7th February 2013 Archive

Browse by publication date, or search the site.

Green supercomputer pioneer to model micro drones

US Air Force backs Wu Feng for fluid dynamics modelling

The US Air Force Office of Scientific Research has slung some money in the direction of Virginia Tech to conduct fluid dynamics modelling as part of its Micro Air Vehicle – to you and I, micro-drones – projects. The wrinkle in the contract, worth up to $US6 million over five years, is that researcher Wu Feng is to bring his …

Science 7 Feb 00:38
IBM rounds out 10GE/40GE RackSwitches with a switch hitter

Adding converged Fibre Channel and pushing 10GBase-T ports

Big Blue is rounding out its RackSwitch top-of-rack switches in conjunction with the launch of entry and midrange Power7+ servers earlier this week. IBM is kicking out two new switches, the RackSwitch G8264CS and G8264T, both of which offer a base number 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and then additional uplinks or so-called " …

Data Networking 7 Feb 00:53
Morphlabs to cloud builders: Osmium is kryptonite to Amazon, Rackspace

Weaken them, and get 60 per cent gross margins

Cloudy infrastructure provider Morphlabs is revving up its private cloud iron while at the same time wooing service providers with add-on software that makes it easier to run the OpenStack cloud control freak to create public clouds. No one who can do math and configure and run systems well would argue that compute and storage …

Cloud 7 Feb 00:56
Windows Phone 8 hasn't slowed Microsoft's mobile freefall

New data shows Redmond's smartphone share is smaller than ever

Four months after its formal launch, not only has Windows Phone 8 failed to win Microsoft a bigger piece of the mobile pie, but Redmond's share of US smartphone subscribers is actually still shrinking, according to the latest figures from analytics firm comScore. You may recall that last November CEO Steve Ballmer was crowing …

Mobile 7 Feb 01:23
Court says startup swiped IP for high-frequency trading tech

Zeptonics zapped by Australian court

Zeptonics, the Australian company that last year promoted the “world's fastest switch”, has suffered a legal reversal after Australia's Federal Court decided some of the the company's technology, namely that used in its ZeptoLink, ZeptoNIC, ZeptoAccess KRX and Crosswise ATS products, was not its own. The case of Zomojo Pty Ltd …

Law 7 Feb 01:29
Why you need a home lab to keep your job

Your boss won't pay for training, so your partner has to put up with servers at home

IT professionals can't assume their employers want, or can afford to, train them in the latest technologies and should hone and acquire new skills at home in a self-built test lab. That's the opinion of Mike Laverick, VMware's senior cloud infrastructure evangelist. Laverick has operated a lab for over a decade, starting with …

Jobs 7 Feb 01:29
Could this be Google's slick new touchscreen Chromebook?

Video Supposed leaked ad claims to show the full monty

If what purports to be a leaked video turns out to be legit, Google may be planning to shake up the PC hardware market by releasing a new, upscale Chromebook featuring a high-resolution touchscreen display. Rumors of a touchscreen Chromebook have been floating around since last year, but the only sources have been Chinese …

Laptops 7 Feb 02:44
Earth-like planets abound in red dwarf systems

Slow-burning stars may host civilizations far more advanced than our own

The nearest Earth-like planet that could support liquid water may be much closer than first believed, according to new research by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet," said Harvard astronomer and lead author Courtney Dressing in a …

Science 7 Feb 02:50
Raspberry Pi grows an eye

Update OmniVision to supply $25, 5MP PiCam capable of 2592x1944 stills

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released photos of a forthcoming camera module for the popular single-board computer. The Foundation has helpfully offered no specs whatsoever for the camera, but the model pictured below is etched with the text “P5V04A SUNNY”. The camera module for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi Foundation posted …

Hardware 7 Feb 04:53
China is world's most malware-ridden nation

We're number one, we're number one!

Some 55 per cent of Chinese computers are infected with malware, the highest of any country worldwide, according to the latest Annual Security Report from Panda Security. The Spanish security vendor’s Panda Labs research team reported 27 million new strains of malware in 2012, bringing the total in its database to 125m. It …

Security 7 Feb 05:54
Space station 'naut supplies Reg with overhead snap of Vulture Central

'So much of history came from this city'

We've all seen photos of London before, but this one was snapped from 250 miles above the Earth's surface by astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is hurtling round and round the planet aboard the International Space Station at the moment. This is what London looks like from the station. Showing the metropolis at night the orbital …

Science 7 Feb 06:00
South Koreans pawn shiny tech for stress-free loans

Hocking Gangnam Style!

Cash-poor South Koreans are increasingly pawning their shiny new smartphones, fondleslabs and laptops for hassle-free loans at a growing number of specialist hock shops springing up in the Asian nation. There are 15 of the new IT pawn shops in the Seoul area alone, all designed to cater to a younger, tech-savvy clientele, …

Business 7 Feb 06:29
Activist investor makes grab for the wheel at Qualstar

Board's figures squeezed into tightening corset

There has been an unwanted bid for Qualstar, a small tape products and power supply vendor, with an activist investor wanting to drag the company into his vision of a profitable enterprise. Steven Bronson and the BKF Capital Group, which he controls, are bidding $1.65/share for 3 million shares, valuing their bid at $4.95 …

Storage 7 Feb 06:57
Ofcom: Fancy running a temporary HD Freeview TV channel?

10 of 'em up for grabs, but they'll only live for 6 years

Ofcom wants 10 new channels on Freeview, all in HD, and is asking if anyone fancies running them, but only until 2019 when the needs of mobile telephony will cause the plug to be pulled. Anyone interested will have to let the regulator know by 4 April, but assuming there's only one expression of interest then they'll get free …

Media 7 Feb 07:26
Microsoft sails into Africa with White Spaces and Huawei phones

4Afrika rural network project

Microsoft is going large into Africa, pushing White Space networks out to the most rural of locations and getting Huawei to launch an Africa-only handset pushing Windows Phone into the continent. The handset is a rebranded Ascend W1 which was demonstrated last month at CES, with a "4Afrika" logo stuck on the front and a …

Mobile 7 Feb 07:57
Storage upstart polishes copied-data slurping tool

Actifio: Buy our redundancy hoover ... or hire us as cleaners

Storage startup Actifio has updated its data-copy killing software, which deduplicates data by preventing redundant copies from being made in the first place. The firm's software tech virtualises a data storage system so that copies of data are pointers to master data and changed blocks rather than full files or databases - …

Storage 7 Feb 08:33
Review: Unitrends backup appliances

Review Backing up, disrupting and... worth it?

In my experience, backup software sucks. Normally, I chalk that up to a lack of exposure to non-crap alternatives on my part. Talking to backup admins and doing the maths on the licensing leads me to believe my original assessment is correct; there are precious few backups applications and vendors that don't cause some form of …

Storage 7 Feb 09:03
Dell: Shhh, don't tell a soul, but the PC sector ISN'T doomed...

HPC blog Let's ditch these shareholders, shall we?

Dell’s move to take itself private has the tech world buzzing. There’s a lot of talk about the motives behind the deal. Some say Dell is doing it to escape the quarterly visit to the Wall Street meat grinder, where either you meet (or exceed) their expectations or get ground into a fine slurry. Going private frees Dell of public …

HPC 7 Feb 09:27
The Register: Our all-new app now available for Android

And the rest...

You can now nip down to the Google Play store and bag yourself our new Android App. This version adds offline reading capabilities and comments! Oh. Nice This is a new release, not an update. So those of that you that have the older version, we're sorry: it won’t automatically upgrade. We're also sorry it took longer than …

Site News 7 Feb 09:28
Seagate squeezes out 4TB desktop monster

Bye bye Barracuda

Seagate seems set to replace its desktop Barracuda brand with the Desktop HDD brand and introduce a 4TB desktop drive with it. The Desktop HDD 15 line runs up from 250GB through 320GB and 500GB all the way to 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB. It uses 1TB/platter technology, spins at 7,200rpm, has a 64MB cache, transfers data at up to …

Storage 7 Feb 09:58
Microsoft techies bust data centres, pull plug on Bamital botnet

Sorry about your servers, they fell down some stairs

The Bamital web-search-hijacking botnet has been taken down by security researchers from Microsoft and Symantec with help from the Feds. The crack unit raided a number of data centres where the botnet's servers were located. Bamital malware intercepted victims' search requests - including those sent to Google, Yahoo! and …

Security 7 Feb 10:28
Don't Menshn the snore: Chick-lit queen's jabber site killed in its sleep

Webste shutdwn: Oh well, back to Twittr

Menshn.com, the sleepy chatroom-blogging thing co-founded by former Tory MP Louise Mensch, has closed following a falling out between its two principals. Mensch and the site's co-founder Luke Bozier, a one-time Labour party flack who defected to the Conservatives last year, are no longer on speaking terms, prompting a decision …

Networks 7 Feb 11:05
Friends with money: Dell's big bet on private finance

Analysis Memo to Michael: Don't be like HP

If not a gambler, Michael Dell seems certainly a born showman. With his 50th birthday on the horizon, when most people his age and with his billions might be thinking of slowing down or going philanthropic, he and his PC company have begun a brand new phase. Dell, a native of the brassy US state that lends its name to a brand …

Financial News 7 Feb 11:19
City sugar daddies mulling £10bn bid for EE, say sources

New 4G operator could really bring in the (Kevin) bacon

Big names in private equity have started talks on a potentially hefty £10bn buyout bid for UK 4G network operator EE. Investment firms like Apax, KKR, Blackstone and CVC Capital Partners are rumoured to be working on consortiums for competing offers for the network formerly known as Everything Everywhere, according to whispers …

Mobile 7 Feb 11:39
Visions of a hands-free data centre

Time for improvements

In our recent Regcast A DC That Takes Care of Itself, one question came up several times: how well does the type of hardware monitoring advocated by the panel integrate with the monitoring capabilities of other parts of the data centre? There are two aspects to this question: first, how applicable to your hardware are the …

Datacenter 7 Feb 11:55
Review: Seagate Wireless Plus Wi-Fi hard drive

A terabyte of portable storage for your Android or iOS device

In the week Apple finally released an iPad with a storage capacity greater than 64GB - double that; 128GB to be precise - Seagate made its Wireless Plus available. Of course, if Apple’s Flash mark-up wasn’t so colossal, or it had had the wit to either built a Micro SD port into its tablets or allow USB mass storage devices to …

Tablets 7 Feb 12:19
Microsoft can't even shift Windows 8 slabs in the middle of a tablet frenzy

Halve the price of RT then we're talking, says analyst

Microsoft can't tap into the fast-growing tablet market, according to new figures that reveal lacklustre sales of Surface RT and other Windows 8 slabs. Canalys figures for Q4 show a 12 per cent growth in the worldwide PC market, fuelled by a 75 per cent rise in tab shipments to 46.2 million units. Notebooks sales were flat (58 …

The Channel 7 Feb 12:45
O2 gobbles up O2 Unify staff from dying UK IT giant 2e2

107 workers tossed a lifeline in the nick of time

Mobile operator O2 has grabbed staff from O2 Unify, a joint-venture it ran with the UK's crashed tech giant 2e2. The team was put together by the pair of companies nearly two years ago. This is the first element of 2e2 that its administrator FTI Consulting has been able to sell. It comes a day after the fallen tech integrator …

The Channel 7 Feb 13:03
BlackBerry Q10: This quirky QWERTY will keep loyalists perky

Hands On Touchscreen and a keyboard? So ~~mad~~ useful it might just work

Eight million people in the UK use a BlackBerry and almost every single one of those phones has a physical QWERTY keyboard. And as good as the virtual keyboard on BlackBerry's touchscreen Z10 may be - it's the best, for my money - a fair number of people will want to use a smartphone with a real keyboard. The Q10 is BlackBerry's …

Phones 7 Feb 13:27
Vodafone cash supply choked as Europe tightens pursestrings

Bad, but could be worse

Vodafone Group's UK revenue dropped more than five per cent in its third quarter ended 31 December 2012, demonstrating that Northern Europe just isn't the counterweight to southern losses it used to be. The UK was particularly bad, thanks to intense competition from Telefonica (O2) and EE's 4G monopoly - which stole profitable …

Mobile 7 Feb 13:39
Now UK must look out for crappy SPACE weather - engineers

Solar superstorm bound to hit us 'at some point', warn boffins

Britain needs immediate plans on how to defend itself against extreme solar superstorms, the Royal Academy of Engineering has warned. In a rather doom-heavy missive (PDF, 2.8MB), the RAE has said that although Blighty is better prepared than some other countries when it comes to the off-chance of extreme solar weather, it …

Science 7 Feb 14:06
Yahoo! strikes! display! ad! deal! with! boss's! old! boss! Google!

No mention of Microsoft from Purple Palace's princess

Yahoo! has inked a contextual advertising deal with Google, the financial terms of which were kept secret. The move comes as ties between the Purple Palace and the Chocolate Factory have grown closer in the months since Marissa Mayer - one-time senior Google darling - took to the helm of Yahoo!. Its agreement with Google is …

Media 7 Feb 14:32
Verwaayen on verwaay out: Alcatel-Lucent big-cheese cheeses it

CEO quits, 4,999 other workers to go

Alcatel-Lucent chief exec Ben Verwaayen will exit the loss-making telecommunications equipment maker in May. The ailing biz is in cost-cutting mode and plans to shed at least 5,000 jobs to compete more effectively against its rivals and its Chinese competitors in particular. Former BT big cheese Verwaayen, who headed up the …

The Channel 7 Feb 15:03
REVEALED: NetApp's upcoming 'version 1.0' all-flash array

We get a few details on stand-alone SANtricity silo

NetApp is going to introduce the NetApp Flash Array, an array using up to 24 SSDs and running the SANtricity (PDF) operating system rather than DataONTAP. The tech giant has been signalling for the better part of a year now that it will be expanding its flash technology offering and working on a few in-house flashy developments …

Storage 7 Feb 15:33
Another year, another $40m: Arrow Electronics to cut costs AGAIN

Shrinkage in Euro Zone and Americas cause for concern

Arrow Electronics warned that it needs to hack out $40m of costs amid concerns of significant shrinkage in economies on both sides of the Atlantic. The enterprise distie took the covers off full-year 2012 numbers that showed a 15.4 per cent year-on-year slide in net profits to $506.3m and a 4.6 per cent dip in turnover to $20. …

The Channel 7 Feb 15:37
200 million office workers gagging for a... Microsoft Surface?

Windows tablet is most desired by office workers - report

Microsoft Surface tablets are top of office workers' wish lists, research from Forrester has found, in a surprising discovery from its yearly survey of global information workers. That means 200 million people want their employers to get them a Surface this year, states Forrester in the report 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption …

Tablets 7 Feb 16:04
Smartphone-in-a-box maker cooks up cheap Facebook-flavoured chips

From developing world? Buying 1st smartphone? Zuck 'Likes' you... bitch

Smartphone platform provider Spreadtrum will work with Facebook to integrate its the social network into the platform at firmware level, putting the interactive life blog into the cheapest hardware. The deal will see Spreadtrum working with Facebook to optimise client software running on its chips, just as it does with Google …

Phones 7 Feb 16:31
British games company says it owns the idea of space marines

Amazon pulls ebook over Games Workshop trademark idiocy

British company Games Workshop, well known for producing tabletop wargames and other products set in various fantasy universes, has claimed that it owns the idea of future space marines and that nobody can write books featuring astro-bootnecks* without its consent. Last December the company succeeded in getting the novel Spots …

Media 7 Feb 16:57
Stricken 2e2 threatens data centres: Your money or your lights

£40k from biggest fish, £4k from minnows, to keep servers running

The collapse of UK IT contractor 2e2 descended into farce tonight as its largest data centre customers were told to each pay £40,000 just to keep the lights on. Clients of debt-crippled 2e2 were told to cough up the cash to keep systems running until they transition to another provider, sources close to the situation have told …

The Channel 7 Feb 17:24
Fujitsu says sayonara to semiconductor biz, thousands of staff

Dividend killed as conquering European IT proves tough

Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has been trying to eject its semiconductor business for a number of years, and has finally had enough of the drag it puts on its revenues and earnings. To that end, Fujitsu will spin out its chip business into partnerships with consumer electronics conglomerate Panasonic and rival Taiwan Semiconductor …

Financial News 7 Feb 18:18
Microsoft's Surface Pro team takes on Reddit to finesse fondleslab

Battery covers, Linux, advanced touch, and much more

In a canny PR move, the team behind the Surface Pro has hosted a discussion on the internet forum Reddit to answer questions about Microsoft's latest fondleslab. These kinds of online forum discussions are risky, since they can't be tightly controlled. President Obama's attempt came across as slick, while others have been …

Tablets 7 Feb 20:36
Dell: May the Force 10 (Gigabit Ethernet) be with your CAT6 cables

Embeds OpenFlow control freakage in two 10GE switches

By acquiring Force 10 Networks back in July 2011, privatizing IT giant Dell moved itself from a maker of low-end switches to a contender for a slice of the top-end market for 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches that are ever so slowly becoming the backbone of data centers. But you have to keep up with the times, and that means …

Data Networking 7 Feb 20:43
Wind now cheaper than coal in Oz: Bloomberg

Let the market decide

Bloomberg has sparked a brand-new debate about clean energy in Australia, releasing a report that suggests finance for new coal-fired power is going to be scarce because wind energy is now cheaper than constructing new fossil-fuel plants – even without subsidy. The analysis, announced here, says Australia's major banks “are …

Science 7 Feb 22:24