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.
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.
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!
:) 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...
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.
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.
In Fermilab’s building phase Wilson’s attitude was famous: he would fire anybody not busy working. At one time such a victim responded: you cannot fire me. Wilson asked why not, to which the man answered that he actually did not work for Fermilab. -- Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics
Some down voters here seem to be at odds with the facts.
...of which a sizeable chunk will go to Western European's private pension fund: the Pension Fund of CERN manages approximately 4 billion Swiss Francs in assets, both internally and externally.
And screw the younger generation, while at it (most of whom aren't eligible anyway). Conditions for new members (see Table 1): https://cds.cern.ch/record/1694667
We expect scientists' salaries to be based on merit, not based on discrimination on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, creed, cultural background or other factors, such as age or nationality.
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]
I have no idea what point you're trying to make with that quote. Companies and universities in different countries pay different salaries. That is outside the control of CERN.
What's the issue with what they are doing? Isn't it the case for most pension system that the retirement age has been increased over time to make up for life expectancy improvements?
Also the assets under management sounds pretty standard compared to similar funds in Switzerland.
The issue is that other people subsidize this luxurious lifestyle.
For example, in Germany it takes 1100 pensioners who are forced to pay "public" television fees to finance the pension and lifestyle of a single ZDF bigshot.
This includes people who are barely above social security level.
