Posts by that one in the corner

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

I missed the Geminids

for all the usual reasons (cloud, a different type of cloud, fog) so maybe this will make up for it when the whole sky comes Alive With Lights.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture

In Ian M. banks SF novels (you usually need the 'M' to get the SF as opposed to his weirder stuff) the main interstellar culture calls itself "The Culture". Effectively presided over by giant machine minds called, um, "Minds".

(Hey, it could be worse - at least the lead character in any story isn't called "Hiro Protagonist"!)

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

> How are you going to stop particular devices?

Same way they do now: my 'phone won't connect to any network I've not paid for. Simply don't sell jew contracts to 'phone holders and if someone does get their hands on a SIM and can manages to make do with basically a low-bandwidth, no voice, limited service with no help line unless they can quote their Big Boys SLA number then good luck to them, they are still paying the contract fee...

> And who is going to pay to maintain the infrastructure when you have no paying customers?

>> meters and other hard-to-upgrade devices

Which pay the same way they have for decades and the same way you are paying now (and probably into the foreseeable future); the majority of the physical plant (metal towers, local backup generation etc) is common to sll the Gs and 2G just bears the cost for sharing its (small) part of that. The software already exists, goes into basic maintenance instead of trying to gain new features.

> In addition, the spectrum has generally be reallocated to other services.

>> you'd need only a tiny sliver of a 2G band available for that stuff, and the rest could be redeployed for 5G.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

> where is all that compute going to go?

As already replied, dumped.

But it isn't as simple as "why bother trying to flog this stuff cheap to consumers, just bury it - and bury any embarrassing record that we stupid enough to buy into the bubble".

As TFA sorta notes, the DRAM in these AI barns isn't going to plug into your boring old ATX gamer's mainboard. Similarly, the CPUs are weird (ludicrous numbers of cores, which can only really be fully utilised by highly specialised algorithms or by hosting lots and lots and lots of VMs) and need different sockets (and software), the "GPUs" haven't been very "G" for a while now (all compute, no video out circuitry, no HDMI fees paid). And the different chip makers have been chucking out more and more oddities, each different from the last, which they sell en masse to a few barns before moving onto the next iteration - they aren't made to fit into existing mainboard sockets.

Unless someone ends up with a huge stash of identical parts, big enough to be worth the bother, we won't be seeing any consumer (or office worker) grade mainboards being designed to make use of all that silicon.

Not saying I don't believe this, but can you provide references for those of us who missed seeing where the "at less than 25% capacity" was reported.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

> who would YOU pick as the patron saint for a holiday best known for hedonism, libertinism, decadence and debauchery?

That's one of those sneaky questions, isn't it?

You want us to say (hmpphh) but then the klaxon will go off!

> not past-ies

Who says "past-ies"?

Isn't is "pass-tees" or "par-stees" (or "parrr-stees", the number of 'r's giving you localisation that GPS could only dream of)?

"Past-ies" sounds like you're reminiscing about golden treats from years gone by (or maybe just Ginsters from the Student Union).

Re: we buy cheese in grammes and measure distance in miles, we drank beer in pints.

Which is where the US went wrong.

If they'd only waited a few more years and had the US Revolution *after* the French Revolution, then the French could have brought the metric system over with them and the 13 colonies would have leaped at the chance for another way to distance themselves from the English Oppressors. Which would have then better prepared them to invade the remaining, what, 90% of the continent as they would already have their ammunition properly sorted out (9mm etc).

Never understood "cream first", it is just Bad Engineering: even the yellowest of clotted cream can not support a sufficient mass of jam on top, without giving way. Especially as you can't spread it fully over the scone base without cracking the protective shell. But a fully formed deep plateau of jam first can then be heaped with a delightful peak of cream that reaches to the heavens.

After that, the *real* test begins: can you manoeuvre the massive morsel, without the baked substrate giving way, so that all of the goodness goes into your gob and not have any smeared upon your moustache*?

* a young child or elfin maid may, of course, allow a single blob of cream to remain decorously perched upon the nose, to be wiped off with an aunt's hanky or kissed away by a hopeful paramour respectively.

DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission

Multi-agent virtual scientific collaborator

A "virtual collaborator" - so that is something that, to the outside world, looks just like a collaborator (takes in grant money, demands to have its name on publications) but when you try to look inside it doesn't have any actual substance at all.

OTOH if they let the "agentic tools" have their head, ordering stuff off the interwebs to be installed as dictated by the neatly generated diagrams inspired by scraping the best mathematics images ever published, maybe we will see the DoE complete its transformation of Fermilab. Brought to you by Google DeepMind and displayed on Google Maps, Illinois will finally have a proper Mandelbrot Set.

China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET

Re: JANET

UK Freeview

BBC 2, 23:05 Friday 19/12/2025 - Don't dream it, be it! Audience Participation Script & FAQ

Sky Arts, 23:10 Saturday 20/12/2025 - the story from stage show to silver screen

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

> Anyone know how to remove Chrome from a Chromebook?

Fire is a beautiful thing...

Re: Idiots are not always wrong

Sometimes, one has to admit that zebras do exist and, yes, that oversize bar code did just eat the office potted plant.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Trust

> my trust went when they made Pratchett's "The Watch"

That was BBC America, which is (now) an entirely separate entity from BBC Studios (the commercial arm of The BBC, which goes out and sells studio time to anyone, as well as making programmes for The Beeb) in the UK. Even at the time of that program, the BBC Studios held at most 50.1% of BBC America. The goings-on of BBC America are completely divorced from any discussion of the UK licence fee or the content of The Beeb over here, except for the fact it allows Aunty a prepared outlet for flogging into that market, taking some of the strain off the licence fee. Stuff that BBC America makes/has made for it does tend to get shown here, with mixed results (as everything shown anywhere is going to have mixed results).

How and why "The Watch" ended up so - unexpectedly different - well, there has been plenty of discussion on that (the best result of which has been "shame they didn't change the names then it would have been received better", sort of like how Sanford and Son didn't try to convince anyone that it was really Steptoe and Son) but for the purposes here, BBC Studios just made what the script said.

Re: Why a TV licence?

What authoritarian "limiting of choice"? Gonna have to put that one into simpler words, 'cos my poor befuddled brain can't see where that is happening.

Re: Why a TV licence?

Disconnect the aerial *and* avoid streaming events live. But that is still trivially easy to comply with.

Then they can leach on the BBC's website, learning materials, news reporting all they want.

Re: Why a TV licence?

I agree that those "enforcers" are heavy handed.

But, take that up with Crapita and tell the government to keep them under control.

That work is not undertaken by the BBC.

Re: Why a TV licence?

The children getting Micro:bit? Revision aids? Anything school may decide to use (But I don't have kids! Ok, so long as you never will and none of your family - or friends - ever do)

Ok, yes, you can scrape away and find people who *really* do not ever use anything from the BBC, who don't know anybody who does (don't know anybody they care about whose use of any BBC material is, to them, worth supporting). And yet who still watches live broadcasts and is therefore "snared" by the licence fee. Just be *absolutely* scrupulous in verifying they don't (no listening to BBC radio in the works canteen, no reading the news snippets offered in a web search page, no overhearing anyone who is talking about what they heard on R4 the day before, no second-hand enjoying of any popular culture that came from the Beeb...).

They are, as is everyone who *does* admit to consuming BBC material, then just left with "the common good" (like the submarine captain waiting for the Today programme before letting off his nukes!). Yeah, yeah, damn commies.

Re: Except

> My cultural enrichment is of no consequence to him

Sigh.

Unless someone is quite staggeringly dull, tedious, boring and stultifying, we *all* benefit from being within a culture that is, well, cultured. Even if it is second or third hand experience.

Heck[1], even people watching Gogglebox are unwittingly exposed to the occasional bit of culture, which they've got to remember so they can talk about it later!

[1] warning: incoming middle class snobbery alert! Awooga!

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

If these LLMs are meant to "know" how to create a working program, why should we have to still tell it how to do the *most* basic things about the process?

If I am running a compiler[1] I would *really* not be impressed if I had to tell it "ok, try again, but this time remember to do the phase two parsing after running the lexer".

Using an LLM in the expectation that it'll manage the difficult bits (picking an algorithm and a representation, selecting libraries, gluing all this together...) whilst knowing that it isn't capable of the simplest bits (i.e. just bothering with a test run *and* remembering to ingest its results) all on its own. Bit of a strange mismatch there?

And having the "specialised code-writing AI" turn out to be the same LLM, but this time running from a batch file that loops to save you typing in "Wro-ong, do it again"[2] isn't any better.

[1] in the most basic fashion, such as just "cc fred.c -o fred", to avoid getting bogged down in pernickety arguments about how you can actually pass these options on the cli and it'll ... but then you have to ... yourself...

[2] "you can''t have a pudding until you've eaten your meat!"

Re: So I'm not a programmer

> If AI could just get to the place where you could feed it the existing source code as the 'spec' and it would rewrite that in a modern language in a modular/maintainable way...

Yeah, well, we *could* have been spending our time creating a system that could do that sort of thing, but nobody could really be fagged to do it properly. Ok, that is a *bit* rude(!), but way back when (1980s and on a bit) there was much talk of taking in source code and applying lots of lovely semantic analysis, leading to a representation that could be re-arranged in just the way you describe. Even adding in comments.

Trouble is, the demos that could be done were rather trivial, compared to the real-world programs that *need* such attention. And one big, big reason for this was that compilers for the ever-increasingly-complex popular programming languages were moving further and further away from being able to provide even the initial stage, conversion of the sources to a manipulable representation.

Consider the simpler problem, of generating documentation of the form that programs like Doxygen do: it tries to build up a representation of the program and how the parts of it interact but first it has to parse the language used. Oopsie, there isn't a nice compiler we can pull apart to get something that handles the entire language; this is a pain, but you can get a long way towards Doxygen's goals with a rather less rigorous parser, but that leaves far too many holes. Some attempts were made - gcc-xml for example, which could spit out (some of) the AST[1] - but unless they are taken onboard as a goal for the compiler team it becomes a never-ending race to keep the modified compiler up to date; so the project dwindles and dies. One of the great hopes of the LLVM project, in its later manifestation with the release of clang, is to have a compiler that *does* make access to the pre-parsed form a core goal. And LLVM is, indeed, giving us that, as can be seen by the replacement of gcc-xml with CastXML (Note: CastXML is limited in what it does, as it is only maintained by and for one project, ITK, but it shows the way).

You can't really blame the compiler writers, there is enough to do keeping up with the language specs, but just consider how long it has taken us to get to the point where our programmer's editors can do "simple" things, like letting us rename a variable and have all the uses of that variable be updated across all the source files. If things had gone slightly differently, we could have had that as a bog-standard feature of every screen editor since the 1990s or earlier[2] and it would be standard practice to let your compiler be invoked for that purpose[3].

Anyway, cutting the story short (too late!) we don't want LLMs tackling that rewriting task, we want to have a pile of front-end processing, based upon sound compiler theory and practice, doing it. And, as part and parcel of that, make use of techniques from the AI labs to work on the processing: pattern recognisers and rewriters, heuristics that can be reversibly applied... Once you've done that, you could even use Machine Learning to help build up and apply those mechanisms. And, as with extant compilers, you know (bar the inevitable bugs) at each point in the process you *still* have a perfectly correct representation of the original program, so even if the generated modern language output isn't as modular as you'd like it is still good: and you can try again with another set of command options and see if it improves.

But, instead, the best we appear to be able to hope for is that "AI gets to a place", realising that it is far more likely that people will just try to keep shovelling cycles and random text scrapings into an LLM, fingers crossed the few remaining human programmers will be able to fix the glaring holes in the "translated" version of our program (but it *must* be modular now, as it has been broken into 7532 files, each containing no more than two screen's full of text, just like all the old company coding standards scraped from the web said)[4]

[1] a weird consequence of software "getting better" but not if you look at it from another p.o.v.: when we *had* to write multi-pass compilers, we *always* had to have a full representation of the complete AST, complete with line numbers (but lacking the comments), in a defined Intermediate Language format, which could survive being written to disc and read back in.

[2] I have a friend who was working on a "syntax-directed editor" in the mid 1980s who was stymied by the lack of parsers.

[3] Obviously, not the commercial compiler and/or editor authors, they'd shun this or only make it work with their own products <cough>Visual Studio</cough>, which is why this whole thing is a pipe dream.

[4] dang, now I'm implying the LLM can "understand" those scrapings...

Re: So I'm not a programmer

> That's why such dusty deck rewrites fail so often.

Don't worry, if you haven't got a dusty deck ful of random mods made with a pair of compasses, but instead really now understand what the system was meant to do all along, the project will be hit by good old-fashioned Second System Syndrome and will still fail.

Re: I've said it once

Oh boy.

So he was told about the ideal goal of perfectly self-documenting code and promptly grabbed the wrong end of that stick.

At least, one *hopes* it happened that way and he wasn't really taught...

Re: I've said it once

So you recommend his students leave all their code wonderfully legible but incorrect from day one, on the basis that "it'll end up being wrong tomorrow anyway, when the client changes his mind"?

Re: I've said it once

Worse, habitually leaves the comments untouched when they rework the code, so there is no longer any connection between the two. Even just not removing the /* TODO: fill in the body of this auto-generated empty method */ wastes so much time: did they leave it because this *isn't* fully done yet?

Bonus points if they are still using the variable names that were already present, but now for completely different values/purposes.

Attacks pummeling Cisco AsyncOS 0-day since late November

Another day

Another hole in Cisco.

Jassy taps 27-year Amazon veteran to run AGI org, which is now definitely a thing that exists

Quantum AI

*** The Physics Interpretation *** (popular in Copenhagen)

It works perfectly in the lab, all the overnight test runs are successful.

Only problem is, every time we open the door to look at any of the results, the whole thing collapses - and we have to start all over again. It appears that we can know that the AI is running, ready to accept our prompt, *or* we can know where to type the prompt, which terminal is active, but never both at the same time.

*** The English Language Interpretation *** (popular with that Collin guy in Oxford)

The smallest possible amount of genuinely useful functionality we can flog to the public.

*** The Common Speech Interpretation *** (popular in boardrooms and other ill-educated spaces)

A really big and important thing that we don't really know the meaning of but it sounds expensive and sciencey so we must have one, doesn't matter what it costs.

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

We at Purdue must lean in and lean forward

Reads like President Mung Chiang is already taking full advantage of AI.

An AI that hasn't quite got the hang of the Hokey-Cokey.

Meanwhile, the advice to the students would appear to be "shake it all about, see what drops out and maybe that'll do to let you graduate". All perfectly clear.

Blockchain company Nomad to repay users under FTC deal after $186M cyberattack

Shouldn't there be an automatic repayment

From every company that ever flogged anything to do "blockchain" and "crypto(currency)"?

We howl about the prices attached to AI and how it'll burst, but at least there are considerable hardware assets present there. Cryptocurrencies are closer kin to the well-known tulips and the instant that faith is lost in them they'll evaporate far more efficiently. Sure, there'll be some mining rigs left, assuming that the loss of faith wasn't caused simply by those rigs (and the piles of storage accumulated for other "proof of" mechanisms) being sold off for "AI" use after the miners realised they could have one big payday on eBay as the next DeepSeek-style AI Hype occurs.

Re: Very selective enforcement by the FTC

Yes, but similar losses to Microsoft would be a trivial amount compared to their total value: i.e. MS get to claim that they really are 99% secure, which is deemed "good enough", especially as MS's core business isn't in "securely" moving assets through their own systems[1]: assets going through *your* systems are sre your responsibility, so if you didn't verify the software running on them, or pay for an SLA relating to security then it is your fault[2]

[1] Of course, with 365 that is what they *want*...

[2] not agreeing with line of argument, but pointing out what the responses can include, which do go a wee bit deeper than just your line of argument

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

But you are only allowed to see the Right Twix; nothing exists on the Left*

* which is very true from the perspective across the Pond, even given how hard our lot are trying.

Or chi, as in Knuth's TeX, which rhymes with the word bleccchhh.

"If you say it properly, your screen should become moist".

Or go the whole hog: "Ecchh (huucchhh spit ding)"

Re: Trademarks

> When companies change their name or merge it's also pretty normal for them to retain ownwership of previous brand names and logos as ...

Those are very good reasons for a company to want ensure that it also retains the old trademarks associated with those names & logos. Not that there is any legal requirement to w.r.t. old contracts, letters etc: unless they were incredibly badly worded, those don't suddenly become invalid just due to change of ownership or mergers. Although it is commonplace for contracts be promptly reissued under the new ownership, that is also when the new owners inform you that the terms have changed (pray they do not change them further)*

But those good reasons for *wanting* do not automatically mean that the new company *does* retain the old trademarks indefinitely: the company has to still make the effort to keep them active as much as previously, and in the public eye. For example, by listing the old trademarks on current products, ads etc.

* I've had subscriptions shut down by the new owners "because we never issue that kind of subscription".

PS

Of course, all these things differ under different legal systems in different countries...

Browser 'privacy' extensions have eye on your AI, log all your chats

Re: I would assume

> https...

Does it count as URL shortening to have a shot at guessing which single video you wanted to refer to?

PS

Mr Morden, not Mr Moden; his - associates - will be informed of your lack of respect in remembering the name.

Low bar, man, low bar.

Stallone couldn't even keep his helmet on.

China's Ink Dragon hides out in European government networks

su VoiceOfTruth

Here we have another article about China/Russia/Genosha ... what about the US/Wakanda doing the same?

CTRL-D

(the answer, of course, being "this is a story about X, drop us a URL in the suggestions box about Y and if if stands up...")

Re: Tools

> attacking misconfigured commercial servers aren't there any tools that can be used as a final or regular check to highlight these misconfigurations?

Somebody is going to say this, or similar, so here goes:

The "commercial servers" are instances of IIS and SharePoint, so the appropriate tools include installers for Apache, Nginx (probably even Confluence instead of SharePoint!!!!*).

* multiple exclamation marks, the sure sign of a mind diseased enough to suggest Confluence, even if, in a case like this...

US gov't launches 'Tech Force' to replace IT staff DOGE fired

Re: No experience necessary ?

Hmm, trouble is they'd just serve to remind DT that he was only skilled enough to handle bagging the fries at McD's, not the whole patty, and he was definitely not up to a complete Happy Meal. This could cause friction and make AF1 fly more slowly.

> If anything, the fact you got wound up about that is kind of the point.

Oh, don't worry on that score.

I was happy to have a DOGE comment to reply to appear so soon, so I could have a chance at a Musk "we blew up one government but it was a win as we have learnt so much for the next attempt" reference.

What I *am* wound up about is that my mind is failing me today and I've *still* not managed to come up with a way to word that reference that is sufficiently mocking, preferably by paraphrasing one of Elon's well-known grand pronouncements :-(

This would be the DOGE that Musk has washed his hands of? You *did* read the linked to article, didn't you?*

If even Elon isn't trying to exaggerate DOGE into a success, you know it must be bad.**

* who am I kidding, he barely read TFA

** "We expected this one to blow up and destroy the pad, but we've learnt so much from it that we can apply next time"

Who is doing the training of the ongoing stream of ignorance*

Borrow management from industry.

Bulk hire "IT pros" with no work experience or higher education. Chuck them out after two years, before they demand a pay rise commensurate with their newfound knowledge and experience (don't worry, those companies involved have been asked to "consider" taking them on). Rinse and repeat.

Tada! No institutional knowledge left, no senior techs, just blank slates sitting at the desks. Under management who can get them cheap deals (but won't, because why would they?) on "training" for whatever package they'll be flogging upgrades for when their leave** is over, but who don't know the government systems and requirements either. Oh, and those systems have just ben buggered by DOGE, so don't expect to be able to "learn how it works on the job" 'cos it currently ain't working!

* ignorance isn't - shouldn't be - a stigma if there has clearly not (yet) been the opportunity to gain the knowledge; but guess who'll be blamed when the IT fails under this scheme.

** as this will be "top industry Management", chosen from the cream of the Sales department, expect them to innovate with the concept of "paid leave", just to remind them which side their bread is buttered.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

> English is my native language

Followed by a long string of utter and total twaddle:

> Although it is common to use less to mean without, in most cases of usage of the -less prefix, the thing is in fact not completely without, just less.

No, nope, uh uh, incorrect, not accurate, totally madey-uppy in just your head and nobody else's (unless you've been filling said head).

> Considering that white is all the colours, I would say "it's white" or its colourmore, as it's certainly not without colour.

I don't doubt you *would* say that - at which point you have decided to totally disregard any and all value, point, purpose, intent or worth in the language you lay native claim to. As well as, in that case particularly, a miserably sad failure at junior school Physics.

Must try harder.

IBM unleashes CUGA, an open-source AI agent that actually completes more than half its tasks

Offtopic

Does anyone else find it hard to take seriously claims posted on something called "HuggingFace"?

Irrespective of what it may actually contain, valuable or otherwise, that name is either absurd or terrifying, with the latter coming more to the fore as screeching newborn horrors burst out of more companies each day.

Repent ye inefficient – the ‘Palantir-ization’ of IT services is upon us

If you own the meaning of the words

Are we talking Newspeak or just Double Dutch?

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

> I suppose the 2nd one of those could be simply cured by adding an ssd as a cache to the front end of the drive...

There is a long history of handling multiple layers of storage, with increasing volume and increasing access time at each layer (from CPU register to robot tape library), so we just need to drop this into the appropriate level in the hierarchy and keep on as usual.

Re: Obvious Question

Perhaps by rotating the medium so that the lasers are no longer shining along the same axes as the recorded bits?

No idea if that is actually possible, except that my gut feeling is that, if it is, the answer will be either incredibly simple (e.g. it will work with the bits in a simple cubic arrangement) or incredibly beautiful (e.g. you need the bits arranged in a three-dimensional spiral thingie, probably something akin to rotating spherical shells involving the Fibonacci or a related series). 'Cos that's just maths works out.

Oh, and once we've got the answer, we'll realise that Nature got there first.

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Your downvote, and those on the chap we've replied to, makes me wonder: are there people here who don't believe that 5 1/4 inch disks ever existed and are annoyed that you're insisting on treating them as real? Youngsters who are still smarting over the way they were taken in by stories of Father Christmas and don't want to hear any more fantastic tales.

394 trillion zettabytes: yawn.

Piffling.

The linked-to article gives no useful source for that number and if you do try to search for its references all you end up with marketing guff for and about the usual bit barns and LLM codswalllop. Which includes all the wastage of everyone duplicating webscrapings because businesses "need to guard *their* copy, it is so super-duper special compared to the feeble scraping *those* people did".

Totally ignoring the REAL sources of data that needs to be archived: Big Science.

Places like the LHC already have data storage problems, tending to hang onto only pre-processed data; which is fine IFF we can trust that the data reduction didn't lose anything important that we didn't even know to look for. The LHC is actually in a nice situation: they know precisely when to switch on the recorders[1] and they know what sorts of events they hope to see, so can put some boundaries on the filters, both of which reduce the amount of data needing storage for more than a few minutes or hours.

But Astronomy really, really needs to be able to record and store raw observations, noise and all, from as much continuous all-sky observing as is possible to do. In as many bands as possible. And be able to cross-reference it all, over as long a time-span as we can possibly manage. From the professionals - the data from the Square Kilometre Array, for one has pretty big storage needs! - but also amateurs who are running instruments scattered far and wide (synthetic aperture long base lines FTW - iff we can get accurate timestamps and raw observation storage; timestamps are becoming doable...). And before you pooh-pooh the usefulness of this, as some do, may I remind you of the increasing need to keep an eye on the big fusion reactor in our neighbourhood and our hopes to predict when it might get a dicky tummy.

What we are unfortunately missing still is long-term storage with a decently fast write speed.

Business data really does not need to be stored on any great timescales. But as they have the money, best just to humour them

[1] although they'll miss the resublimating thiotimoline events that occur just before they start the collider running

And they only need to switch

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Look around a bit more, there are a fair number of people who do things like floppy recovery on an enthusiast level: if you can't get the cash to use a "proper data recovery service" you can use your (spare!) time instead.

You want to get a flux reader attached to your drive, rather than an "old enough computer" 'cos the computer will (very sensibly) throw a wobbly when it hits a bad patch and fail, whilst the flux reader will just keep on going (reading back the lack of properly organized flux - at that level, it doesn't care enough to throw a wobbly). Then you get to run software on your big, modern bog-standard desktop PC to recover what data is left.

Start by reading up on Greaseweazle.

Oh, and write up what you manage, successful or not, and leave us a link to that blog post :-)

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Even in the Days of Yore, I'd've been thinking about a way to automate the keypress.

Which would mean a few days of fun, hacking something together* but that would be it. The more sensible Hannahs of this world get far more play time.

* yes, yes, these days all you need is a RubberDucky but back then...