 6 Dec 08:57
Why you need an interactive archive

Live today Real-world benefits from Taylor Wessing

When the bell tolls, you really want to be sure that you can find the relevant documents and emails you need to support your case. For most of us, that bell rarely tolls and we live in hope that the ad-hoc measures we’ve cobbled together will see us through when it does. For others that bell doesn’t just toll, it’s like Tinnitus …

Business 6 Dec 09:21
ScaleIO uncloaks, offers glimpses of mighty SANitisation plans

Virtual storage will be a pocket miracle - if it works

Startup ScaleIO has come out of stealth-mode operation. Its ECS virtual storage appliance (VSA) is on major steroids, making it a serious alternative to existing storage array network (SAN) arrays rather than a toy. ScaleIO turns application servers' local storage into an on-demand low-cost SAN. This puts it in the same …

Storage 6 Dec 09:31
Windows Phone 8 must be Microsoft's priority one, two AND three

Analysis Woe betide Nokia if Redmond can't keep its smartphone promises

Unless Microsoft gives Windows Phone some urgent attention, all of its hard work will go up in smoke and take Europe's largest technology company with it. We've now seen Windows Phone 8 running on four strong handsets - two each from Nokia and HTC - and it's fair to say the manufacturers have kept their side of the bargain. …

Windows 8 6 Dec 10:00
'HP has just days to cough what it knew about Autonomy'

Former SEC aide urges watchdog to 'hold HP's feet to fire'

HP will have to bare all in its beef with Autonomy's former management before the year is out, a former SEC advisor has suggested. Hewlett-Packard took an $8.8bn write-down last month after alleging accounting errors were made at Brit biz Autonomy in the weeks before HP acquired it for $10.7bn in 2011. In turn Autonomy co- …

The Channel 6 Dec 10:32
Latest Call of Duty sequel shoots past Avatar sales benchmark

Black Ops beat blue cats

In December 2011, Activision boasted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had clocked up $1 billion in sales more quickly that James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar had done back in 2009. CoD reached that milestone in 16 days, ‘Dances with Wolves in space’ in 17 days. A year on, the games publisher is making exactly the same …

Games 6 Dec 10:52
Will Westerners soon be getting their IT direct from Asian players?

Analysis 'We already see the Indians all over the world'

Singapore’s money is made of plastic, which makes it incredibly hard-wearing but also slightly slick and unreal. Which is just as well, given the amount of cash which was moving around when the Asia Pacific region’s channel players descended on the city state for the Canalys Channels forum last month. The event was held at the …

The Channel 6 Dec 11:00
Apple-HTC patent deal doesn't include designs, 'cloned' iDevices

Alright you can make phones. But not with round corners

Apple's licensing agreement with HTC excludes any of the fruity firm's design patents and any HTC products that are "clones" of iDevices. The deal has been published in a heavily redacted format with a California court as a result of Samsung's ongoing legal struggles with Cupertino, in which Samsung successfully petitioned the …

Law 6 Dec 11:31
Amazon unzips its digital-only Brazilian, waves Kindles at Canada

Build warehouses in South America? We'll pass

Amazon has entered the Brazilian market by launching Amazon.com.br - but it will just sell Kindles and ebooks to see if a digital-only operation can sink or swim. Shortly after its midnight launch, the website was spotted by sharp-eyed tweeters before any announcement was made. Even before the official press notification …

Media 6 Dec 11:39
The best e-readers for Christmas

Feature Nexus 7, iPad Mini, Kindle Paperwhite - the top book-reading tech of 2012

Digital reading devices separate into two basic types. On the one hand, you have the traditional e-reader, based on e-ink technology, and designed specifically reading. But now we have the 7in tablet, an altogether more sophisticated gadget, but one now starting to challenge the old-fashioned e-reader on price, especially when …

Hardware 6 Dec 12:00
Musk's SpaceX gets foot in door of US secret 'black' space program

NASA? That's peanuts, let's go for the real money

Internet space cowboy Elon Musk has scored two lucrative military contracts from the US Air Force, which could be stepping stones into the hugely lucrative 'black' spy-sat launch market. SpaceX will launch two science missions for the USAF in 2014 and 2015, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and Space Test Program 2 ( …

Government 6 Dec 12:23
Frenchmen's sperm plunges by a third in quality and quantity since '89

Une sabotage méchant droite dans les sphères de mariage

The future of the French nation is in serious doubt if boffins don't get to the bottom of a serious decline in transmanche sperm production. According to the BBC, the sperm content of Gallic nut butter fell by 32.3 per cent between 1989 and 2005, while "the percentage of normally shaped sperm fell by 33.4 per cent". The …

Science 6 Dec 12:57
Apple shares take biggest one-day hammering in 4 years

Foxconn rebrander not worth $0.7 TREELLION, turns out

Apple shares took the biggest single-day hit in four years on Wednesday, falling more than 6 percent on NASDAQ to $538.79. The tumble took Apple's market cap down to $506.84bn, well below the dizzy heights of $705.07 billion reached in September this year. Yesterday saw an eye-watering $34.8 billion wiped off the total value …

Financial News 6 Dec 13:26
Dutch army digs in on spare spectrum rest of Europe could use

Needs bands no one else uses to talk to itself

Early next year Ofcom is planning another consultation on two bands around 900MHz with a view to opening them up for unlicensed use, having established that only the Dutch care about them. The bands are empty in the UK, so the EU telco body CEPT has been asking around to see if the bands are being used elsewhere, and …

Mobile 6 Dec 13:56
Consolidation in the cloud

Not just saving cost. What else?

De Vere hotels had legacy systems, systems that needed updating but, most of all, it had lots of servers doing different things. Having grown by acquisition, it needed to consolidate if it wanted to realise its plans for customer service. It did this using a private cloud created by ANS Group, based on NetApp's FlexPod. On …

Datacenter 6 Dec 14:23
Looking closely at HP's object storage: Questions Answered

Q+A Object of desire, or just access method?

Looking closely at HP's StoreServ and StoreAll announcements at HP Discover we wondered if the object storage was simply an object access method layered on the base StoreAll file system. It isn't, being a real object deal as the Q and A session below shows. We talked to Patrick Osborne, the Director of Product Management in HP …

Storage 6 Dec 15:03
E-reader demand slumps, slapped down by slates

E-ink kit falling out of consumers' favour

E-book readers sales are taking a pummelling from tablets. IDC, a market watcher, reckons some 19.9 million dedicated e-readers will have shipped in 2012 - 28.2 per cent fewer than were shifted in 2011. Lower prices, the rise of the 7in screen, colour, apps, aggressive promotional activity by tablet makers Apple, Amazon and …

Hardware 6 Dec 15:12
Google defames Reg columnist Verity Stob

Auto-trawled headshot too AWFUL to contemplate

Google’s latest improvement to its web search has produced a catastrophic consequence. The Chocolate Factory now adds biographical information to the search result for a person, drawing on the fantastically accurate well of truth that is Wikipedia, and also adding Google’s best guess of an identifying photograph. When it works …

Verity Stob 6 Dec 15:31
Amazon belches fragrant clouds of AWS Node.js for JavaScripters

Come scrawl your scripts across the digital skies

Node.JS is claiming another web giant, with official backing coming from Amazon’s cloud. The cloud giant’s released the AWS SDK for Node.js, a programming environment for building JavaScript apps on its Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Amazon claimed developers can get started “in minutes” building JavaScript apps for …

Cloud 6 Dec 15:54
Single? Thrill-seeking? Love selling? I've got a top job just for YOU

Comment Come on in, the Channel's lovely

We're barely into December, but let's not forget what awaits us when all the parties are over and 2013 rudely slaps us awake. January is a time of festive hangovers, belt tightening and making resolutions that will be broken by February. But the beginning of a new year also tends to spur the more adventurous into a fresh bout …

The Channel 6 Dec 16:51
Zynga throws chips down on US gambling gambit

Taps up Nevada for online poker licence

To morph gaming into gambling you only need to add the letters 'B' and 'L' and then apply some cold hard cash to the proceedings, so it's hardly surprising to see a bruised Zynga trying to get in on the, er, game. The publicly-trading outfit, which was recently spurned by one-time close partner Facebook, has reportedly filed a …

Media 6 Dec 17:50
US Army demos first robot Black Hawk helicopter

Video 'We told you so!' scream paranoid Californians

The US Army has reported the successfully completion of a two-hour low-level test flight by an automated Black Hawk helicopter dubbed RASCAL, aka the Rotorcraft Aircrew Systems Concept Airborne Laboratory. "This was the first time terrain-aware autonomy has been achieved on a Black Hawk," said Lt. Col. Carl Ott, test pilot and …

Science 6 Dec 20:32
T-Mobile USA inks deal with Apple, will offer iPhone in 2013

Last holdout among the Big Four US carriers

Fourth-ranked US wireless carrier T-Mobile has announced a new partnership with Apple, which should allow it to begin offering the iPhone on its network sometime next year. The company dropped the bombshell in a notice to investors on Thursday, saying only, "T-Mobile USA has entered into an agreement with Apple to bring …

Mobile 6 Dec 21:11
Tim Cook: Apple to manufacture Macs in US in 2013

Also, why iOS headman got the ax, whether iOS and OS X will merge, and more

One day after Apple's stock suffered its biggest hammering in four years, interviews with company CEO Tim Cook appeared in both video and print covering a broad range of issues, including Apple's plans to move some manufacturing to the US and Cook's reasons for showing iOS chief Scott Forstall the door. When asked by NBC's …

Hardware 6 Dec 21:52
The big bully theory investigated at CSIRO

Premium science org rife with bullying

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - better known as CSIRO - is rife with bullying according to an assessment by workplace relations body Comcare. The bullying claims follow investigation of a dozen claims from employees. Comcare has since issued an improvement notice to the organisation, …

Government 6 Dec 21:56
Apple security team adds British white hat hacking talent

From Redmond to Cupertino for Kristin Paget

Apple has added to its growing security team with the hiring of noted white-hat hacker Kristin Paget, who broke and then got hired to fix Windows security, Wired reports. Kristin Paget, formerly Chris and originally from the UK but lately of California, is the inventor of the term "shatter attack" in a 2002 paper on a system …

Security 6 Dec 22:43
John McAfee rushed to hospital over heart attack fears

Updated Asylum requests denied by Guatemala, US

Eccentric tech millionaire and fugitive John McAfee was rushed to a hospital in Guatemala on Thursday after suffering what his lawyer says were two mild heart attacks. At the time, McAfee was in the custody of Guatemala's Special Police Task Force, which had detained him for questioning after he entered the country illegally …

Law 6 Dec 23:02
Australian Prime Minister: Mayan calendar 'true'

Gangnam style, not Y2K, to end world, PM says

Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has declared the "Mayan calendar was true," and told her nation to expect the end. "My dear fellow remaining Australians," Gillard says in the video below, "the end of the world is coming." The Y2K bug was not to blame, Gillard says, fingering the Mayans, zombies and even Korean pop …

Bootnotes 6 Dec 23:14
Intel prepping Atom bombs to drop on ARM microservers

Roadmap is top secret, dual-core 'Centerton' Atom looms

To hear Intel Fellow Matt Adiletta tell it, Chipzilla not only invented the term microserver but saw the trend towards wimpy computing coming way ahead of the all this fawning over the ARM architecture and a half-dozen upstarts wanting to take big bites out of the Xeon server processor cash cow. When El Reg says "fawn", that's …

Servers 6 Dec 23:17