A New York Times columnist has launched an attack on the idea of electrocar poster-child firm Tesla Motors receiving "bailout" federal loans, saying that the company's products are toys for the super-rich. Tesla says that the only reason it wants the government money is to finance the production of more affordable cars; the existing $100k Roadster supercar is expected to start turning a profit shortly without further investment.…

MSI has turned to Intel's other Atom processor, the Z series, for its next netbooks.…

Fail and You Before the internet, software distribution was cumbersome. While it was relatively cheap to reproduce computer code once it was written, sending floppy disks and CD-ROMs about created friction. Now, with heavy adoption of high speed connections, you can easily buy software and download it over the tubes. Bytes are bytes, no matter the medium.…

Review Releasing two MP3 players onto the market at the same time doesn't strike us as a wholly smart thing to do. Releasing two that look pretty much identical and have equally silly names could well be the acme of foolishness.…

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) looks set to hit manufacturers in April next year.…

Gamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks. A key design change in the P2P application promises to make the headaches faced by ISPs so far look like a party game. So what's happened, and why does it matter?…

Workers in the media industry face either an intoxicating future or one filled with doom because of Apple's Final Cut software and unifying digitisation removing layers of complexity from their work. That's the theme coming out of a tapeless media summit in held last week in London's Soho, a centre for media production and post-production work.…

Computer systems at three London hospitals are almost back to normal two weeks after a computer virus forced staff to shut down its network.…

Mini Poll When it comes to systems and processes for handling data and information, we've all heard about 'BI', data warehousing, content management, work flow and so on. However, if the challenge of 'exploiting information' were so easily dealt with, we'd presumably not be talking about such things so much. Except we are, and all the signs point towards an issue that's 'sort of only been half dealt with'.…

'Leccy Tech New pictures have emerged of Swiss car company Mindset's electric fast-back coupé type thing-a-me-jig, the E-Motion.…

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is firing 700 employees in Germany to increase its profitability in a move it says is not connected to Fujitsu's buying out of Siemens AG's 50 per cent holding in FSC.…

Blockbuster will start integrating its OnDemand film download-to-rent service into Blu-ray players from early next year, the firm’s Chairman has revealed.…

Radio Reg Bundling’s come a long way since Microsoft was dragged through the US courts in the 1990s for wrapping Internet Explorer into Windows.…

Four directors have left controversial ISP adware firm Phorm, including chairman of three months Stephen Heyer. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont is among their replacements.…

Free Download - The Reg Guide to Storage and Storage Platforms

The space shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Edwards air force base in California yesterday, completing a 16-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Lord Mandelson of Foy is preparing criteria to decide which British businesses the government should save if they go bankrupt.…

The wolves are gathering around the wreck that is Plasmon with companies offering to migrate people off Plasmon's optical products and onto a format with a more dependable future.…

Exclusive Hewlett-Packard has told its UK and Ireland-based staff that the computer giant won’t be funding their Christmas celebrations this year because of the worsening economic climate.…

Review Apple's MacBook Air may have put off some potential purchasers by eschewing a built-in optical drive, but it's not the only laptop to do so. The whole new wave of Small, Cheap Computers skimp on opticals for size and price reasons.…

Have you ever had the nagging sense that there's something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell - the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn't quite put your finger on it? We're here to help, dear reader.…

Taiwan might be best known to Reg readers as the home of the major DRAM manufacturers and other computer component makers but it is also home to the world's largest Buddhist charitable foundation.…

Review Elgato’s EyeTV 310 isn’t an entirely new product, but the recent launch of the Freesat satellite TV service has made it a bit more interesting for TV addicts here in the UK.…

A Wizard whispers in your ear: "The password of Sheffield Library Packet Switching Service is ABC1234XYZ."…

A Wizard whispers in your ear: "The password of Sheffield Library Packet Switching Service is ABC1234XYZ."…

Comment Silicon Valley has a new parlour game: what's going to happen to Sun after the cuts? Rumours suggest it will merge with EMC, that HP or IBM will take it over, that Fujitsu will buy its hardware business, or even that the StorageTek storage business unit will be spun off. Do Sun's leaders want to be redeemed or to retire?…

SanDisk is soon to announce new technology needed for its solid state drives to take on hard disk drive storage.…

Snipers are nasty, everyone knows that. They hunt people like animals, killing them without giving them a chance to fight or even to surrender. Few soldiers are more hated; even their own armies often seem less than pleased to have them around.…

Sally Murrer, a journalist for the Milton Keynes Citizen, has had charges against her for receiving leaked information dismissed by the judge.…

If you’re planning a rowdy night out in Portsmouth soon, then be careful what you get mixed up in. Because the city’s installed Minority Report-style CCTV cameras able to predict crimes before they’ve happened.…

The Ministry of Justice promised to provide public guidelines to the new extreme porn legislation this week and – behold! – here they are.…

Danish ISP Sonofon (part of Tele2) has once again been ordered by a Danish court to block the controversial Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. The record industry represented by The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) calls it a landmark ruling and says the decision confirms the illegality of Pirate Bay.…

A northbound stretch of the M42 was this morning closed after a six-vehicle pile-up "sent marshmallows and beer spilling out onto the carriageway", the BBC reports.…

The Liberal Democrats have called on the government to accept a set of priorities to stop the loss of confidential patient data from the health service.…

Clichés like ‘can’t measure, can’t manage’ stick around precisely because they are so difficult to achieve. Providing business managers with information about what their staff are up to is something that should be a fundamental use of IT, and indeed we have all spent happy hours tapping away our timesheets and capturing our actuals. Haven’t we?…

Are you frustrated with how difficult it can be to find information? What makes this more irksome is that the vendor community seems to have just woken up to the fact that there's a lot of information 'out there' to manage. Translated, this means that some of the larger vendors have recently got their act together with information management solutions (IMS) technology. The rest of the world has dealt with the challenge since time immemorial.…

Exclusive EDS UK and Ireland-based employees will face compulsory firings if Hewlett-Packard doesn’t hit its targets for voluntary redundancies for the first half of its fiscal 2009, The Register has learned.…

In 2004 Eric Raymond wrote an open letter to Sun Microsystems' then chief executive officer Scott McNealy demanding Sun open up their core Java intellectual property and allow anyone do whatever they damn well please with it.…

The BBC is poised to start filming on a new adapation of John Wyndham's The Day of The Triffids, due to hit screens in a high-definition two-parter some time next year.…

Researchers have unearthed rootkit-like functionality in an enterprise security product.…

The BBC's head of television yesterday declared that the corporation's output would next year feature less of Jonathan Ross telling Gwyneth Paltrow he'd "f*ck her", lest such choice language alienate viewers.…