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1st April 2013 Archive

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  • Cricketer the face of in-car heads-up satnav

    A 'Boon' for drivers

    Popular former test cricketer David Boon is to be the face and voice of a new satnav add-on launched in Sydney today. 'Your Guide Boonie', as the system is known, is a wallet-sized unit that attaches to the car's ceiling and projects the translucent images as a heads-up display on the vehicle's windscreen. It packs enough …

    Bootnotes 1 Apr 00:04

  • Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

    April Fool Cook Islands entity claims rights to code present in *nix, MacOS, Windows

    A company registered in minor league tax haven the Cook Islands, but with a subsidiary in Delaware, lawyers in the patent-troll heaven of East Texas and an office in Sydney, Australia, has asserted intellectual property rights over all versions of Unix and “Unix-like derivatives” and plans to seek royalties from every company …

    Operating Systems 1 Apr 00:36

  • Facebook buys Dummly from outernet prodigy Dick D'Miner

    April Fool Our journo bravely brings you the news from 2023

    Your correspondent reports from 2023, via some kind of freak time continuum loop vortex in Google's soon-to-be-killed-dangerously-revolutionary Reader tool which has brought you tomorrow's news before it's even happened yet. Like, wow! That dying and completely irrelevant web advertising dinosaur Facebook, whose balding, …

    Networks 1 Apr 09:03

  • 'Super' market tops $11.1bn, propped up by massive sales

    But can high-end HPC keep growing like this?

    The high-performance computing market did well in 2012, rising 7.7 percent to $11.1bn and by far outpacing the sluggish growth in the systems space overall. But the market is top-heavy and dominated by a relative handful of supercomputer shipments, and sales of divisional, departmental, and workgroup systems all shrank last year …

    HPC 1 Apr 16:07

  • Apple denied trademark protection for 'iPad mini'

    Kindly – if dim – reviewer offers advice on application revision

    The US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Apple's request to trademark the term "iPad mini" – but there's good reason to assume that Cupertino will overturn the decision on appeal. The central reason for the denial is rather straightforward: that "mini" is merely identifies the original iPad's little brother as being, well …

    Tablets 1 Apr 18:51

  • Veiny green 'scum' meteorite may be first visitor from Mercury

    Four billion year-old Moroccan mystery explained

    A mysterious green meteorite with a unique geological signature may have arrived on Earth thanks to an explosion on the surface of the Solar System's smallest planet, Mercury*. The meteorite, dubbed NWA 7325, is actually a 345g package of 35 extraterrestrial stones formed around 4.56 billion years ago that were found in the …

    Science 1 Apr 18:54

  • Facebook prepares to dominate Android

    'We'll own your homescreen'

    Facebook's upcoming Android announcement could see Zuckerberg & Co. take over smartphone homescreens, making the social network an ever-present companion for people with a thirst for e-validation. The company will announce on Thursday an HTC phone that comes loaded with a Facebook app that supplants the traditional smartphone …

    Phones 1 Apr 19:44

  • World's first petaflops super dumped on scrap heap

    Moore's Law, not Wile E. Coyote, brings down Roadrunner

    Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break through the petaflops barrier and the first capability-class machine to demonstrate the viability of using specialized coprocessors in conjunction with processors, is having its plug pulled at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's time to hack in and play Crysis while you still can …

    HPC 1 Apr 21:11

  • Music resale service ReDigi loses copyright fight with Capitol Records

    Updated Judge: Infringement is all it's good for

    A US District Court in New York has ruled that ReDigi, an online marketplace that allows users to sell their purchased music files, violates copyright law. Cambridge, Massachusetts–based ReDigi, which launched its service in October 2011, claimed to be "the world's first, real legal alternative to expensive online music …

    Media 1 Apr 21:32

  • Call centers under attack in targeted cyber-blackmail scheme

    Crooks blasting public-safety phone lines with calls

    The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has cautioned public-safety call centers against the rise of so-called telephony denial of service (TDoS) attacks, which it says have the potential to cripple local telephone exchanges. The warning was issued in March in a confidential Situational Awareness Update that was obtained …

    Security 1 Apr 23:56

  • Tim Cook eats necessary crow, apologizes to China

    Comment State media: Apple 'greedy' and 'incomparably arrogant'

    Apple CEO Tim Cook has released an open apology to his company's Chinese customers after coming under increasing pressure from that government's propaganda machine's attacks on Cupertino's customer-service practices. In a letter published on Apple's Chinese website (Google Translate) – and which some of The Reg's Chinese- …

    Management 1 Apr 23:58