Top Twenty Stories

1. US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster

   Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC

   Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has built a 32-way Beowulf cluster from Raspberry Pis. Kiepert says his research focuses on “developing a novel data sharing system for wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data.” To study that field Kipert figured he would need a …

2. Massive EXPLOSION visible to naked eye SEEN ON MOON

   Vid 'Equivalent to 5 TONNES of TNT going off', says NASA

   Sensational news today from the Moon, as skywatchers say a huge explosion - as bright as a star, and visible from Earth with the naked eye - has been seen on the lunar surface. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," splutters Bill Cooke, a top NASA boffin. According to NASA, …

3. I know identity of Bitcoin's SECRET mastermind, says Ted Nelson

   Coiner of 'hypertext' claims to identify the links

   Sociologist, philosopher, computer industry pioneer and inventor of the term “hypertext” Ted Nelson is claiming that he knows the identity of Bitcoin inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a rambling – and, let's face it, odd – 12-minute post on YouTube, Nelson spins out the suspense, throws in a dialogue with himself as Sherlock …

4. So you want to be a contractor? Well, here's how it works

   Free advice from Reg headhunter Dom Connor

   Back in the heady days of 1984, working on the development of Microsoft Unix (yes, that was a real product, AKA Xenix), we needed to write an Ethernet driver, but none of us really felt up to that. We needed to hire an expensive specialist. And so I met my first contractor, who turned up in a far better car than anyone else …

5. Last time CO2 was this high, the world was underwater? NO, actually

   Ice sheets DIDN'T melt 3 million years B.C., say boffins

   OK, so levels of atmospheric CO2 are rising through 0.0004 (or 400 parts per million) at the moment. Disaster, right? The last time the world saw carbon levels like this, some three million years ago, the mighty ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic had melted from the heat and the seas were 35 metres higher than they are …

6. Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans

   All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us

   Nintendo has contacted fans who post walk-through videos of its games to YouTube, claiming all revenue from their efforts. Gamer Zack Scott brought the practice to light in a Facebook post. Scott is a member of Let's Play, a community in which folks post "videos in which the author records the complete gameplay of a video game …

7. Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS

   Let's all play find the secret hardware register

   With new CEO Brian Krzanich and new president Renée James in control of Intel, all kinds of changes are very likely in store: the chip giant wants to expand beyond its dominance in PCs (a declining market) and servers (one that is profitable but not growing very much) to other aspects of the computing landscape. And one such …

8. Gay marriage? We'll put a stop to that 'human BUG', says Nintendo

   Sayōnara, Mr and Mr Robotto

   A bug that permitted same-sex marriage in a Nintendo game was a mistake by the developer rather than a victory for equality, we're told. Gamers playing Tomodachi Collection: New Life - the latest version of The Sims-like role-playing game for the 3DS handheld - noticed they had the option of allowing male characters to marry …

9. IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL

   Zombie language gets XML, Java support

   IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language. To the cool kids, COBOL probably looks like a zombie, complete with loose bits of decaying flesh. However it still accounts for a vast amount of operational enterprise code that's too expensive to replace all …

10. 'Untidy' Shoreditch just CONFUSES American techies - Olympic hub team

    Come join the tech mall in Stratford instead, US firms told

    A leading American tech incubator is considering opening a British outpost on the site of the Stratford Olympics, The Register can reveal. Cambridge Innovations Center, once home to part of the Google team that designed Android, is in top-secret preliminary discussions with iCity, the company building a digital hub in a …

11. Cameron's Tech City: Desks? Yes. Cash? Yes. Coders? Nope

    Silicon Roundabout's stovepipe-hat-wearers can't find the staff

    Lack of skilled staff is hampering the growth of almost half of all tech businesses based around East London's Silicon Roundabout, a survey has found. Research firm GfK asked top-ranking staff from than a hundred companies based within Shoreditch's Tech City cluster about the problems faced by their businesses. 77 per cent of …

12. Biz bods: Tile-tastic Windows 8? NOOO. We lust after 'mature' Win 7

    Tired corporates prefer predecessor, says analyst

    Windows 8 won't become an enterprise IT standard as customers dump Microsoft's legacy PC operating system XP. Instead, corporate IT departments will stick to what they know and install Windows 7. That’s according to technology analyst Forrester, which reckoned Windows 7 is fast becoming the de-facto PC operating system for big …

13. Marks & Sparks accused of silently bonking punters over the tills

    Analysis Bank cards bought stuff ALL BY THEMSELVES, say shoppers

    High-street socks'n'frocks chain Marks and Spencer is accused of quietly taking money from shoppers' contactless bank cards at the tills. The accusations come from Radio 4's Money Box listeners, who called in to report that M&S had billed cards in purses and handbags over the air, unbeknownst to customers who had intended to …

14. EMC vuln gives mere sysadmins the power of storage admins

    Time to patch VNX and Celerra software before non-experts do something silly

    EMC has warned a flaw in the Control Station software for its VNX and Celerra arrays could allow just about anyone logged into them to do just about anything. EMC's described the fault as stemming from “Script files in affected products exist with ownership permissions for the nasadmin group account.” The nasadmin group is …

15. Schmidt: Don't like our tiny tax bills? Google this... 'Change the law'

    Ad biz chairman says he can't wait for reform

    Google chief Eric Schmidt has once more defended his advertising giant for its pitiful UK tax bills: the search supremo said his biz abides by the rules, and claims he can't wait for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to reform those rules. Schmidt said in an op-ed for The Observer that Google "has …

16. Is it time for the great Jihad against networked storage?

    Blocks and Files Big boys look wide open with eyes wide shut

    Dheeraj Pandy is running Nutanix as if the company is on a crusade against networked storage. Data delivery latency from networked storage is plain unacceptable, it seems, and clustered virtualised servers should run and present their local storage as part of a pool. There's more of course with big-iron converged systems being …

17. Intel releases 'Beacon Mountain' Android-on-Atom dev tool

    Indroid Inside

    Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery. Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.” The software's in version 0 …

18. Streaming music works for us, say US and UK indie labels

    Analysis Not clear it does for the musician, however

    Are legal music streaming services just Kim Dotcom on a diet, with a lawyer? The debate has raged amongst musicians for years now, and really ignited when Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery took issue with the “new music economy” two years ago. In what became known as the “Letter to Emily” storm last year, …

19. NetApp boffins first to go in 'WORKFORCE DECIMATION' plan

    300 R&D bods out the door in proposed cull of 1,300, say insiders

    Storage array biz NetApp has laid off 300 people at a research and development centre in India and “hundreds” more in the US, according to industry sources. The Times of India reports that anonymous insiders at NetApp's Bangalore operation - which is the company's largest R&D facility outside of the US - have been given their …

20. Hold our tiny silicon spheres, say gravity wave detection scientists

    Nano-sensors in optical trap for more sensitive instrument

    A group of scientists from the University of Nevada at Reno says tiny sensors – small enough to be suspended in an optical trap – could pave the way for a new kind of ultra-sensitive gravity wave sensor. That is, of course, if gravity waves exist: predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity waves have proven …