www.theregister.com - Articles

Believe it or not, torching existing stock and starting over may work out cheaper Throughout my career I have seen many Windows releases with minimum requirements that were a little bit deceiving. Sure, the machines would boot, but you would sometimes have enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee before the computer was in a usable state.…

The next stage in China’s world domination plans – buying Micron

Splatter your digital fluid all OVER than screen Google has mashed the Processing graphics language into its Cast software, letting visual artists and others with a bent for graphics point their creations at the nearest big-screen TV.…

Benefits, costs and performance HPC blog + vid I recently had a conversation with Pat McGinn, product manager at Cool IT. Fortunately I recorded our chat, then matched it up with some slides to package it into a webcast.…

Latest rock-zapping by nuclear laser tank yields strange results NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover has aimed its ChemCam laser at some unusually light-coloured rocks on Mars and discovered a surprising similarity between them and the rocks of Earth's granitic continental crust.…

‘New legislative framework’ needed, says RUSI report Blighty's Independent Surveillance Review, commissioned by former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and conducted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), has concluded that spy agencies aren't breaking the law - and recommends a new legislative framework and oversight regime.…

Your customers' cat vids will be safe and dispatchable aboard this Micron has revved its middle-of-the-road M500DC SSD with smaller cells and boosted security to turn out a cost-optimised SSD which it says will take over more work from spinning disks.…

Brussels moves like striking cobra, looks to achieve October agreement The second round of negotiations on the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) saw real movement on Tuesday, according to negotiators.…

50 legal letters land in six months as spooks seek insights into traffic Content delivery network CloudFlare says it has received 50 court orders in the first half of this year, more than double that clocked in the whole of 2014.…

Or giving the money back A former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lecturer has been sentenced to a year in prison, after videotaping himself as he robbed a Manhattan bank last year.…

Redmond wants to work where the grunt is, not where power is puny Microsoft and Georgia University researchers have developed a system that can make wearable devices up to nine times faster with four times the battery life by offloading processing to traditional mobile devices.…

Better to rebuild later than over-invest now, says network builder +comment nbn™ , the entity charged with building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has argued it is better to re-configure its fibre-to-the-node network than to build it to handle high levels of traffic.…

Retro-gamers rejoice: there's an Amiga emulator aboard Video The Commodore PET, a beloved micro-computer of the late 1970s, is coming back as an Android phablet.…

New mums will be able to ship nature's finest food to junior IBM will start a breast-milk-delivery-as-a-service offering for female employees and their kids.…

XP rump now carrion for hackers as malware removal tool pulled, A-V updates cease Windows XP holdouts are even more danger than ever after Microsoft abandoned anti-malware support for the ancient platform.…

Some see a dog or a heart in NASA snap, we see SASQUATCH NASA has announced that the New Horizons spacecraft has phoned home after passing behind Pluto. All systems are apparently nominal, the craft has recorded just the amount of data NASA hoped for and images and analysis are beaming their way back across the solar system as you read this story.…

A little bit of Snowden paranoia and a whole lot of economic stimulus India is reportedly pondering a new policy that would see only home-baked silicon used in its military, space program and atomic energy industry.…

Non-penguins finally allowed into Chocolate Factory's cloud club, with hybrid options Google's Cloud Platform has offered any operating system you want, so long as it's Linux. But as of this week you can also run Windows Server in the company's cloud.…

Screeching U-turn on what was touted not that long ago The CEO of discussion-board website Reddit has barely been in the job for a few days, and already he's managed to arouse the ire of some redditors.…

Compliance-conscious folk get SmsSaaS: Slightly-more-secure-software-as-a-service Salesforce has launched its slightly-more-secure-software-as-a-service for organisations in industries compelled to wrap themselves in red tape.…

Chocolate Factory asking users to police themselves with edits Google is set to reopen its Maps service to user-submitted edits and labels albeit through a new moderating process.…

AArch64 build aimed at testing and development Suse has made a version of its eponymous enterprise Linux distro available for hardware vendors who want to deliver products to market based on 64-bit ARM processors, in a new expansion of its partner program.…

Bulk phone record snooping is no longer allowed, privacy watchdog cries The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing James Clapper – the US Director of National Intelligence – and other government bigwigs to stop the NSA from gathering innocent citizens' phone records in bulk.…

Why this three-billion-mile journey was worth it Comment With everyone going ape over the stunning crisp pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe of the dwarf freezeworld Pluto, there are few voices asking if it was worth sending out a space probe to the far end of the Solar System – but it wasn't always that way.…

59 flaws, many critical, affecting Office desktops, RDP servers, Hyper-V systems, etc Microsoft has released fixes for 59 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its software – including a patch for the elevation-of-privilege flaw in Windows exploited by spyware maker Hacking Team.…

Apple isn't the only one that wants to track your smartphone Google has jumped on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon bandwagon with a set of open standards and software interfaces to give Apple's iBeacon a run for its money.…

Snowden's pal SSSSick of getting TSA shakedowns Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar for the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, is suing the US government to find out why she spent six years being repeatedly harassed by border security guards.…

How someone was able to buy bloomberg.market and, er, move the market Twitter's shares jumped four per cent this morning after a fake news story claimed the biz had received a $31bn buyout offer.…

Ha - that made ya think, didn't it? HP will resell Seagate's Lustre-ous ClusterStor 1500 and 9000 high-performance computing arrays, while Seagate is adding IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system to ClusterStor alongside Lustre.…

Mighty Large Hadron Collider traps squealing ultrateeny thingy Pic Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they have discovered the pentaquark – a class of subatomic particles never seen before. The LHCb collaboration team has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.…

With these data building bricks you could build a data ... shed? DDN has an entry-level Lustre appliance called the ES7K, EXAScaler 7000.…

Software portfolio looks like a nicotine addict's buttocks Adobe has released patches for its Flash software to fix a pair of critical security vulnerabilities exposed by the Hacking Team megabreach. The bugs can be exploited to hijack PCs and infect them with malware – and crooks are already doing just that, so apply the updates now.…

Finns reaffirm arms-length hardware plans Analysis Yes, Nokia will probably make Nokia-brand phones again. And other people will make them for Nokia. The company has just re-reaffirmed the strategy it announced at its Capital Markets Day last November - when nobody seemed to be paying close attention.…

No amount of scrubbing could shift UEFI BIOS nasty ‪Hacking Team RCS spyware came pre-loaded with an UEFI (‬Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) ‪BIOS rootkit to hide itself on infected systems, it has emerged following the recent hacking of the controversial surveillance firm.‬…

Cool it chaps, fed-dodger kit is hardly a major innovation Rhino Security has suddenly pulled the plug on its “ProxyHam” WiFi relay project and withdrawn from the upcoming DefCon conference.…

'Temporary pending a patch'. Until the next time Mozilla has blocked Flash in Firefox by default in response to newly unveiled Hacking Team exploits against Adobe's already Swiss-cheesey software.…

Whoops, sorry, did we not make that clear - Google Uninstalling the Google Photos app from your Android device will not safeguard your pictures from being slurped up by Google, it turns out.…

Justify your travel and supplies, Oompa-Loompas told Google is curbing staff recruitment and introducing a number of penny-pinching efficiency practices to try and gets its profit growth back on track, according to reports.…

Temporary measure to 'stress and validate' delivery system Microsoft’s closed the tap on fresh builds of Windows 10 in preparation for final launch.…

Uncle Sam may have something to say about that, though A WSJ report says a Chinese government owned chip-maker is bidding $23 billion to buy Micron, the USA's top DRAM and flash manufacturer.…

Waves against the machine Geek's Guide to Britain Last time London flooded was 1953. Three hundred lives were lost, 30,000 evacuated and the damage totalled a considerable £5bn in today’s money.…

Office 365 leads the way Microsoft’s enterprise customers are adopting its cloud software in droves, a survey of delegates at the vendor’s Ignite 2015 conference in Chicago reveals.…

You'll have to get your wallet out like some sort of Stone Age SAVAGE HSBC has denied it has been frozen out of Apple Pay, after its customers were surprised to learn they could not join in the mass British bonk-banking bonanza today.…

Boffins chuffed at chromosome activity breakthrough We all start out as a single cell, which divides into new cells which divide into new cells in their turn. Worn-out tissues get replaced, wounds heal, our ears - not especially usefully - keep on growing even once they're quite big enough thank you*.…