The Register
Ballmer backs away from 'Vista Capable' legal row
Steve Ballmer has distanced himself from the ongoing “Vista Capable” legal spat by claiming he had no direct involvement in Microsoft’s marketing campaign for the operating system.…
Harvey Keitel to experience <em>Life on Mars</em>
Here's some good news for those of you who like a good British TV series with fewer British people in it and preferably set in the US of A: American viewers will later this week get to enjoy Life on Mars relocated to New York and with Harvey Keitel as "irascible" Lieutenant Gene Hunt.…
Acer: We’re comin’ at ya, Dell
And so to Budapest last month for Acer’s annual global press conference. What did I learn?…
eBay cuts jobs, buys credit firm
eBay is laying off 1,000 staff and getting rid of hundreds of temporary positions at the same time as it buys three companies.…
Nexsan breaks up archive for faster search
Nexsan is splitting its content archive into pieces for faster search and archive service delivery to individual users.…
Captain Cyborg to chew the fat with Ultra Hal
Reading Uni's cybernetic media strumpet Kev "Captain Cyborg" Warwick is poised to put six computer programmes to ultimate test - that devised by Alan Turing in which the machine must engage in convincingly human banter, thereby heralding "the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997".…
In-body electric eel tech to make 'leccy from body fat
US scientists believe it could be possible to use artificial electric eel cells grafted into the human body to generate power for cybernetic implant devices. The pseudo-electrocytes would harvest the necessary energy from body fats and sugars.…
Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API
Fail and You If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.…
Agile development - can’t scale, won’t scale?
Reg Reader Workshop Who could fault the base principles of agility? I was recently talking to a CIO of a European telco, who was totally bought into the strategy of delivering services as fast as possible to customers. In this fickle, subscriber-based market time literally means money won or lost relative to the competition.…
SanDisk gets Samsung in X4 armlock
A US court ruling makes SanDisk free to charge Samsung more licence fee cash for its industry-leading four-bits-per-cell Flash technology.…
<em>Manhunt 2</em> to hit UK on Halloween
What better day to release the second most complained about game after Grand Theft Auto IV than 31 October, otherwise known as Halloween?…
BSA flashes gums at 'online software scams'
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) claimed late last week to have issued nearly 50,000 takedown notices about BitTorrent files in the first half of this year.…
Melamine, poisons and the misappliance of science
As melamine alerts reverberate around the world in the wake of China's dairy export industry, it affords us an opportunity to look at bad chemistry while considering the scale of the global food market. And how vulnerable consumers are when garden-variety greed, not terrorism, is the driver in mass poisonings.…
Obscene Publications Act rides again
The legal world is buzzing at the announcement last week of the prosecution of 35-year-old civil servant Darryn Walker for the online publication of material that Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) believe to be obscene.…
Stick health warnings on gays, says Stock Exchange chaplain
The chaplain to the London Stock Exchange may be forced to walk the plank after demanding that gay chaps be tattooed with cig-packet-style health warnings highlighting the evils of boy-on-boy.…
Amazon's 'Kindle 2' spotted in the wild
Amazon clearly isn’t about to sit back and let Sony’s latest Reader hog all the limelight. It's no surprise, then, that pictures of the online retailer’s updated Kindle have appeared online.…
Credit agencies get death lists
Credit agencies and other organisations will receive a weekly encrypted list of deaths from the official registrar to stop fraudsters using the identities of the recently deceased to apply for credit cards and identity documents.…

