Offshore IT facilities plummet

According to a report from Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), the establishment of cheap offshore centres by the world's 50 largest IT vendors slowed in 2009, writes Computing.co.uk.

The top 50 suppliers opened a combined total of 33 new delivery centres in the first 11 months of the year, compared to a total of 49 in 2008 and 35 in 2007.

Nick Mayes, senior consultant at PAC, says: "IT services vendors have reined in their capital expenditure in the last 18 months and have focused on maximising the use of their existing delivery sites."

A security bug in the latest version of the FreeBSD can be exploited to grant unprivileged users complete control over the operating system, reports The Register.

The flaw is present in FreeBSD 8.0 and is known to affect versions 7.1 and 7.2 of the open source operating system, German researcher Nikolaos Rangos told The Register. He said it was "unbelievably simple" to exploit. Shortly after he disclosed the flaw on the Full Disclosure mailing list, other researchers said they were able to confirm the bug.

FreeBSD security officer Colin Percival said the Full Disclosure post was the first his team had heard of the reported vulnerability. The team is investigating.

According to new research, the cost of installing and owning solar panels will fall even faster than expected, says the BBC.

Tests show that 90% of existing solar panels last for 30 years, instead of the predicted 20 years.

According to the independent EU Energy Institute, this brings down the lifetime cost.

Early Monday morning, the problem-plagued Large Hadron Collider (LHC) set a world record in Switzerland when it accelerated twin proton beams to an energy of 1.18 teraelectronvolts, surpassing the record of 0.98TeV set in 2001 by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Tevatron collider in the US, reports Information Week.

The LHC, a particle accelerator used to study small particles for advanced physics research, is operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

The LHC began operation on 10 September 2008, only to be shut down nine days later following a breakdown caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's massive magnets.