5th > November > 2008 Archive
12
Shawshank thesp erased from NY voter rolls
USA '08
Susan Sarandon's common law hubby was miffed this morning when election officials at his local polling station couldn't find his name.
Dell pressures workers into leave without pay
Nearly all employees at Dell are being asked to take a week of unpaid leave. If they don't obey, another round of layoffs will begin.
FCC defies Dolly Parton, opens white space waves
Defying TV broadcasters, wireless microphone makers, God, and Dolly Parton, the FCC has opened America's "white spaces" to unlicensed net devices.
NY man charged with boosting TJX credit hijack
A New York man has been charged with aiding the alleged leader of the hacking gang accused of stealing more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from stores owned by TJX Companies and other companies.
Intel selling half its stake in VMware
Intel's investment arm plans to pawn half its stake in VMware, a recent regulatory filing has revealed.
Is the internet going down down under?
The battle is now on for the soul of the Australian internet. The outcome could have enormous repercussions for the future of the internet in the UK.
Barack Obama will be president
America Saved
Barack Obama has defeated John McCain to become the next president of the United States and the first African-American to hold the highest office in the land.
Nokia closes plant, 'reorganises' 600 staff
Nokia will close its site at Turku, Finland and redeploy the staff there to Salo or near Helsinki. The company has also announced a "sharpened focus" that will put 130 research staff at risk - plus another 35 "workforce adjustments" in operations.
School to hand out e-textbooks
A London school’s pencilled in plans to ditch old-style textbooks because it wants pupils to swot up using mobile phones instead.
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi ExpressCard and Wireless Receiver
Review
Creative's X-Fi sound cards have been around for a while, but with the Sound Blaster X-Fi Notebook we have the first ExpressCard 34 iteration of the breed.
Gordo entertains a couple of lapdancers
Two lapdancers from the Spearmint Rhino chain yesterday shimmied their way to Downing Street to present a petition protesting against the attempted reclassification of their places of work as “sex encounter establishments”.
CBI warns of harsh winter for small biz
Business group the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) called on banks to free up lending to small and medium enterprises this winter, warning that many firms will be looking for funding.
Defra drafts proper pet practice for the daft
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is consulting on new guidelines for gormless pet owners who don't know a dog's arse from whatever it has in lieu of an elbow.
Another 180 'hover & stare' ducted fan bots for US forces
The US military has ordered a further 180 hovering ducted-fan spyeye robots, renowned for their ability to operate in tight places and "stare" through windows at will.
Freesat gets Five
Channel Five will arrive on free-to-air satellite broadcasting network Freesat in a couple of weeks.
The great platform and operational excellence survey
Reg Tech Panel
There's a lot of stuff running on servers that underpin the majority of your organizations applications and end user computing.
VIA and Nvidia nix netbook pact
Nvidia and VIA have reportedly canned their plan to jointly develop a reference design for Small, Cheap Computers based on their chippery.
Which top-of-the-line graphics card should I buy?
I play Crysis and Half-Life 2-based games on a PC connected to a 50in Pioneer Kuro plasma, but my ATI Radeon 1950 Pro is starting to show it's age. What should I replace it with?
Dell's sticks with dual de-dupe strategy
Dell is going to have two de-duplication technologies, not a single de-duplication architecture across its products,
Coppers nab more mobe-yapping drivers
The number of people charged for driving while talking on the mobile has been climbing steadily for the last few years. The majority were Londoners, who are also the most adept in getting away with it.
Yee-hah! Ford demos electric pick-up truck
'Leccy Tech
Grab your shotgun, a six-pack and smell-hound because a 400+ bhp electric version of Ford's F-150 pick-up has been unveiled at the 2008 Speciality Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show in Las Vegas.
The Independent gets the wrong end of Jacqui's gIMP
A confused and technically illiterate account of Jacqui Smith's government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP) by The Independent crosses our desk this morning.
Opera update plugs bug brace
Opera has updated its browser to plug a pair of critical security holes.
Bombproof TV rolling-news eco bins target the City
City workers not yet living in old fridge boxes under motorways will now be able to receive news of their redundancies even faster, as a new video news channel may soon deploy onto street screens across the Square Mile. The screens will be attached to recyclo-eco-bins - which will also feature secret terrorist-bomb-proofing technology.
Smith's airport ID card plans cut back to small pilot scheme
Jacqui Smith's plans for ID cards for airport workers are in deeper trouble, with the news that next year's rollout has been downscaled to an 18 month trial at only two airports, Manchester and City of London. According to a report in today's Financial Times, the Home Secretary is due to announce the trial on Thursday - but the paper adds that no agreement has yet been reached on whether or not the trial would cover existing workers, or only new employees.
Asus denies sub-10in Eee PCs for the chop
Asus UK has said it's not going phase out its 7in and 8.9in Eee PC netbooks next year after all. In fact, these models may be in for a revamp in the near future.
Demand for consoles, add-ons skyrockets as PC games plunge
Videogame sales in the UK will eclipse the combined value of music and video purchases in the UK this year for the first time ever, despite plummeting demand for PC titles.
Microsoft retires Windows 3.11 on 18th birthday
Microsoft finally withdrew its ancient operating system, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, on 1 November from the embedded market.
Jonathan Schwartz scrambles aboard the Obama train
Sun showed it can still get ahead of the crowd last night, as it became the first tech company to try and grab some reflected glory from Barack Obama's victory in the US election.
Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Vodafone HSDPA
Review
Dell may be late to the netbook party, but it's turned up with something very fashionable on its arm to make up: the Inspiron Mini 9, bulging in all the right places with HSDPA 3G mobile broadband goodness.
Europe takes aim at BBC licence fee
The European Commission has opened a period of consultation on its proposals to change the rules governing state aid handed to broadcasters.
Roadpricing satnav spybox trials under way
The UK's Transport minister has confirmed that technical trials of road-pricing systems are underway.
Whitehall credit card abuse and payment fraud costs £4m
Financial losses in UK government rose last year despite a decreased number of incidents, according to official Treasury figures.
Orange opens dual-display LG clamshell
Orange has taken exclusive delivery of LG’s latest talker: a stylish clamshell device with two screens.
Oki okays release of 'jumping robot leg' chair
Japan's Oki has developed an office chair that, it claims, can jump. And we thought all they were good for is spinning around and skating along on the casters.
UK.gov apologises for Tory-bashing child database memo
A top government official has apologised after civil servants working on the ContactPoint project wrote a memo to local authorities that was sharply critical of Tory policy on child data sharing.
Firefox hits 20% share as testers tickle 'pr0n mode'
Popular browser Firefox has snatched more than 20 per cent market share during two separate weeks in October, according to new statistics.
Guy Fawkes stunt arrives early
Comment
A Libertarian celebration of Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night has put junior transport minister Tom Harris in trouble - and yet again, it is his shoot-from-the-hip style of blogging that is the cause of his discomfort.
Nasty Toryboy bloggers ate my politics, claims Blears
Cynical, viciously nihilist bloggers are destroying British political culture, claims Communities Secretary Hazel Blears. And furthermore, she is due to say today in a speech to the Hansard Society, they're all Tories.
Lords demand DNA database deletions
The House of Lords forced another climb-down by the government yesterday by voting to amend the rules for the DNA database to allow innocent people to have their DNA samples destroyed and removed from the database.
HP apes IBM's SVC
HP is introducing a SAN storage virtualisation platform, using LSI software, to combine mid-range HP and third-party drive arrays into a single pool of storage.
Olympus E30 DSLR leaked
Details of an upcoming Olympus digital SLR camera have been released by an online retailer.
Will 'wi-fi on steroids' give you spots, baldness and liver damage?
The FCC has voted to allow unlicensed use of White Space spectrum between the TV stations. Meanwhile UK-regulator Ofcom today published a statement on cooperative common spectrum, but both proposals are based on technically unproven concepts of radio agility that hardly stack up.
Orange IPTV: Missing, presumed dead
What if you launched an IPTV service, and nobody cared? That's the question that has apparently led Orange execs to ditch plans to offer broadband customers pay TV down their phone lines.
Google! aborts! Yahoo! deal!
Google is abandoning attempts to push through its ad-sharing deal with Yahoo!
SanDisk pitches 100x SSD speed boost tech
SanDisk has come up with a tweak for solid-state drives that, it claims, will accelerate SSD random write speeds by a factor of 100.
PETA goes ape over Sega chimp advert
An animal rights group went bananas when it discovered that Sega had used a real chimpanzee in an advert for its latest Wii game. But the gaming firm has now promised to end its monkey business.
Pentagon spends $442m on 'multiple kill' space interceptors
The US Missile Defence Agency has assigned a further $442m for work on "multiple kill vehicles", designed to let a single American interceptor rocket destroy several orbital targets. The multi-kill capability is seen as vital if the nascent US missile shield is ever to become a credible defence.
9 hilarious election tweets worth remembering
It was an epic night for nettards and social inadequates as Barack Obama beat that guy the Vietnamese tortured to become the United States' first black African-American president-elect. And hey, it was all go down at Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded in a veritable bukkake of inanities and half-baked blogulations.
Atrato taps salesman for CEO post
Start-up Atrato has made Steve Visconti, previously EVP for sales and marketing, its new CEO. The previous CEO, Dan McCormick, becomes chairman of the board and will focus more on fund raising.
Microsoft woos startups with new BizSpark program
Redmond is giving a select bunch of software startups thousands of dollars worth of development tools and server software at a big discount for up to three years.
Porn breath tests for PCs heralds 'stop and scan'
Technology that claims to pick up traces of illicit images on PCs has attracted the interest of Australian cops. The software, developed in an Australian University, might eventually be used to screen PCs for pr0n during border inspections.
Sun injects Euro universities with OpenSparc
The processor and operating system technologies that made Sun Microsystems one of the first big Silicon Valley startups got their start three decades inside the computer science departments of two universities. It was Stanford University for the hardware and the University of California at Berkeley for the operating system that would eventually become Solaris.
Michael Crichton dead at 66
Michael Crichton - the author, filmmaker, and television producer best known for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park - is dead at the age of 66.
Report: Obama, McCain campaigns hit with 'sophisticated' cyberattack
Sophisticated overseas hackers broke in to the computer systems of both the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns and stole a large amount of data, according to an article published Wednesday by Newsweek.
Who's got more cash? Apple or Microsoft?
Recent figures from Microsoft and Apple reveal some interesting changes to how the companies compare financially. Apple's earnings may be closer to Microsoft's than you think.
Boffins: global warming kills lemmings, not suicide
The Norwegian lemming population is dwindling - through no fault of its own.
Hackers jailbreak T-Mobile's Googlephone
Hackers have managed to jailbreak T-Mobile's new G1 phone by exploiting a gaping loophole in Android, the open source operating system supplied by Google.
Sun bundles servers in MySQL blankets
You're Sun Microsystems. You have a server lineup you brag about all the time. You have one of the best operating systems in the world in Solaris. And you shelled out $1bn in cold, hard cash to acquire the most popular open source database in the world, MySQL.
New cleaning products erase murder stains
Thanks to a new breed of detergent, getting away with murder isn't the daunting task it once was.
WoW accused of turning man's mind into 'living video game'
World of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment's lawsuit against MDY Industries is getting a little dose of bat-shit insane before the case rolls to trial.
Microsoft's 'M' treads on US veterans' toes
Microsoft is in hot water again for again taking the name of someone else's software for one of its fledgling products
Obama-themed malware mauls world+dog
Malware purveyors have wasted no time capitalizing on Barack Obama's landslide victory in the US presidential race. Within 12 hours of his acceptance speech Tuesday night, net users were being treated to scams involving Google AdWords and prodigious volumes of spam.
