The Register

Management, devs, ops, Bob too... just be freakin' reasonable Don't be like Bob. You remember Bob, right? Tasked with building the company's cloud. Sinking in a quicksand of managerial buzzword bingo and ever-changing requirements, burdened by a lack of resources. Bob was under pressure, which produced tension at home, and Bob quit the job resulting in the company's cloud project floundering.…

The keyboard's cosmetic in this 'retro-games-baked-onto ROM' with HDMI and USB caper The Commodore 64 is coming back, in a form that owes a debt to both Nintendo's shrunken Mini SNES and thee Vega+ Sinclair ZX Spectrum reboot.…

Reality will have to do unless you can leap-frog quantum computing That “we live in a simulation" trope being advanced by Elon Musk and some folk on the fringes of science? Fuggeddaboutit, because it's impossible to build a simulator that would reproduce what humans already know about quantum systems.…

Cosmic carbon crashes, plus grains galore, set the chemical world cranking Life began on Earth only a few hundred million years after the planet’s surface was cool enough for pools of liquid water to form, according to a new study published today.…

Big Red has all this year's big buzzwords covered OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has launched an enterprise-grade blockchain cloud service, as part of a flurry of announcements at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.…

Google wants Android devices to survive four OS upgrades, even if LTS releases make Linus a bit grumpy Long-term-support (LTS) editions of the Linux Kernel will henceforth be supported for six years, up from the current two.…

KompriseCloud can now shunt data between different cloud storage operators Data management software vendor Komprise has added extra cold cloud tiers to its data lifecycle manager, which moves data to slower access storage tiers without affecting its accessibility.…

We thought this stuff would turn up where there's already life. Turns out it's everywhere Scientists have announced today that a stable organohalogen, a class of compounds normally produced by organisms on Earth, has been detected for the first time in space.…

Newly-freed security vendor thinks it can drag users into cloudy security analytics SonicWall has updated its product range with an eye on ransomware and mesh networking.…

Ghost-of-Zune music subscription service retired, users shunted to Spotify Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new book says the company has its groove back, yet the company has also decided to kill off the Zune-zombie nby sending music subscription service "Groove" to its doom.…

AU$297 million a year bought co-operation as much as services, says ANAO Australia's National Audit Office (ANAO) says Telstra isn't delivering value for money under contracts it won to deliver subsidised telecommunications services in remote areas under the nation's universal service obligation (ISO) program.…

There's a nasty bug in media file handling – deja vu, right? Another month, another round of Android patches – although October's batch is pleasantly small compared to other recent releases.…

Hurd flames first after his 2016 predictions were live-trashed OpenWorld 2017 Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd appears not to have shrugged off past criticism of his predictions for the state of cloud computing in the year 2025, a staple of his recent appearances at Big Red's OpenWorld gabfest.…

Ex-CEO says company stayed silent about hack to stop crims piling on with more attacks Equifax was just as much of a trash-fire as it looked: the company saw the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability warning, failed to patch its systems, and held back a public announcement for weeks for fear of “copycat” attacks.…

Australian mine train capable of hauling 236 carriages and 29,500 tonnes goes 100km without anyone aboard Paraburdoo is a tiny town in Australia's north west famous for being hot, dry, remote … and the site of a rich iron ore mine operated by Rio Tinto, which has just run the first fully autonomous mine train to the town.…

Monday's events cancelled after music festival attack NetApp's Insight conference has been delayed a day after its venue, the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, was used by a terrorist to shoot and kill at least 59 people and hurt more than 527.…

Broadcast TV gets a big bear hug in upgraded operating system and gizmo line Roku today responded to Apple with a new range of streaming boxes and an updated operating system that tightly integrates broadcast TV.…

Launch comes a week after Nest does the same The smart home battleground has moved to security systems, with smart doorbell biz Ring announcing this week a new product just days before Nest dove into the same market.…

FSB buddies pinky-swore to let ArcSight know of any flaws discovered Hewlett Packard Enterprise handed over the source code for its ArcSight security platform to Russian investigators in exchange for being allowed to sell kit in the former Soviet Union.…

We can't throw money at nerds if they can't get here, wail Silicon Valley's sugar daddies A group of technology venture capitalists are suing the US government for, effectively, preventing them from investing in startups due to immigration red tape.…

Long-delayed update adds support for modern web tech OpenWorld Java EE 8 arrived last month rather later than expected – but it landed in time for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne, which are taking place this week in San Francisco, California.…

Linux, Android, IoT, you name it, they'll need updates if you use this open-source tool Google security engineers have spotted not one, not two, but seven serious flaws in Dnsmasq, a fairly widely used DNS forwarder and DHCP server.…

New report digs into economic damage caused by over-zealous governments A new report estimates the cost to African countries routinely pulling the plug on their citizens' internet access is around $1m a day.…

Class-action sueball alleges discrimination OpenWorld Oracle is being sued by some of its former women staffers who claim they were deliberately and unfairly paid less than their male colleagues.…

But analysts say good luck convincing newcomers In an attempt to entice new blood to those dinosaur systems of record known as mainframes, Detroit software firm Compuware has moved its development environment to the cloud.…

Perhaps this will calm the American military? Chinese drone-maker DJI has re-announced its "local data mode" for phone-home UAVs, around six weeks after first promising to introduce it following the US Army banning use of its products.…

It's the same for fruit flies Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbach and Michael Young have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".…

Injunction application nixed by Northern Irish High Court A sex offender with 74 convictions who changed his name to escape his past has been refused permission to sue Google by a judge in Northern Ireland.…

Orange you glad that growers beat showers? Things are getting real for outdoor pumpkin growers ahead of a European championship that starts in less than a week: a German team yesterday won the national heats with a near-800kg orange beast.…

But sources say critique is 'politically expedient' Head of Ofcom Sharon White has come out swinging against providers' legal challenges to its spectrum auction proposals – accusing them of derailing Britain’s “golden opportunity” to take a lead in 5G.…

What now? Readers and pundits like to compare Apple products to Veblen goods: the pricier they are, the stronger the demand. An iPhone is a status symbol and an aspirational good; it shows the world you have taste and money. When Apple tried a cut-price iPhone, it flopped.…

The bonbon of backup, cola bottle of containers, foam teeth of flash Storage roundup You're getting plenty of hardware sugar (NVMe) and remote software spice (the public cloud), with lots of tasty goodies in between in this week's storage roundup.…

Back up now, but packet loss ongoing Problems at Linode's data centre in Germany have led to connectivity issues with its cloud services over the weekend, and we understand the vendor is currently trying to solve a packet loss problem.…

It could be you* The UK National Lottery has apologised for a website outage that left money in their pockets of punters unable to play games on Saturday evening.…

Kill or capture, and get £50k for trying The Ministry of Justice is offering up to £50,000 for bright ideas to stop drones and mobile phones from getting into prisons.…

File under management bullsh$t, for now* As soon as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's book Hit Refresh was introduced as a "masterpiece" of how to scale up the "growth mindset" by the on-stage interviewer, it quickly became apparent this wasn't going to be a Paxman-esque grilling.…

Buy now! Buy now! Buy now! Or commit to the firm for a decade Life is about to get a lot more expensive for some customers of Fasthosts with domain renewal price hikes as high as 160 per cent coming into effect late next month – unless of course they buy early.…

Security, compatibility, control... we enter another world of pain I have a confession: I've fallen out of love with Bring Your Own Device.…

Larry Ellison is keen on ‘Anything we can possibly do to reduce human intervention’ OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has kicked off its annual OpenWorld conference with a pledge to automate in the company's “autonomous” database, plus plenty of snark directed at Amazon Web Services.…

US financial watchdog drags four into court A US SanDisk manager and his family have been accused of insider trading after profiting from the biz's acquisition of Fusion-io.…

Cloudflare Workers offered to customize content Bit caching biz Cloudflare on Friday teased website publishers with the prospect of being able to run JavaScript at the edge of its content delivery network, a capability that promises performance, security, and reliability improvements.…

It could hint at the possibilities of life on other planets early on in their development Scientists claim to have found the oldest evidence of life on Earth – contained in Canadian rocks 3.95 billion years ago, when our planet had no oxygen and was being pelted by asteroids.…

Sorenson dinged after cockup blocked emergency calls A US telco will cough up $3m after a web domain screwup caused it to drop potentially emergency and other essential video calls from deaf and hearing-impaired people.…

By 2024. Possibly. SpaceX isn't very good at deadlines Elon Musk thinks he can get humans onto Mars within the next seven years. On Friday, he told the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, how he intends to do it.…

Senate draft law finds careful balance, opens doors to mass production A law proposed in the US Senate would pave the way for hundreds of thousands of autonomous vehicles on America's streets in the next few years.…

Boffins bash stale Stack Overflow fixes and lazy developers Relying on search engines to find answers to coding problems has become so common that two years ago it was suggested computer programming be renamed "googling Stack Overflow," in reference to the oft-visited coding community website.…

Iceball K2 is already active despite being far from the Sun The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of the farthest-away inbound comet, at a whopping 1.5 billion miles from Earth.…

Cutting-edge tattoo checks your blood sugar, still disappoints your mother Researchers at Harvard and MIT have developed a subdermal ink capable of monitoring vitals such as hydration and blood sugar.…

But Ajit Pai still expected to clear US Senate hurdle next week For a man who repeatedly criticized his predecessor at the Federal Communications Commission for dragging the US watchdog in a bi-partisan direction, in his eight months as FCC chairman Ajit Pai has done more than anyone to infect it with Washington politics.…

Advises US citizens to avoid Castroland The US State Department on Friday announced that it is pulling all non-essential staff and their families out of its embassy in Cuba following reports of a secret weapon being deployed against employees there.…