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Documentation was so substantial, staff measured it in feet

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of helping confused, caustic, and curmudgeonly customers to crank their computers into correct configurations.…

Ancient Slashdot reader Epeeist shares a report from The Guardian: The newest version of the maglev train is capable of traveling at 600km/h (about 370mph). However, the train's engineers have wrestled with the problem of the shock waves which occur as the train exits the mouth of a tunnel. When a high-speed train enters an enclosed space such as a tunnel, air in front is compressed, like in a piston. The resulting fluctuations in air pressure coalesce at the tunnel mouth, generating low-frequency shock waves. These are colloquially known as a "tunnel boom" -- a related, albeit different phenomenon to the "sonic boom" heard as aircraft pass the speed of sound. Tunnel booms pose serious challenges to operational safety, as the shock waves can disturb humans and animals nearby, as well as causing structural damage. Now, however, researchers have discovered that placing innovative soundproofing buffers at tunnel mouths can reduce shock waves by up to 96%. This promises improvements in operational safety, noise pollution and passenger comfort, as well as safeguarding animals in the vicinity of future lines. [...] The porous structure of the new 100-meter long buffers, combined with porous coatings on the tunnel body, allow the trapped air to escape before the train reaches the tunnel mouth, suppressing the boom in the same way as a silencer fitted to a firearm.

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Will someone think of the deals politicians are making?

Opinion You might think, since I write about tech all the time, my degrees are in computer science. Nope. I'm a bona fide, degreed historian, which is why I can say with confidence that the UK's recently passed Online Safety Act is doomed to fail.…

Home of Manchester Baby can't bid for talent, baby

Institutions in the North of England are being left out of the government's Global Talent Fund (GTF), designed to attract top scientific brains from abroad to come and work in Britain.…

Fears adversaries will use them in the belief they can take plenty of punishment

The US Air Force wants to blow up two Tesla Cybertrucks.…

A new connector may be on the cards, too

The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has confirmed that version 8.0 of the PCI Express (PCIe) specification will allow up to 256 gigatransfers per second, which equates to up to 1 TB/s bi-directionally in a x16 configuration.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine's entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.