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25th January 2013 Archive

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  • China wants eight new Lenovos by 2015

    Government decree says local firms should merge to reach global scale

    Western technology companies' view of China as the biggest pool of potential customers ever is looking less accurate than ever, after the Chinese government called for the formation of up to eight super-companies through mergers and acquisition by 2015. The calls came as part of government plans designed to urge the …

    Business 25 Jan 00:18

  • Fujitsu launches 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers in Japan

    And Larry has slapped the Oracle labels on them, too

    Japanese IT giant and long-time Sparc partner with Sun Microsystems and now Oracle has let slip the details on its "Athena" line servers based on its own sixteen-core Sparc64-X processors, which bear the same code-name inside Fujitsu. And it looks like Oracle is going to be reselling them, too. It is not clear if this is an …

    Servers 25 Jan 00:35

  • Lenovo considering RIM buyout to boost mobile biz

    'We are looking at all opportunities'

    Lenovo CFO Wong Wai Ming says the company is actively pursuing ways to improve its position in the mobile device market, spurring speculation that the Chinese firm may be planning to cozy up with Research in Motion – or even swallow it whole. In an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, …

    Business 25 Jan 00:53

  • Opportunity celebrates nine years on Mars

    Rover has lasted 36 times longer than planned mission

    Mean time between failure wonks take note: The Opportunity rover launched in 2003 and expected to survive 90 days on Mars today racks up nine years of continuous operations on the red planet. That's 3195 days longer than first planned. Opportunity was hauled into orbit by a Delta II rocket on July 7th, 2003. A little over six …

    Science 25 Jan 01:09

  • NASA joins ESA dark stuff hunt

    Euclid mission heading to L2 in 2020

    NASA has signed on for a European Space Agency project to send a telescope to the L2 earth-sun Lagrange point in 2020, to investigate dark matter and dark energy. L2 is a spot where the gravity of sun and Earth will keep the spacecraft in a stable orbit in Earth’s shadow behind the Earth (relative to the Sun). Once stationed …

    Science 25 Jan 01:22

  • Activists urge Skype: Tell us who is spying on us

    Microsoft mum on privacy, security policies

    A coalition of activists, privacy organizations, journalists, and others have called upon Microsoft to be more forthright about when, why, and to whom it discloses information about Skype users and their communications. In an open letter published on Thursday, the group argues that Redmond's statements about the …

    Security 25 Jan 02:11

  • Belkin buys Linksys from Cisco

    Tie-up means Cisco's not entirely free of low-end business

    Cisco has found a buyer for its unwanted and unstrategic Linksys low-end networking brand, in the form of accessories and small networks player Belkin. Both companies have issued gushing notifications of the deal, but haven't let it be known how much cash or other fungible instruments will change hands to make it happen. It's …

    Business 25 Jan 04:34

  • Alien space rocks EXPLODE in fireball over Japan

    Vid: Were the Mayans just a few weeks out?

    Japanese star-gazers have been all a-buzz this week after a fireball lit up the night sky before crashing to earth in Saitama prefecture, a little north-west of Tokyo. News of the fireball started to flood Twitter in the early hours of last Sunday morning, 20 January, according to RocketNews24. The entertainment site has …

    Science 25 Jan 04:58

  • Microsoft acknowledges the long and winding road ahead

    Still blames OEMs for lack of touch

    Microsoft's latest quarterly results are a mixed bag; record revenues, a slight fall in profits and Windows going full steam ahead – but CFO Peter Klein was taking a cautious tone at Thursday's analyst call. "It's early days, an ambitious endeavor like this takes time," he said. "We've learned a lot over the past quarter and …

    Business 25 Jan 05:30

  • Fedora project may expel MySQL

    Devs don't like Oracle's direction, prefer more open MariaDB

    The developers of Fedora Linux are pondering a slap in the face for Oracle by picking MariaDB as the database for the forthcoming Fedora 19. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, bills itself as a “drop-in replacement” for the database and is the result of efforts by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Red Hatter Jaroslav …

    Operating Systems 25 Jan 05:47

  • Waiter! There's a phone in my soup

    'iBowl' makes lunch less lonely

    Salvation is in sight for iPhone addicts who find they can't put their handsets down long enough to eat lunch, thanks to New York company Miso Soup Designs' “Anti-Loneliness Ramen Bowl.” The bowl's design is simple: a slot in rim is just the right size for an iPhone and hides its button but leaves the screen free for swiping. …

    Bootnotes 25 Jan 06:02

  • Michael Dell and the Curse of the Exploding Batteries

    First his laptop, now his personal jet may belch fire

    Call it the curse of the exploding lithium ion battery. The Wall Street Journal reports that Michael Dell, the man, or MSD Capital, his personal investment arm, is on the list to get a Boeing Dreamliner 787. Perhaps Dell's MSD arm is just taking a piece of the investment action in the Dreamliner, the Journal speculates, or …

    Hardware 25 Jan 06:04

  • Sympathetic Scots scoff-house offers hard-up Apple fanbois a discount

    Understands their Cupertino habit will leave them penniless

    iPhone users feeling the strain from chucking wads of cash into the Apple's cavernous maw can now get a bit of relief in the form of money off potato scones and haggis spring rolls in Aberdeen. Musa, a restaurant in Exchange Street in Aberdeen, is offering a deal just for iPhone owners - giving them 20 per cent off the bill if …

    Small Biz 25 Jan 07:01

  • RoboVM stirs up another helping of Java for iPhone

    Apple unlikely to get cross over this compiler

    The free RoboVM, timidly launched as version 0.0.1, claims to bridge Java code into Objective C - including the native iOS Cocoa Touch APIs - providing greater portability to mobile apps. The release announcement boasts: RoboVM makes it possible to develop native iOS apps that use the CocoaTouch APIs in Java using familiar …

    Developer 25 Jan 08:02

  • Hotel chain De Vere checks out of server rooms and into the cloud

    Live today Tips on how consolidation can save more than just cost

    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. At 11:00 …

    Business 25 Jan 08:27

  • Ministry of Fun builds crack team to juice up bumpkin broadband

    BDUK consultants, Whitehall mandarins sent to the sticks

    The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has assembled a crack team of Whitehall and BT bods to speed up the deployment of broadband to rural areas. A pilot scheme will be be tested on bumpkins* in Norfolk after the county chose BT as its preferred bidder for a £41m contract to bring faster net connections to the region. …

    Broadband 25 Jan 09:05

  • Tiny tech ZigBee harnesses puny power of the press

    Batteries? Where we're going we don't need batteries

    The ZigBee Alliance - which looks after the low-power radio comms standard - has now introduced wireless communications that are powered by the act of pressing a key. Green Power is an extension to the Zigbee protocol that allows switches and sensors to operate from tiny amounts of power - such as the power generated by the …

    Networks 25 Jan 09:29

  • 'We are not concerned about your patents at all' - Jobs

    Plus: 'Not only is this a pain, it's actually losing me wages'

    This was the week when an ex-Microsoftie said that Steve Ballmer was not the man who could lead the company back to its former rival-crushing glory. Joachim Kempin also claimed that Ballmer held on tight to his seat at the top by tossing out anyone in management who looked like they might replace him: When you work that …

    Business 25 Jan 10:04

  • Shiny, shiny! The window's behind me...

    Something for the Weekend, Sir? Has the matte-screen lobby finally given up?

    For reasons too mundane to express, the location at which I have been currently working comprises two adjacent but separate open-plan areas conjoined by a small office occupied by the departmental boss. The easiest and quickest way to get from one open-plan area to the other is to pass through the little office. In fact, it’s …

    Hardware 25 Jan 10:23

  • Now Spanish sperm takes a kick to the cojones

    Male fertility falling, shock study shows

    Scientists have announced that sperm production in young chaps in south-east Spain has fallen 38 per cent in the last decade, and is heading towards the "danger level" where it might prejudice conception. An international team, headed by the Department of Preventative Medicine and Public Health of the University of Murcia (UMU …

    Bootnotes 25 Jan 10:43

  • LOHAN premieres intimate REHAB vid

    Lid blown on shed-built hypobaric rocket motor test rig

    As the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team continues to advance inexorably on various front towards the launch of our Vulture 2 spaceplane, we've taken a bit of time to look back at our REHAB experiment. LOHAN fans will know that the purpose of the Rocketry Experimental High Altitude Barosimulator was to test …

    SPB 25 Jan 11:03

  • Amazon: IVONA bevy of 'all natural' blabber babes to beat Siri

    Look out, Apple - Voice of Kindle now owned by book-slingers

    Amazon bought text-to-speech company IVONA systems on Wednesday, the online book-floggers have announced. The acquisition fuelled rumours that Amazon, the quietest member of The Gang of Four, is planning a rival to Apple's talking assistant Siri. Amazon announced the deal with Ivona Software yesterday on its website, but didn' …

    Financial News 25 Jan 11:17

  • Panasonic: We'll save Earth by turning CO2 INTO BOOZE

    Scrub air of greenhouse gas, get plastered to celebrate

    Electronics giant Panasonic is showing off its ambitious attempt to tackle global warming – with a plant-like machine that uses light to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. The Japanese biz's Artificial Photosynthesis System, which turns the greenhouse gas into organic material, differs from other attempts to mimic the behaviour of …

    Science 25 Jan 11:38

  • Have Brits fallen for Netflix, or do they still LoveFilm?

    Feature Stream engine: Internet television in the UK

    BBC iPlayer turned five at Christmas, and the Corporation reported some pretty impressive usage statistics as it did so. While iPlayer is something of a juggernaut in the IPTV world, it’s only relatively recently made the leap from PC to living room and connected devices such as smart TVs and set-top boxes. Arguably 2012 was …

    Media 25 Jan 12:02

  • Cisco and NetApp fatten up Flexpod, chuck it at cloud biz

    Also fling out ExpressPods for branch offices

    Cisco and NetApp are drawing closer together with their FlexPod converged system effort, an attempt to grab branch office, data centre and public cloud infrastructure business. Cisco has servers and networking, which is not enough, and NetApp has storage, which is not enough either - because IT people need servers, storage and …

    Cloud 25 Jan 12:16

  • Twitter must unmask racist French twits or face $1,300-a-DAY fine

    Paris court demands easier abuse report system too

    Twitter has been ordered by a tribunal in France to name the anonymous twits who tweeted anti-Semitic bile. The social network was sued by the Union of French Jewish Students to make it to reveal the identities of those behind the vile messages, which were pulled from the website in October. Twitter said it obeyed the laws of …

    Media 25 Jan 12:36

  • Silly gits upload private crypto keys to public GitHub projects

    Amazing what you can find searching for 'BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY'

    Scores of programmers uploaded their private cryptographic keys to public source-code repositories on GitHub, exposing their login credentials to world+dog. The discovery was made just before the website hit the kill switch on its search engine or, more likely, the service collapsed under the weight of curious users trawling for …

    Security 25 Jan 12:47

  • Boffins baffled over pulsar with 'split personality'

    No explanation for its changing behaviour

    A pulsar that randomly and without warning dramatically changes its pattern of radio wave and X-ray emissions has surprised a team of astronomers, who wrote that it "challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories". Pulsars are spinning neutron stars the size of a small city, with a mass roughly comparable to our Sun. They …

    Science 25 Jan 12:55

  • Facebook DIES ON THE VINE hours after Twitter tie-in

    Has 'find friends' ferret had a fall ... bitch?

    Twitter's public spat with Facebook continued on Thursday when Mark Zuckerberg's free content ad network appeared to have cut off access to video-sharing app Vine's "find people" function - which allowed Viners to ferret out their Facebook mates. The abrupt shutoff came just hours after the micro-blogging site bought video- …

    Media 25 Jan 13:22

  • Tablets aren't killing ereaders, it's clog-popping wrinklies - analyst

    Market dying... literally

    Don’t blame the tablet computer for the demise of the ebook reader. Instead, look no further than aged users who are inconveniently - for Amazon, Sony, Barnes & Noble, Kobo et al - kicking the bucket. That’s the claim made by ABI Research, a market watcher which has been tracking the ereader business for more than 10 years. …

    Hardware 25 Jan 13:43

  • Broadband ESSENTIAL to life, titsup ISPs must cough up - court

    Aber nur in Deutschland, ha ha. Entschuldigung Engländer!

    Home broadband isn't yet deemed a vital utility in Europe, but that hasn't stopped a German court ruling that ISPs should compensate customers who suffer from network service disruptions. The decision in the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe was made after it described the internet as an "essential" part of life, Reuters …

    Broadband 25 Jan 14:04

  • Samsung posts RECORD profits, but execs drip cold sweat over 2013

    Can't have a 75% profit spike every year, eh?

    Samsung urged a note of caution for the future, despite announcing bumper profits for the last three months of 2012. The two big drivers that powered the Korean super-manufacturer to record revenue of 56.06 trillion Korean won ($52.7bn, £33.3bn) at the end of 2012 are showing signs of decelerating. Samsung execs expect cooler …

    Financial News 25 Jan 14:32

  • Brit 2.5-tonne nuke calculator is World's Oldest Working Computer

    Elderly giant takes 10 seconds to divide a number

    Britain's hefty Harwell Dekatron is back in the Guinness Book of World Records after being recognised - for the second time - as the world's oldest working digital computer. The 2.5-tonne number-crunching goliath began life at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire, in 1951, and put reliability over …

    Vintage 25 Jan 15:02

  • NFC Forum: We're not just about paying by bonk, you know

    Special interest groups show other ways to make the tech pay

    Five new Special Interest Groups (SIGs) will promote the use of Near Field Communications as the panacea which can cure what ails ya, rather than the electronic-wallet tech it has become. NFC is increasingly perceived as a pay-by-bonk technology, but has applications across industries, and the NFC Forum intends to remind …

    Mobile 25 Jan 15:32

  • Scottish Power blows a fuse after Twitter hijacking

    'Leccy biz 'really sorry' after customers lured to villains' lair

    A Scottish Power Twitter account was hacked this morning to usher customers into the clutches of web miscreants. Many of the 2,000-plus followers of the UK utility's @SP_EnergyPeople feed received malicious direct messages tempting them to visit a phishing website designed to harvest Twitter login details. Scottish Power …

    Media 25 Jan 16:04

  • Apple 'dismayed' to find over 100 kids building its iDevices

    Stops doing biz with worst offender - report

    Apple found 106 different ongoing cases of underage workers in its suppliers in China and 70 historical cases, according to its seventh annual supplier audit. The fruity firm said it was "dismayed to discover" that one supplier, Guangdong Real Faith Pingzhou Electronics (PZ), was rampantly violating the policy, with 74 …

    Software 25 Jan 16:27

  • IT box'n'services floggers to learn coding as biz want apps

    @property (nonatomic, copy) NSString *file? Screw this, we're outsourcing

    Companies in the IT hardware and services channel are having to bone up on programming or outsource development as big biz takes a growing interest in mobile versions of enterprise software. At the Canalys Channel Forum, the analyst said, thanks to the growing trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), services customers want are …

    The Channel 25 Jan 16:58

  • Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be FINE

    Doubled CO2 means just 1.9°C warming, say Norwegian researchers

    New research produced by a Norwegian government project, described as "truly sensational" by independent experts, indicates that humanity's carbon emissions produce far less global warming than had been thought: so much so that there is no danger of producing warming beyond the IPCC upper safe limit of 2°C for many decades. “ …

    Science 25 Jan 18:02

  • Don't like your cell network? Legal unlocking ends TONIGHT in US

    Land of the free big corporate operator

    Unlocking a phone to use it with another carrier will be illegal in America from midnight tonight unless the cellphone is already in your hands. Freeing a phone from a particular network used to be allowed, but under last October's reinterpretation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act that right disappears from all …

    Mobile 25 Jan 19:03

  • Boeing 787 fleet grounded indefinitely as investigators stumped

    Short circuit may be culprit for flammable flights

    Boeing's flagship fleet of 787 Dreamliner aircraft will be grounded for the foreseeable future after a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the cause of two battery fires had yet to be found, and that Japanese investigators are similarly baffled. "We have not ruled anything out as a …

    Science 25 Jan 19:41

  • Juniper carbon copies sales and profits in Q4

    SDN, security, and cloud will drive the future – and maybe servers

    If you squint real hard and tilt your head a little bit, you can see the difference between this year's fourth quarter at Juniper Networks and the quarter it turned in a year ago as 2011 came to a close. In the quarter ended in December, Juniper's product sales were down a barely perceptible two-hundredths of a point to $847. …

    Financial News 25 Jan 20:41

  • Samsung demands Apple's iOS 6 source code in patent case

    Apple's lawyers: It's 'insane'

    In the latest chapter in the ongoing global patent litigation between Apple and Samsung, the South Korean company has asked a local court to grant it access to the source code to iOS 6, claiming that only the code will tell whether Apple infringed its patents. According to a report in The Korea Times on Friday, Apple's legal …

    Law 25 Jan 20:51

  • Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

    Visualizing code in a whole new way

    Programmers often talk about writing "beautiful code," but computer scientist Ramsey Nasser has taken that idea to new lengths by developing the first programming language that uses Arabic script for its source code. The language is called قلب – roughly pronounced "alb," after the Arabic word for "heart" – and as Nasser …

    Developer 25 Jan 23:26