Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Updated: 19 min 43 sec ago
Scottish iSchool goes 100% iPad
'The best equipment available'
A Scottish independent Christian school has forsworn books, pencils, pens, and paper, and will now educate its young charges solely via Apple's iPad.…
SGI bleeds less than expected
Vows 2011 break-even
Supercomputer and hyperscale server maker Silicon Graphics is still losing money, but it's hopeful that the years ahead will actually yield some profits. And thus, as the company announced its fiscal 2010 financial results today, SGI's board of directors reanimated a latent $40m stock buyback program that the merger between Rackable Systems and Silicon Graphics put on hold.…
CarderPlanet founder charged in $9.4m RBS WorldPay hack
And then there were nine
A man accused of being one of the most prolific sellers of credit-card data has been charged with participating in the brazen hack of RBS WorldPay in 2008 that funneled about $9.4m out of the payment processor in just 12 hours.…
Mexican telco exec: iPhone 4 antenna fix imminent
¡iCaramba!
According to a Mexican telco exec, Apple will release an iPhone 4 with an upgrade to its problematic antenna after its "free case" giveaway ends on September 30.…
Xsigo rejiggers virtual I/O director for Ethernet
Adapter cards given the boot, too
Xsigo Systems, one of the pioneers of virtual I/O for server networks and their links to storage, is beside itself with excitement at the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza in San Francisco now that it has finally brought a product to market that is designed for enthusiastic uptake by IT shops that like their Ethernet and don't want to buy special adapter cards from anyone to virtualize their I/O.…
Judge bashes warrantless cellphone tracking
Tower data protected by Fourth Amendment
A federal magistrate has ruled that information pulled from cellphone towers provides such an intimate portrait of a customer's life that government investigators must get a warrant before obtaining it.…
Big Blue finally punts an Opteron 6100 server
One System x rack only, no blades
It only took five months, but on Tuesday it finally happened: IBM announced its first — and what could very well end up being its only — System x or BladeCenter server fitted with AMD's "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100 processors.…
VMware boss: we rise as Windows falls
The OS sets in the west
VMworld Update: This story has been updated with additional statements from Maritz and additional commentary.…
Game-addicted man scores rare win over software lawyers
Lineage II and the unenforceable EULA
A Hawaii man who sued a company over his crippling addiction to the computer game Lineage II has gone where few litigants have managed to go, defeating the end-user agreement that said he had no right to bring the case to begin with.…
Microsoft douses VMware with cold cloud shower
'We have the apps you trust'
Microsoft has told users they've got "nothing to lose" by checking out the company's Azure cloud and hosted applications before committing to a deal with archrival VMware.…
Hitachi GST IPO may be coming
Reuters saying - so it isn't spin
Via Aaron Rakers of Stifel Nicolaus I'm hearing Hitachi GST may be being prepped for an IPO.…
VMware eats two companies at once
Integrien and TriCipher munched
VMworld VMware has agreed to acquire Integrien, an outfit that offers "real-time" analytics software for monitoring application and infrastructure performance, and TriCipher, a company that handles access management and security for net-based applications.…
Yahoo! begins ad handover to Microsoft
Bingification to end in October — maybe
The Bingification of Yahoo! took another step forward Tuesday, when the transition of advertisers' search-based campaigns from Yahoo! Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter got underway.…
EMC embraces benchmarks
Celerra gateway excels
EMC has started getting enthusiastic about benchmarks, the latest being SPECsfs2008-nfs v3. It submitted a Celerra VG8 Gateway system - that's a NAS head sitting atop either Symmetrix VMAX or CLARiiON Fibre Channel storage. This VG8 is a bit of a monster with up to eight data movers, called X-Blades, which contain 6-core Xeon 5600 CPUs cycling at 2.83GHz.…
Ruby on Rails 3.0 <strike>sets sail</strike> <strike>gets off ground</strike> oh, chuff chuff
'Never struggle with user pastes from MS Word again!'
The Ruby on Rails creator has released version 3.0 of the open source web framework, following a two-year project involving more than 1,600 contributors to the code.…
Bye-bye to bizarro bye-laws, says UK.gov
Local laws, for local people
If you have plans to fry fish in Gloucester or beat your carpet along Blackpool promenade or transport a dead horse through Hammersmith and Fulham, you should know all these activities are still subject to local bye-laws. But this may be about to change, with the announcement today by Local Government Minister Grant Shapps of plans to give councils a new power to review and revoke outdated bye-laws.…
German judge chides Google over YouTube freeloading
Teutonic songwriters' case kicks off
A German judge thinks Google should do more to detect illegal uploads to its YouTube video service. He was ruling on a case last week brought by an alliance of composers and songwriters' performance rights societies led by Germany's GEMA.…
NHS Online consult service to live on: Calls go to 111
Free gov phone-a-lonely-nurse service dropped
The Department of Health has said there are no immediate plans to drop the NHS Direct web service, despite signalling the end of telephone consultations.…
IT engineer fights spider with improvised flamethrower
Can of deodorant + lighter = hospital
An IT engineer who attempted to dispatch a spider with an improvised flamethrower ended up on the wrong end of his own can of deodorant, the Sun reports.…
Diesels greener than battery cars, says Swiss gov report
Get a TDi estate not an EV, and save the planet!
Swiss boffins have mounted an investigation into the largely unknown environmental burdens of electric cars using lithium-ion batteries, and say that the manufacturing and disposal of batteries presents no insurmountable barriers to electric motoring. However, their analysis reveals that modern diesel cars are actually better for the environment than battery ones.…
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