30th > November > 2009 Archive
31
Border agency to start fingerprint checks
Fingerprint checks on foreigners at border controls will begin at the end of November, says the UK Border Agency.
Dell sows 'experimental' Chrome OS for Mini netbooks
A team of Dell engineers has released a very unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS for use on the PC manufacturer's Mini 10v netbooks.
Samsung H1 Vodafone 360
Review
Apparently, you are nobody today if you aren't connected to hundreds of other people through a web of social networks. If you aren’t poking, tweeting, linking, posting, chatting, emailing and texting, you're living in the past.
HP readies plan for EVA revolution
Comment
It appears that HP is getting ready to announce two revolutionary EVA arrays, abandoning its proprietary EVA controller design and using SAS drives for the first time.
Royal Society offers all-time top boffinry selection online
The Royal Society, Blighty's premier boffinry club, has celebrated its 350th year by putting online a selection of its most eye-catching research papers.
Expanding the footprint of enterprise apps
Workshop
Many organisations originally invested in ERP and CRM suites to deal with specific problems they were focused on at the time. Whether it was automating or fixing certain processes, or simply replacing existing obsolete systems, the job at hand was clear, and bad things happened if the immediate objectives weren’t met.
LHC smashes Tevatron record: Humanity enters the unknown
In the early hours this morning, boffins at the controls of the Large Hadron Collider brought the colossal particle-punisher up to beam energies of 1.18 tera-electron-volts (TeV), breaking the world atomsmasher record of 0.98 TeV held by the US Tevatron. The LHC is now officially the most powerful matter-rending machine in operation.
Should you lose your religion on your CV?
Comment
Your CV should tell prospective employers who you are - but should that include details of your religious faith?
BMW to provide 'low emission' cars for London Olympics
Leccy Tech
Nissan has allegedly denounced BMW's contact to supply 4000 "low emission" vehicles for the 2012 London Olympics as a “backwards step” for the capital’s chances of becoming an e-car world leader.
IBM poised to acquire database security start-up for $225m
IBM is set to buy database security firm Guardium for $225m.
Should we care about SLA Monitoring and Management?
Webcast
If you ask readers of The Register, they’ll tell you that they have an ever-increasing range of systems to look after and a vast range of tools and services to manage them. That’s a big enough headache for most.
Villagers revolt over BT chairman's broadband
BT chairman Sir Mike Rake has reportedly upset some of his neighbours in the Oxfordshire village of Hambleden, because he's got broadband and they haven't.
Gizmo5 Linux client vanishes in wake of Google takeover
Gizmo5 users are complaining that since the VoIP outfit was acquired by Google earlier this month, the Linux client of the firm’s tech has been ditched.
Sony ships chips for 560Mb/s Bluetooth beater
Sony has unwrapped the first of its chips able to provide Bluetooth-style short range communications at speeds of up to 560Mb/s.
Notts County Council sprays £82k on PC smut trawl
As Nottinghamshire County Council gets ready to issue hundreds of redundancy notices to staff in an effort to plug a £30m gap in its finances, it is also spending six-figure sums on an anti-porn crusade.
EU waits for wise men to deliver digi-books plan
EU culture ministers have moved to block Google's book scanning juggernaut - by appointing some wise men to come up with a policy. Eventually.
Gervais pic used in amusingly rubbish failed bank fraud
Crooks tried to impersonate Ricky Gervais by using a picture of The Office character David Brent mounted in a counterfeit passport as part of a comically inept attempt to withdraw a large sum from the comedian's bank account.
Samsung UE40B7000 40in LCD TV
Review
Flatscreen TVs with LED backlighting offer more vivid colours, darker blacks and greater contrast than regular LCD screens. And there’s a slimness dividend, too, as edge-mounted LED backlights take up less space than conventional LCD bulbs. A case in point is Samsung’s UE40B7000, a 40in 1080p HDTV that’s only 30mm deep.
Google Phone: What's it gonna be?
Rumors of a 'Google phone' are almost as frequent as those of an Apple iTablet, but the search giant may indeed release some form of hardware platform in January.
Why is USB 3 so slow?
USB 3.0's SuperSpeed rating is a dismal joke if magazine tests are anything to go by, with transfers at a laggardly 127MB/sec at best, only three to four times faster than good USB 2 products. So why is USB 3.0 so slow?
Climategate: Why it matters
Analysis
Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really?
Titan has Earth-style 'climate change', says prof
Scientists at Cal Tech say they have cracked the puzzling conundrum of the polar patio-gas lakes of Titan, moon of Saturn. The reason why such bodies of fluid are found at the moon's north pole but not at its antarctic is apparently eccentricity in Saturn's orbit, of the same type as that governing ice ages on Earth.
Prevx blames Microsoft for black hawk screen down
Microsoft’s most recent release of security patches is causing some computers to freeze and display a, er, black screen of death.
Nokia mole says one more Maemo smartphone next year
Nokia will roll out one more Linux-based smartphone in 2010, a company mole has claimed, suggesting it's more keen on Symbian than recent executive statements have implied.
Lost mobiles to pile up in taxis in run up to Xmas
London residents leave an average 10,000 mobile phones in the back of taxis every month.
Gov targets boozers as Manc ID card scheme launches
A handful of lucky Mancunians should be getting their hands on ID cards within ten days, after the government officially kicked off the much-anticipated scheme in the Northern city today.
EU to approve more banking data for US spooks
European home affairs ministers are today set to approve a transatlantic deal that will see them turn reams of private banking data over to US intelligence.
Why do people keep buying CDs?
Who on earth still buys CDs? If you only went to digital music conferences, you'd think the last CD had been bought some time ago, probably back in 2005. Audio connoisseurs' favourite Linn Products last week confirmed that it will stop designing and selling CD players from next year to focus on streamers, although its legendary turntables will continue.
French WiMAX is stepping stone to LTE
French wannabe operator Bolloré Telecom will deploy a national WiMAX network in 2010, but admits that it's really waiting for LTE to arrive.
BNP leader unlikely iPlayer poster child
BNP leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time last month helped boost take-up of the Corporation’s popular online iPlayer service.
Bumbling NJ firemen, cops blown up in 'huge fireball'
Firemen and police officers in New Jersey blew themselves up last week in an "orange mushroom cloud of fire and debris" which created a "deafening boom felt miles away". The unfortunate public-safety operatives had been attempting to light a bonfire at a high-school rally.
No Nook e-reader til 7 December or later
Amazon has sold more of its Kindle e-reader than any other products, it claims, boding badly for Barnes & Noble whose Nook won't even be seen in stores until 7 December.
Consumer group preps legal challenge to Facebook terms
A Norwegian consumer protection agency is preparing a legal challenge to Facebook and other social networking companies, accusing them of operating "in a legal vacuum and irrespective of norms and standards".
Web service automates WordPress password cracking
Hackers have developed a distributed Wordpress admin account cracking scheme that poses a severe risk for the security of blogs whose owners select insecure passwords.
Making big ones out of small ones: 3Leaf
The wheel is turning full circle. In the 1980s and 1990s, the HPC crowd pioneered scale-out processing and advanced parallelism in response to cost and scalability limitations imposed by the shared-everything systems of the day, ushering in an era where huge numbers of small computers were harnessed to solve large-scale problems.
Making big ones out of small ones: ScaleMP
As we talked about in our last post, a handful of vendors are pushing technology that lets users tie bunches of smaller systems into large, shared-everything SMP servers.
eBay fined 1.7m euros in perfume kerfuffle
A Parisian court has fined eBay 1.7 million euros (roughly $2.6 million) for violating an injunction that bars users from buying and selling perfumes and cosmetics from French luxury goods maker LVMH.
Prolific penis pill pushers fined almost $19m
Federal authorities have imposed almost $19m in fines on an enterprise accused of spamming the world with billions of emails advertising male-enhancement pills and other pharmaceuticals.
Apple 'games' NAND flash market
Korean flash-memory manufacturers are grumbling that Apple is gaming the NAND market.
IBM hoists Tivoli Monitoring onto Amazon cloud
After lobbing a large chunk of its database and middleware software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service early this year, IBM has now hoisted its Tivoli Monitoring onto the Amazon cloud.
Microsoft files cloud data portability patent
Updated
Microsoft has filed a patent to lock-down a method for moving data between different "clouds."
Apple job listing hints of iPhone-Google divorce
Apple is advertising for a software engineer to help take its iPhone Maps app to "the next level" - and perhaps to help Cupertino gain independence from its latest smartphone competitor, Google.
Sun VirtualBox gets live migration
The clever techies behind Sun Microsystems' VirtualBox hypervisor just keep plugging away on improving the product, as if the $7.4bn Oracle acquisition had not happened and as if Oracle will have anything useful to do with VirtualBox other than sit on it and keep it out of a rival's hands when the deal gets approved by the European Union's antitrust regulators.
Cisco and Juniper 'clientless' VPNs expose netizens
Virtual private networking software from Cisco Systems, Juniper, and other manufacturers can make users susceptible to a variety of web-based attacks, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned on Monday.
TechCrunch knocks off Vulture Central RegPad™
The long-rumored TechCrunch CrunchPad does not exist, according to more rumor.
