The Register is one of the few websites on the internet which makes tech articles worth reading. They make the reader realize the significance of tech, who might otherwise pass it off as nuances which only nerds should be aware of.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it should be noted that, after a few years, Magee very publicly disagreed with the direction taken by The Register, and started its own separate thing (the Inquirer).
Shortly after that happened, I found myself at a tech-conferance-adjacent soire (financed by, in El Reg's parlance, Chipzilla, open bar natch) with several Reg hacks and Magee hisself. Despite the parting of ways, all seemed to be getting along famously.
Mike handed me his business card, with the Inquirer imprint. I examined it carefully, looked at him gravely, and intoned "but you've misspelled 'Register'".
He looked back at me quite chagrined.
Great guy, and an amazing history. Godspeed Mad Mike!
Very true. Their journalists understand the technology they are writing about and explain it clearly. They also provide background and a bigger picture. One can view them as sceptical, perhaps even jaded hacks, but what they write generally stands the test of time.
I understand where you are coming from but silly stuff like that is one way to encourage what I am now going to call: "harmless tribalism".
You may not be familiar with the extensive campaign to find a suitable name for Microsoft. The winner was Micros~1. It took quite a lot of discussion and once the winner was declared, most people hated it but it became the standard. That's the nature of proper, decent, discourse. People riffing on all sorts of stuff and basically having a laugh. No one was hurt and a lot of fruitful chat was had.
el Reg has changed. It is rather more "professional" these days or as we say in the trade "boring". However, it is still there and you never know, vestigil thingies can re-grow. It is certainly more alive than /. but it is bordering on lumbering around with its arms outstretched looking for brainzzzz.
`MICROS~1` being how 32-bit Windows abbreviated the first file or folder named "Microsoft $BLAH" for 16-bit code.
So while (IIRC) Office 95 installed into C:\Program Files\MSOffice (in DOS, "C:\PROGRA~1\MSOFFICE"), Office 97 called its folder "Microsoft Office" which in DOS looked like C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1".
The Inquirer's name for Microsoft was "the Vole". The British field vole's specific name is Microtus agrestis.
As a full-time staff member there are obviously limits to what I can say.
Yes, it has been toned down a little. This is intentional, and there are good reasons. For example...
* El Reg has more writers in the USA than the UK these days. As a rule, Americans do not react well to British sarcasm and cynicism. Many take it at face value and find it offensive.
* A great many readers these days are not native English speakers and struggle with wordplay and so on. So, we reduce that.
It's all a bit more international. OTOH it's alive and thriving. That is a good thing.
I thoroughly understand what you both say and don't say. We are all a little flabbier than we used to be and the world is rather more madder and increasingly so.
"As a rule," - in the main but I have some fabulously sarcastic American mates.
There are some very dodgy commentards on el Reg. I don't mean "Jellied Eel" and other Johnny come latelies, who are clearly state sponsored nonsense.
Back in the day there was a single whipping boy, whose handle was "eadon" (I think). He was obviously human and came across as somewhat mad and seemed to enjoy being a bit bizarre. Nowadays we have amanfrommars who is a bit strange and probably a bot. Then there is the usual collection of noddies from various dictatorships.
As you say, it is thriving but I do think it has lost some of its edge (as I said we are all a little flabbier).
There used to be a fabulously foul mouthed Canadian writer who majored in virty stuff and of course, we all lament the passing of Lester who was frankly barking mad (in a sane way).
I often think that el Reg and Private Eye are in a similar space in the hyper-dimensional space of reporting (yes, I said that without blushing).
Increasingly, both sides of the pond are getting the hang of each other, thanks to the internet and a few other less important things, such as shared values.
"are not native English speakers and struggle with wordplay" - hard disagree (as a HN noddy would say). English is the French language, as you know well. People who are proficient with English as a second language appreciate being stretched and those that are not, have access to enough machine translation to get a good idea of what is going on.
I do think you have lost a little bit of your edge and I think you know what little means in this context. You could quite easily create ... sorry ... re-instate in house personalities and "el Reg ... things" that work for at least both sides of the pond.
What about running a bot outing competition? It could end in tears or be hillarious.
> "As a rule," - in the main but I have some fabulously sarcastic American mates.
Sure, me too. They are my favourite kind of American mate. :-D I stand by the point though.
Parallel example: Lobste.rs bans Reg links being posted as stories, at all, 100%.
The mods said it is "snarky" and mean and mocking and feel it is not worth sharing.
> There are some very dodgy commentards on el Reg.
I said nothing about commentards, and I'm not now.
> As you say, it is thriving but I do think it has lost some of its edge (as I said we are all a little flabbier).
Please note: I am a writer, not an editor. I have zero editorial control and in the context of the Reg I don't want to be an editor again. I've done it, for a much smaller site, and it's very hard work indeed. I do not fancy the job of doing it on such a high-profile high-traffic site, not one bit.
All I will say is this: the change in style is conscious and intentional.
> I often think that el Reg and Private Eye are in a similar space in the hyper-dimensional space of reporting (yes, I said that without blushing).
Fair. Aspirational, I'd say. I like and respect Lord Gnome's mighty organ.
> "are not native English speakers and struggle with wordplay" - hard disagree
Ha!
This again is a policy decision, but at coming up on 3Y full-time there now, they are right. You would be amazed how little people understand. I was.
And the ones who understand least do not know it.
General reading comprehension on the Internet at large is extremely poor.
> English is the French language, as you know well.
You mean, "lingua Franca"?
You know the Franks spoke an ancestor of German, right?
But yes, it is.
I also note I lived in Czechia for nearly a decade, speak poor intermediate-level Czech as a second (er, 6th) language, and in that time I had to totally redefine my understanding of "fluent English speaker".
I stand by what I said.
Globish is a thing. It is not the same as standard English, and British English is, sadly, not the standard form: that is American English.
> enough machine translation to get a good idea of what is going on.
Which is precisely an example of an area where idiom and slang and elliptical figurative speech goes wrong the worst.
The decisions were made, and made knowingly. It's not my place to question them, but anyway, the reasoning was sound.
Might be a British thing (assuming you're not?) in magazines with a tongue-in-cheek character. For example Private Eye always refer to "the Grauniad" and "Carter-Fuck"
Given the British influence on Iberian Penisula culture in computing, and the amount of BBC stuff we consume, I always have a special place for that kind of humour.
Oh, so that's where "the Grauniad" comes from? I never knew, although I've occasionally used it myself. Fairly sure I first saw it on Usenet in the late '90s, from Charlie Stross.
Private Eye is a satirical magazine though. It's not a primary news source in the same way that The Register wants to be for tech news. At one point The Register would have been one of my primary news sources, with multiple visits daily. They definitely* ramped up their absurdist side some time in the 2010s. It's not that I'm specifically against satire, but for me they just overused it to the point where visiting their site was annoying.
I guess that I should note that I haven't really looked at the site other than the odd linked article in probably close to a decade.
* okay, not definitely, but that was my impression
Do you read private eye? the satirical pieces are confined to a few pages in the middle, definitely not more than a third (maybe the purely humourous sections count as a third if you include cartoons). They're primarily investigative journalism if you ask me, admittedly the news pieces are often sarcastic and witty. Look up their role in the post office scandal, or the Paul Foot awards.
> They definitely* ramped up their absurdist side some time in the 2010s.
Huh? Naah. Or, maybe -- perhaps they ramped it back up in the '10s, if they'd ramped it down a lot in the '00s. Because they were wildly satirical in the '90s.
They also enjoyed slagging on corporate rebranding. When PriceWaterhouse Cooper spun out their consulting arm in 2002, they became a target for a minute[1][2]. I still have a "We like donkeys la la la" t-shirt and mug as a pair of weird and obscure artifacts from that stage of my IT career. I am heartened to see that archive.org provides a way to experience the silly Flash animation[3] they created just for that second article.
Personally I love that they insist on calling Google "The Chocolate Factory", but I can certainly understand you perspective. It easily gets to much if you have the feeling that their are trying to hard to come up with "cute" names.
