THE REGISTER

'''The Register''' ("'''El Reg'''" to its staff) is a British technology tabloid 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 first Register article was published on 1 August 1998.^[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 labeled 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''). Much of the reporting is of a style more commonly found in British tabloid newspapers than in more serious news publications. 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).

Contents

Divisions

Resignation of Mike Magee

In-jokes

References

Further reading

External links

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.
On 25th 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.^[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. The Register has offices in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco and Mountain View in California.

Resignation of Mike Magee

Mike Magee, one of the original founders of ''The Register'', left the site amid some controvery after posting criticism of ''The Register'' management, complaining that The Register had become a "vehicle of software"^[4], 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^[5]. 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.

In-jokes

''The Register'' is famous for its many long-running in-jokes in the manner of the British satirical magazine Private Eye.

★ 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.^[6]

★ 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.

★ Second Life is referred to as 'Sadville'.

★ Captain Cyborg , Kevin Warwick described as 'the nutty professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading'
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.

References

1. GAME expansion plans on target
2. The Register Comes to the US
3. theregister.com goes live
4. Mike Magee posts ''The Register'' criticism to Silicon Investor message board, retrieved 22nd August 2007
5. Mike Magee posts email from ''The Register'' management to Silicon Investor message board, retrieved 22nd August 2007
6. My dead, much mourned friend: Jimmy Wales An article that refers to Julio Stantore.

Further reading

★ How online journalism got its UK start

External links

★ The Register: UK Edition, International

★ Channel Reg: UK Edition, International

★ Reg Developer: UK Edition, International

★ Reg Hardware: UK Edition, International

★ Cash'n'Carrion