Joe Fay is group editor of The Register, and The Channel.
How Novell peaked, then threw it all away in a year
One grey morning in the mid 1990s, your writer was bundled on a plane and flown to somewhere in Germany - it might have been Dusseldorf - to attend the Olympics. Not those Olympics. The inaugural Certified NetWare Engineer Olympics.
Marketing for tech companies is tricky, and all the harder in the '90s, when sci-fi visions of …
How do you drive a supercomputer round a Formula 1 track?
When you arrive at the Lotus F1 Team HQ you’re politely asked not to take pictures without asking first. It soon becomes clear that most of the site is off bounds photographically, so we agree that it’ll be easier all round if our guide, senior account manager Luca Mazzocco, simply tells us when we can take photos.
It’s not so …
1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi
In June 1953 millions of Brits huddled around their newly bought TVs - all two million of them - and watched their new young Queen take the Coronation Oath before God, her bishops and peers amidst the gothic splendour of Westminster Abbey.
Just over two months later a similar number clustered around their sets again, to watch a …
MS Office on iOS is OFF the menu, says Fujitsu as it nixes Personal Cloud
Fujitsu has put its Personal Cloud project on ice after failing to reach licensing agreements with the likes of Microsoft to deliver applications on devices that could run an HTML 5 browser.
However, Joseph Reger, the Japanese vendor’s CTO, says he still believes the licensing model is inevitable as customers become disenchanted …
WD HAMRs down shingles on disk drive road map
Twenty years ago a myriad of hard drive vendors pushing essentially the same technology fought themselves into oblivion.
Over the coming years the remaining players will be pushing traditional technology to its limits to extend the life of hard disk technology. While the industry is pretty much standardised on perpendicular …
Shrinking iPads, Ultrabooks will lead to disk boost: WD boss
WD showed a slide at its annual summit earlier this month that described the current computing market as "very chaotic". That would be a highly relative description, given the storage giant had booked the summit into Istanbul just as a sit-in at a park in the Turkish city had escalated into a three-day battle between protesters …
Western Digital promises long hot summer of S&M products
Western Digital’s SME business will expand on its Sentinel range over the summer, as it looks to step up from the S to the M part of the market
The vendor will also refresh the Arkeia dedupe and backup software platform it bought in December and expand it in the similar direction, after completing the integration of the 17-year- …
Who wants a 'robot companion'? Look no further than Intel Labs
Can you imagine IBM Research ever developing a social robot companion? Intel CTO Justin Rattner can’t, but he’s happy for his own researchers to build one – and for the technology to find its way into the market. Eventually.
Ask most techies of a certain age how a company should carry out research and development and they will …
First Cook, now Intel bigwig pokes Google in the eye over Glass
Google Glass, the advertising giant's techno-spectacles that beam information into your eyes, have not impressed Apple boss Tim Cook.
The iPhone supremo reckons that while wearable tech is "incredibly interesting", he doesn't think Google's geeky electronic eyewear will catch on.
And he's not alone in his criticism: Intel's …
Intel's extreme ultraviolet dream still somewhere over the rainbow
The great ultraviolet hope that will enable Intel to break the 10nm chip geometry barrier is further away than ever, the vendor’s CTO has admitted, raising the spectre of Moore’s Law* running out of steam.
The breakthrough revolves around the distance between the circuit-lines chipmakers can etch onto the surface of a computer …
BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily
The Post Office Tower in London, adorned with microwave dishes and resembling a gigantic Star Trek gadget, symbolised the UK's white heat for technology in the 1960s.
The tower in 2009 before the dishes were removed
(Credit: David Castor)
In an era of transistor radios as a fashion accessory, the space race, and the arrival …
Stephen Hawking nixes Intel voice upgrade plan
Stephen Hawking scuppered an Intel plan to upgrade his voice, sending researchers at the chip giant into a desperate effort to emulate a defunct speech-synthesis chip.
The A Brief History of Time author's nixing of Intel efforts to bring his robotic voice up-to-date was revealed at an innovation awards ceremony hosted by the …
Reg careers live chat: Upgrade or go home with Dominic Connor
Are you looking to switch jobs, skill-up or go back to college? Have a browse of The Register’s Careers’ Live Chat now.
City headhunter and Reg contributor Dominic Connor and the Reg’s group editor Joe Fay hosted an hour's worth of career-enhancing discussion to help your next steps.
We threw open the doors at 1.30pm to allow …
Reg man goes time travelling at iconic observatory
There are two ways to approach Jodrell Bank. From the north you fly through the WAGish end of Cheshire, with towns like Wilmslow and Alderley Edge housing Manchester and Liverpool’s finest and their harems. I prefer coming from the south, under the Twemlow Viaduct, a 105ft high, 500 yard long symphony of red brick, completed in …
Attention, CIOs: Stop outsourcing or YOU will never retire
Walk down the hall. Look into the IT room. How old are the people in there? How are they getting on? Or are they just getting on? Would you trust them to keep the server lights on in a couple of years? Is there anybody actually in there at all?
If there isn’t, your company may be part of the problem that’s keeping John Harris …
Pope resigns months after launching social networking effort
Pope Benedict announced his resignation today, becoming the first pope to relinquish the leadership of the Catholic Church in six centuries - and just months after becoming the first pontiff to join Twitter.
The 85-year-old will step down at the end of the month, clearing the way for a conclave to elect his successor. He is the …
Web smut sites are SAFER than search engines, declares Cisco
Cisco proclaimed that it is more dangerous to click on a web ad than a porn site these days as it unveiled the latest version of its security threat report.
The vendor also expanded its security offering, pulling in mobile management support for its ISE platform and announcing it had hoovered up Czech-based real-time security …
Cisco unwraps Unified Access boxes in East London
Cisco took its life in its hands today by choosing the heart of East London to take the wraps off two shiny boxes to be sold under its Unified Access architecture banner.
Senior vice president for enterprise, Rob Soderberry unveiled the Catalyst 3850 unified access switch at the opening of CiscoLive, saying it combined the best …
Vatican shrugs off apocalypse, fiddles with accounts dept
The Vatican has shrugged off predictions of the world ending this Friday, deciding instead to overhaul its accounting department.
This will ensure a gradual reduction in the cost of running the world's biggest Christian denomination - although if the Mayans are right and humanity is annihilated on 21 December then that cost …
Musk to blast right of way through California with railgun Concorde
Elon Musk dropped a few further hints about his Hyperloops transit plan in London last night, saying it was "a cross between a Concorde and a rail gun" whose biggest hurdles included "right-of-way" issues.
And it seems that the ultimate destiny of the futuristic system would be to shift aging tech entrepreneurs around their …
Target Silicon Valley: Why A View to a Kill actually made sense
A View to a Kill is generally regarded as one of the least successful Bond movies. Yet it stands out for two things: a suave villain who is deranged in an entirely believable way, and a villainous plot that appeared both logical and plausible.
While its box office performance was passable at $152m, on a budget of $30m, even …
The Register flicks switch on Data Centre channel
Our sharper-eyed readers - the sort that care about storage, servers, HPC and the like - will have noticed The Register has launched a Data Centre section.
This pulls our enterprise systems coverage together in one place, while our PC, mobile and client news continues under the Hardware banner. You can find links to these …
Fujitsu bigwig: Microsoft's doing us a favour with Surface either way
Last week's launch of Microsoft’s Surface product is a good thing for tablet veteran Fujitsu, even if it only shows the battle is actually between Android and iOS.
The Japanese vendor, in its various European incarnations as International Computers Limited and Fujitsu-Siemens, has often been a lonely voice pushing tablet-like …
TERROR in SEATTLE: Gang of violent LEPRECHAUNS on the loose
Seattle is expected to go into lockdown this weekend, as fears grow that a gang of rogue leprechauns is on the loose and attacking locals.
Komonews.com reports that police were called to reports of a street fight last Saturday. When they arrived they saw a number of people run from the scene, before finding a man "covered in …
Vatican subtly shifts its position on The Blues Brothers
The Vatican has subtly shifted its stance on the Blues Brothers, with in-house(ofgod) magazine Osservatore Romano declaring the 33-year-old movie “a modern classic”.
The latest blessing, which coincides with an Italian outing for the movie on the 30th anniversary of John Belushi’s death, represents a reworking of the paper’s …
William Shatner confirms Devon town actually prostitute free
William Shatner has apologised to the burghers of Ilfracombe for claiming, on national TV, that the Devon seaside town is a hotbed of prostitution.
However, Shatner undermined the earnestness of his apology by insisting someone must be having sex in the resort for "something of value", the Daily Mail reports.
The erstwhile …
'Kindness of America' snapper shot himself in 'act of self-promotion'
The hitchhiking photographer who captured the hearts of a nation after being shot while researching "The Kindness of America", has admitted administering the lead supplement himself and making the rest of the tale up.
Authorities in Montana are considering whether to charge Ray Dolin over the whole sorry saga.
Dolin was found …
Clouds gathering on horizon for software devs, say wise men
The software industry will dissolve into a soup of micro-detailed web services delivered over the cloud by 2022, with IT departments reduced to “guiding” users to prevent them from leaking their companies’ crown jewels onto the net.
That was the extremist version of the vision sketched out by a panel considering “The Software …
Trust lawyers, not techies, when it comes to the cloud
CIOs thinking of shifting to the cloud or kicking off a flagship big data project would be better off talking to their lawyers than their techies before starting to leaf through glossy corporate presentations.
Mark Webber, partner and head of technology at law firm Osborne Clarke, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum …
Hitchhiker shot while researching 'Kindness of America'
A hitchhiker researching a book on "The Kindness of America" is currently recovering in hospital after a gun-toting truck driver gave him a small donation of some searing hot lead.
Ray Dolin, was hitching on Highway 2 in Montana on Saturday as part of a project to produce a memoir on the great things about the open road in the …
Intel phone boss: 'Multi-core detrimental to Android mobes'
Intel’s head of mobile has dissed handset-makers that have already adopted multi-core processor architectures, saying that most implementations so far are actually “detrimental”.
Mike Bell, general manager of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, also said that smartphone users who buy into Chipzilla's platform can expect to …
Facebook jumps then slumps in first few minutes day's trade
Facebook's shares debuted on the Nasdaq today at $42 and immediately skidded downwards to the original IPO price of $38.
The social network set its IPO price last night at $38, valuing it at $104bn. However, through the mysteries of IPOing, it actually opened at $42, shortly after 11am Eastern Time. That price values the company …
Pirate Bay struggling to get on feet after DDoS to the knee
The Pirate Bay claimed to be “getting back up! Stronger than ever!” this evening after crumpling under a DDoS attack for most of today.
The draining of the Pirate Bay sparked speculation that it was a victim of Anonymous, after the torrent site slated the hacktivist collective last week.
The torrent site cum copyright freedom …
Greenpeace targets Apple with 10-foot Pod stunt
Silicon Valley cops arrested two Greenpeace activists who sealed themselves into a huge (i)Pod outside Apple HQ today, but chose not to cuff another bunch of activists who were dressed as giant iPhones.
Greenpeace has been chastising the Mac and iOS firm for the last few years for not exactly being the freewheeling, earth- …
Cisco hits the roof in Olympics marketing dash
Cisco has thrown open its Olympics hospitality suite, giving partners and customers both a panoramic view of the Olympic Park and an up-close, 3D view of Stephen Fry loitering on a London Underground platform.
The 2012 Olympics logo
The networking giant is the London 2012 Network Infrastructure Supporter, meaning it is the …
Swedish men ordered to present cervices in database flub
A database screw-up saw 2,056 Swedish men ordered to report to their gynecologists and midwives for smear tests.
Health officials in Stockholm County and the island of Gotland are mailing the men to tell them to disregard the missive, The Local reports.
Meanwhile midwives are "briefed and ready' on how to deal with any confused …
Lenovo forced to expand 'flaming' PC recall
Lenovo has been forced to expand the recall of possibly flamey desktops it first announced back in March.
The Chinese PC giant, in conjunction with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, announced the initial recall affected around 50,500 ThinkCentre M70z and M90z desktops.
At the time, it said, "A defect in an internal …
Fabulous execution prompts Apple to rein back Q3 outlook
Apple's third quarter figures will come in below Wall St forecasts the vendor revealed today, but that's just fine because it's just because it did so well in the second quarter.
The Mac and iOS vendor said it was expecting revenues of $34bn in June, with earnings per share of $8.68. This compares to analyst expectations of $9. …
Apple profits almost double on iOS product sales leap
Apple sold buckets more iPhones and iPads in its second quarter, helping it almost double net income year on year to $11.6bn and driving up gross margins.
The purveyor of magical and revolutionary shiny things turned in sales of $39.2bn for the quarter ending March 31, a 59 per cent rise on the year.
However, net income leapt …
Facebook IPO 'delay' as Zuckerberg keeps Wall St 'waiting'
Facebook's much-awaited IPO may be pushed back into June reports claim, as its glamourous and youthful CEO Mark Zuckerberg is just too busy to meet Wall St.
CNBC reports that "a string of acquisitions and other business distractions are threatening to delay the sale". The suggestions comes from "people familiar with the matter …
Facebook prospectus shows jump in users, fall in profits
Facebook's latest pre-IPO filing shows the social network giant ramped up to 901 million users, who produce 3.2 billion likes and comments a day.
Oh, and it said its net income slipped on the year as operating expenses ballooned.
The updated S1 filing covered the period up to March 31, and bombarded potential investors with …
Courier mishap sends woman's corpse to shopping club
A mix-up at a freight forwarding firm meant a dead woman's torso was diverted from a research facility in Florida and shipped to a wholesale shopping club in Massachusetts instead.
Staff at the headquarters of BJ's Wholessales Club's HQ in Westborough, Mass, were initially unconcerned when the comparatively large package turned …
Microsoft and Facebook in $1bn pass the IP parcel play
Microsoft and Facebook concluded a significant round of pass the patent parcel today as the soon-to-IPO social network gained rights to a bundle of IP formerly belonging to AOL.
The companies have carved up the $1bn patent pile that Microsoft secured from AOL earlier this month, strengthening both their respective IP positions …
Workers' comp covers sex-related injuries, judge rules
Injuries sustained while having sex on a work trip are covered by workers' compensation, an Australian federal judge has ruled.
The ruling accepted that the nookie-related injury sustained by a government employee on a business trip occurred during "the course of employment", overturning an earlier rejection of the woman's claim …
Techie stages 'strip down' protest at TSA 'harassment'
An Oregon man who "does something with the internet" stripped stark naked at Portland airport on Tuesday in a protest at TSA screening policies.
John E Brennan, 50, turned up to board a flight San Jose yesterday, according to reports, but took umbrage at the TSA's screening procedures.
KATU News reports that Brennan said he was …
Intel boss turns earnings call into iPhone flirt fest
Intel boss Paul Otellini used its Q1 earnings call today to continue the chip giant's flirty pitch to build chips for Apple's iOS devices.
The vendor flagged up the launch of the first Intel-based smartphone, which is expected as early as next week.
However, Otellini also used its briefing with analysts to make a public pitch …
Intel beats Q1 expectations, jacks up revenue forecast
Intel crept in over expectations with its Q1 results today, though its silicon business dipped 2 per cent on the previous year's slightly longer quarter.
The chip giant characterized its Q1 performance as a "solid start" to the year, and was bullish enough to jack up its expectations for the second quarter.
Revenues were $12. …
Austrian village considers a F**king name change
An Austrian village with an amusingly obscene name has decided to throw in the towel and vote on whether to change it.
The 100 odd residents of Fucking, in Upper Austria, are to vote this week on whether to change their hamlet's name to something less attractive to English-speaking visitors, the Daily Telegraph reports.
The …
German software giant plucks London software outfit
Software AG has hoovered up a UK-based messaging software developer founded by a bunch of Deutsche Bank alumni.
The German enterprise software vendor has bought out 13-year old London-based my-Channels for a sum reportedly in the low double digits of million euros.
my-Channels' "extremely fast (low latency) messaging software …
'Not guilty' plea in Utah cop site hacking case
An Ohio man pleaded not guilty today to charges that he hacked into a pair of police websites in Salt Lake City, Utah in January.
John Anthony Borell III, a 21 year old from Ohio, made the plea at an arraignment hearing in Salt Lake City today, AP reports. He faces up to ten years inside and a $250,000 fine if found guilty on …
