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25th March 2013 Archive

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  • Apple buys indoor mapper WiFiSLAM

    Oh joy: your iPhone will know where you've shopped

    Apple has acquired mapping company WiFiSLAM, in a move one hopes can only improve the quality of its inaccurate and oft-derided maps service. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, by the sum of $US20m is getting plenty of airtime. So is the acquired company's ability to help Apple create indoor maps, as an …

    Business 25 Mar 02:52

  • Nokia deflates Google's video codec thought bubble

    VP8 proposals face fight from the Finnish

    Nokia has published an IETF patent declaration that could spell trouble for Google's hopes to pitch VP8 as a new standard codec. Google has put forward VP8 as part of the WebM project, and has put forward various IETF documents, such as RFC 6386, this draft (data formatting and decoding) and this (RTP payloads). Mountain View …

    Law 25 Mar 03:10

  • India may can low cost Aakash tablet project

    Brit biz Datawind under fire for lagging on delivery

    The Indian government may pull the plug on its ambitious but misfiring plan to put a low-cost Aakash tablet in the hands of 50 million students across the country. The project has been hit by repeated delays since its 2011 launch, when British manufacturer Datawind was contracted to build 100,000 of the Android tablets. Now …

    Government 25 Mar 04:21

  • Japan's rare earth discovery bad news for China's monopoly plans

    Pacific sea sludge find could keep prices low

    Japan is celebrating the find of an “astronomically” high level of rare earth deposits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a discovery which will further undermine China’s failing attempts to control the global supply of the substances. The deposits, a vital component in the production of a range of high technology equipment …

    Science 25 Mar 05:44

  • Chinese graves use quick response codes to recall the dead

    Scan for more info on your loved ones

    Japan’s reputation as a global technology trend setter has received some rather unlikely validation: after graves in the country started sporting QR codes, the little squares of encoded data have now appeared in cemeteries in China. The codes are placed to provide links to information about the deceased. In Japan, adding QR …

    Mobile 25 Mar 06:03

  • No, really: Austrians develop hi-tech jewellery made out of concrete

    Mmm, darling, it's just so ... grey

    A Viennese designer has just snagged a prestigious international award for his new line of jewellery, which uses a new high-tech process to fashion the ornaments out of concrete. Can it be that I hold here in my mortal hands ... a lump of purest grey? "Concrete has incredibly beautiful aesthetics. As a material it can do a …

    Hardware 25 Mar 06:05

  • Maybe don't install that groovy pirated Android keyboard

    It could be loggin' your login, warn experts

    A mobile software developer has turned an popular third party Android mobile keyboard called SwiftKey into a counterfeit package loaded with a trojan as a warning about the perils of using pirated or cracked apps from back-street app stores. Georgie Casey, who runs a popular Android app-development blog in Ireland, created a …

    Security 25 Mar 06:57

  • Flash card latency: Time to get some marks on benches

    Chuck out the slicks and platters, and MLC it

    Fusion-io flash cards outperformed a slew of competitors in a Marklogic NoSQL benchmark reported by StorageReview - for which much thanks. The benchmark rig is detailed in the article text and it notes that tested storage configs must have a more-than-650GB usable capacity, meaning individual flash devices can be bunched up. …

    Storage 25 Mar 08:03

  • Help save the endangered QUANTUM OWL, pleads Reg man

    Tin rattler Chip in for proper science with balls and bad smells

    I’m sitting in Faraday’s lecture theatre where electricity was first demonstrated, taking part in yet another Royal Institution near-death experience. You need to drop your simplistic idea that the RI is about the Christmas Lectures we all know and love: it runs by far the largest UK science outreach programme, hitting around …

    Science 25 Mar 08:29

  • It's a BYO-slingshot party in the Silicon Valley of Elah

    Blocks and Files Camel, needle, VC, Kingdom of Heaven

    Silicon Valley is the new Valley of Elah, the place where David slew Goliath by using a disruptive innovation. Today's Silicon Elah is the holy ground of Clayton Christensen's venture capitalists' bible, The Innovator's Dilemma, and its incredibly powerful idea of disruptive innovation. Oddly Christensen is giant-like in …

    Storage 25 Mar 08:58

  • The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures

    Wrap up and think of Gaia

    They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, we’re about to save you reading 3,000. The UK is running out of gas. Very rapidly indeed. So much so, that shortly after Easter cuts and rationing may be introduced, with industrial users and hospitals getting preferential treatment. This month is the coldest March …

    Government 25 Mar 09:26

  • Bulging Kelway: Too big to get out of the obvious exits

    CEO: Just big-boned, Equanet gobble was nutritionally sound

    Phil Doye acknowledges that 21 years after setting up reseller Kelway, he still doesn't have a key for the exit. The London-based firm is moving to rapidly integrate new buy Equanet, the once mighty IT dealer that was taken over by Dixons in 2007 and subsequently pulled apart and bent out of shape. The transaction is expected …

    The Channel 25 Mar 10:03

  • New-age tech marketing secrets REVEALED

    Sysadmin blog Everything is an advert these days

    Traditional marketing is all about risk management. Say nice things about your product. Do whatever you can to prevent people from saying bad things about your product. Run down the competition, but do so without being obvious about it. Never under any circumstances admit you're wrong. This "control the message" marketing …

    Small Biz 25 Mar 10:33

  • Reg man goes time travelling at iconic observatory

    Geek's Guide... Jodrell Bank: The visitors' centre at the start of the universe

    There are two ways to approach Jodrell Bank. From the north you fly through the WAGish end of Cheshire, with towns like Wilmslow and Alderley Edge housing Manchester and Liverpool’s finest and their harems. I prefer coming from the south, under the Twemlow Viaduct, a 105ft high, 500 yard long symphony of red brick, completed in …

    Science 25 Mar 11:03

  • Indie array-flogger tries to tempt flash mob with COLD HARD CASH

    Your own, which you get back if their gear doesn't work

    According to upstart Pure, other vendors' flash arrays don't deliver the advantages they are supposed to. Standing out from the crowd is what a new flash array start-up has to do, and having a marketing message saying it's a top tier all-flash array (AFA) vendor alongside EMC, NetApp and SolidFire is all very well but Pure doesn …

    Storage 25 Mar 11:31

  • Freetard den isoHunt loses appeal against search ban

    But owner no longer prohibited from getting a proper job

    Canadian file-sharing website isoHunt has lost an appeal against a court injunction that required it to filter out searches for copyrighted material. Canadian national Gary Fung, who operated the site, was ordered to filter searches for BitTorrent downloads in 2010. He was also prohibited from using the terms in the website's …

    Media 25 Mar 11:56

  • Apple share-price-off-a-cliff: Told you that would happen

    Don't tell Oracle, but you can be too rich and too thin

    I was allowed to write this piece because in November I wrote to our glorious editor after a London Quant's Group seminar to say that the price of Apple shares would tank sooner rather than later. As you all know, that’s just what happened - from just shy of $800 to the mid $400s. The reason I don’t make all that much money …

    Financial News 25 Mar 12:25

  • Fujitsu sloshes £800m into lukewarm UK pension bathtub

    Bumpkin broadband? Bah, urban pipe is where's it's at

    Fujitsu has announced plans to pump £800m into its British business. The Japanese tech giant was last seen dropping out of the race for £530m in taxpayers' cash to install broadband in Blighty's countryside. The Financial Times reported this morning that the company had decided to invest in the UK wing of the corporation, …

    Financial News 25 Mar 13:03

  • The gaming habits of Reg readers revealed

    The rise of the silver gamester and the impact of wedding vows

    A recent research study carried out by Freeform Dynamics we looked at the activities of Register readers with respect to smartphones, tablets, gaming and TV viewing. In this article we willf ocus on what you told us about your gaming habits (that’s gaming in the sense of playing electronic games rather than gambling). In total …

    Games 25 Mar 13:07

  • South Korea data-wipe malware spread by patching system

    Long dark teatime in Seoul saga continues to unfold

    South Korea's data wiping malware that knocked out PCs at TV stations and banks earlier this week may have been introduced through compromised corporate patching systems. Several South Korean financial institutions - Shinhan Bank, Nonghyup Bank and Jeju Bank - and TV broadcaster networks were impacted by a destructive virus ( …

    Security 25 Mar 13:27

  • Branson, Berners-Lee, Google, £2m: LET'S SAVE THE WORLD

    Who will defend us from privacy-stealing mega-corps? Oh

    Google is waving £2m in front of charities, promising to donate dollops of the dosh if the orgs develop tech that improves people's lives. The not-for-profit bodies are invited to apply and compete for the cash; four "data-driven" projects that successfully prove their worth will each get a £500,000 cheque from the advertising …

    Small Biz 25 Mar 13:43

  • Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

    'I'm NOT upset. Anyway I've got more Twitter followers. HA'

    Official British National Treasure Stephen Fry has responded to El Reg teasing last week with an emotional defence of his TV voice-over work, in two impassioned audio burps this weekend. "It doesn't upset me," Fry insists. "I am a voice-over artist, I have read every one of the Harry Potter novels - and I'm proud to have done …

    Media 25 Mar 13:58

  • Next from Microsoft: 'Blue', the Windows 8 they hope you don't hate

    Vid People are used to a blue screen with Windows, right?

    Windows Blue - the supposedly leaked sequel to Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system - will apparently look a lot more like Windows Phone 8 and allow users to further personalise their computers. Copies of what appears to be build 9364 of Windows Blue are circulating on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks; once the alpha-grade …

    Operating Systems 25 Mar 14:28

  • Watch the skies: SPACE HEDGEHOG plunges to Earth in Oxfordshire

    Public asked to help find knitwear-clad 'naut

    Reg readers in the Leamington Spa area are asked to keep an eye out for a knitted hedgehog which may have fallen from the skies thereabouts, and is currently the focus of a frantic search and rescue operation. CASSiE (Cosmic Ambassador for Space Science and Engineering), aka the Cosmic Hedgehog, was sent aloft last Friday on a …

    SPB 25 Mar 14:53

  • ElasticHosts: EIGHT resellers signed up for our white-label cloud

    Count them. That's eight. Not seven

    ElasticHosts lured one UK reseller to its white label cloud programme in each of the months since it launched last summer - eight in total. This seems a far cry from the picture painted by CEO Richard Davies as the covers were taken off its cloudy infrastructure in July, when pointed to feedback that resellers were "fed up" …

    The Channel 25 Mar 15:19

  • Dell buy: Icahn puts more cash on table than Blackstone or Mike D

    Beat that if you can, Mikey baby

    As El Reg expected, the deals offered separately by private equity firms Blackstone Group and Icahn Enterprises to take over IT giant Dell are not as generous as some have been arguing the company is worth. And, ironically, the company backed by activist investor Carl Icahn is offering considerably less than Icahn himself had …

    Financial News 25 Mar 15:26

  • Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH with Summly buy

    Mobe! News! Scraper! In! Inspirational! Goal!

    Yahoo! has agreed to buy Summly - an app created by a 17-year-old Londoner that summarises news stories for smartphones, which only launched last November after Nick D'Aloisio spent two years raising over $1m in funding. Register readers have probably heard quite enough about Stephen Fry in these pages over the last few days, …

    Media 25 Mar 15:54

  • TD Azlan set to rock up at EMC, murmur sources

    Will thrust SME packages into the <$25k niche

    EMC is to sign up TD Azlan as its third UK distie with a specific focus on the small biz space, The Channel can reveal. Distribution has been a tinker-free zone for EMC since it hauled in Arrow at the start of 2010: but with a raft of SME tech in the pipeline the vendor undertook a review of its roster. Sources close to the …

    The Channel 25 Mar 16:21

  • Quantum: No! Object storage CANNOT exchange data with tape!

    Curse you, English language

    Quantum introduced object storage to its StorNext data virtualisation product last week, saying data could be automatically moved between primary disk, object storage and tape. But actually there is effectively a wall between tape and object storage. StorNext virtualises the location of data in primary disk arrays, tape …

    Storage 25 Mar 16:27

  • Gartner magicians mumble, fling bones, scrawl new disk pentacle

    None of woman born shall harm EMC, cackle midnight hags

    Gartner's magicians have thrown their animal bones and precious relics up in the air and discerned a new pattern in the way they landed; general-purpose disk arrays. The magicians have invented a new Magic Quadrant (MQ) and say: Improvements in scalability, availability, performance and functionality of midrange storage …

    Storage 25 Mar 16:58

  • Nanowires boost photovoltaics sunlight capture by 15X

    Fifty-year-old theoretical solar power limit shattered

    A team of European researchers has discovered that a single nanowire can concentrate the amount of solar energy delivered to a photovoltaic cell by a factor of up to 15, a breakthrough that could improve the efficiency of electricity-producing solar cells. "Due to some unique physical light absorption properties of nanowires, …

    Science 25 Mar 19:03

  • NASDAQ's $62m apology for Facebook snafu approved by SEC

    Payoff for market FAIL around IPO

    The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a $63m settlement by NASDAQ OMX Group for the downtime its exchange suffered during the Facebook IPO which left traders unsure if their requested trades had gone through. "Nasdaq proposes to compensate market participants for certain claims related to system difficulties in …

    Business 25 Mar 19:05

  • Oracle grabs Tekelec for telco assault

    Sticky control tech destined for inner networks

    Oracle has added another network-focused tech company to its business as Ellison & Co. try to takeover the IT stacks of telecommunications companies. The acquisition of Tekelec was announced on Monday, and follows Oracle buying unified communications specialists Acme Packet for $2.1bn in early February. Oracle will add …

    Networks 25 Mar 19:27

  • Rug tugged from under 2e2 after it racked up £50m loss - report

    Bosses admitted 'significant weaknesses in financial reporting'

    Brit IT biz 2e2 went under because its financial reports were flawed, it plunged nearly £50m into the red and its backers refused to throw good money after bad. That's according to a two-inch-thick dossier by the company's administrators FTI Consulting. The report documents the days leading up to the Berkshire-based integrator …

    The Channel 25 Mar 19:57

  • West Virginia seeks Google Glass driving ban

    No funny cat videos for motorists

    The next time Sergey Brin visits West Virginia, he'd better think twice before getting behind the wheel. Lawmakers in that state have proposed a new law banning the use of Google Glass and similar headsets while driving. "The problem with [Glass] – and this might not be the right term – is that it's an open architecture," …

    Hardware 25 Mar 20:05

  • Oil giant Total shells out €60m for world's fastest private super

    2.3 petaflops now, double that in 2015

    Total Group wants to do a better job finding oil lurking in the Earth's crust, and these days that means getting more computing power to turn the jiggling of the planet into pretty 3D pictures that show where the Black Gold might be hiding. To that end, Total is paying Silicon Graphics €60m over the next four years to build the …

    HPC 25 Mar 20:38

  • Florida fisherman bags two-headed MUTANT SHARK

    Updated Pix Zaphod Beeblebrox's worst nightmare

    A Florida fisherman found an unpleasant-looking surprise in the belly of a bull shark he had just caught; a two-headed fetus ready to be born. Double the bite (credit: Journal of Fish Biology) The specimen, described in the latest Journal of Fish Biology, has two heads side-by-side, each with its own gills, mouth, and teeth …

    Science 25 Mar 21:19

  • Lightspeed variable say intellectuels français

    Vacuum isn't always empty, French boffins argue

    French researchers have proposed a mechanism by which the observed speed of light might not be the constant we think it is: it could, in fact, vary at the attosecond level. It's not, however, time to reach for the “the old boffins were wrong!” template, because their reasoning is actually elegant and simple: we know that …

    Science 25 Mar 22:51

  • Microsoft splashes coat of paint on Windows 8 comms apps

    Updated Mail, Calendar, and People to get updates on Tuesday

    Microsoft has announced that it will make updates to Windows 8's built-in Mail, Calendar, and People apps available via the Windows Store beginning on Tuesday, March 26. "This update will bring improvements to your Windows experience across your whole life – your personal communication and your work," Brandon LeBlanc of the …

    Applications 25 Mar 23:27