Simon Sharwood

On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, the column The Register squeezes in before the weekend so you can revel in a fellow reader’s tales of tech support terror. This week meet “Zac” who told us the story of how “When I started as a computer engineer for a now defunct manufacture everything was learned on the job (in the 'field'). “ “ …

Microsoft’s Azure cloud has turned on a preview of “Azure NetApp Files”, which readers may recall was NetApp teased in October 2017. The service is a bit late: NetApp called for pilot users back in November 2017 and said it would “be available for public preview in early 2018”. We’re pretty sure July 12 doesn’t count as early …

Broadcom’s share price has dipped by nearly 14 per cent after it announced its plan to acquire CA Technologies. The $19bn deal, announced yesterday, was a bolt from the blue. It was also a major change from Broadcom’s most recent quarterly earnings statement in which executives discussed extending the company’s lead in silicon …

Sales of personal computers rose in 2018’s second quarter, making it the best time to be in the PC business since 2012. News of the sale rise came from analyst firms IDC and Gartner who’ve both hit F9 on their spreadsheets recording Q2 shipments and found a positive number. Gartner found 62.1 million PC shipments, up a 1.4 per …

Guido van Rossum – who created the Python programming language in 1989, was jokingly styled as its “benevolent dictator for life”, and ushered it to global ubiquity – has stepped down, and won’t appoint a successor. In a mailing list post on Thursday titled, “Transfer of Power,” he wrote: “Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't …

Microsoft’s revealed a new way to buy Windows Server and SQL Server – a subscription offer tied to Azure. The new offer is tied to Azure Reserved Instances plan that Redmond announced last year, under which you can pay up-front for one or three years of Azure servers. As of July 10th, Reserved Instances are alive and breathing …

VMware’s quietly slipped out a Tech Preview of an update to Workstation, its desktop hypervisor for Windows and Linux. The most notable new bit appears to be a REST API that matches the one added to the 2017 edition of Fusion, VMware’s desktop hypervisor for the Mac. Once it arrives in Workstation it’ll allow automated testing …

Salesforce has unleashed an upgrade to its Einstein AI that equips it to handle customer service chores. Einstein has hitherto been offered as an assistant capable of helping Salesforce users to make predictions based on the data they’ve collected on the SaaS platform, with one variant also capable of making suggestions to …

Nostalgia aggregator Timehop has revised its advice about the data breach it reported earlier this week. The news is bad in two dimensions, the first of which is that the company has found more data was accessed. Updates to its oops! post has now added “dates of birth, gender [and] country codes” to the list of lost …

The security industry’s supply chain is currently inferior to that of its attackers, says Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley, but he thinks the industry is finding ways to fight back. In conversation with The Register yesterday, Morley advanced a theory that exploit brokers, malware authors and other bad actors work together. …

Canonical has released a new cut of Ubuntu it recommends for use in the cloud and containers. “Minimal Ubuntu” is based on either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS. A Docker image of the latter weighs in at positively paltry 29MB, making it a highly efficient starting point for developers needing to rapidly shovel out …

The Xen Project has released version 4.11 of its hypervisor. As we reported last week, it’s more than a month late, but the projects leaders thinks it is worth the wait because this release delivers on an ambition to “create a cleaner architecture for core technology, less code and a smaller computing base for security and …

AWS has announced that “Application Auto Scaling can be used to add scaling to any services that you build on AWS”, and Netflix has revealed the new feature started life as a custom job for the vid-streaming company. As explained here, Netflix's home-brew “Titus” container management platform had no auto-scaling features and …

Microsoft has revealed its long-rumoured smaller Surface device – and to The Register’s mind it looks a lot like the re-invention of the netbook. The new US$399 “Surface Go” has a ten-inch screen and comes in a tablet form factor. A Surface Go Signature Type Cover will set you back another $99, but includes a touchpad so you …

Google’s given its Android Emulator a tickle to add support for AMD processors and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Android product manager Jamal Eason said the new features are “two long-standing user requests from the Android developer community that we are happy to address with this Android Emulator update.” It’s not hard to see why …

Who, me? Welcome once more to “Who, me?”, in which Reg readers ‘fess up to messes they made in the pursuit of IT excellence. This week meet “Iqbal” who told us about a Week from Hell he experienced in the year 2010, when working for a law firm. First came “a virus outbreak that infected Windows desktops” that required him to travel …

Open plan offices don’t deliver their promised benefits of more face-to-face collaboration and instead make us misanthropic recluses and more likely to use electronic communications tools. So says a new article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, by Harvard academics Ethan S. Bernstein, Stephen Turban. …

A service named “Timehop” that claims it is “reinventing reminiscing” – in part by linking posts from other social networks – probably wishes it could go back in time and reinvent its own security, because it has just confessed to losing data describing 21 million members and can’t guarantee that the perps didn’t slurp private …

Microsoft’s announced a new twice-annual release cadence for Dynamics 365, its cloudy CRM/ERP service. Corporate veep and COO for business application engineering Mo Osborne has pitched the change as “modernizing” Microsoft’s efforts by making a new release every April and October. “Our new update cadence aims to lower …

A couple of days back we covered Dell’s new portable workstations and now HP Ink has launched some too. One that caught The Register’s eye is the ZBook x360 G5, a convertible PC that flips to become a tablet. And does so while offering a six-core Xeon E-2186M at 2.9 GHz (bursting to 4.6 GHz(, integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 …

On-Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register’s attempt to make Fridays tolerable by bringing you fellow readers’ tales of terrifying tech support jobs they somehow survived. This week, meet “Guy”, who told On-Call he grew up in the golden age of the microcomputer, meaning that by the time he joined his local Army National Guard …

Aerospace giant Boeing looks to have addressed a weakness that Airbus exposed last year, by proposing a joint venture with Brazilian plane-maker Embraer. The deal's about regional jets, passenger planes with about 100 seats and ranges up to 5,000km. Neither Airbus nor Boeing make such planes – the former’s A318 and the latter’ …

IBM’s cloud is having a bad day. An incident that kicked off at 19:48 UTC on Thursday, July 5th, saw “long provisioning times [for virtual servers] … observed through monitoring systems,” leading to a warning to the effect that “At this time, customers may experience longer than normal times for provisioning new services.” …

Who, me? Special Welcome to a special edition of “Who, me?” The Register’s opportunity for readers to get their worst mistakes off their chests. We’re usually here on Mondays, but with the United States Independence Day making for slow news days, we decided to keep The Register’s servers red-lining by running an extra column. When we sneak in …

The developers of Gentoo Linux have revealed how it was possible for its GitHub organization account to be hacked: someone deduced an admin’s password – and perhaps that admin ought not to have had access to the repos anyway. The distro’s wiki has added a page describing the SNAFU. It describes the root cause of the cockup as …