The Register

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Current logo of The Register.

The Register ("El Reg" to its staff and readers) is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice and Mike 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.

The Register frequently uses sarcasm and satire in its articles, in the manner of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, and often provides an iconoclastic stance e.g. referring to Google as the world's largest text-ad broker. Articles are listed on the home page with most recent at the top, three to a line, allowing easy access to breaking news. The Register occasionally runs articles satirizing selected people e.g., Captain Cyborg, aka Kevin Warwick.

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 does not aim to be popular with the powerful corporations – its tag line is: Biting the hand that feeds IT.

1 Divisions
2 Resignation of Mike Magee
3 In-jokes
4 References
5 Further reading
6 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. News and articles for computing and consumer electronics hardware is covered by Reg 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. On 25 February 2002, 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.^[1] On February 24, 2003, that site was switched to the current theregister.com domain name.^[2] The Register US site was later expanded into an international news site. The Register has offices in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco and Mountain View in California.

[edit] Resignation of Mike Magee

Co-founder Mike Magee left the company amid some controversy after posting criticism of The Register management, complaining that The Register had become a "vehicle of software",^[3] on 23 August 2001. This ran counter to Magee's own expertise and interest in hardware. The following morning, Magee posted an email from The Register management team that described Magee's criticism of The Register as "gross misconduct", concluding that Magee had effectively dismissed himself.^[4] Magee went on to found The Inquirer which reported science and technology news with the same tongue-in-cheek style as The Register, but with a greater emphasis on hardware development.

[edit] In-jokes

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The Register features 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".
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.^[5]
Haiku competition results often include entries from a list of regular contributors who, intentionally or unintentionally, break the rules of the competition for comic effect.
The Intel Itanium processor 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.
Second Life is referred to as 'Sadville', joking Daniel Sadville, a reporter that covers Second Life to CNET.^[6]
Captain Cyborg, Kevin Warwick described as 'the nutty professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading'
Journalistic Integrity, Under the motto "Integrity - we've heard of it", The Register claimed that, for a price, they would print any story and for an even higher price they remove any story, with a tariff list".^[7] This was, however, satire.
The Register consistently refers to the Apple iPhone as the "Jesus Phone" – satirizing the immense hype over its launch.
The Register consistently refers to prolific Wikipedia editors as 'wiki-fiddlers'.^[8]
Headlines for stories about Facebook often add "...bitch" to the end or imply its users are "bitches", mocking its founder, who had "I'm CEO...bitch" on his business card.^[9]