Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
funny, up - to - date |
| Disadvantages: |
none |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
When you think of it and it related news you might think that this going to make for a very boring read. In most cases you would be correct and the news would be dull and un-interesting, especially to the non-it professional!
So then if I told you that there was a website that gave you all of the latest it and it related news, with a twist would you believe me? Well you should! If you visit www.theregister.co.uk you will find a website with all the latest it news, but the crucial thing is that on the whole this news is dealt with in an amusing (sometimes sceptical) way, if possible. Yay... is what I say!
**The Site **
The website is split into several sections, so you could go and read news about: Software, Enterprise Systems, Personal Hardware, Semiconductors, Internet, Net Security, Anti-Virus News, Business, Networks and Bootnotes. Each of these sections is easily accessible form the side of the main page and will load a page full of the latest articles for that particular section. Bootnotes is a section full of the wackier articles that the Register team comes across. The main page displays the latest articles from all of the sections.
Apart from the main sections that I mentioned above there are some other less prominent sections available for you to browse through. These sections are: Broadband, e-business, The Mac Channel, Channel Flannel, BOFH: Whole Shebang, The Vulture Central Mailbag. Some of these sections might need a little more explaining to do as they don't mean much to those who have not used the website!
Channel Flannel - this is a section that deals with articles to do with bad sales, job losses, fallings out etc… happening within the sector.
BOFH: Whole Shebang - this one might take a little longer to explain! Basically BOFH stands for Bastard Operator From Hell! This section is full of stories written for The Register with a mythical bad operators, which are dubbed BOFH. This makes for very entertaining reading as a lot of these stories are too close to reality than you might think! This has been so successful that you can even buy books with these articles in, at a very reasonable price, although I would just browse through the articles on the website!
**The Articles**
On the whole most of the articles that are published on the website are not written by The Register, but by other organisations. But the credit is given to the organisation where it is due with a link to their website, if they have one.
The articles are always very easy to read, some might need a bit of technical knowledge as they might be a bit techky, but on the whole they tend not to be. Also something that I found quite useful is that if there are any other related articles then there is a link to those articles, so you can read that, if you wanted to get more of a background to the current article. Also if there are some useful places that you can find out more information there us usually always a link to that place from the article.
**General**
The Register is a very easy website to use and is very easy to navigate around. It is also quite a speedy site and always loads quickly; well at least it does for me! The content is updated at regular intervals, this is usually several times a day and the site even gives you a date and time when it was last updated, which is usually never that long ago!
**Other Stuff**
Other stuff that The Register offers is merchandise, things such as t-shirts of their logo (which I think look quite good). You can also buy books, caps, mugs and all other sorts of merchandise.
The Register team have also made deals for users of their website with the it book website, www.it-minds.com. This offers the users of The Register a discounted price on selected books.
The Register also has a jobs section, form which you can look through jobs that are advertised on their website. I have not used this so I can't say anything about the quality of the jobs that are being offered. This I'm sure must be quite useful, but for those looking for jobs www.gojobsate.co.uk is good alternative.
**My Thoughts**
A very good website, which I have found I keep going back to as they have the news that I am interested in, presented in a good way. Everyone that I know who has been to this website goes back at least once a week to catch up on everything that has happened. In an industry that is constantly changing this is a good place to get the latest information.
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