Top Twenty Stories

VMware virtually crashes Windows 7 desktop party

Tempts Windows XP laggards

VMware has unveiled the latest version of its ESX-based virtualization software to capitalize on Microsoft's rollout of Windows 7. The company has launched VMware View 4.0, featuring a new communications protocol called PC-over-IP to provide real-time screen rendering, plus the ability to deploy and manage tens of thousands of …
Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

Comment Behind the taskbar

Much better than Vista, and the best Windows yet. That seems to be the consensus view on Windows 7, and after two and a half months with the final build, I more or less agree - despite the niggling voice that says behind the new taskbar it is not really so different from Windows Vista. Nevertheless, Windows 7 on its launch …
Windows 7 lessons - the must know before you buy

Sin, SKUs, and puke

Today's launch of Windows 7 by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer marks the end of a 12-month product turn around - one of Microsoft's fastest. But what price did Microsoft pay to build Windows 7 so quickly? And what should we expect from Microsoft, and the Linux competition, as the company tries to entice people into …
Lloyds TSB's online banking system shows no love for Firefox

Only supports IE and, er, Netscape Navigator

Many Lloyds TSB business customers who use Firefox as their default browser are currently unable to access their online banking accounts. Several readers have contacted The Register telling us that the service is throwing up an error message when they attempt to logon to the site via the world's second most popular browser. …
Sun files $120m loss on the hush

Only $120m. Well done

It was a week later than El Reg expected, but the behavior was the same. After the stock market closed on Friday and everyone was heading home for the weekend, server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems snuck out its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010. Revenues fell 25 per cent to $2.24bn. Sale have …
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?

Mountain View wants your exabyte

Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. The distributed technology was first hinted at — in classically coy Google fashion — during a conference this summer, and Google fellow …
Could a hard drive dedupe data?

Comment Manufacturers start looking for the next big thing

Hitachi GST president Steve Milligan says one of the drivers affecting the hard drive industry is the need for efficient storage with technologies like virtualisation and deduplication. What is he on about? He presented at a recent Needham conference for HDD investors and said that the storage market was driven by three things …
Google wheels out Chrome, Wave updates

Bookmark that, federate this

Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform. "One of the fundamental concepts we discussed was the vision for wave as an open communications protocol. We …
Virgin America dumps servers, flies for the clouds

Open-source payload

For a start-up, Virgin America is acting pretty big these days. In the spring of 2007, the low-price airline wasn't even flying. It was still struggling for US regulatory clearance. But suddenly, Washington DC gave it the green light, and on August 8 that year, Virgin's first commercial flight took off from its base at San …
Ubuntu's Karmic Koala bares fangs at Windows 7

Review Shuttleworthian scrap

Ubuntu 9.10 - aka Karmic Koala - is taking the fight to Microsoft and its new Windows 7 operating system. The Koala - due for its official release today - brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop. We took the release …
Large Hadron Collider team flicks switch on Xeon grid

But hurry up with octo? We switch on tomorrow

CERN today unveiled the upgraded grid that will support the Large Hadron Collider when the titanic particle-punisher finally kicks back into life. Sverre Jarp, CTO at CERN OpenLab supporting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, described the network, powered by Intel Xeons, as …
Students get deep Windows 7 price break

Upgraders wanted in US, UK

With its deepest Windows 7 discounts yet, Microsoft is targeting students who might otherwise chose Apple. The company has announced qualified college and university students can obtain Windows 7 for just $30 in the US and 30 pounds in the UK. Students in the US can pre-order their copies from September 17 and download with …
Windows 7 OEM prices revealed

Call yourself an OEM, get 50% off

Online retailer NewEgg has coughed up OEM pricing details for Windows 7 this week, revealing deep discounts from the full retail version. If you want Microsoft's latest OS on the cheap and missed out on earlier promotions, it's certainly not a bad way to go. Strictly speaking, OEM copies are intended for computer builders, but …
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't

Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to …
USB 3.0 thumb drive pops up

Super Talent goes SuperSpeed

Flash vendor Super Talent is leading the pack again and has come up with a USB 3.0 thumb drive. Its SuperSpeed USB 3.0 RAIDDRive comes in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities and works with current USB 2.0 ports, but obviously at USB 2.0 speed. Plug it into a proper USB 3.0 port and it transfers data much, much faster, at up to a …
Red Hat pitches x64 virtualization with KVM rollout

RHEVing up server hypervisors

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat today got its freestanding, bare-metal Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor, a hardened version of the KVM hypervisor it took control of last summer, to market. That makes Red Hat a player as x64 servers the world over are set for a massive wave of virtualization. Red Hat announced its …
Michael Dell: Netbooks go sour after 36 hours

You'll be happier if you give me more money

According to Michael Dell, a netbook is a dream purchase - until it's about 36 hours old. "If you take a user who's used to a 14- or 15-inch notebook and you say 'Here's a 10-inch netbook,' they're gonna say 'Hey, this is so fantastic. It's so cute. It's so light. I love it,'" Dell told Silicon Valley's tech-obsessed Churchill …
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks

Review RHEL power management

The Fedora Project has released the first beta of Fedora 12, the next major revision of the Fedora Linux line, and though it's still a work in progress, there are already some standout features, including a much improved power management system and support for the Moblin project, Intel's effort to make Linux work better on …
HP to throw Matrix tech beyond x64 blades

Neoview data warehouse ported to Unix blades

Like the rest of the IT industry, Hewlett-Packard was apparently expecting Cisco Systems and EMC to announce their Acadia joint venture and Vblock virtualized data center infrastructure on Wednesday. Hence the timing of a hodge-podge of system announcements that HP is stacking up against the Vblock stacks and whatever …
ZFS gets inline dedupe

Switch it on and off at the dataset level

Sun's Zettabyte File System (ZFS) now has built-in deduplication, making it probably the most space-efficient file system there is. There's a discussion of ZFS deduplication in a Sun blog, which says that chunks of data, such as a byte range or blocks or files, are checksummed with a hash function and any duplicate chunks will …