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News, podcasts and Tweets by Gavin for The Register, Europe's biggest IT and science site

ARM’s new CEO: You’ll get no ‘glorious new strategy’ from me

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ARM: the British tech success that counts electronics and computer giants from the US, Japan and South Korea as its customers and whose chip architectures run almost every single smart phone on the planet. Now, the CEO architect of ARM’s success, Warren East, is leaving. How does replacement Simon Segars ensure ARM sweeps into PCs, [...]

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JBoss is juicy, but Vert.x could bring sexy back to Red Hat

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Red Hat, the industry’s leading Linux, bought JBoss seven years ago to take on the app server giants IBM and Oracle. Under Red Hat, though, JBoss lost its sex appeal among open-source and Java devs. I look at how spinning up Vert.x can put the sexy back into Red Hat – but at the expense [...]

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Simple as 1-2-3: 30th anniversary of the PC’s first successful spreadsheet

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The PC revolutionized business but it wouldn’t have succeeded without the spreadsheet and Lotus 1-2-3 from Mitch Kapor  – it was a revelation in power and simplicity. However, it’s Bill Gates and Excel that got the glory and the money. I wrote and jointly commissioned a series of pieces for The Reg celebrating Lotus 1-2-3′s [...]

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James Bond hits 50: 007-size science, technology and myths

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The Reg celebrated the 50th anniversary of the James Bond films and arrival of Skyfall with a month-long series of articles and quizzes celebrating the science and technology of Ian Fleming’s stories and of the movies, commissioned by me and written by me with Reg and freelance writers and experts. We covered: The physics of making [...]

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Doug Cutting: Hadoop dodged a Microsoft-Oracle stomping

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Open source, it’s said, is an inevitable force and closed-sourcers who resist will fail. If that’s true, why did the founder of the world’s default big-data processing framework – Doug Cutting, creator of the Google MapReduce-inspired Hadoop used by Amazon.com, Facebook and Yahoo! – have so much to fear from Oracle and Microsoft before they [...]

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Atari turns 40: Pong, Pac-Man and a $500 gamble

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With just $500 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari on June 26, 1972. 10 years later Atari was making $2bn in  sales while games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man were the first to break the one million sold barrier. You can read my take what made the Atari star burn so bright, outliving the [...]

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Owning Opera better by millions for Facebook

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With $16bn in its pocket, half-reports are running rife about what’s next for Facebook. Is it a smart phone built using ex-Apple engineers? More acquisitions? A reported deal for Norwegian browser maker Opera makes sense for a company answerable to shareholders and that must get out from under Apple. Opera also means millions more customers [...]

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Mozilla Europe Prez: our post Firefox freedom phone challenge to Apple and Google

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Boot to Gecko, Mozilla’s  open-source handset, is key for the web and Mozilla according to Mozilla’s Europe president Tristian Nitot. For Mozilla, it means life after Firefox and for mobile it means freedom and openness in a closed and controlled Apple and Google world. Can Mozilla convert the success it’s had with Firefox on the [...]

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Adobe sucks on Oracle brain drain for HTML5 game gain

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Oracle suffers a sudden loss of Java VM talent, bought with Sun Microsystems in 2010, to Adobe Systems. Signs are Adobe’s tuning a Flashless version of its ActionScript language that takes on  ECMAsript cousin HTML5 in gaming. Read my exclusive on the Oracle exodus here.

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Spinning electrons! Boffins bake graphene big data beater

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Scientists are developing technology to crunch growing volumes of data for intensive apps like search. They are marrying Nobel-award winning work in graphene with new theories in RAM and electron spin to devise a chip architecture combining memory and logic they say spells the end of conventional silicon electronics. I spoke to the physics and [...]

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