The Register

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Current logo of The Register.

The Register ("El Reg" to its staff) is a British technology news website focusing on the computer industry. It was founded by John Lettice and Mike "Crazy Brit" Magee in 1994 as a newsletter called "CHIP CONNECTION", initially as an email service. Mike Magee left The Register in 2001 to start The Inquirer after some controversy.

The first Register article was published in 1998-08-01.^[1]

The Register has run Simon Travaglia's BOFH stories since 2000. Comment pieces are included along with the news, such as "Bootnotes" and "Opinion". Letters and "Flames of the Week" are often run, and as well as carrying its own content, licensed articles from other sites are included to augment their coverage. The Register aspires to provide an objective viewpoint, and most subjective pieces are labelled as such. It does not aim to be popular with the powerful corporations -- its tag line is: Biting the hand that feeds IT.

The Register frequently uses sarcasm in its articles and often provides an iconoclastic stance (e.g. referring to Google as the worlds largest text-ad broker). Some think its reportage is closer to that of British tabloid newspapers than other technology web sites, terming it a Tech Tabloid. Articles are listed on the home page with most recent at the top, three to a line, allowing easy access to breaking news. Much to the amusement of its readers, The Register occasionally runs articles satirizing selected people (e.g., Captain Cyborg, aka Kevin Warwick).

1 Divisions
2 In-jokes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Divisions

Channel Register covers computer business and trade news, which includes business press releases.

Reg Developer covers news and articles for software developers.

Reg Hardware covers news and articles for computing and consumer electronics hardware.

Reg Research is an in-depth resource on all manner of technologies and how they relate to your business.

Cash'n'Carrion is a shop for The Register merchandises.

In 2002-2-25, The Register expanded its business to United States under 'The Register USA', using domain name www.theregus.com, through a joint venture with Tom’s Hardware Guide.^[2] In 2003-2-24, that site was switched to the current theregister.com domain name.^[3] The Register US site was later expanded into an international news site.

[edit] In-jokes

The Register is famous for its many long-running in-jokes:

Articles dealing with Yahoo! often have each word in their title punctuated with an exclamation mark, e.g.: "Yahoo! Is! A! Search! Engine!"
When talking about the RIAA or the MPAA, the organizations are always referred to as the "Recording Industry Ass. of America" and the "Motion Picture Ass. of America," respectively, deliberately shortening "Association" (to one letter shorter than the usual "Assn." abbreviation).
Articles which deal with the growth of artificial intelligence technology and technological mishaps are often reported in tongue-in-cheek "alarmist" fashion, and grouped under the heading "Rise of the Machines" (RoTM). In cases of technological mishaps, the incident is always speculated to be the work of an evil alien race called the Lizard Alliance and that they are being fought back by a group called the neoLuddite Resistance Army (or NRA, quite possibly a play on the acronym of the National Rifle Association).
"Otto Z Stern" is a contributor for The Register. Otto's persona is that of a controversy-courting right-wing American technology commentator. Stern's articles specialise in criticism of topics such as open-source software, blogs, Google and the perils of the Asian Invasion as well as other things that Stern considers to be weak and unmanly. Many of Stern's comments are considered deeply racist especially towards Asians (mostly Chinese). It is suspected that Stern's stories are written by Julio Stantore, based on frequent references to him in Otto's articles as well as attributing quotes to him.^[4]
Haiku competition results often include entries from a list of usual suspects who, intentionally or unintentionally, break the rules of the competition for comic effect.
Intel's Itanium is always referred to as Itanic. The term refers to Titanic, the infamous ocean liner which sank in 1912, and alludes to the perception that Itanium is a white elephant which cost Intel and HP many billions of dollars while failing to achieve expected performance and sales in the originally projected timeframe.

Many readers take The Register's spoof articles seriously. To the amusement of The Register's regular readers, their anger-filled letters are commonly published a few days later. Many of these letters are left unedited, leaving in misspellings, grammatical errors, and errors in logic. In fact, the Register publishes many of the letters they are sent, usually on Friday afternoon.