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28th February 2013 Archive

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  • SGI rejigs financing ahead of possible asset sale

    NUMAlink shared memory interconnect not for sale, but could be licensed

    Supercomputer and dense-pack server maker Silicon Graphics has rejiggered its credit facility with Wells Fargo Capital Finance ahead of a possible sale of intellectual property or other assets. In an 8K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SGI said that it had amended its credit agreement with Wells Fargo, …

    HPC 28 Feb 00:13

  • Apple CEO Cook's investor-meeting reveal: 'Dog bites man'

    'Great stuff coming', unhappy with stock drop ... snxxx

    One of the duties of a modern CEO is to offer as little detail as possible during investors' meetings, and Apple's headman Tim Cook has proved himself a Jedi master of snooze-inducing vapidity. Speaking at Apple's annual investors meeting on Wednesday at the company's Cupertino headquarters, Cook piled bromide upon cliché upon …

    Business 28 Feb 01:03

  • Big Data tools cost too much, do too little

    Strata 2013 SHOCKING REVELATION: Fashionable technology is high maintenance

    Hadoop and NoSQL are the technologies of choice among the web cognoscenti, but one developer and technical author says they are being adopted too enthusiastically by some companies when good 'ol SQL approaches could work just as well. Ever since a team at Yahoo! did their turn at being prometheus and brought Google-magic down …

    Cloud 28 Feb 01:24

  • Super-fast super-massive black hole spins at nearly light-speed

    NuStar boffins peek through the clouds at NGC 1365

    NuStar – the X-ray telescope launched by NASA last year – is turning in its first science with measurements revealing that the outer edges of the NGC 1365 black hole are spinning at 84 percent of light-speed or more. The supermassive black hole in the NGC 1365 galaxy has a mass more than two million times that of the sun, but …

    Science 28 Feb 01:32

  • German boffins turn ALCOHOL into hydrogen at low temp

    Tricky chemistry unlocks methanol's energy potential

    Hydrogen is one of the cleanest-burning fuels known, but storing and transporting it can be a problem – as anyone who's seen footage of the Hindenburg disaster knows. But researchers at Germany's University of Rostock say they've come up with a solution that could make hydrogen fuel safe and practical, by storing it as liquid …

    Science 28 Feb 01:52

  • Larry Ellison buys airline

    'Island Air' can ferry Oracle boss to private island

    Oracle boss Larry Ellison's passion for investing in Hawaii has seen him acquire local airline Island Air. Ellison last year acquired most of Hawaii's sixth-largest island, Lanai. Today he owns 98 per cent of the 141 square mile (365km2) lump of land. Should the billionaire database guru desire to visit Lanai by air, he can …

    Business 28 Feb 02:26

  • Jimmy Wales: 'I'm Wikipedia's monarch'

    RSA 2013 Off with their heads

    The RSA conference usually has some off-topic keynotes at the end of the day and this year was no exception, with Jimbo Wales popping in to explain how the UK's Royal Family aren't the only Wales' to wear a crown. He explained that while the bulk of the work on Wikipedia was done by 100,000 unpaid volunteers, they were …

    Media 28 Feb 02:39

  • NetApp's FlashRay to zap Symmetrix with fibre channel

    Flash-for-VDI is wimpy startup play, says CTO's man Bercovici

    What if an enterprise storage vendor launched a new array and didn't tell anyone how it would connect to the outside world? Oddly, this scenario played out earlier this month when NetApp revealed its FlashRay, an all-flash array it intends to start selling in 2014. Even Val Bercovici, who works in NetApp's office of the chief …

    Storage 28 Feb 04:35

  • Intel beckons SMBs aboard Big Data bandwagon

    Small fry firms can be Big Data fish with Hadoop

    Cutting edge Big Data projects might seem the sole preserve of big name multinationals and government organisations but the democratisation of these next gen analytics capabilities is coming soon to an SMB near you, according to Intel. Speaking at the APAC launch of the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop, Chipzilla’s global …

    Management 28 Feb 04:48

  • Strategic SIEGE ROBOTS defeated by 'heavily intoxicated' man, 62

    Epic battle in Ohio: Fall of the Machines™

    In yet another sign of the continued supremacy - for the moment at least - of humanity over its machines, reports are coming in that a duo of powerful police robots has been bested in combat by an elderly American man who was "heavily intoxicated" at the time after the "strategic" enforcement machines attempted to storm his …

    Bootnotes 28 Feb 06:03

  • Google builds web games using Chrome on mobes as controller

    Mutant offspring of Wii U and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon

    Google has released a Chrome Experiment, titled Chrome Super Sync Sports, that turns mobile devices into controllers for games in which the action takes place on a PC’s screen. The games offer simple running, cycling and swimming variants, none of which are conceptually too far beyond the “mash a button as fast as you can” …

    Games 28 Feb 06:52

  • First, servers were DEEP-FRIED... now, boffins bring you WET ones

    Super-cooling liquid shaves 97% off data centre cooling costs

    We've seen quite a few innovative engineers who have tried to bring down data centre cooling costs, including this mad crowd who dunked theirs in a deep fryer... Now boffins at Leeds University and British start-up Icetope have invented a super cooling liquid that could create a new generation of "wet servers". They say it could …

    Servers 28 Feb 07:02

  • GSMA: Help us, OneAPI proxy, you're our only hope

    Mobile operators fight off OTT players with an 'Exchange'

    Continuing the fight against OTT players, mobile operators' group the GSMA has launched the OneAPI Exchange, a moderated proxy providing access to OneAPI functions across operators that are too lazy and uninterested to implement the standard properly. The OneAPI, for those who've forgotten, is an API allowing applications to …

    MWC 28 Feb 08:04

  • Emulex eats 87% of Endace for Ethernet examinations

    Elliott says no thanks

    Emulex has acquired ownership of 89 per cent of New Zealand-based Ethernet network traffic analysis company Endace. One of the 11 per cent holdouts is an Elliott Management subsidiary which also holds Emulex shares. It wants Emulex to stop spending on acquisitions and slip a few greenbacks into shareholders' wallets. Endace …

    Storage 28 Feb 08:35

  • So much noise on WinMob, but Microsoft's silent on lovely WinPhone

    MWC 2013 When it had a terrible OS, it wouldn't shut up

    I came to Barcelona to take the pulse of Windows Phone - which I’ll confess I've grown to like quite a bit - I came away trying to make sense of the following paradox. A decade ago, and for some years either side, Microsoft had a terrible mobile device platform but noisily insisted it would succeed. Perhaps because it was …

    MWC 28 Feb 09:04

  • EMC intros self-service VMAX CE for cloud-slingers

    New model prods service providers to move that AAS

    In May last year EMC rolled out a VMAX for service providers, the VMAX SP. Now we have its successor, VMAX Cloud Edition, which provides tenant self-service provisioning and pre-organised storage service classes to make life easier for cloud storage slingers. The upgrade provides a new payment model, too. The big VMAX CE …

    Cloud Infrastructure 28 Feb 09:31

  • 4G, quad-core, pah. Now connect the next billion bods to mobile web

    MWC 2013 What Nokia, Mozilla and telcos are up to beyond the West

    Phones are here, there and everywhere - but there is a need to drive down costs to connect the next billion or so people to the world of mobile internet. This was a subject tackled by Manoj Kohli, the MD of Bharti Airtel; Dr Nasser Marafih of Ooredoo; our favourite Canadian, Nokia’s Stephen Elop; and new-boy at the GSMA party …

    MWC 28 Feb 10:04

  • Apple assimilates France, Sweden and pals into iCloud

    Europeans - lower your shields and surrender ...

    Finnish, Belgian and Cypriot fanbois are among a group of European and Nordic Apple users who woke up today to find themselves able to share films with iCloud. The cloudy service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your Apple kit, allows users to access their previously purchased movies and music. If they …

    Media 28 Feb 10:44

  • Take that, freetards: First music sales uptick in over a decade

    Industry parties like it's almost 1999, pirates face extinction

    Year-on-year sales of recorded music have risen for the first time since 1999, albeit by a smidgen, according to industry stats. The business of selling and licensing sound recordings is now 40 per cent smaller than it was pre-Y2K, but in 2012 revenues increased by 0.3 per cent - and that hasn't happened before in this …

    Media 28 Feb 10:59

  • Squillionaire space tourist offers oldsters a holiday to Mars

    Who fancies an all-expenses-paid 501-day trip?

    A new organisation led by Dennis Tito - the world's first space tourist - wants to send an older couple on an all-expenses-paid 501-day trip to Mars. How the Inspiration Mars spacecraft could look Mega-rich engineer Tito announced yesterday that his Inspiration Mars foundation is looking for a man and a woman beyond child- …

    Science 28 Feb 11:16

  • Upstart Aerospoke flings NoSQL ninja star into data-centre rings

    Ouch! Right in the topology

    A NoSQL startup is upping its game with a feature update allowing biz types to share data across multiple data centres. Aerospike has released Enterprise Edition 2.6 with the addition of star topologies. The architecture allows one data centre to simultaneously replicate information to multiple data centres – a move the …

    Data Networking 28 Feb 11:31

  • 25% of Groupon share value WIPED OUT after rates slashed

    Voucher bazaar forced to cut fees to lure wary merchants

    Groupon lost a quarter of its market value yesterday after it admitted it was taking a smaller cut of revenue on its coupons to keep retailers interested. The daily deals bazaar's stock dropped 24.78 per cent yesterday to $5.98 after its fourth quarter results were once again a disappointment to investors. Critics have been …

    Financial News 28 Feb 11:44

  • Moscow's speed cameras 'knackered' by MYSTERY malware

    Infection spread from cops to traffic gear - report

    Malware has infected a Russian police computer network, knackering speed cameras in and around Moscow, according to reports. Broadsheet daily Izvestia reckons a server operated by the Office of Traffic Police was infiltrated by an unidentified Trojan. The infection disabled parts of the cops' Arrow-ST system used to monitor …

    Security 28 Feb 12:06

  • Air-to-ground rocket men flog top-secret mobe-crypto to Brad in accounts

    MWC 2013 US Army supplier touts spy-phone tech to suits

    Don’t believe what you see at the cinema - James Bond doesn’t use a Sony mobile. Today’s British spies are kitted out with a BlackBerry for email and a Motorola for voice. The Motorolas use a protocol called Sectéra for scrambling which comes from General Dynamics, which does stuff for the US military, including system …

    MWC 28 Feb 12:24

  • HP: We will never sell 100 per cent through the channel

    But execs plan to push more business towards partners

    HP's EMEA boss Peter Ryan can't foresee a time when it will sell entirely through the channel but has "no problem" if the level of business transacted directly with the customer shrinks considerably. His comments come after CEO Meg Whitman told folks attending last week's Global Partner Conference that she will not tolerate …

    The Channel 28 Feb 13:04

  • Spectra: Tape is dead? We installed 550PB of the stuff in 6 months

    Amazon beauty could be behind unexpected growth

    Tape library vendor SpectraLogic says it installed 550PB of tape library capacity in the second half of 2012 and reports that its revenues, led by rising T-Finity library sales, for that six months were up 9 per cent compared to a year ago. Half an exabyte of tape equates to the installation of roughly a dozen of the vendor's …

    Storage 28 Feb 13:13

  • Nominet tosses plan for shorter .uk domains in the bin (for now)

    Clear-as-mud proposal to skip the .co in .co.uk

    Dot-uk registry Nominet has rejected its plan to offer shorter domain names - such as theregister.uk - to British businesses after a three-month consultation process ended in utter confusion. Nominet admitted that its line of questioning had, in places, been "confusing and potentially misinterpreted" by respondents. It had …

    Hosting 28 Feb 13:25

  • Let software take the strain off your data centre

    Provisioning made easy

    Software-defined networking (SDN) may not yet be at the top of your data centre to-do list but if you want the benefits of private cloud, it should be soon. Our recent Regcast, during which HP discussed SDN and “virtual application networking” (the concept name for how it sees SDN and virtual networks developing), provides a …

    Data Networking 28 Feb 13:44

  • Mobile tech bods beg devs: C'mon, where's that KILLER app?

    MWC 2013 Can you code? Phone gear makers need YOU

    The overriding theme among technologies being showcased at Mobile World Congress this year was their reliance on you lot - developers young and old - to create the killer applications they need to achieve commercial success. Take Plantronics, a perfectly respectable manufacturer of headsets and other phone accessories, which …

    MWC 28 Feb 13:49

  • Mobe networks test-drive punter-tracking kit to sling 'better' ads

    MWC 2013 They know what and where you browsed last summer

    Mobile network operators are already storing your browsing data for a year to better target advertising and optimise the network. But is that any worse than Google harvesting the same thing? Not according to Guavus, one of the companies providing the monitoring technology, which last month acquired "mobile data intelligence" …

    MWC 28 Feb 14:28

  • Stargazers spot first-ever planet forming in dusty disc

    Gas giant growing by accretion

    An international team of astronomers has spotted what appears to be the first sighting of a planet being born from stellar debris, possibly confirming theories about the origins of the Solar System And the universe said, "Let there be a planet!" The proto-planet is forming from a huge disc of dust and space debris orbiting …

    Science 28 Feb 15:00

  • Not so fast with the bubbly, Capita: IT Services has bad economic wind

    Turnover up at group level, operating profits down

    Capita IT Services unit continues to face an economic headwind with top-line growth stalling in calendar 2012. The same can't be said of parent Capita Plc, which today filed full-year results showing a 14 per cent rise in turnover to £3.35bn, fuelled by 14 acquisitions notched up in the 12 months that cost it £178m. Organic …

    The Channel 28 Feb 15:26

  • Micron whips out new SSD, runs to data centre, yells: I'm GOING IN

    SAS version of SATA SSD

    Micron is going deeper into enterprise data centre SSD arena with its launch of a SAS version of its P400M SATA interface solid state disk. The mixture is pretty much as before - apart from the 6-gig SAS interface. The new P410M comes in 100, 200 and 400GB capacity points and uses the same 25nm NAND as the P400. It has the …

    Storage 28 Feb 16:03

  • Big Blighty telcos ordered to block three BitTorrent search sites

    Judge demands action from BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk

    A High Court judge ruled today that Britain's six biggest telecoms providers should block three BitTorrent tracker websites - one of which is allegedly fronted by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Swartholm Warg. BT, BSkyB, EE, Virgin Media, O2 and TalkTalk were all ordered by Mr Justice Arnold to shutter access to downloads …

    Law 28 Feb 16:42

  • ParAccel plugs SQL queries into its analytics engine

    Strata 2013 Thar be money in them old SQL hills, boys!

    Amazon-blessed database company ParAccel has layered an analysis suite for SQL users on top of its technology. The extra analytic capabilities – social-media parsing text features, sessionization, JSON parsing, and pattern matching – combine to make the complex system a little bit more attractive to old SQL pros, ParAccel …

    Applications 28 Feb 17:17

  • Chinese Army: US hacks us so much, I'm amazed you can read this

    PLA, USA finger each other harshly in cyber mud-slinging

    Two Chinese military websites - including the Defence Ministry - are routinely subjected to thousands of hacking attacks every month, the majority of which can be traced based to the US, Chinese authorities alleged this week. Two-thirds of the 144,000 attacks a month against Chinese military sites last year came from the US, …

    Security 28 Feb 17:23

  • Wikileaker Bradley Manning pleads not guilty to 'aiding the enemy'

    Accepts charges of misuse of information

    After over 1,000 days of solitary confinement in a military prison, Private First Class Bradley Manning finally got his day in court, and he pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge brought against him. Manning, 25, pleaded guilty to 10 charges that he misused and transmitted classified information – which could net him …

    Security 28 Feb 19:24

  • CloudBees in PaaS THREESOME with Cloud Foundry tie-up

    Java cloud caught in VMware love-in seeks 'other relationships' as well

    Promiscuous Java-lover CloudBees has integrated its platform-as-a-service with VMware's Cloud Foundry, giving developers a simple way to use Jenkins continuous integration with VMware's well-developed PaaS. The love-in means developers can use CloudBees' Jenkins-based Java development tools to perform build-and-test …

    Developer 28 Feb 20:09

  • Browser makers open local storage hole in HTML5

    Bad implementation of disk space limits

    A slip-up in the implementation of HTML5 on Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer can be exploited to fill users’ hard drives, according to a 22-year-old Web developer from Stanford. Feross Aboukhadijeh has posted a proof-of-concept of the exploit here and a demonstration page here. He explains that HTML5 is designed to allow …

    Security 28 Feb 21:59

  • SHIELD Act proposed to make patent trolls pay

    Bipartisan bill goes Nick Fury on the lawyers

    Shell companies that threaten legal action over patent infringement without actually producing anything themselves could be driven out of business if the newly proposed and risibly backronymed Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act becomes law. In an all-too-rare display of US congressional …

    Policy 28 Feb 22:43

  • Australian Bureau of Meteorology apps to map future rain

    Third-party ads to commence this month

    Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) will this month start to place third-party advertising on its websites and is also on track to produce its own apps later in 2013 and appears set to equip them with technology that maps future rainfall. The BoM last year won Budget funding to enhance its website to take ads, a measure …

    Policy 28 Feb 23:28

  • Groupon CEO Mason sent packing as shares continue to plummet

    'I was fired today and you all know why'

    Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has been handed his walking papers, to be replaced by executive chairman Eric Lefkofsky and vice chairman Ted Leonsis on an interim basis while the board looks for a new chief exec. The move comes less than 24 hours after the struggling daily-deals site announced yet another disappointing quarter, …

    Business 28 Feb 23:51