Welcome to Random Short Take #90. I remain somewhat preoccupied with the day job and acquisitions. It’s definitely Summer here now. Let’s get random.

• You do something for long enough, and invariably you assume that everyone else knows how to do that thing too. That’s why this article from Danny on data protection basics is so useful.
• Speaking of data protection, Preston has a book on recovery for busy people coming soon. Read more about it here.
• Still using a PDP-11 at home? Here’s a simple stack buffer overflow attack you can try.
• I hate it when the machines shout at me, and so do a lot of other people it seems. JB has a nice write-up on the failure of self-service in the modern retail environment. The sooner we throw those things in the sea, the better.
• In press release news, Hammerspace picked up an award at SC2023. One to keep an eye on.
• In news from the day job, VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC Version 1.24 was just made generally available. You can read more about some of the new features (like Express Storage Architecture support – yay!) here. I hope to cover off some of that in more detail soon.
• You like newsletters? Sign up for Justin’s weekly newsletter here. He does thinky stuff, and funny stuff too. It’s Justin, why would you not?
• Speaking of newsletters, Anthony’s looking to get more subscribers to his daily newsletter, The Sizzle. To that end, he’s running a “Sizzlethon”. I know, it’s a pretty cool name. If you sign up using this link you also get a 90-day free trial. And the price of an annual subscription is very reasonable. There’s only a few days left, so get amongst it and let’s help content creators to keep creating content.