A KLM flight to Curaçao became an 11-hour flight to nowhere after a power bank reportedly belonging to the airline’s former CEO exploded while being charged onboard.

People seem to approach this from the wrong angle. The question here should always be what data do we actually genuinely need to be able to back up and restore? //

The problem was this was 30+ years ago. Imagine even in a small salon we'd backed up decades of booking data on the basis that we could easily store it given the cheapness of storage.

Now compound that problem across all businesses and throw in loads of AI toss. How much stuff is actually in backups that is never going to see the light of day again?

The volume of data that you could back up in comparison to what you genuinely need gets more and more skewed over the years. Which is part of this problem and a reason why so many people either don't have a proper strategy or find it just doesn't work when they need a restore.

If systems designed to withstand war cannot cope with sustained physical attacks, civilian bit barns have little chance. The episode also underlines a familiar but easily neglected lesson: resilience within one cloud region is not the same thing as maintaining an independent backup elsewhere.

Physical destruction is not the only threat. A major outage of the UK air traffic control system in September, which stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and led to thousands of flight cancellations, was reportedly triggered by a military aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan. Presumably Flight Lieutenant Bobby Tables has been reprimanded.

The apparent failure to validate the flight plan data was not the worst of it. NATS, which runs the UK's air traffic control system, reportedly told airports and airlines that no backup system was available because it was undergoing a "complete overhaul." Nor was there a backup of the live data, supposedly because of the "vast amounts" involved.

If your system produces too much data to back up, you had better be running a particle collider or a giant telescope. Otherwise, you may be in the wrong business. More charitably, backup strategies are complicated, expensive, and difficult to test. They also suffer from the insurance problem: while nothing is going wrong, management sees only capital and operating expenditure with no obvious return. //

The development of marine insurance in 14th-century Italian city-states spread risk and helped make what became today's global trading network viable. The loss of a vessel was no longer an existential disaster for its owner. Provided insurers understood and priced the risks correctly, the market could grow in lockstep with mercantile activity. Data resilience has a similar dynamic, although it is rarely described in those terms. Modern IT would be impossible without it, and moving off-premises amounts to sharing some of that risk with an outside provider. //

It may take the combination of geopolitical instability and intense competition for storage to make enterprises perform similar calculations about their own precious cargoes of information. When AWS can lose an entire region and critical national infrastructure can fail without an adequate backup, those risks have plainly not been priced in properly. There is no global market where AWS, NATS, or your organization can buy the data equivalent of war-risk insurance, although imagining what one might look like suggests some intriguing possibilities.

Until something like that happens, we'll have to play by the old rules. Work through what happens if your primary data store disappears. Match backup provision to the actual risks, and if you cannot afford to protect all the data your organization needs to survive, determine how to survive with less. Backups, like insurance, are all too easy to let slide.

IoTaWatt is probably the only monitor in it's class that can literally be used to monitor any power system.  It is in use in over 60 countries worldwide.  USA split-phase 120V/240V is easy, but also 230V single-phase as in Europe, 230V three-phase as in homes in Australia, Germany and norway to name a few. Most folks only care if it will work in their situation.  The answer is an unqualified yes.

There are also many commercial/industrial users monitoring high voltage three-phase systems including 277V/480V industrial with 600Amp service using several megaWatt-hours per day - more than most households use in a year.  Then there's a site in Uganda measuring voltage and power used to charge rental electric motorcycles using Solar Energy.

This is all possible because IoTaWatt uses simple external sensors that are available for any and all voltage/power combinations.  Just install, plug into the IoTaWatt and select the sensor type from a dropdown menu in the configuration app.

kwh meters

Circuit-level energy monitoring, with your data under your control.

Accurate, open, browser-based power monitoring for homes and small commercial buildings. View real-time power, store history locally, create detailed graphs, and connect to the tools you already use.

kwh meters

By teasingly striking at their children’s egos and emotions without teetering over into bullying, fathers build their children’s resilience and train them to withstand minor attacks and bouts of negative emotion without getting worked up or acting out, teaching them impulse control and emotional regulation.

In light of this, it is worth considering dad jokes as a pedagogical tool that may serve a beneficial function for the very children who roll their eyes at them.

By continually telling their children jokes that are so bad that they’re embarrassing, fathers may push their children’s limits for how much embarrassment they can handle.

They show their children that embarrassment isn’t fatal. //

So to all the dads out there, I salute you. We are not just amusing ourselves with silly puns; we are improving the health and well-being of our kids.

Scribus is the Go-To Libre Desktop Publishing Application.

Scribus is a libre page layout program for almost every operating system

Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, Windows, macOS, many current UNIX and *BSD systems, OS/2 Warp 4 and variants, as well as Haiku.

Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). The leading German IT website heise.de listed Scribus as one the of the best Open Source programs available.

The end of Microsoft Publisher is near. I've tested the top alternatives, and here's what I recommend for both pro and beginner designers.

From Waterfox to LibreWolf and Pale Moon, there's a browser for almost every Mozilla dissenter

Pale Moon – The Private, Secure and Fully Customizable Open Source Web Browser
If you’re looking for a fully non-commercial alternative to Chrome that respects your privacy, Pale Moon is built for you.
Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser built on its own maintained platform and rendering engine (Goanna™), available for various operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux (with community-contributed support for other operating systems), focusing on customization, security, privacy and extensibility.

Basilisk is considered stable software. This means it does not change for the sake of change. Updates are made deliberately, with an emphasis on maintaining existing workflows and minimizing unnecessary disruption.

If you want a browser that works consistently and respects established workflows, Basilisk may be a good fit.

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. //

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

A 2017 review of literature noted that human milk complexity is generated by “individual variations in breast milk composition, which are attributed to the stage of lactation, the degree of breast fullness, infant feeding, the health of the breastfeeding dyad, and other factors” [1]. That means it’s quite literally always changing, in response to all sorts of different factors. Practically, it also means that the milk a mom makes at 2pm on a Tuesday is constitutionally different from the milk she might make 24 hours, 2 weeks, or 6 months later. 

What’s more, the breastmilk a mom makes when her child is sick has more infection-fighting cells than when her child is well. And these changes and adaptations in breastmilk composition continue for as long as the mother breastfeeds. Likewise, breastfeeding remains a vital source of nutrition and immune protection for as long as breastfeeding continues; yes, even after the child is primarily consuming solids! 

Even more fascinating, milk composition follows a circadian rhythm and has more sleep-inducing hormones (primarily melatonin) at night time. And the balance of fat and sugar is always in flux, too. When breasts are very full (like they are upon waking when baby blessedly sleeps a bit longer at night!), milk contains more sugar and less fat, while “emptier” breasts (e.g., towards the end of a good, long feeding) make milk higher in fat content. (This is one of the very reasons that in my work as a lactation consultant, I often tell moms that their breasts are rarely, if ever, empty—even when they feel like they are!) 

iPadOS version by device
Before iPadOS 13, iPadOS was known as iOS.

Research suggests that bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits

According to Abrams' Law, the compressive strength of concrete is inversely proportional to the water-cement ratio, provided the mix is fully compacted. If you add too much water, it creates large spaces or capillary pores inside the concrete when the excess, unreacted water evaporates.

This results in a highly porous, weaker structure that can crack under loads. On the other hand, if you add too little water, the cement particles will not fully react, making the concrete harsh, difficult to place, and prone to internal honeycomb voids. //

Understanding how to calculate water cement ratio helps maintain consistent concrete quality on site. The formula is straightforward:

Water Cement Ratio = Weight of Water ÷ Weight of Cement

For example:

If one bag of cement weighs 50 kg and the required water to cement ratio is 0.5, the water required will be:

Water Required = 0.5 × 50 kg = 25 litres

This means 25 litres of water should be used for one bag of cement to maintain the correct water cement ratio in concrete. //

Testing the Water-Cement Ratio: The Slump Test

The slump test is a simple method used to check the workability of fresh concrete. While it does not directly measure the water-cement ratio, it helps indicate whether the water content is appropriate.

In this test, fresh concrete is placed into a cone-shaped mould. When the mould is lifted, the concrete settles or “slumps.” The amount of slump shows the consistency of the mix. A higher slump usually indicates higher water content, while a lower slump indicates a stiffer mix.

This test helps builders ensure the water ratio for concrete mix remains suitable for proper placement and compaction.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the AWS update said.

A good design doc can save you years of development time. Writing a design doc forces you to think through important decisions before you waste time on the wrong implementation. It’s also the best way to coordinate design decisions among teammates and partner teams.

I’ve written design docs as a developer at Google, Microsoft, and within my own companies. The specifics vary, but the underlying principles remain the same. A design doc articulates the hard problems you’re solving and helps your teammates give you feedback.

Below, I share my approach to creating effective design docs and explain what belongs in a design doc and what does not.

There is an old AWS quote that has aged in a particularly interesting way.

In 2017, CBS asked AWS executive Matt Wood a rather pointed question:

CBS: “I don’t mean to give anyone ideas, but let’s say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it’s so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn’t notice?”

AWS: “Yeah, you wouldn’t notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn’t notice!”

Nine years later, somebody effectively ran the experiment, although on a much larger scale than the loss of a single building, and people did, in fact, notice. //

I Guess Maybe Now They’ll Do 3-2-1 Backups

The gold standard for data protection is “3 copies, 2 different kinds of media, 1 of which is offsite”.

I’m all for the cloud, but if it’s important data and you’re limited to keeping all of your cloud data in one set of buildings…then for pity’s sake, have off-site backups. You don’t need to have another failover site ready to light up if Amazon goes down for you, but you shouldn’t lose the data. Replicate it off-site. I mean, forget even acts of war – what if hackers get into your systems? Into Amazon’s systems? What if an employee goes rogue? What if, what if…

A replicated off-site solution with ransomware protection and disk snapshots (or heaven forbid, tape!) doesn’t mean you can restore service quickly, but it means you won’t lose the data. In other words, go ahead and say “if we have to go to that dire situation, we’re not promising a recovery time objective (RTO). But we are promising a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).”

Losing data sucks.

Jonathan Richards 1Silver badge
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Re: Ooh cms
Upvoted. Librarianship 101, or the correct principles for an office filing system which brought myriads of companies successfully through generations of business and progress. The oldest of those companies have curated archives that you can still find documents in. Good luck with that in a hundred years for any of the software solutions kicking around now.

The nightmare began when we stopped filing things in carefully chosen places, or alternatively carefully indexing things placed in a managed store. Some clown thought that having a list of all the words in all the documents would make it easy to find what one was looking for. Repeat after me: the set of words in a document does not tell you what the document is about. cf Manila and manila!