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'Just do what Shai tells us to do'

The San Francisco Bay Area has embraced Shai Agassi's Better Place vision , announcing a "sweeping plan" to drive public and private investments in electric cars and the infrastructure needed to run them.…

Unified, horizontal system for communications...bitch!

A Ohio-based technology company is suing Facebook for patent infringement, claiming it invented the platform the insanely popular social networking site uses to store and manage information.…

Cost cutting saves the day

If you were looking for some good news out of Dell today as it reported its fiscal 2009 third quarter financial results, you will probably be disappointed. But not as much as you might think. That's good news of a sort considering the miserable week the global economy is having.…

Rented tubes should still be clear tubes

Canada's telecom regulators gave Bell Canada the OK tothrottle peer-to-peer Internet traffic on pipes it leases to third-party ISPs.…

SC08 A dense cluster of Intel Atoms

While supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics was showing off its existing Altix lines of Xeon and Itanium servers at the SC08 supercomputing show in Austin, Texas, this week, the most interesting thing the company touted was not yet a real computer, but a concept system, called Molecule.…

Third beta, then release

The "standards-compatible" next edition of Internet Explorer has been bumped into 2009 by Microsoft.…

Error.com's missed opportunity

PayPal, the online payment service that is a major target of phishers, has been caught sending customer emails that confuse its own login page with a third-party landing site that offers spyware protection and a bevy of other products.…

All's fair in love and court

Online dating service eHarmony.com has agreed to create a new website for matching same-sex couples, as part of discrimination settlement with New Jersey's Civil Rights Division.…

This is not The Matrix . But it is

QCon 2009 Agile development practices may be growing in popularity among developers, but agilistas aren't getting much love from software architects.…

Storage doesn't have to spin

Comment When you are recovering from a long period of hard times and light appears at the end of the tunnel and gets closer and closeruntil you emerge into glorious daylight, you get a spring in your step and start making plans. Now you're back on your feet, the world becomes an oyster again, and you go off in different directions pursuing pearls. That's the feeling I get talking to Hitachi GST.…

Pricing power goes virtual

Antitrust 2.0 Why did Google leave outgoing Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang heartbroken at the search engine altar? If you believe the words chief ad broker and CEO Eric Schmidt funneled through The New York Times , Google chafed at the prospect of winning a Department of Justice (DoJ) antitrust suit.…

To Itanium or not to Itanium

SC08 Architectures can change quickly in the supercomputing space, and slow-moving vendors can get left behind or at least find themselves out of step with the next big wave of sales in the HPC area. This has happened in the past with Silicon Graphics, and the company is determined to not let it happen again.…

Subscription service customers only

In brief Sun Microsystems has added a query analysis tool to MySQL, but for paying customers only.…

RRoD, frozen consoles and missing avatars mentioned

The New Xbox Experience (NXE) has barely been out for 24 hours, but gamers have already claimed that it’s messing with their consoles. Some have even said the update’s caused the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RRoD) to rear its ugly head once more.…

Freebie teraflops for ISVs

SC08 When it comes to parallel supercomputing, and indeed any kind of parallel processing, the hardware is the easy part. The systems software, including a tuned software stack and middleware for managing data, visualization applications for turning datasets into something human beings can use to make decisions or understand some phenomenon, is a bit trickier.…

While ISS crew hunt missing spider

Endeavour mission specialists Shane Kimbrough and Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper are getting ready for the second mission STS-126 spacewalk outside the International Space Station this afternoon, scheduled to get under way at 18:45 GMT.…

MSPs say nae, but move means naething

The Scottish Parliament has voted against the government's proposed ID cards, in a gesture of Phythonian futility.…

Galactic jaunt for F1 champ?

Formula 1 champ Lewis Hamilton is planning to stump a cool £625,000 for five seats on a Virgin Galactic flight, according to the Evening Standard .…

Oh no! Here comes the government...

A day after Nominet decided to sue one of its own directors, a senior civil servant warned that the domain industry must be better behaved to avoid government intervention.…

Database corruption blamed

300,000 UK T-Mobile customers had a quiet morning as they were unable to make or receive calls thanks to a database snafu that forced the operator to restore from backups - a process which is still in progress.…

This will only take a second

Analysis Put yourself in these hypothetical shoes for a moment. My goal is to make as much money as possible by doing as little work as possible. I have no creative talent except for generating and recycling marketing buzzwords. I have no technical knowledge or ability - but I can get my head around a Twitter feed. It doesn't sound promising, but you'll want in, I promise.…

Backseaters still tolerating pilots for now

Bandwidth-starved military spyplane chiefs are resorting to the use of humans as airborne data-processing nodes, according to reports. Difficulties in deployment of unmanned robot surveillance craft have led to the purchase of basic civilian planes for use in intelligence work above Iraq and Afghanistan.…

Free Download - The Reg Guide to Storage and Storage Platforms

Unfriendly fire

The US Army has reportedly suspended the use of USB and removable media devices after a worm began spreading across its network.…

70 hits a second

The Wikileaks website struggled to stay online yesterday because of thousands of people looking for the leaked BNP membership list.…

Avoiding legacy status

Mini Poll Following on from the discussion of legacy systems and platforms occurring as part of our platform optimisation workshop here , we're trying to work out the best way to avoid having your expensive IT systems degrading to legacy status. So, if you have a couple of spare minutes, let's have your views on this in our mini-poll below:…

Irish are the talkiest and Yanks watch most TV

Ofcom has published the third of their annual reports comparing the UK digital communications industry to those found in nearby countries, and concludes that we're the most advanced - though the Irish make more mobile calls and the Americans watch more TV.…

Small box, very big sound

Review Logitech's Squeezebox Duet network music player doesn't really have any faults but if you absolutely had to come up with an Achilles' Heel it would be the need for an amplified stereo system for it to play through. Not an issue if you only want music in one room, but more of a problem if you want tunes all around the house.…

If they're not ranting, they're bumbling

Comment The times, they may be changing on the internet, but if our Parliament has anything to do with it, that change is unlikely to be for the better. The problem is that far too many MPs not only don’t get it when it comes to the net, they actively bask in their ignorance of new technology.…

Off-the-shelf sets prepped for use next season

Formula One Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) are becoming like London buses – nothing for weeks then two come along together.…

Office of Fair Trading not convinced

Capita's £78m takeover of IBS Opensystems Software has been referred to the Competition Commission.…

Italian pol says sub prime collapse all in the good loan book...

Pope Benedict predicted the current economic apocolypse back in 1985, an Italian politician has declared, suggesting that the Vatican may be the one global institution likely to make a killing out of Mammon's downfall.…

Pay per dump, and think of Gaia

Australians could face ' pay as you dump ' charges as part of a Toilet Tax. It's all in the name of "sustainability" - and part of a growing eco-movement to replace flushing conveniences with smelly and unhealthy inconvenience.…

EU agency launches campaign

Online gamers have become a soft target for cybercrime, with three in 10 users reporting the loss of items of virtual property through fraud.…

'We don't know what we're talking about'

The government's climate minister in the House of Lords dropped a clanger on Monday evening, when he claimed that the polar ice caps were melting at a record rate.…

'Oh I wish it could be Christmas..' etc, etc

The BBC has quite righty done a U-turn on its shock decision to can the Top of the Pops Xmas special, and viewers will now be able to enjoy Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates presenting the traditional count-down to the Yule number one.…

DisplayPort-only direction yields iTunes playback woes

Analysis Apple's decision to adopt the DisplayPort digital monitor connector is pissing off punters, all thanks to the technology's incorporation of a copyright protection mechanism.…

'Lively' wasn't

Could it be there isn't a pot of gold at the end of the Sadville rainbow? Google doesn't think there is, and will shutter its "virtual world" Lively after less than six months.…

Court rules against ITT

Dealers and resellers can use a manufacturer's trademark as a domain name even when their sales are not authorised by the manufacturer, an arbitration panel has ruled.…

Exotic object or dark matter?

Scientistsare pondering the possible source of an "unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy", and suggest they're either pouring out of an exotic object relatively close to Earth or represent the fall-out from the annihilation of theoretical particles comprising dark matter.…

We don't even want to talk about it

Steve Ballmer has said again that Microsoft has got over its infatuation with Yahoo! and has moved on.…

Linux A-bomb sim rig could go commercial

America's Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb lab has teamed up with open-source computing heavyweights to build the next generation of Linux superclusters, ultimately scaling into the petaflop range. The project has been dubbed "Hyperion".…

An Eee to truly challenge thin'n'light laptops

Review Asus pretty much started the whole Small, Cheap Computer ball rolling with its first Eee PC just over a year ago. But now there are hundreds of the darn things, from every manufacturer imaginable, so how does Asus ensure it stays at the forefront of the market?…

The 'sharpest' BlackBerry yet?

BlackBerry Bold and Curve owners had better watch out, because Research in Motion has thrown a sharp new rival into the mix.…

80-core servers will add-up to nothing without hypervisors

Opinion Intel is pumping up its virility through proxies like Michael Dell reminding us of an 80-core chip future. It's impressive, but Intel is a company obsessed to distraction with Moore's Law. It's like watching a crack addict do anything to get the next hit, a doubling of processor performance every 18 months, whatever it takes, in Intel's case.…

Mozilla faces IRS audit over search sugar daddy

In 2007, the Mozilla Foundation received 88 per cent of its revenue from a certain Mountain View sugar daddy. And thanks to its longstanding Google dependence, the organization is facing an IRS audit and questions over its tax exempt status.…

Smells like Endeavour team spirit

NASA astronauts aboard Endeavour's STS-126 mission will soon be testing the space agency's latest generation of "electronic nose," designed to monitor the International Space Station's crew cabin for harmful chemicals.…

Free Download - The Reg Guide to Storage and Storage Platforms

Change? Start with security

President elect Barack Obama's embrace of online video and social networking may have propelled him to victory, but unless he's careful, his administration could be brought down by the same sloppy security problems that have plagued MySpace, Facebook, and dozens of other Web 2.0 properties.…

What price systems integration?

Windows Vista is in more legal hot water and this time the ones getting wet are the companies who've rolled out the operating system, not Microsoft.…

Look familiar?

Microsoft released the anticipated face-lift for its Xbox 360 game console and online service today, dubbed the New Xbox Experience (or NXE).…