The Register
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The Register ("El Reg" to its staff) is a British technology news website focusing on the computer industry. It was founded by John Lettice and Mike "Crazy Brit" Magee in 1994, initially as an email service. Mike Magee left The Register in 2001 to start The Inquirer after some controversy.
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 labelled as such. It does not aim to be popular with the powerful corporations - their tag line is: Biting the hand that feeds IT.
The Register frequently uses sarcasm in their articles, meaning that the language used is closer to that of British tabloid newspapers than other technology web sites. Articles are listed on the home page with most recent at the top, three to a line, allowing easy access to breaking news. Much to the amusement of its readers, The Register occasionally runs articles satirizing selected people (e.g., Captain Cyborg, aka Kevin Warwick).
The Register has been a frequent critic of Wikipedia and those who have spoken out in favour of Wikipedia. [Here is an example]. Its recent articles have criticised Nature and its study on the accuracy of Wikipedia. These articles appear to have been written exclusively by Andrew Orlowski.
In-jokes
The Register is famous for its many long-running in-jokes:- Articles dealing with Yahoo! will often have each word in their title punctuated with an exclamation mark, e.g.: "Yahoo! Is! A! Search! Engine!"
- When talking about the RIAA, their acronym is always partially expanded to "Recording Industry Ass. of America", deliberately shortening "Association" (to one letter shorter than the usual "Assn." abbreviation).
- Articles which deal with the growth of artificial intelligence technology are often reported in tongue-in-cheek "alarmist" fashion, and grouped under the heading "Rise of the Machines".
- Otto Z Stern is a fictional byline commonly used by The Register for satirical articles. Otto's persona is a parody of controversy-courting right-wing American technology commentators in general. Stern's articles specialise in criticism of topics such as open-source software, as well as other things that Stern considers to be weak and unmanly. Although the articles contain clear hints that Stern is not a real person (his biography at the end of each article states that he is "locked and loaded... nursing an opal-plated prostate"), many do not understand the joke. It is suspected that these are written by Julio Stantore, based on similarily provocative writing style.
External links
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