Top of the mornin' to ye. I've been browsing Freshmeat a lot recently (word to the clueless: it's...

Top of the mornin' to ye. I've been browsing Freshmeat a lot recently (word to the clueless: it's about software. Not meat), and it's really quite fascinating. Today's interesting tidbit is Boot and Nuke, a self-contained operating system that fits on a single floppy. Its single purpose in life is to completely destroy the data on any hard drives attached to the computer into which it is inserted. This of course has perfectly valid, sensible applications for computer security. It also means you can give a clueless person you don't like a single floppy disk, tell them it's got a cool game which needs to reboot to work, and enjoy.

This year is going to be interesting. The exam boards have fucked up royally, giving students lower grades than they should have received, because of pressure that A-levels are now too easy. So now nobody knows whether they got rejected when they shouldn't have because of mark-fixing, or whether they got accepted when they shouldn't have because the exams were too easy. Meanwhile, all the universities are already full, so the argument is pretty much academic (no pun intended). I'll be interested to see if this year's crop of freshers will be dumber than last year's :-)