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CERN builds almost next to nothing anymore. Half a century ago they really did do RF cavities, cooling, electronics etc. Not anymore. It is either COTS (DELL, Alterra etc.) or chiefly vendor bidding for some custom parts. Much like what NASA (from Rocketdyne, TRW to Boeing and SpaceX) or copycat ESA (Airbus, DLR, BAE's suppliers) does today.

It is a project bureau. Everything is essentially outsourced, leaving a management shell institute to parade for VIPs. Actually they are close to completely forgetting what they already knew in the hard sciences domain.


You could argue that that's what CERN should be.

Everyone needs to agree on a place to put the LHC, and a lot of the accelerator team is on sight and probably should be payed by CERN, but they have a clear set of KPIs for that: they need to get the machine up to design energy and luminosity and hold it there. The CERN accelerator and civil engineering teams are pretty impressive and have mostly done their job.

The rest of the scientific community can (and does) organize into pseudo-autonomous collaborations that draft proposals for what to do with the real-estate around the collision points and beam dumps. The vast majority of these people don't work for CERN.


Other news, is that HEP has used FPGAs for L0 triggers (amongst others) for decades. These always had a diverse selection criteria in their algorithms, event filters, suppression, weights etc. And just mentioning, that some custom radhard simple readout silicon from the likes of STM isn't any news either.

And for historians: Delphi people (amongst others) had papers on Higgs selection using (A)NN from LEP data (overfit :) , obviously without the 5 sigma. It was an argument for LHC.

Dear downvoters/shadowbanners: do your homework.


It's a discussion forum. Saying people are all wrong with no proof comes off as arrogant but isn't helpful. If you have links to examples, you can simply say, "Here's some prior art or previous work in this area you all might like."

People would probably upvote that.


You mean string theorists?

also dark materialists and dark energetists

  - OpenStreetMap, MapLibre
  - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota
  - Nextcloud, Seafile
  - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad
  - Discourse, Flarum
  - LimeSurvey Framaforms
  - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix
  - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH
  - Qwant, DuckDuckGo
  - Matomo, Plausible Analytics
  - Firefox, Brave
  - LineageOS, /e/ OS
  - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux)
  - Open Health, Gadgetbridge
  - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
  - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various)
  - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus
  - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral
  - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK)
  - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity


>Firefox

Mozilla is dependent on Google money.

>Brave

Chromium-based (another engine monopoly on itself) and crypto connections (if you're not a fan of them).


> Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad

+ OnlyOffice

> Qwant, DuckDuckGo

+ Mojeek

> Matomo, Plausible Analytics

+ Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics

> Firefox, Brave

+ Vivaldi

> GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota

+ Infomaniak, Mailo, Runbox

and tons of others


thank you for these good alternatives. I will take a look at them later


I've got to say, the IKEA PS 2014 lamp is really a Death Star - not just because of its spherical shape, but also because it played a significant role in bankrupting the factory that produced it. According to Wikipedia, the Szarvasi Vas-Fémipari Zrt. factory in Hungary had big plans to expand its production in 2011, including manufacturing high-end design lamps for Western European markets. By 2018, they had invested 2 billion forints in a development project that would make them the exclusive supplier of one of IKEA's lamp families. At its peak, the factory was producing 130,000 coffee makers and 2 million lamps per year. However, it seems that producing the PS 2014 lamp at a price point that was too low to be sustainable ultimately led to the factory's downfall. It's a cautionary tale about the risks of prioritizing low costs over sustainability and fair labor practices. The Death Star lamp may have been a stylish and affordable addition to many homes, but its production came at a significant cost to the workers and community involved.


Carole Cadwalladr: Six years ago I was sued for libel. This time, I call Silicon Valley collaborators and data rapists. What could possibly go wrong?


Funny thing. Perfect defense against libel is the truth.


It's not a perfect defense.

It doesn't defend against abuse of process. Merely being subject to a libel suit takes an enormous amount of time and money.

And the truth is not a defense to libel. The defendant must be able to prove that whatever they've said is substantially true.

It's honestly pretty amazing that anything negative gets published about the rich or powerful in the UK.


KHTML, officially discontinued in 2023. -- "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE) also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice. It's also possible that President-elect Donald Trump may interfere with the DOJ's proposed remedies; he said on the campaign trail that a Google break-up may not be desirable since it could "destroy" a company that the US highly values.


The GP's complaint was that Google "took over projects" or "forked them without trying to contribute to the original".

In the case of KHTML, they never used it in the first place, so it seems like a particularly inappropriate example. I assume you actually meant Webkit? In that case, they spent half a decade and thousands of engineer-years contributing to Webkit, so it doesn't fit the original complaint about not "trying to contribute" either.


   November 4, 1998; 26 years ago (KHTML released)
   June 7, 2005; 19 years ago (WebKit sourced)
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/third_...

   * (C) 1999-2003 Lars Knoll (knoll@kde.org)
   * (C) 2002-2003 Dirk Mueller (mueller@kde.org)
   * Copyright (C) 2002, 2006, 2008, 2012 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.
   * Copyright (C) 2006 Samuel Weinig (sam@webkit.org)
"...they never used it in the first place"


I think the point is that KHTML was already forked into webkit by apple long before google came along (though, they have in fact also now forked webkit into blink).


Thank you, I rest my case. I didn't even need to bring up the DragonEgg cartel (Chandler?) going down the gcc-llvm-clang pathway used essentially for getting rid of the pesky GPL quoted above. With BSD-style, source code is no longer any of your business (not to mention chrome-chromium differences along the textbook AndroidTV tivoization).


> I didn't even need to bring up the DragonEgg cartel (Chandler?) going down the gcc-llvm-clang pathway used essentially for getting rid of the pesky GPL quoted above.

That's... not even close to what happened?

Historically, LLVM was at one point proposed by Chris Lattner, while he was at Apple, to be upstreamed into GCC (and relicensed to GPL, natch) for use as at the LTO optimization phase, which was declined. For most of its early existence, it used llvm-gcc as the frontend to generate LLVM IR. In the late '00s, serious effort was put into making a new frontend for LLVM IR which we know as clang, primarily by Apple at that point, which become self-hosting in 2009 or 2010. Basically the moment clang becomes self-hosting, everyone jumps ship from using llvm-gcc to using clang to make LLVM IR.

Google shows up around this time, I think primarily motivated by the possibility that Clang offered for mass rewriting capabilities, since it has extraordinarily good location tracking (compared to the other compilers available), which is necessary for good rewriting tools. The other major area of Google's focus at this time is actually MSVC compatibility, and I distinctly remember Chandler talking in one of his presentations that you need to be able to compile code to trust it well enough to rewrite your code, so I think the compatibility story here was mostly (again) for rewriting.

Also around this time, gcc gains proper plugin support, and llvm-gcc is reworked into dragonegg to take advantage of the proper plugin support. But because clang now exists, dragonegg is no longer very interesting, with almost all the residual attempts to use dragonegg essentially being limited to people trying to use it to get LLVM IR out of gfortran, as LLVM had no fully-working Fortran compiler at that point.


Again, that seems to be in no way demonstrating the pattern that was claimed to be happening often.

AFAIK Google did not take ownership of gcc, nor did they try to fork it without contributing to the original. They used GCC for a good couple of decades while contributing to it, but eventually switched to a different compiler. The same for clang, they neither "took it over" nor "forked it without trying to contribute".



For the others: According to James Gosling's intentions, by retaining the familiar syntax of C programming with its use of curly braces, Java aimed to build upon the existing skills and knowledge of a larger community of developers who were already well-versed in C. This decision was meant to make the transition to Java as smooth as possible for those programmers, thereby increasing their adoption of the new language and its associated ecosystem (VM etc.). By the way, JavaScript was originally an embedded Scheme and had nothing in common with Java, except for the Sun marketing team (Brendan Eich was brave and took no pride...).


Hi! We are grateful for all your nice archeological work, may we please ask to make "Baa Baa Black Sheep" on the Ferranti available again based on the scans? Many thanks!


That's not me. Sorry.


:) From what I can recall, it was a java (applet) Ferranti simulator running a typed in copy of the song obtained from a library (Manchester?). It was part of a research/art installation project. I'm not so sure now, but .at, and masswerk seemed to be involved. I'll look into it, or if someone here recognizes it...


Do you mean this one (Manchester Mark I emulator in Java by David Link)? https://web.archive.org/web/20110723062727/http://alpha60.de...

Related to the topic of music on the Mark I: "BBC finds oldest digital music recording", https://bit-tech.net/news/beeb-finds-oldest-digital-music-re...

See also this paper for a bit more background: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_...


Thank you! Although it wasn't the loveletter I was thinking of, but you are right: it was probably this, because it also plays some music and it is covered in the paper. There was an instance on the web, so those who could not make it to the installation could also experience it. According to alpha60.de, there was a Group Exhibition "Love Letters", Gallery Gabriele Senn in Vienna from 12.05.2023 to 28.07.2023. I think it was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110723063000/http://alpha60.de... but the jar never loads from the archive. This is what I am after!


The key connection here is that David Link's emulation running "Love Letters" was an exhibit at the dOCUMENTA exhibition in 2012 and the Mark I thus entered the art world.

> David Link’s eponymous installation LoveLetters was first shown at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012. In it, the artist and computer archeologist Link romantically resurrects the earliest electronic, programmable and universal calculating machine worldwide: the Manchester University Computer or MUC. In 1953 and out of nowhere, it started to produce strange and touching love letters, addressed to anonymous people, or perhaps machines. The present version Love Letters – core is also based on the original source code by Christopher Strachey, a friend and colleague of Alan M. Turing, from 1951, and accompanied by two photographic prints of love letters on vintage CR tubes in the first on-screen font ever.

(Gallery Gabriele Senn, https://galeriesenn.at/love-letters/)


Because CERN is pretty much active in the global surveillance effort (recruiting and training), hence the authwall people are discussing above. The previous DG openly despised anonymity.


Are you confusing reality with Steins;Gate?


Pff, everyone knows all you need is an old IBM computer, a hot pocket, and a circuit-bent microwave to outsmart CERN.


How exactly is CERN involved with that?


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