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20th February 2013 Archive

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  • Agile development may be taught in Australian High Schools

    New curriculum wants “IF” statements for early primary, SQL for tweens

    The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has released its long-awaited draft Technologies curriculum for students from kindergarten to year 10 (Australian secondary schooling ends in Year 12), and the draft offers hope to those who want kids to be taught heavyweight IT skills. The “Digital …

    Policy 20 Feb 00:07

  • VMware promises better security, considers scheduled patches

    Security enhancements, more and better warnings on the agenda

    VMware is thinking about emitting security patches on a fixed schedule, instead of its current just-in-time regime. The virtualisation giant revealed its thinking in a post for VMware user group members, 1,700 of whom it surveyed for their thoughts on the company's security practices. The results found “an almost even split …

    Security 20 Feb 00:30

  • Whitman vows to end channel conflict at HP

    Direct sales teams made to honor partner-led deals

    Direct-sales staffers who continue to pilfer deals from under the nose of channel partners do not have a long-term future at the company, top brass at HP claim. A Rules of Engagement template has been devised by the vendor, designed to give confidence to partners that their investment in certifications to specialize in …

    The Channel 20 Feb 00:46

  • Apple accounts for 20% of all US consumer electronics cash

    Smartphones and tablets the only growth markets

    The latest research data on US consumer electronics spending from analyst house NPD shows that Apple has a commanding market position, taking 19.9 per cent of all sales in 2012. The top five companies by spending last year were Apple, Samsung, HP, Sony, and Dell, but of those only Apple and Samsung actually saw their market …

    Business 20 Feb 01:39

  • Next HP CEO is already working at HP, says Meg Whitman

    But won't get job 'anytime soon'

    HP CEO Meg Whitman says her eventual successor will be recruited from within the company and not externally as has been the case with the previous batch of bigwigs. Ever since it hauled in Carly Fiorina from Lucent, who was replaced by Mark Hurd, then Leo Apotheker and Whitman, onlookers criticised HP's board for bypassing …

    Management 20 Feb 01:43

  • Chip daddy Mead: 'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science

    ISSCC The scientific revolution has stalled, here's how to kickstart it

    Microelectronics pioneer, Caltech professor emeritus, and all-around smart guy Carver Mead believes that the scientific revolution that began with the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics has stalled, and that it's up to us to kickstart it. "A bunch of big egos got in the way," he told his audience of 3,000- …

    Science 20 Feb 01:52

  • HP rolling out shiny rebates programmes and tools

    May deadline set for radical overhaul

    HP is pushing through some radical changes to its PartnerOne channel programmes and tools in a tacit admission it needs to partner more predictably and consistently with the channel. Tech vendors have for time immemorial talked up the need to be easier to do business with, but this has proven difficult for most to nail and …

    The Channel 20 Feb 03:46

  • Dell fattens disks in D2D backup product beef-up

    Still struggling to pry shareholders' mitts off company

    Dell has fattened up its DR4000 disk backup target array. The newer, bigger, fatter little brother is called the DR4100 and has bigger disks, more of them, plus faster server engines and more backup software certifications. The DR4000 used Dell's acquired Ocarina deduplication and compression technology and was announced just …

    Storage 20 Feb 05:04

  • Addicted to games? Maybe not in China

    New, non-western, definition of games addiction under way for Chinese

    China is reportedly hard at work on its very own definition of gaming addiction, according to Xinhua, the multi-lingual Chinese newswire service that that has “setting a good image of China abroad as its main task.” China has long-recognised gaming and internet addiction as real syndromes worthy of corrective action, because …

    Games 20 Feb 05:33

  • Microsoft holds off on shooting Windows Live Messenger

    Extra three weeks before the axe falls

    Microsoft's firing squad has put off the execution of Windows Live Messenger, leaving it sitting on death row for another few weeks. Redmond is in the process of ditching Messenger in favour of Skype Chat and was due to throw everyone off the older messaging service on 15 March. Instead, users will be compelled to switch over …

    Applications 20 Feb 06:02

  • Tizen mobile OS releases v2.0 code

    Android alternative has Samsung's support

    The men and women behind the open source Tizen mobile OS platform have stated an early claim to win developer hearts and minds ahead of Mobile World Congress next week with the official release of Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK. After a particularly slow start since its launch in by the Linux Foundation in September 2011, the …

    Operating Systems 20 Feb 06:03

  • FIFA stages shoot-out between British and German goal line tech

    Electric eyes will watch the World Cup, with Hawk_Eye to face off against German foes

    Football’s ruling body FIFA has agreed to use goal-line technology (GLT) at next year’s World Cup in Brazil after successful trials in Japan in December. The decision marks a turnaround in thinking for FIFA after big match errors of judgement by referees in major tournament games which have benefitted and penalised England*. …

    Hardware 20 Feb 06:43

  • Android 4.2.2 slides up skirt slightly, reveals a slip of fishnet

    Android@Home and mesh networking - not dead, just sleeping

    Obsessives crawling through the minutia of Android's latest changes have spotted evidence that Google's vapourware home-automation system might yet live, and mesh networking too. The evidence is in an Android 4.2.2 diff of a system configuration file, which specifically mentions both mesh networking and Android@Home (as …

    Mobile 20 Feb 07:32

  • Meet the stealthiest UK startup's app Swiftkey - and its psychic* keyboard

    * Actually quite a lot of maths in new version 4

    If ever there was a company that found itself in the right place at the right time, it's TouchType - the team behind SwiftKey. The firm is one of Britain's most successful tech startups: it says its intellectual property is used in 100 million phones and that its SwiftKey software was last year's best-selling program in the …

    Applications 20 Feb 08:03

  • Nasuni fondles clouds, says Microsoft's is nicest...

    Amazon's S3 drops in the rankings

    Nasuni says Microsoft's Azure is the best cloud service provider for users of its cloud storage gateway. Last year the enterprise storage company ranked Amazon's S3 at the top. It tested five cloud service providers (CSPs): Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, HP Object Cloud Storage and Rackspace Cloud Files. …

    Cloud 20 Feb 08:32

  • Mobe networks bag UK 4G for a steal - £1bn shy of Osborne's £3.5bn

    BT, EE, Three, O2, Vodafone win spectrum licence auction, raise 10% of 3G's £23bn

    The rights to use Blighty's 4G frequencies were today sold to UK operators, plus a BT subsidiary without national aspirations, raising a mere £2.3bn for the Treasury. That's somewhat short of Chancellor George Osborne's expectations of £3.5bn. EE (which also operates the Orange and T-Mobile brands in Britain), Three, O2 and …

    Mobile 20 Feb 09:05

  • I used to be an Oracle DBA ... but now I'm a Big Data guru

    Dominic Connor shows you how to jump the bandwagon

    As the demand for Oracle skills fades along with VB and as even Java loses its shine, the smart developer is looking at what will pay the bills for the next decade. As an ITpro you have to bet your career every few years and Big Data is too obvious an opportunity to pass up. The problem being that it’s not a single product …

    Management 20 Feb 09:36

  • Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'

    Telly bloke promises to 'visit' Twitter hijackers

    Motormouth Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson has joked he will kill the spammers who took his Twitter account on a joyride to tout dodgy diet pills. Several tweets appeared on his feed promoting miracle weight-loss medicine. But the stunt may backfire on the Twitter-jackers: rather than delete the spam and reset his password, …

    Media 20 Feb 09:58

  • HP serves up backup-array combo platter to channel diners

    On the LeftHand StoreVirtual and on the right StoreServ (3PAR)

    HP has introduced follow-on systems to the iSCSI P4500 and a channel-only pairing of a StoreServe 3PAR array with StoreOnce Backup. The firm believes both will help channel partners in the mid-range/high-end external array and purpose-built backup appliance markets. The new HP StoreVirtual products are based on ProLiant Gen8 …

    The Channel 20 Feb 10:09

  • Is it a bird? Is it a cloud? No! It's just a new Seagate biz NAS box

    Four bays, external SATA bus, 16TB, no buzzwords

    Seagate has added one, two and four-bay desktop filers to its product range, calling it Seagate Business Storage. The boxes also feature an external SATA bus to hook up removable drives. The manufacturer has, unlike its rivals, mercifully resisted the temptation to call the network-attached storage a personal or small-biz "cloud …

    Storage 20 Feb 10:33

  • Concurrent gives old SQL users new Hadoop tricks

    Lingual lets SQL devs speak HDFS lingo

    Application framework specialist Concurrent has given SQL devs a free tool to get at data stored in Hadoop, without having to learn the intricacies of the trendy computational framework. The "Lingual" tool is an ANSI-standard SQL engine built on top of Concurrent's "Cascading" software, a Java application framework for Hadoop …

    HPC 20 Feb 11:06

  • Apple FINALLY fills gaping Java hole that pwned its own devs

    Zero-day vuln also downed Facebook staff and other Mac users

    Apple has belatedly patched a security hole in the Java engine it ships with Mac OS X - the very hole exploited by hackers to infect Apple's own developers, their counterparts at Facebook and scores of other Mac-using companies. The vulnerability allowed miscreants to execute malicious code outside of the limited and …

    Security 20 Feb 11:24

  • BBC: Monster cargo ship delivers '863 million tins of baked beans'

    New behemoth carrier hewn from 'eight Eiffel Towers'

    The BBC has sensationally quantified the cargo capacity of a new behemoth container ship as "863 million tins of baked beans". Auntie's penchant for describing very big, heavy, strong or long things in terms mere mortals can get their heads round is well known to Reg regulars. Last year, it described the constricting force of …

    SPB 20 Feb 11:44

  • Survey: Bosses are DESPERATE and GAGGING for Linux skills

    Penguin gurus sought more than other tech workers

    Demand for IT professionals with Linux skills is stronger than ever, but a new worldwide survey of more than 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals indicates that companies are having a hard time finding qualified hires. Among the findings of the survey, which was conducted by careers website Dice and the Linux …

    Management 20 Feb 12:04

  • Ubuntu's Shuttleworth embraces tablet terror: Our PC biz will survive, too

    Linux man's roadmap munches tab, phone, PC, TV

    Ubuntu spaceman Mark Shuttleworth is embracing the full horror of tablets and smartphones, calculating they’ll do little harm to his Linux distro’s PC business. Shuttleworth yesterday announced a fondleslab-friendly Ubuntu interface for tabs ahead of next week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The first tabs running the UI will …

    Operating Systems 20 Feb 12:24

  • From stage to stream: The unseen tech at the BRIT Awards 2013

    Feature You'll never moan about the price of Thunderbolt cables again

    If you think you know all about the O2 Arena having visited it when it was called the Millennium Dome, then think again. When the site was sold to entertainment biz AEG in 2004, it was gutted and turned into a concert venue; all that remains of the original structure is the tent. Today, its owners claim it’s the busiest live …

    Data Networking 20 Feb 12:43

  • OnApp packs bullet-proof SAN into v3 of its cloud software

    Hey, telcos, fancy some cut-rate cloud storage?

    UK cloud control freak OnApp has released the third version of its OnApp Cloud, which packs in its distributed SAN for telecommunications companies that want to spin-up Amazon-like iterations. The v3.0 release, which became generally available on Wednesday, incorporates OnApp's ambitious distributed SAN, along with CDN, DNS, …

    Cloud Infrastructure 20 Feb 13:03

  • VMware sharpens axe for PCs: Horizon boxset brings Windows to iPads

    Control systems, access files from 'droids, iThings, slabs, desktops

    After eighteen months of hints, VMware has unveiled the final version of its “Horizon Suite” end-user computing stack. VMware has wanted more of a desktop presence for years, shelling out for Zimbra in 2010 in the hope enterprises liked the idea of webified email and calendars operating within their own data centres. Zimbra's …

    Virtualization 20 Feb 13:23

  • Sony flogs off more assets in scramble for full-year profit

    £800m sale of medical market biz stake to staunch cash bleed

    Sony is selling off nearly 10,000 shares in medical market research firm M3 as part of its business overhaul. The Japanese firm, suffering from competition on a number of fronts and feeling the effects of the sad economical state of Europe, has been selling off bits and pieces and rejigging others to streamline its business …

    Financial News 20 Feb 13:45

  • Future war, what it is good phwoar? asks Crysis skin-paint babe

    Erstwhile Pussycat Doll dons spray-on cybersuit to stir up game sales

    Crysis 3 goes on sale this coming Friday, and in a blatant bid to arouse interest among gamers, developer Crytek and publisher EA has sprayed some leggy lass called Ashley Roberts with hi-tech body art. Said skin paint job represents the sci-fi suit worn by Crysis 3's protagonist and is a more skintight variant on the usual …

    Games 20 Feb 14:00

  • Rid yourself of Adobe: New Firefox 19.0 gets JAVASCRIPT PDF viewer

    Built-in reader escapes into wild from beta incubator

    Mozilla's Firefox web browser now includes a built-in PDF viewer - allowing users to bin plugins from Adobe and other developers. The move to run third-party PDF file readers out of town comes after security holes were discovered in closed-source add-ons from FoxIt and Adobe. The new built-in document viewer is open source, …

    Applications 20 Feb 14:34

  • Mail.ru tycoon, Silicon Valley titans announce $3m life science prizes

    Yuri Milner teams up with Zuck, Brin and Levinson

    Russian internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner has persuaded Mark Zuckerberg, Art Levinson and Sergey Brin to pool their money for a science prize of $3m to for research into curing diseases and extending human life. The Silicon Valley titans from Facebook, Apple and Google have joined forces with the Mail.ru tycoon and US …

    Science 20 Feb 14:57

  • BlackBerry squashes W-TIFF-F bug that's ripe for malware squirters

    Picture this: BES servers hacked by evil image files

    BlackBerry has patched a security vulnerability that allowed hackers to execute malicious code on systems running its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) software. The bug, rated as "high severity", is triggered by specially crafted TIFF image files that travel into BES as users visit webpages, receive emails and exchange …

    Security 20 Feb 15:29

  • Ad-titan Google blocks Adblock Plus in Android security tweak

    We're being singled out, claims app maker

    The maker of Adblock Plus is upset its users must jump through hoops to get its advert-banishing app working on devices running Android - the mobile OS made by advertising giant Google. The complaint follows moves by Google that made it more difficult for Google Chrome users to use Adblock Plus as a browser extension. The …

    Developer 20 Feb 15:59

  • France Telecom takes huge profit hit after swallowing €1.8bn writedown

    CFO says it might put 20% of EE on the market

    Telecoms is not the fat market it once was as the low spend in the UK 4G auction showed today, and Euro telco giant France Telecom has also felt the pain. The former French monopoly telco had to write down €1.84bn on units in Poland, Egypt and Romania, which was partly to blame for the hefty 79 per cent plunge in profits year-on …

    Financial News 20 Feb 16:31

  • Red Hat has BIG Big Data plans, but won't roll its own Hadoop

    Kicks HDFS to the curb and replaces it with GlusterFS

    Let's get this straight. Red Hat should package up its own commercial Hadoop distribution or buy one of the three key Hadoop disties before they get too expensive. But don't hold your breath, because Red Hat tells El Reg that neither option is the current plan. Red Hat is going to partner with Hadoop distributors and hope they …

    HPC 20 Feb 17:00

  • Linaro Linux-on-ARM effort sets sights on network gear

    PowerPC, x86, and MIPS can run, but they can't hide

    The non-profit Linaro software engineering effort , established two summers ago to whip the Linux kernel and add-ons to create the Linux platform for mobile devices, is setting its sights on myriad networking devices. The proliferation of and tinkering with ARM processor designs is what makes for powerful technology, just like …

    Data Networking 20 Feb 18:04

  • Speaking in Tech: Tesla's Elon Musk takes on NYT - ballsy move, man

    Podcast Plus: Open file systems and the commoditisation of infrastructure

    Want to hear a quick and funny wrap-up of everything - well, everything important - that happened in tech this week? El Reg's enterprise and consumer kit gurus Greg Knieriemen and Ed Saipetch are here to discuss the business of tech, the tech of storage, and the quality of watered-down bourbon. They also chat about why SpaceX …

    Storage 20 Feb 18:19

  • Forget Dropbox, here's Drobo-box: Small-biz array meets Barracuda cloud

    When you just can't reach your office's cart o' disks

    Security appliance maker Barracuda Networks has agreed to marry its online file-sharing service to storage biz Drobo's box of hard drives called 5N. People can upload and download files to and from Barracuda's Copy cloud, and share their data between desktop computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Android devices and Microsoft's …

    Storage 20 Feb 19:04

  • HP CEO talks up uncertainty in Dell buy-out

    If anyone knows about instability, it's Whitman

    HP's self appointed turnaround queen Meg Whitman reckons that Dell's move to go private again will create a period of uncertainty for the customers and channel partners. And who can blame her for putting the hammer down on her rival? Dell waded with some barbed comments when HP's hapless homer CEO Leo Apotheker publicly stated …

    The Channel 20 Feb 20:09

  • Google stokes hype machine over Project Glass robospecs

    Social networkers react predictably

    Google has been talking up its augmented-reality specs, dubbed Project Glass, for the past year. Now its hype machine has kicked up a notch with a competition on social media to allow members of the public to get in the queue for the $1,500 prototypes. The wire and screen glasses are one of Sergey Brin's pet projects and there …

    Hardware 20 Feb 20:12

  • Chinese search engine giant Baidu forges ARM servers

    Marvell notches another design win after Dell and Codethink boxes

    Chip maker Marvell has notched up its third public design win for an ARM server, this one at Baidu, one of the two big search engine giants in China. Avi Liebermensch, manager of server products at the maker of ARM processors and other kinds of chips, tells El Reg that the Baidu server is based on the company's Armada XP …

    Servers 20 Feb 21:05

  • 'On demand' fibre: Could it happen in Oz?

    Trying to find the subsidy

    A question posed by El Reg to Australian opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull has opened up something of a can of worms. It’s probably unfair to say that Turnbull “floated” or “supports” the idea of Australia imitating the Openreach “Fibre on Demand” model. He merely didn’t dismiss the notion out-of-hand. …

    Broadband 20 Feb 21:24

  • CSIRO: Landscape is biggest carbon sink

    No big enough, though

    New research published by the CSIRO has found that Australia’s landscape is by far the country’s largest carbon sink. However, its nowhere near enough, absorbing just one-third of the national fossil fuel emissions over the last 30 years. The research, published in the open-access Biogeosciences (abstract here with link to …

    Science 20 Feb 21:56

  • Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER

    Can't be transferred, even to yourself

    Microsoft has clarified the licensing for retail versions of its Office 2013 productivity suite, confirming that boxed editions of the software are licensed for a single PC only and that the license may never be transferred, even if the user upgrades to a new PC. Over the past week, Office users around the web have expressed …

    Applications 20 Feb 22:46

  • E-taxes aren't really stuffing Uncle Sam's pockets enough

    Internet sales tax proves less lucrative than predicted

    Some US states have started collecting the first tranche of internet sales taxes, but it's a lot less than studies were anticipating. A number of states fought to get a sales tax on internet commerce, saying that the advantages enjoyed by etailers like Amazon not paying the man over bricks-and-mortars shops was unfair. Of …

    Business 20 Feb 22:58

  • Microsoft, EMC, NetApp support Oracle against Google

    Grey ladies of tech hope to bend court's ear

    Microsoft, EMC, and NetApp have joined Oracle in urging the US Federal Circuit Appeals Court to overturn an earlier decision in the landmark Oracle versus Google Java trial. The three companies filed an amici curiae brief on Tuesday – legal-speak for "friends of the court." Such briefs are a way for parties not directly …

    Law 20 Feb 23:03