The Register

Strengthening pound knocks Q4 off course Computacenter closed off 2015 on a bit of a low as turnover slipped due to the strengthening Pound versus the Euro and comparatively lighter customer spending on classic tech products in Blighty.…

Beat these nasties – if you can Nightmare before downtime Blame cloud, blame DevOps, blame the increasingly prevalent trend towards managerial OCD, but server installations are becoming tidier.…

When the Royal Statistical Society slaps you down, you've got it badly wrong The heads of Britain’s statistics society have written to the Health Secretary to point out that the government’s alcohol guidelines don’t accurately reflect the numbers.…

Ovine stinger A high-speed car chase in New Zealand's south island ended rather improbably when a carload of perps was brought to a halt by a flock of sheep.…

Carry on database splicing Splice Machine has secured $9m in C-round funding to carry on splicing Hadoop and relational database management system (RDBMS) technologies together. Total funding is now $31m and the extra cash will pay for accelerated product, sales and marketing efforts.…

It's all about the money, moans anti-lobbying chap Google has once again proved it is Silicon Valley's biggest lobbying spender, splashing out more than $16m (£11.2m) for the second year running in its attempts to bend the ear of government.…

Leader of world's biggest religion meets the Pope The leader of one the world’s biggest religions was due to meet the pope today, leaving some Vatican watchers wondering if the pontiff has discovered a new form of Friday self-sacrifice.…

Some well known, and some you've probably never heard of This week marked the 97th birthday of one of the world's greatest ever airmen, Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown RN, who flew nearly 500 different types of aircraft. Here's a quick look at some notable daredevils from World War Two.…

Dark plasma lenses or divine appendages? Stargazers from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) have recorded the effect of interstellar gas "lenses", which interfere with quasar radio wave emissions.…

But before all that, think of a really crap car firm Comment Imagine that one giant manufacturer dominated the car market. The cars it made weren’t very good, but they were much cheaper and easier to buy than cars from anyone else, so the car company had ended up dominating the market.…

Agenda for DevOps and CD conference filling up The schedule for Continuous Lifecycle London is filling up, and today we’re pleased to announce four all-day workshop sessions on May 5 for those of you who want to drill really really deep on DevOps, Agile and CD.…

It's only taxpayers' money, nobody will really care. Right? Kent County Council and two other local authorities are on a mission to splash between £50m and £100m on a mega outsourcing gig with managed services providers.…

Malwarebytes sting operation catches out Silurian Tech Support An authorised Symantec reseller has been caught hoodwinking users into buying security software by employing underhand marketing tactics.…

Mystic Meg? Bring it on, Delusive Dabbs! Something for the Weekend, Sir? Welcome to the future! The skies are full of flying cars, the waters are full of personal submarines and our digital wallets are full of 57 varieties of mutually incompatible blockchain-based monetary currency.…

Says Continuous Delivery world deserves more than "half-baked" solutions... Software delivery automation vendor JFrog has snagged $50m in investment, in what it claims is the biggest single investment in any DevOps company so far.…

Do you think we bang on about the cloud too much? We write about cloud computing so often that some readers have taken to our forums to accuse us, as one put it, of flag waving for "cloud, cloud, cloud, nothing but cloud and how good it supposedly is."…

Outsourcing 'your mess for less' no longer viable. So what is? Comment Having thrown out the baby with the bathwater in its "outsource everything" drive beginning nearly two decades ago, Whitehall is now keen to bring tech staff back in-house. But how much roadmap does it have for breaking its soon-to-expire mega deals and for "transforming" IT?…

Even the cargo market's dried up for the Jumbo Jet. Next stop, elephant's graveyard? Boeing will reduce the number of 747s it makes to just one every two months, citing a collapse in demand for the iconic aircraft.…

There are times when even asking the user to turn it off and on again just won't do On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our regular look at the things readers have been asked to do on duty as paid fixer-uppers.…

App-specific parameters divvy up the storage pool Maxta Application-Defined Storage (MADS) can optimise storage in its pool for multiple and concurrent applications like VDI, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Oracle Database.…

And to get the good ones working for you, you'll need ten times that sum The scrawniest organisations wanting to setup bug bounties should be prepared to pay at least $1500 for the least important but relevant vulnerability reports, according to Bug Crowd.…

New tech preview scales up, eases migrations and mixes CPUs into compute soup Would anyone move VMs from VMware to Citrix? XenServer's made it easier with a w technical preview of XenServer, probably for version 7.0.…

Ad giant claims it's cracking down on dodgy downloads, fringe medicine and phoul phish Google blocked 780 million malicious and annoying advertisements last year, up from 256 million in 2014.…

Thinking about a single point of access for storage is just crazy! Comment A few days ago I had an interesting chat with Andy Warfield at Coho Data and the topic of the network/storage relationship came up several times. (Quick disclaimer: I'm currently doing some work for Coho). In a couple of my latest articles (here and here), I talked about why many large IT organizations prefer PODs to other topologies for their datacenters but I forgot to talk about networking (I also have to admit that networking is not my field at all). So, this article could be the right follow-up for those posts.…

Should be a good conference if the medium is the message (NOT) Scores of security bods registering for security outfit RSA's Executive Security Action Forum (ESAF) have handed over their Twitter account passwords to the company's website in what is seen something between bad practise and outright compromise.…

Influential editor and author put his stamp on dozens of classic novels and anthologies Influential science fiction author and editor David G. Hartwell has died, aged 74.…

Office Insider program extends to OS X Microsoft is extending the Office Insider early build program to users running Office for Mac.…

Astronauts won’t require parachutes with new design Vid SpaceX has released video showing the hovering capabilities of its Dragon 2 crew capsule that could eventually eliminate the need for astronauts to land using parachutes.…

FDA says to return drug-laced bottles. We're sure everyone will comply The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is sounding alarms after an herbal cough remedy sold throughout the US was found to contain morphine.…

And Google paid Apple $1bn to put its search into iPhones An Oracle lawyer has blurted out in court how much money Google has made from Android – figures that the web giant has fiercely fought to keep secret.…

Greene light for cloud plans The Chocolate Factory and Red Hat have announced a partnership to run the Linux firm's OpenShift Dedicated container platform on the Google Cloud Platform in the next few months.…

Developers had a thing for Scarlett Johansson, too AMX, which supplies communications kit for the White House, US military, and several of the largest corporations, built a superhero-themed surveillance backdoor into its products.…

MIKEY-IBAKE could alert people to fact they're being monitored The researcher who discovered that the UK government's phone encryption standard has a huge backdoor installed has made another discovery: GCHQ's rejection of a better encryption standard because it didn't allow for undetectable spying.…

It’s a pain! Data and storage capacity growth Research house 451 reckons public cloud storage spend will double in two years, with on-premises storage spend falling 17 per cent.…

Big Blue's bucks buy business to build better broadcast bundles IBM has acquired internet telly station Ustream in hopes of boosting its cloud lineup.…

Eyes in the sky spy Lima's illegal rubbish dumps The powers that be in Peruvian capital Lima have scrambled a squadron of ten trained vultures in their war against illegal rubbish dumping.…

Up your game, says Dutch consumer group Samsung is being sued by a Dutch consumer group for its alleged lackadaisical approach to security updates for its Android phones.…

Build the apps and they will come? Er, no they won't, say developers Microsoft has invested huge effort into building the Universal Windows Platform, but it is failing at the last hurdle - getting applications to users, according to frustrated Austrian developer Nikolaus Gebhardt.…

There, there... personal storage, no pain It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a 2.5in 1TB class SSD roundup would have been laughable mainly because the very idea of a 1TB drive aimed at the consumer market would have been considered a flight of fancy.…

Caught drunk, armed and packing perplexing pork product A Virginia man is due to appear before a Grand Jury in February having been caught in his neighbour's garden while drunk, armed, wearing a camouflage mask and carrying "a suspicious bag of bacon".…

Virtualisation is the future. Not cloud. Got that? OpenStack, once seen as the open alternative to Amazon’s AWS, is positioning itself as virtualized telecoms middleware.…

Republicans plot 2016 rising over tax regime Ireland’s republican party Sinn Féin has declared it has no intention of giving Apple any wriggle room over an upcoming European ruling that could leave it liable for billions in back taxes.…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux release packs it in Review Red Hat closed 2015 with an update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that bumps the venerable distro to version 7.2. That might sound innocuous but don't let the minor version number fool you, with huge leaps in software versions, a newfound love of all things cloud container and systemd updates under the hood, this is one of the single biggest updates Red Hat has ever pushed out.…

No, that's not a good thing The European Union has totted up all the IT jobs in the region for 2014 and this is what it found: nearly eight million ICT pros employed in the 28 member states and more than 80 per cent are men. They are also well-educated, with more than half completing tertiary education.…

Plus: Nuke all emails after 6 months Interview Microsoft thinks its litigation against the US government to protect your data is far more important than the Schrems case. And that was pretty big. What’s it all about?…

It’s official: 2015 was the warmest year on record. But those global temperature records only date back to 1850 and become increasingly uncertain the further back you go. Beyond then, we’re reliant on signs left behind in tree rings, ice cores or rocks. So when was the Earth last warmer than the present?…

Ad watchdog to clamp down on 'misleading' price claims Blighty's advertising regulator has vowed to clamp down on "misleading" broadband advertising prices, following its findings that three in four people are unable to work out true cost of broadband deals.…

Wannabe a kernel developer? Well, soon you can be and rather easily Analysis Linux container biz Docker has bought Unikernel Systems, a startup in Cambridge, UK, that's doing interesting things with roll-your-own operating systems.…

Troubled telco's 2015 TITSUP tore into subscriber base Around 250,000 broadband customers left TalkTalk following its major hack in October, according to research.…

Farewell to the division scrum? Britain’s MPs are to "de-quaint" the way they vote by registering their choice on tablets.…