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IRISH BETTING FIRM Paddy Power has started accepting bets on what Apple’s first announcement of the year will be.

Apple has confirmed an event at the end of the month in New York when it will be making its first announcement of 2012. As usual there is an air of mystery surrounding the event so Paddy Power wants to cash in.

There have been a typically large number of rumours as to what the announcement will be, with many related to the next Ipad. Paddy Power’s favourite is electronic or digital textbooks with odds of 1:6.

A spokesman for Paddy Power said, “Like all tech junkies I’m awaiting the latest Apple announcement with bated breath, it looks very likely that they’re on the verge of launching electronic textbooks but I don’t think it’s beyond those geniuses at Apple to build a robot teacher!”

Coming in second and third are the Ipad Lite and Ipad 3 with odds of 6:1 and 9:1, respectively. Further down the list are a new Imac, Apple TV and the Iphone 5.

If you fancy a lucky punt then the firm is taking bets for a fruit themed robot teacher with odds of 40:1. You can also bet on how many Ipads Apple will announce this year. Interestingly the most likely is two with odds of 4:5 closely followed by one at 10:11 and the odds of none are 16:1.

We reported earlier this month that the announcement could be related to its Ibook service. The location could be a clue, as New York is the US stronghold of publishing media empires and advertising businesses. Apple traditionally announces hardware on the west coast of the US.

This isn’t the first time that the firm has taken the opportunity to rake in some money and it did the same thing in the months just prior to previous Iphone and Ipad announcements. µ

FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia has announced that it will issue two software updates to address power efficiency issues with its Lumia 800 smartphone.

Nokia’s new flagship Windows Phone handset has been on sale for just over a week and already the firm is promising a fix for power problems. The first software update will come in December followed by another in January.

Nokia said in its support forum, “We understand that some people have expressed concerns about battery life on the Nokia Lumia 800. Early investigations show that the majority of people are enjoying the full Nokia Lumia experience without any problems. A software update in early December will include improvements to power efficiency, while a second update in early January introduces further enhancements to battery life and battery charging.”

We’ve had the smartphone in for review at The INQUIRER and we didn’t discover any problems in this area, but a quick web search reveals that a lot of customers have been encountering the issue. The trouble seems to be with the firmware rather than the physical battery, which is good for Nokia as it will avoid having to replace faulty units.

It’s not exactly what Nokia needs at the moment with its aim of scraping back market share that it has lost recently to rivals such as Samsung and Apple. An industry analyst has slashed its sales forecast for Nokia’s Lumia 800 but the company remains positive about the launch of its first Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5 smartphone. µ

Back at CES 2011 EVGA showed off an interesting concept card featuring 2 GF104 GPUs on a single board. The resulting product was the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win, a true dual-GPU card packing 2 GTX 460s on to a single board. EVGA has since refined this product by replacing the GTX 460s with GTX 560 Tis, and today is launching the next 2Win card: the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win. Priced at 9, EVGA has the GTX 580 set in their sights, claiming to offer 30% better performance for the price. But can EVGA’s dual-GPU behemoth really surpass NVIDIA’s flagship video card? Let’s find out.

THE RESEARCHER who discovered flaws that he claims are serious enough to allow hackers to take over industrial systems has blasted Siemens for its evasive treatment of the issue.

Dillon Beresford is a researcher at NSS Labs who first discovered vulnerabilities in Siemens’ programmable logic controller (PLC) devices used to control, monitor and automate systems such oil and gas pipeline valves, power plant systems, cooling systems and traffic lights.

NSS Labs regarded these vulnerabilities as particularly serious, saying, “Unlike classic computer crime and exploitation, where data is remotely stolen or manipulated, attacks on industrial control systems can have devastating physical world implications such as loss of life and environmental impact.”

In a posting on a mailing list used by security professionals involved in working with these systems, Beresford aimed a volley at Siemens for attempting to downplay the seriousness of the issue by saying the hacks were difficult to exploit.

Beresford said, “The flaws are not difficult for a typical hacker to exploit because I put the code into a series of Metasploit auxiliary modules, the same ones supplied to ICS-CERT and Siemens.”

He also claimed that he performed the exploits in his apartment, after buying the controllers he hacked using cash that NSS Labs gave him.

He added, “Remember, I look for vulnerabilities in products and exploit them every day at work. In fact, in a few hours I will be doing the same thing on other products. The bad guys are looking too! They aren’t playing by the same standard of ethics or rules I am.”

“The clock is ticking and time is of the essence. I expect more from a company worth billion and so do your customers.”

Siemens has not replied yet to a request by The INQUIRER to respond to Beresford’s comments. µ

INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONS such as power plants or oil refineries might be sabotaged by vulnerabilities in Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLCs), devices previously targeted by the Stuxnet worm in Iran.

In a report by the Associated Press, NSS Lab researchers claimed they had found multiple vulnerabilities in Siemens PLCs, which are used in industrial facilities and factories to control machinery, valves, pumps and other general purpose systems. These flaws could be used by hackers to cause serious damage to technological infrastructure.

NSS chief executive Rick Moy said, “This is a global problem. There are no fixes to this right now.” He continued, “Bad guys would be able to cause real environmental and physical problems and possibly loss of life.”

Siemens PLC devices were targeted by the Stuxnet worm, malware designed to reprogram them after using Windows PCs and USB sticks to propagate. Believed by some to be state-sponsored malware, Stuxnet was thought to have caused major damage to Iran’s nuclear fuel refining efforts.

But while Stuxnet hit the operating system software, Moy claimed that PLCs might be reprogrammed directly if reached on the network.

NSS Labs’ claims also back up a contention by F-Secure chief security researcher Mikko Hypponen that terrorists could use modified versions of Stuxnet for the their own ends, using vulnerabilities in PLCs to attack critical infrastructure such as power plants. µ

Just recently we had a chance to lay hands on SilverStone's FT03 enclosure, and it was impressive enough to earn a Bronze Editors' Choice award. It wasn't the quietest case we've ever reviewed, but it had strong thermal qualities and a slick-looking design. Now DigitalStorm has taken SilverStone's eye-catching little number, custom-painted the grills, and turned it into a double-shoebox-sized monster. The Enix we're looking at today boasts the highest overclock on an Intel Core i7-2600K we've yet seen from a system vendor and pairs it with not one but two EVGA GeForce GTX 580 cards.

The Enix will naturally be fast given those components, but how does it perform in the areas of thermals and acoustics? Read on to find out.

THE US MILITARY is giving Nvidia money to progress GPU technologies for supercomputers that will be 1,000-times more powerful than today’s.

Prototypes of the super duper computers are to be completed by 2018 for the four-year long Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program that has awarded Nvidia’s team million. But surely 2010 plus four is 2014? The super duper computers, whose maths are hopefully better than the project’s leaders, are so super that their operations will be measured on the exa-scale, meaning 10 to the power of 18. Tera is mere piffle at 10 to the power of 12.

Each team will develop new software and hardware to overcome the limitations of conventional computing to achieve the 1,000 times increase in computation speed while being 50 times more energy efficient. They also aim to improve reliability, but does anyone believe the BSOD is not going to make an appearance?

“We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that are many orders of magnitude above today’s systems,” said Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist and the team’s principal investigator. Well, maybe one person. µ

Keeping an eye on power when choosing the hardware and software components is thus much more than naively following the hype of “green IT”. It is simply the smart thing to do. We take another shot at understanding how choosing your server components wisely can give you a cost advantage. In this article, we focus on low power Xeons in a consolidated Hyper-V/Windows 2008 virtualization scenario. Do Low Power Xeons save energy and costs? We designed a new and improved methodology to find out.

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THE INQUIRER

Review GA 7TCSV2 with L5640 ultra low power Xeons