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24th April 2013 Archive

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  • AWS says private clouds are vaporware

    Veep flings darts at VMware, Windows Server, et al

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) Adam Selipsky has told an event in Sydney, Australia, that private clouds aren't really clouds. There's an element of “of course he would say that, wouldn't he” about Selipsky's remarks, which were made at an AWS Summit at which he preached to the choir by reciting AWS' well-worn mantra about low …

    Cloud 24 Apr 00:24

  • Boffins explain LED inefficiencies

    Electrons misbehave at higher energies

    One of the problems with using LED-based lamps to replace incandescent or fluorescent lamps is that they're expensive: not only do they need more electronics than the alternatives, LED efficiency is capped by a fall in light output at higher current. To answer the so-what question: getting rid of the “droop effect” allows LEDs …

    Science 24 Apr 01:16

  • Huawei preps new mobes to overhaul Apple

    60 million sales the target with innovation to trump sinister reputation

    Huawei says it’s on track to almost double its smartphone sales this year with a target of 60 million units shifted, as it looks to peg back “superheroes” Samsung and Apple, but admitted its brand image is still holding it back from world domination. Speaking to media at the firm’s annual global analyst event in Shenzhen on …

    Phones 24 Apr 04:38

  • Bill Gates offends Koreans after sticking hand down trousers

    'American style' session with madam president

    Bill Gates has managed to offend the whole of South Korea after brazenly breaking the country's strict but unwritten handshake rules. He greeted female President Geun Hye Park with the customary one-handed palm press, but neglected to remove his other hand from his trouser pocket. Using one mitt with the other stuffed in a …

    Bootnotes 24 Apr 05:02

  • BitTorrent offers file synch tool for PCs and NAS

    Peer-to-peer file sharing for backup and collaboration … honestly

    BitTorrent has opened the Alpha testing program for its new BitTorrent Sync tool to all. Announced last January but only available to a select few, BitTorrent Sync looks a bit like the numerous DropBox-without-the-cloud-in-the-middle contenders inasmuch as it lets you set up a source of data, then involve trusted third parties …

    Storage 24 Apr 05:04

  • Ofcom to UK: Really - you're using the same password for everything?

    And would it kill you to use something a little less OBVIOUS...

    Brits are taking serious security risks by continuing to use the same password for multiple websites, communications watchdog Ofcom warned today. Worse still, the regulator - which published a report today based on a survey of 1,805 people aged 16 and over - found that a staggering one in four (26 per cent) UK adults used …

    Security 24 Apr 06:04

  • Galaxy S4 radiant, but has black holes

    First Look Samsung's new flagship does a lot very well and tries hard at everything

    Samsung's Galaxy S4 is as wonderfully polished as you would expect from the Korean manufacturer's latest flagship, but the software the company says turns it into a “life companion” will be an acquired taste for many. Samsung yesterday officially launched the S4 for Australians at a lavish event staged at Sydney's Opera House …

    Phones 24 Apr 06:28

  • Reddit: So very sorry for naming innocent man as Boston bomber

    Front page of internet maybe not where you read the news

    Condé Nast-owned community website Reddit has issued an apology for an "online witch hunt" launched by its users in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt. Reddit enthusiasts banded together in a bid to find the people responsible for the bombs, but mistakenly named missing 22-year-old student Sunil …

    Media 24 Apr 06:31

  • App reads The Indie's dead-tree pages - so you don't have to

    Tabloid-broadsheet joins digital world circa 2003

    Printed pages of lefty paper The Independent can be scanned by a phone app and decoded into links to recently updated words and pictures online. The newspaper, operated by Russian father-and-son duo Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, is using "augmented reality" app Blippar, which uses a phone's camera to recognise pages from the …

    Media 24 Apr 07:03

  • EE: Of course we're going to get 1m 4G users by the end of the year!

    Brave numerical spinning by EE, but is it enough?

    Everything Everywhere put a brave spin on its latest 4G numbers today and insisted it was on course for its goal of 1 MEEEELION users by the end of the year. With its new LTE network criticised for being buggy, patchy, and wildly overpriced, EE has nevertheless found 318,000 punters to step up to the plate. These include …

    Mobile 24 Apr 07:29

  • World's first 5mm-thin gyrating models paraded on disk catwalk

    Crumbs, someone needs a fat lunch

    Western Digital has launched the world's first single-platter 5mm-thick disk drives - including one with a cache of flash memory. It's also announced an enterprise-class 2.5in drive in a 3.5in frame so as to ease migration from 3.5in performance to the XE, a 2.5in form factor. The single-platter 5mm-thick UltraSlims are …

    Storage 24 Apr 08:05

  • Mad Leo exit finally clears way for Blighty to love HP again

    German's spectre no longer haunting sales staff?

    HP has finally halted the downward sales trend in distribution that dogged its UK operation for much of 2012. Figures from Context show that HP accounted for 22 per cent of the £1.8bn worth of tech shipped by distributors in Q1 2012, a share that steadily declined to 16 per cent by Q4. But Jeremy Davies, CEO at the Brit-based …

    The Channel 24 Apr 08:31

  • Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

    Deep dive

    You often ask us to show you how to use the abilities that our experts describe. On the 17th May, join us for an hour that will change broadcasting for ever: for 60 minutes we will show you how to take advantage of the improvements and new features of virtual machine migration with Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows Server 2012. Our …

    Virtualization 24 Apr 08:48

  • Review: Corsair Voyager Air 1TB wireless hard drive

    The basic network storage box that transforms into extra space for slates and smartphones

    Corsair has made a name for itself offering solid-state drives, fast memory and other components to fit inside high-performance PCs. But its latest product takes the supplier out of its comfort zone and into the world of smartphones and tablets. It also carries the company into the network-attached storage arena. It’s a good …

    Hardware 24 Apr 09:05

  • Speaking in Tech: Your OpenStack plug-in is NOT a meaningful code contribution

    Podcast Talking smack about vendors ... Plus: How to unfollow Amy Lewis

    It's another episode of El Reg's weekly enterprise tech podcast, hosted by Ed Saipetch, Greg Knieriemen and Sarah Vela. Ed's in the driving seat this week as a jetlagged Greg rides shotgun. Cisco's Amy Lewis joins as our special guest this week... and jumps right into a chat about why "listless" Greg unfollowed her on Twitter …

    Cloud 24 Apr 09:29

  • Your phone may not be spying on you now - BUT it soon will be

    Infosec 2013 Smash it with a hammer now, it's the only way to be sure

    Tibetan political campaigners targeted by mysterious smartphone-spying software. Eastern European governments' mobiles allegedly snooped on by state-sponsored hackers. Malware feared injected into gadgets during customs inspections. You've seen these headlines. And according to Kaspersky Lab’s senior malware analyst Denis …

    Security 24 Apr 10:04

  • Amazon: Hard luck Microsoft, AWS will always be cheaper

    We're in the driving seat and the only way is down

    Amazon’s struck back at Microsoft camp over its "lowering" of its cloud computing prices by touting Amazon’s track record for saving money. The etailer-turned-cloud-giant’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels yesterday claimed there had been 31 price reductions in AWS since the service went live in 2006 – seven years ago. …

    Cloud 24 Apr 10:24

  • Black-eyed Pies reel from BeagleBoard's $45 Linux micro blow

    Pics Gigahertz-class pocket-sized ARM Ubuntu rig, anyone?

    Open-source hardware outfit BeagleBoard has formally announced a major revision of its BeagleBone board computer that ups the spec and downs the price. The BeagleBone Black's single-core processor jumps from its predecessor’s 720MHz to 1GHz. It’s a Texas Instruments AM335x system-on-a-chip, which uses ARM’s Cortex-A8 …

    Hardware 24 Apr 10:44

  • Hidden dragon Huawei: 'We’re making increased efforts at transparency'

    Can the telecoms kit maker make it big in biz IT?

    Huawei sent out a clear signal to its competitors in the global enterprise IT market on Tuesday with predictions of stellar growth for the vendor’s smallest business group over the next five years to reach revenues of $10bn by 2017. But analysts are sceptical about its chances of becoming a genuinely disruptive alternative to …

    Mobile 24 Apr 11:04

  • Brutally efficient galaxy SPITS OUT STARS at 'maximum rate'

    Burns through its gas supply, making Milky Way look slooow

    Astroboffins have spotted a brutally efficient galaxy, busily converting almost all available fuel into birthing new stars. The "green" galaxy, spotted by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Hubble as well as the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, jumped out at researchers, despite …

    Science 24 Apr 11:17

  • Microsoft hoists ZTE onto the Android patent bandwagon

    Huawei and Googorola still holding out on licensing deals

    China's ZTE has become the latest firm to sign a licensing deal with Microsoft for its Android and Chrome patent portfolio. The firm, which is one of the world's biggest smartphone makers, has agreed to stump up royalties to MS for Android and Chrome stuff just a week after Hon Hai's Foxconn signed a similar deal. "The ZTE …

    Operating Systems 24 Apr 11:37

  • Virgin Media revs up for Liberty Global merger

    Bags 'significant' backhaul contract wins with rivals

    Virgin Media - which is imminently set to be scooped up by US cable giant Liberty Global - reported a good start to its financial year this morning. It told the City that revenue had climbed to £1.04bn for the three months ended 31 March 2013 - up 3.6 per cent from £1.01bn for the same period a year earlier. The telco said it …

    Financial News 24 Apr 11:58

  • Apple slips Antennagate victims $15 each. The lawyers get $16m

    But hey, don't forget the free iPhone 4 case, right?

    Apple has sent out $15 cheques to fanbois whose iPhones suffered from dicky phone reception. The Cupertino idiot-tax operation agreed to dish out the small payments after punters lodged a class-action lawsuit over the iPhone 4 "Antennagate" flaw. When the smartmobe went on sale in 2010, its users complained about poor mobile …

    Law 24 Apr 12:18

  • Appliances are the new data centre onesie

    It's all coming together

    It has been a fun and very profitable couple of decades for upstart IT server and systems software makers. They have thrown new server technologies at venerable mainframe and minicomputer systems and blasted the data centre into a thousand shiny metal bits. Then they lashed it all together with networks running distributed …

    Servers 24 Apr 12:44

  • Cook: iPad is a gateway drug which leads to harder Mac addiction

    Though curiously Macs are down as fondleslabs surge

    Apple CEO Tim Cook has claimed that surging iPad sales could result in people buying more Mac computers. Answering questions after he announced quarterly results last night, the Cupertino overlord said that tablet sales could end up getting users hooked on Apple products, perhaps encouraging them to graduate to more expensive …

    Hardware 24 Apr 12:59

  • Frenchies and Germans are holding us back, moans Computacenter

    Everything's just super in Blighty, though

    Tech resell monster Computacenter (CC) today warned investors that troubled services contracts and economic woes in its mainland Euro ops will dampen group growth for 2013. London-based CC provided the guidance as it rolled out an interim management statement reporting sales of £659.4m, flat relative to Q1 a year ago, with a …

    The Channel 24 Apr 13:27

  • UK gov's troll-finder general says he's hanging up his axe

    Prosecution chief will quit after finishing web abuse playbook

    The UK's director of public prosecutions, web troll-tackling Keir Starmer, will step down from his job in October this year. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed that he will complete his five-year term in the autumn. It did not comment on any possible candidates to replace the outgoing director. Last year, Starmer …

    Government 24 Apr 14:04

  • Boffins KALQ-u-late the ultimate 'board for two-thumb tablet tappers

    Grip that 7-incher and get it pumping out stuff

    Boffins in Scotland, Germany and the US of A have calculated what they claim is the most efficient two-thumb keyboard it’s possible to put on a tablet, at least for folk writing in English on a 7-inch slate. Researchers at the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech crunched the …

    Tablets 24 Apr 14:32

  • Ofcom: When shall we squeeze Freeview's girth?

    Luvvies and White Space tools can't even touch unloved bottom

    Ofcom wants to know when Freeview broadcasts should be kicked down the dial in favour of iPad-friendly 4G signals - and, controversially, whether the BBC should be recompensed when it happens. Ofcom mooted the idea of shuffling Freeview aside onto new frequencies back in 2011, and put it into last year's plan with a 2018 date …

    Media 24 Apr 15:04

  • Indian IT consultant becomes idol to legions of football fans

    Hat-trick hiccup bloke declines offer to join Premier League

    Jubilant Manchester United fans have celebrated Robin van Persie's astonishing hat trick by bombarding an Indian IT consultant with congratulatory tweets. Despite a picture that clearly shows him to be a bespectacled middle-aged Indian man rather than the slick-haired striker, football fans have mistaken Ravi Visvesvaraya …

    Bootnotes 24 Apr 15:14

  • Cameron: Get those saucy websites off Blighty's public Wi-Fi

    'Good, clean' wireless for babycino-chugging cherubs

    Prime Minister David Cameron is once again crusading against online pornography after he admitted late last year that network-level smut filtering was a "crude system". This time his antenna is twitching about Brits accessing the internet over public Wi-Fi services. The PM wants to get skin flicks banned from wireless …

    Mobile 24 Apr 15:26

  • Google snaps up Wavii for $30m - report

    Choc Factory said to have nabbed machine-learning social network

    Google is getting ready to announce the acquisition of natural language processing firm Wavii for around $30m, familiar people have been muttering. Sources told the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others that the Chocolate Factory had snapped up the Seattle startup, which specialises in programming computers to understand …

    Financial News 24 Apr 15:46

  • Microsoft: Brits, grab our Surface Pro ten-incher for satisfaction in May

    Hey, where's our cut, grumbles UK channel

    Microsoft's Intel-powered Windows 8 Surface Pro laptop-tablet-thing will arrive in the UK within the next six weeks. But while Brits will be able to order the 10.6" touchscreen-keyboard hybrid direct from the software giant, companies in the IT distribution chain are unlikely to get their hands on pallets of the Pro until …

    The Channel 24 Apr 15:58

  • General Electric pours $105 MEEELION into Pivotal Initiative

    Skunkworks lab for the industrial internet

    General Electric is pouring $105m into Pivotal, a skunkworks cloud and big data company spun-out of VMware and EMC. The investment was announced on Wednesday, several hours before Pivotal held its coming out party first major press conference. "It's no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business …

    Cloud 24 Apr 16:16

  • Free French app app booted by Apple, triggers 1m-strong petition

    'Extrêmement brutale et unilatérale' rages minister

    Almost a million people have signed a petition demanding Apple rethink its decision to pull a popular free-app-finding app from the App Store. French-designed AppGratis - which describes itself as an "app-discovery" service - was pulled from the App Store earlier this month after falling foul of Apple's new rules regulating …

    Applications 24 Apr 16:17

  • Spectre of Steve Jobs in one last outing at WWDC

    WWDC Cupertino sets conference date for 10 June - tickets on sale tomorrow

    Tickets for the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference will go on sale tomorrow, offering fanbois the chance to ogle some of Steve Job's final creations. Launched with a flash new logo resembling a day-glo jelly mould, the event will showcase the work that has been going on in Cupertino over the past year. Apple has …

    Developer 24 Apr 16:32

  • COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO: NASA rovers scrawl giant willy on Mars

    Pic Jet (Propulsion) Set Willy

    Space cadets tittering at the mention of Uranus have a new celestial object to giggle at: A giant penis drawn on the surface of Mars by NASA robots. Hard-up NASA in space knob outrage ... the rover's actual pic. Credit: NASA The US space agency's $820m exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity set out for Mars in 2003 and, …

    Bootnotes 24 Apr 16:47

  • Behold Ubuntu Server 13.04: Focus on hypervisors and OpenStack

    A Raring Ringtail riding a Grizzly smoking a Havana

    It is getting hard to see where Ubuntu Server ends and where the OpenStack cloud controller begins - and this is absolutely intentional on the part of Canonical, the corporate entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system. The Ubuntu Server 13.04 release that is coming out this Thursday is not one of the …

    Cloud 24 Apr 17:24

  • MetroPCS shareholders approve sweetened T-Mobile merger

    $1.5bn cash offer seals the deal

    Shareholders in US mobile minnow MetroPCS have approved an improved offer from Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA subsidiary after the Germans sweetened the terms of their offer. Institutional investors had balked at the merger, saying it loaded the company down with too much debt. But Bloomberg reports they have accepted a deal …

    Mobile 24 Apr 18:04

  • Vulns, exploits, hacks: Trusteer touts tech to terminate troubles

    Infosec 2013 If I don't know what you're doing, I'll kill you

    Trusteer is expanding from its speciality of providing transaction protection security to financial institutions with an enterprise-level product designed to guard against zero-day exploits and social engineering. Unpatched application vulnerabilities in widely deployed endpoint applications (such as web browsers) can be given …

    Security 24 Apr 18:05

  • Reg man crunches IBM's storage hardware revenues

    Analysis A tale of two charts

    IBM's under-performing storage hardware business can be understood better if we look at the quarterly revenue numbers. For that to be made possible someone has to dive into IBM's results over the past few quarters and work out the storage hardware revenue numbers, seeing as IBM doesn't present them on a plate. That's what El …

    Storage 24 Apr 18:33

  • Microsoft to unveil new Xbox console on May 21

    Redmond promises 'a real taste of the future'

    Microsoft has confirmed that it will unveil the next iteration of its Xbox gaming platform next month. The new console will be revealed at a special press event that will take place at Microsoft's Redmond campus on May 21. The event will also be streamed on Xbox Live and Xbox.com and simulcast on Spike TV in the US and Canada …

    Games 24 Apr 18:59

  • EMC announces record revenues: But hey, Joe, where're the profits?

    'Cloud, Big Data, er, I'm incredibly energised'

    Hardware, virtualisation and services giant EMC has announced its first-quarter results for 2013 and while its finances are broadly positive, the devil's in the detail. EMC's revenues for the first quarter of 2013 were a record $5.39 billion - lower than Wall Street's estimates - and its profits were down by a smidge. The mid- …

    Financial News 24 Apr 19:57

  • Juniper pushes up sales and profits in Q1

    Data center switches, service provider routers start to pick up

    The top brass at Juniper Networks are breathing a little bit easier as the company turned in numbers that show it is growing despite taking a big hit in sales of gear, software, and services to the US government in the first quarter. In the quarter ended in March, Juniper nudged up revenues by 2.6 per cent to $1.03bn, and net …

    Data Networking 24 Apr 20:24

  • Court orders Visa partner to allow donations to WikiLeaks

    Credit card blockade begins to crack

    WikiLeaks may soon be able to accept donations again, now that the Icelandic Supreme Court has ruled that the blockade on donations imposed by local Visa partner Valitor is illegal and has ordered the company to pay huge fines if it doesn't change its ways. In its ruling, the court upheld an earlier court decision that cutting …

    Business 24 Apr 20:44

  • Insight Enterprises EMEA president Fenton quits

    Longest handover in channel history as successor sought

    Insight Enterprises EMEA president Stuart Fenton has resigned after more than a decade at the helm but is remaining on board until the end of the year to help recruit his successor. Fenton joined the reseller giant as UK boss in October 2002 - three years after it acquired Choice Peripherals to set up a Euro beachhead and some …

    The Channel 24 Apr 21:04

  • Pivotal takes guts of Google, sells to enterprises

    Small team aims to clone Google-stack for enterprises

    Pivotal wants to build and sell the systems that run Google, but though its ambition may be bold, its claims are as yet more visions than statements of fact. At a packed press event in San Francisco on Wednesday Pivotal executives unveiled their plans for the company, which aims to bring the sorts of technologies and …

    Cloud 24 Apr 21:09

  • IBM CEO Rometty swaps heads of strategy and servers

    Musical boardroom chairs – possibly related to x86 server and other spinoffs

    Ginni Rometty, who has been CEO at IBM for a year and a half, is making two big changes in the upper echelons of her management teams; she is swapping the head of corporate strategy and the head of its Systems and Technology Group, and it is presumably to get better results than IBM showed in its first quarter of 2013 in its …

    Management 24 Apr 21:15

  • Another blow for Flash as Unity gaming engine kills support

    Says Adobe 'eroded developers' trust'

    Unity Technologies has announced that it has dropped support for Adobe Flash from its cross-platform Unity game development toolset, citing the declining popularity of the technology among developers and inconsistent support from Adobe. "As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses," Unity founder and CEO David …

    Developer 24 Apr 21:53

  • Western Digital profits down despite revenue rise

    Declining drive prices ate into income

    Revenues for disk drive industry leader Western Digital's third fiscal 2013 quarter rose 24 per cent to $3.8 billion – compared to $3 billion a year ago – but profits fell 19 per cent. It's a hard life in the disk drive business. The previous quarter's revenues were $3.8 billion too; no change there, then. Third-quarter …

    Financial News 24 Apr 22:15

  • Mellanox boffins concoct chips for 100Gb/sec InfiniBand

    Swings to a loss in Q1 as R&D, sales, and marketing costs rise

    Mellanox Technologies reported its first quarter financial results today, and Eyal Waldman, chairman and CEO at the networking chip and switch maker, said in a conference call that the company had taped out its first experimental chip that would run at 100Gb/sec and support the future Enhanced Data Rate (or EDR) version of …

    Cloud Infrastructure 24 Apr 23:06

  • Fusion-io buys NexGen

    Gets hybrid flash/disk array startup

    PCIe flash industry leader Fusion-io has bought a startup: hybrid flash/disk array vendor NexGen, paying $114m in cash and $5m in stock. NexGen, founded in 2010 by its CEO John Spiers and CTO Kelly Long, uses Fusion-io flash cards in its n5 arrays which are sold to small and medium enterprises. It has total funding, that we …

    Storage 24 Apr 23:08

  • Sprint promises to take 2G into the Internet of Things

    They'll be no refarming round here

    Sprint has committed to keeping its 2G network operational beyond AT&T and Verizon, hoping to sign up some machines even if fleshy humans wander away. Announcing a deal with u-blox to provide embedded modules which are pin compatible with GSM kit already in use, Sprint promised to maintain its CDMA network for "the long term …

    Mobile 24 Apr 23:13

  • Heroku PaaS floats over to Europe

    Geo-redundancy for the trendy Ruby cloud

    Heroku's platform-as-a-service cloud has come to Europe, giving local developers a chance to reduce the latency of applications they've stuck on top of the application automation technology. The Salesforce-owned company announced on Thursday that brave devs can try serving their apps from Ireland rather than America, if they …

    Developer 24 Apr 23:30

  • Want a coffee with Tim Cook? Better start saving now

    Apple boss chin-wag will cost $100,000+

    Anyone with a suitably large checkbook will be able to sit down and have a coffee (or the beverage of their choice) with Tim Cook or meet Elon Musk for a personal tour of the SpaceX headquarters later this year. Cook, Musk, and other well-known names have donated their time to an auction in aid of the Robert F. Kennedy Center …

    Bootnotes 24 Apr 23:48