sysadmin.ie

250GB bundle

Microsoft has priced up the Xbox 360 Kinect bundle it's hoping will tempt console-less consumers when the motion control tech launches on 10 November.…

Fast access to priority bookings

O2 has been tempting existing and potential customers with the carrot of early access to event bookings for some time. Now it's made getting hold of tickets easier.…

Cheaper flash storage array drives

The march of MLC flash into mainstream enterprise storage took another step forward today as Pliant launched its Enterprise Flash Disk (EFD) products.…

Reg Guide to Enterprise Virtualization - Free Download!

cortex writes with an excerpt from the L.A. Times: "In a first step toward helping severely paralyzed people communicate more easily, Utah researchers have shown that it is possible to translate recorded brain waves into words, using a grid of electrodes placed directly on the brain. ... The device could benefit people who have been paralyzed by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease or trauma and are 'locked in' — aware but unable to communicate except, perhaps, by blinking an eyelid or arduously moving a cursor to pick out letters or words from a list. ... Some researchers have been attempting to 'read' speech centers in the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. But such electrodes 'are so far away from the electrical activity that it gets blurred out,' [University of Utah bioengineer Bradley] Greger said. ... He and his colleagues instead use arrays of tiny microelectrodes that are placed in contact with the brain, but not implanted. In the current study, they used two arrays, each with 16 microelectrodes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CSC gets a pittance

Connecting for Health spent £470m with BT last year, more than twice as much as went to CSC.…

A bundle of Windows 7 joy

It looks like someone didn't get the deal done in time for the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza last week. Today, server wannabe and networking giant Cisco Systems and virtualization player Citrix Systems will announce their first partnership, bundling up the XenDesktop Swiss army knife of desktop and application virtualization on Cisco's "California" Unified Computing System blade servers.…

BlackBerry chalks up another acquisition

BlackBerry maker RIM has apparently bought out DataViz, publisher of the popular Documents To Go, in a deal worth $50m in cash.…

Turning a tidy profit on the deal

Vodafone is planning to raise $4.3bn selling its stake in China Mobile, and will be handing most of the cash to its shareholders.…

Did dodgy battery cause £350,000 of damage?

A retired schools inspector is suing her former employer because her work laptop allegedly set fire to to her thatched cottage, causing £350,000 of damage.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

Much in demand, apparently

Nokia's N8 smartphone will go on sale at the end of this month priced at £429 for the SIM-free version, the Finnish phone giant said today.…

Five thousand fixes in three weeks

In the three weeks following its offer to replace the batteries in overheating first-generation iPod nanos, Apple Japan swapped out a total of 4,994 suspect cells.…

bgweber writes "There's been a lot of discussion about whether games should adapt to the skills of players. However, most current techniques limit adaptation to parameter adjustment. But if the parameter adaptation is applied to procedural content generation, then new levels can be generated on-line in response to a player's skill. In this adaptation of Infinite Mario (with source [.JAR]), new levels are generated based on the performance of the player. What other gameplay mechanics are open for adaptation when games adapt to the skills of specific players?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like Unity. Like Titanium

Much like the San Francisco-based startup Unity, Appcelerator has asked Apple if iPhone applications coded with its dev kit violate the new Jobsian rule against the use of languages other than Objective C, C, or C++. And like Unity, Appcelerator hasn't received an answer.…

The Great Lost Jukebox turns up in captivity

Review Best known today for its mobile phones, Nokia has released a connected jukebox at a knock down price. Nokia Home Music is an unusual beast: essentially it's a radio – primarily an Internet radio – built around a giant mono 10W speaker, but there's a Swiss Army knife selection of I/O options for getting music in and out of the box.…

An anonymous reader writes "Following Qualcomm, Samsung is also close to launching a new smartphone processor with two cores. Based on ARM architecture, the new Orion processor promises five times the graphics performance of current chips and to enable 1080p video recording and playback. Next year, it seems, dual-core smart phones will be all the rage. Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today, may be under pressure to roll out a dual-core iPhone next year as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monday unveiling

At next week's Intel Developer Forum, Chipzilla will unveil its long-awaited Sandy Bridge microarchitecture — and the more we learn about it, the more it appears to share with AMD's oh-so-late Fusion effort.…

Wielding the executioner's axe for Ellison

Comment It's going to be a long time before Oracle can take on the likes of HP and IBM for the IT-market crown. But before he retires, you can bet Larry Ellison's last billion bucks that he most surely wants to become the dominant systems supplier in the data center.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Labs has started an initiative to promote and develop gaming based on Open Web technologies. They write, 'We are excited to present to you the latest initiative from Mozilla Labs: Gaming. Mozilla Labs Gaming is all about games built, delivered and played on the Open Web and the browser. We want to explore the wider set of technologies which make immersive gaming on the Open Web possible. We invite the wider community to play with cool, new tech and aim to help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices.' To that end Mozilla Labs will launch Game On 2010, a game development competition, at the end of September."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Drops 60s psychedelia API

Mozilla has released a fifth Firefox 4 beta, offering graphics hardware acceleration on Windows and a new API that lets site developers code pages that visually display audio data inside the browser.…

When infringement is big business

A copyright enforcement service has filed a lawsuit seeking $150,000 from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting two newspaper articles without authorization.…