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Bluebells can be a pleasant sight to take in and there are some great spots around Essex where you can find them.

Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News. Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he's better known at her CS lab for Git than for Linux, "because they actually use Git for everything there." Which he describes as "ridiculous" because he maintained it for just four months before handing it off to Junio Hamano who's been heading up development for more than 19 years now. "When it did what I needed," Torvalds says, "I lost interest." Linus then goes on to share how Git was never a big thing for him, but a means to an end that prevented the Linux kernel from descending into chaos over the absence of a version control system. You see, before Git, Linux used BitKeeper for version control, but its proprietary licensing didn't sit too well with other Linux contributors, and Linus Torvalds had to look for alternatives. As it turned out, existing tools like CVS and Subversion were too slow for the job at hand, prompting him to build a new tool from scratch, with the coding part just taking 10 days for an early self-hostable version of Git. In its initial days, there were some teething issues, where users would complain about Git to Linus, even finding it too difficult to use, but things got calmer as the tool developed further. Torvalds thinks some early adopters had trouble because they were coming from a background that was more like CVS. "The Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person's standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week, leading money educator Vanessa Stoykov helps a mum who paid for her daughter's wedding, but is now getting divorced after two years of marriage.

The pop legend, who has been posting photos and video from her adventures in the country these last few days, was spotted jetting into the country with a bodyguard by her side.

The school has recently been rated 'good' by Ofsted which found pupils 'loved going to school'

The New York City helicopter that plunged into the frigid waters of the Hudson River, killing all six people onboard, had experienced mechanical issues months before breaking apart midair.

'Say one of us changed our name, and without any other evidence that we were transitioning, walked into the male changing room, believing we had every right to be in there, in our bra and knickers.'

Nicky Katt, who was known for his roles in projects such as Dazed And Confused as well as School Of Rick, has passed away at the age of 54.

Hang on, wasn't Capita already handling things like billing, etc? Ah, AgentSuite comes to the rescue

Scandal struck UK utility company Southern Water is extending a long-running managed services contract with Capita, everyone's favorite outsourcing badass, for up to five years at an estimated cost of £92.4 million ($121 million).…

One's a world power with extensive cutting-edge electronics manufacturing empire, the other is America

World War Fee  President Trump's trade war with China kicked into gear this week. The upshot is Americans face having to pay more for products and components sourced from the Middle Kingdom, as the eye-watering import tariffs on the gear are set to be passed onto them.…

Middle Kingdom gets 145%. So this is what it's like living in reality TV

World War Fee  The EU voted Wednesday to introduce 25 percent import tariffs on American goods, with the first duties being collected from European consumers on April 15.…

Shoppers have said they are 'obsessed' with the collection

Planning documents for the controversial embassy on the site of the Royal Mint buildings include 'two suites of anonymous unlabelled basement rooms and a tunnel'.

Westminster Bills normally need months of scrutiny but this one whizzed through in roughly the time it takes to chill a Cotes de Gascogne. By the end of a captious day we certainly all needed a gargle.

A source close to Priti Patel , who was Home Secretary in 2020, said that the decision to scale back his security 'was a professional one' taken by the Royal and VIP Executive Committee.

Portraits of historic figures were among the 69 works of art 'deinstalled' from the Government Art Collection since the election.

Here's an update from the Wall Street Journal about a "widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure." China was behind it, "Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting... according to people familiar with the matter..." The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said... U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict. [American officials at the meeting perceived the remarks as "intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait."] The Chinese official's remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said... In a statement, the State Department didn't comment on the meeting but said the U.S. had made clear to Beijing it will "take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity," describing the hacking as "some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security...." A Chinese official would likely only acknowledge the intrusions even in a private setting if instructed to do so by the top levels of Xi's government, said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. The tacit admission is significant, he said, because it may reflect a view in Beijing that the likeliest military conflict with the U.S. would be over Taiwan and that a more direct signal about the stakes of involvement needed to be sent to the Trump administration. "China wants U.S. officials to know that, yes, they do have this capability, and they are willing to use it," Cary said. The article notes that top U.S. officials have said America's Defense Department "will pursue more offensive cyber strikes against China." But it adds that the administration "also plans to dismiss hundreds of cybersecurity workers in sweeping job cuts and last week fired the director of the National Security Agency and his deputy, fanning concerns from some intelligence officials and lawmakers that the government would be weakened in defending against the attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exclusive pictures reveal Australian actor Jacob Elordi, 27, in the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights - and it appears to have reimagined him in a rather different light to past productions.

OLIVIA ATTWOOD, 33, is a prime-time TV star and podcaster with millions in the bank. Is she really set to be the new Cilla Black, asks Julia Llewellyn Smith

RUTH SUNDERLAND: The US President has an idiosyncratic grasp of economics, to put it tactfully, but when he declared in, 'If you don't have steel, you don't have a country', he was correct.