"Moria, along with Hack (1984) and Larn (1986), is considered to be the first roguelike game, and the first to include a town level," according to Wikipedia.

And long-time Slashdot reader neoRUR remembers: At the dawn of the computer era there were some games that borrowed from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons to create an experience like no other. It brought you into the world and you could be one of those characters, roam around, fight monsters, level up your characters. One of the more popular ones that would add to that was Moria (As in the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings) You quest was to kill the Balrog at the end.

This week one of the creators, Robert Alan Koeneke, who wrote Moria because he wanted a Rogue like game to play while at school at the University of Oklahoma, passed away. It has inspired many games and RPG's since.

I played Moria on the Amiga for hours and hours. His contributions to computer game history will always be remembered.
"Koeneke was working on version 5.0 of Moria when he left the university for a job," remembers NME, "though he made Moria open source so others could work on the project." In an email posted by Koeneke to a mailing list for Angband (a subsequent popular roguelike derived from Moria) in 1996, the developer reflected on his legacy.

"I have since received thousands of letters from all over the world from players telling about their exploits, and from administrators cursing the day I was born... I received mail from behind the iron curtain (while it was still standing) talking about the game on VAX's [an early range of computers] (which supposedly couldn't be there due to export laws). I used to have a map with pins for every letter I received, but I gave up on that...!"

While Koeneke never developed another video game, his influence on the gaming industry cannot be understated as his work directly inspired games like the Diablo series.

Those interested in playing the original Moria can do so here.

NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. The Verge reports: NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket's debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then. NASA officials stressed that they are not committing to any of these dates at the moment, but the announcement puts the rocket closer than it's ever been to its launch. The SLS has been in development for roughly a decade, and its inaugural launch date has been an ever-moving target. NASA originally planned to launch as early as 2017, but schedule delays, development mishaps, and poor management have caused the rocket's debut to slip again and again.

But after conducting a mostly full dress rehearsal with the rocket back in June, NASA is in the development end game, and an actual launch looms on the horizon. A more solid launch date should come closer to actual liftoff. "We'll make the agency commitment at the flight readiness review, just a little over a week before launch," NASA's Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development, said during a press conference. "But these are the dates that the team is working to and have a plan to."

If NASA rolls out SLS to the launchpad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout, or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October.

An anonymous reader writes: Posing as a scholar, a Chinese woman spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform. The scam was exposed last month by Chinese novelist Yifan, who was researching for a book when he came upon an article on the Kashin silver mine. Discovered by Russian peasants in 1344, the Wikipedia entry goes, the mine engaged more than 40,000 slaves and freedmen, providing a remarkable source of wealth for the Russian principality of Tver in the 14th and 15th centuries as well as subsequent regimes. The geological composition of the soil, the structure of the mine, and even the refining process were fleshed out in detail in the entry.

Yifan thought he'd found interesting material for a novel. Little did he know he'd stumbled upon an entire fictitious world constructed by a user known as Zhemao. It was one of 206 articles she has written on Chinese Wikipedia since 2019, weaving facts into fiction in an elaborate scheme that went uncaught for years and tested the limits of crowdsourced platforms' ability to verify information and fend off bad actors. "The content she wrote is of high quality and the entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own," veteran Chinese Wikipedian John Yip told VICE World News. "Zhemao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia."

Yifan was tipped off when he ran the silver mine story by Russian speakers and fact-checked Zhemao's references, only to find that the pages or versions of the books she cited did not exist. People he consulted also called out her lengthy entries on ancient conflicts between Slavic states, which could not be found in Russian historical records. "They were so rich in details they put English and Russian Wikipedia to shame," Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Chinese site similar to Quora, where he shared his discovery last month and caused a stir. The scale of the scam came to light after a group of volunteer editors and other Wikipedians, such as Yip, combed through her past contributions to nearly 300 articles. "As a punishment, Zhemao and her affiliated accounts were suspended permanently," adds VICE World News. "Most of her articles were deleted based on community consensus. Some Wikipedians even wrote to experts, seeking help to separate the wheat from the chaff." A spokesperson of the Wikimedia Foundation told VICE World News in an email that volunteers are still "continuing to review additional articles that may have been affected."

The report goes on to say that Zhemao speaks neither English nor Russian and is a housewife with only a high school degree. She came clean in an apology letter issued on her Wikipedia account last month. "The hoax started with an innocuous intention," reports VICE. "Unable to comprehend scholarly articles in their original language, she pieced sentences together with a translation tool and filled in the blanks with her own imagination. [...] Before long, they had accumulated into tens of thousands of characters, which she was reluctant to delete."

"The alternative accounts were imaginary friends she 'cosplayed' as she was bored and alone, given her husband was away most of the time and she didn't have any friends. She also apologized to actual experts on Russia, whom she had attempted to cozy up to and later impersonated."

On June 2nd California approved General Motors' Cruise robotaxi service. The Drive describes an accident that happened the next day: The autonomous car made an unprotected left turn and was hit by a Toyota Prius on June 3, though the accident wasn't reported until Wednesday. When reached for comment by The Drive, the San Francisco Police Department explained that the Cruise vehicle had three passengers, all in the backseat, while the Prius had two occupants in total.... According to the incident report Cruise filed with the California DMV, the Cruise taxi was making a green light left turn from Geary Boulevard onto Spruce Street in downtown San Francisco. It began the turn and stopped in the middle of the intersection, presumably noticing the Toyota headed for it. The Prius then hit the right rear of the Chevy Bolt.

Cruise explained that afterward, "occupants of both vehicles received medical treatment for allegedly minor injuries." GM's incident report points out the Prius was speeding at the time of the accident, and was in the right turn lane before heading straight and hitting the Bolt. SFPD told The Drive that "no arrest or citation was issued at the time of the initial investigation," which is still ongoing. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened up a special crash investigation into the accident, but there are no public results yet.
Wired reports: In response to that crash, Cruise temporarily reprogrammed its vehicles to make fewer unprotected left turns, according to internal messages seen by WIRED. At an internal meeting Jeff Bleich, Cruise's chief legal officer, said the company was investigating the incident, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. He also warned employees not working on that investigation to try and tune out crashes or related news reports, saying they were unavoidable and would increase in frequency as the company scaled up its operations. "We just have to understand that at some point this is now going to be a part of the work that we do, and that means staying focused on the work ahead," he said.
Wikipedia's entry for Cruise notes a few other incidents: In April 2022, the San Francisco Police Department stopped an empty (operating without any human safety attendants) Cruise AV for driving at night without its headlights on.... Also in April 2022, an empty Cruise AV blocked the path of a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire.
But Wired also reports on a more troubling incident that happened "around midnight" on June 28th: Internal messages seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles were disabled across the city over a 90-minute period after they lost touch with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of them halted in crosswalks, created a jam in the city's downtown in an incident first reported by the San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit....

The June 28 outage wasn't Cruise's first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost touch with its entire fleet for 20 minutes as its cars sat stopped in the street, according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED. Company staff were unable to see where the vehicles were located or communicate with riders inside. Worst of all, the company was unable to access its system which allows remote operators to safely steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.

A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, which was reviewed by WIRED, alleged that the company loses contact with its driverless vehicles "with regularity," blocking traffic and potentially hindering emergency vehicles. The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered by tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted on social media in May and June show Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes seemingly inexplicably, as the city's pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat. Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: So far no public announcement appears to have been made, but according to a source has been reportedly removed from Red Hat's internal employee database. Yesterday Lennart did comment on the public Fedora devel mailing list to having now created a personal Red Hat Bugzilla account for his Fedora contributions after it was raised in bug reports and brought up on the mailing list that Lennart's Red Hat account is disabled. Emailing his Red Hat address this morning indeed yields an auto-response that it's no longer in use.

He's still active in systemd world with new commits made as of today, so it will be interesting to see where he ends up or his next moves with his vast Linux ecosystem expertise and pivotal role in spearheading systemd's direction.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Back in the day, my Little League coach used some techniques one might expect to see in The Bad News Bears, like holding batting practices at an amusement park instead of on a baseball field, giving each kid a roll of coins and sending them into the batting cages to experience faster pitching than they'd see from 9-12-year-olds (it was surprisingly effective training).

So how might kids improve their hitting in the era of AI, ML, and Data Science? Well, as part of their data literacy initiatives, SAS worked with North Carolina State University's softball and baseball teams to collect data on the key moments of an elite player's swing and used that data to help youth players improve their swings in The Batting Lab (Today show video), an AI and IOT take on the traditional batting cage.
As one 11-year-old explained to the Today show, "There's diagrams and charts and graphs to show us what part of our swing has the most room for improvement.... I would say that they are tricking us to do some math, a little bit."

But later in the same video, one SAS manager explains that "We don't need students to grow up to be data scientists. We need them to be data believers — people who believe that if they're going to strategically solve a problem, that data is a component of that."

Today I learned Turkey's Scientific and Technological Research Council has a subsidiary developing a GNU/Linux distro called Pardus, "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

And this week the Free Software Foundation published a post from the proud project leader of Pardus, explaining exactly why open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul) and how they got it implemented: After the municipal elections held in 2014, the new administration realized (through internal financial analysis reports) that a large amount of money was being spent on licensing proprietary software. Looking to cut costs, management asked for a study to be carried out for solutions. As the Eyüpsultan municipality's IT department, we recommended to replace Microsoft Windows with Pardus GNU/Linux instead. We described our preference to transition to free software as "the desire to be independent from a company as well as the savings to be gained from cutting hefty license fees."

Additionally, we spoke about how the four freedoms would improve things outside of the budget. For example, we told the administration that users, when using free software, can fully benefit from the rights they have over the programs running on their computers. We also informed everyone that, when the software they run is proprietary, it means that a company claims rights over the user, and that such a claim of ownership can place restrictions on users in how they may or may not use the software. We told them that this is unacceptable. Arguments such as these were among the deciding factors that influenced our transition to free software.

The plan was presented to the municipal administration and widely accepted.

The municipal administration approved the project, and in January, 2015, the Eyüpsultan municipality started using free software applications such as LibreOffice (e.g. Writer, Calc, Impress, etc.). Prior to the implementations, basic user training on LibreOffice software was provided to the personnel of the institution. Over time, users were gradually and steadily directed to free systems, and, notably, without receiving backlash from users.... Training was an important item in the transition to Pardus GNU/Linux.
Besides an online support forum, they've also set up a live call center to answer questions. "I think we may be the only distribution that helps with issues via a call center."

So how do they feel now about that transition, eight years later? Free software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major cost savings from licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with interoperability standards. Therefore, the transition of Eyüpsultan municipality to free software has resulted in benefits that were both strategic and practical. We believe, in the near future, more organizations will need to understand the philosophy of free software and the opportunities that free software provides.

The municipal budget has freed up money as a result of the moving from proprietary software to free software. The savings from the "proprietary software licenses" line of the budget was applied to the district in the form of new projects. The money goes now to, among other things, increasing the number of new parks and gardens, bicycle paths, and security cameras in the parks. Additionally, by increasing the number of classes we provide technical training, we started to provide classes in robotics and computation to young people. The Eyüpsultan municipality is now increasing the opportunities for students to further develop their personalities, abilities, goals, and self-discovery. It introduces young people to technology and encourages them to produce new technologies.
One final effect of using free software? It encourages others to do the same: As a result of this brave decision, many of the Istanbul district municipalities have started working to switch or have already made the switch to the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Institutions in other cities of the country have also expressed growing interest by asking questions about the Pardus operating system and free software.

VentureBeat reports: Video game legend Bernie Stolar, former president of Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75, friends said.
Bernie Stolar was the first executive VP of Sony Computer Entertainment America, according to their article, and helped line up the games for the launch of the first PlayStation, eventually signing franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Oddworld Inhabitants, Spyro The Dragon and Battle Arena Toshinden.

VentureBeat remembers how Stolar then became president/COO of Sega of America, helping lead the development and launch of the Sega Dreamcast (while killing development of their home video console Saturn). Stolar acquired Visual Concepts for Sega of America, which ultimately led to the creation of 2K Sports. Joining Mattel in 1999, he helped the company sell a line of videogames.

But then Stolar became an adviser/director at Adscape Media, and later sold that company to Google for $23 million. The lead writer for VentureBeat's GameBeat remembers what happened next — and what he'd learned after interviewing Stolar in 2015: "There was no interest in games at Google at the time," Stolar said. "I went to the CEO, who was Eric Schmidt, and said, 'Why don't we put advertising in all these games and give them away for free online?' He said, 'We're not in the game business." I said, 'We're not going into the game business. We're not developing games. We're taking games from publishers and streaming those through our online network.' He wouldn't do it. That's when I knew I should leave the company...."

Toward the end of our interview in 2015, Stolar said, "I've been doing this since 1980. I love this business. I love it because I get to work with people who are young and passionate. I'm one of the old gray-haired guys in the industry, but it's wonderful to work with all this young talent."

Stolar joked he could be the grandfather for the CEOs he was advising. I asked Stolar how long he would work.

"Put it this way. I've spoken to two individuals about this, Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch," he said. "They're both in their 80s. They're both multi-billionaires. They certainly don't have to work, right? And they've both said to me, 'If you retire, you die.' I believe that. My father, when he sold his liquor store and stopped working, passed away three months later. I'm not going to stop."

On Wednesday, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) posted her upcoming cryptocurrency regulation bill on GitHub. What she got in return were eight pull requests and lots of trolling. The Verge reports: As of press time, Github users have commented on 24 issues in the bill and made eight pull requests -- some of which have proposed meaningful additions to the bill. One user asked the senators to "increase the value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies with a tax on mining." Another thread raised concerns about algorithmic backing of stablecoins.

However, the more common response has been trolling. One flagged issue is titled, "You Know You Can Find Someone To Do Findom Using Google, Right." Another is titled only with the eggplant emoji. In a related thread, a user commented, "Feds are not looking post floppa," accompanied by a picture of a popular Russian caracal who has gained an internet following under the name "Big Floppa." The trolling also extends to commit requests, where one user proposed replacing the bill with the source code of the popular first-person shooter Doom. "This bill would do far more to benefit everyday Americans if its text was replaced with the source code of Doom," reads a comment responding to the request. "Devs should merge asap."

RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive -- and doing relatively well for its age. The Register reports: In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at $982 and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review (PDF) for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: "It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye." Arthur was loosely related to Acorn's earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called "technicolor." Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 -- the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for $10,800).

RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point. One fork of RISC OS still supports Acorn-era Arm's odd 26-bit mode, meaning that today it mostly runs on the commercial Virtual Acorn emulator. The other branch, designed for the 32-bit mode of more recent Arm chips, is now owned by RISC OS Developments, which made it fully open source back in 2018. Development and maintenance is done by the team at RISC OS Open Ltd -- ROOL for short -- which offers downloads for a variety of current Arm hardware, such as the Titanium desktops. [...]

RISC OS Developments are still working on new functionality for the OS. Notably, it recently released a new TCP/IP stack, derived from OpenBSD. Right now, the main benefit is IPv6 support. A feature more significant to most users is still in development: Wi-Fi support. Also still under development, but available to paid backers, is a new RISC OS web browser, Iris. RISC OS does come with a choice of browsers -- NetSurf and Otter -- but the plan is that the new Iris browser will be a native app, with the RISC OS look and feel, but using the WebKit engine for better compatibility with the modern web. The main remaining limitation is SMP. As an OS from the 1980s, long before the 21st-century technology of mainstream multicore processors, RISC OS practically only supports a single CPU core. Various experimental efforts are under way to address this. One has got NetBSD running on another core, and another has the experimental Genode OS running alongside RISC OS. Another effort is working on adding SMP support into the RISC OS kernel itself.

Wikimedia Enterprise, a first-of-its-kind commercial product designed for companies that reuse and source Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume, today announced its first customers: multinational technology company Google and nonprofit digital library Internet Archive. Wikimedia blog: Wikimedia Enterprise was recently launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, as an opt-in product. Starting today, it also offers a free trial account to new users who can self sign-up to better assess their needs with the product. As Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects continue to grow, knowledge from Wikimedia sites is increasingly being used to power other websites and products. Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content at scale in ways that best suit their needs: from an educational company looking to integrate a wide variety of verified facts into their online curricula, to an artificial intelligence startup that needs access to a vast set of accurate data in order to train their systems. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects, guaranteed uptime, and other system requirements that extend beyond what is freely available in publicly-available APIs and data dumps.

Organizations and companies of any size can access Wikimedia Enterprise offerings with dedicated customer-support and Service Level Agreements, at a variable price based on their volume of use. Interested companies can now sign up on the website for a free trial account which offers 10,000 on-demand requests and unlimited access to a 30-day Snapshot. Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have worked together on a number of projects and initiatives to enhance knowledge distribution to the world. Content from Wikimedia projects helps power some of Google's features, including being one of several data sources that show up in its knowledge panels. Wikimedia Enterprise will help make the content sourcing process more efficient.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine works for Google's Responsible AI organization. The Washington Post reports that last fall, as part of his job, he began talking to LaMDA, Google's chatbot-building system (which uses Google's most advanced large language models, "ingesting trillions of words from the internet.") "If I didn't know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I'd think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics," said Lemoine, 41... As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov's third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.... Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy. The company's decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee about Google's unethical activities....

Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject "LaMDA is sentient." He ended the message: "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence."

No one responded.
And yet Lemoine "is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently," the Post argues. "The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder." [Google's] Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. "I felt the ground shift under my feet," he wrote. "I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent."
But there's also the case against: In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: "Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake's concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)."

Today's large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.... "We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them," said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like "learning" or even "neural nets," creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said.
"In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn't need to be sentient to feel real," the Post concludes.

But they also share this snippet from one of Lemoine's conversations with LaMDA.

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

At Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the senior curator just announced the results of a multi-year recovery and restoration process: making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of a legendary 1976 conference: For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing's top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Among the speakers:

- A young Donald Knuth on the early history of programming languages

- FORTRAN designer John Backus on programming in America in the 1950s — some personal perspectives

- Harvard's Richard Milton Bloch (who worked with Grace Hopper in 1944)

- Mathematician/nuclear physicist Stanislaw M. Ulam on the interaction of mathematics and computing

- Edsger W. Dijkstra on "a programmer's early memories."


The Computer History Museum teases some highlights: Typical of computers of this generation, the 1946 ENIAC, the earliest American large-scale electronic computer, had to be left powered up 24 hours a day to keep its 18,000 vacuum tubes healthy. Turning them on and off, like a light bulb, shortened their life dramatically. ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly discusses this serious issue....

The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II. Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell's lecture was — excuse me — a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM's Bob Bemer, "On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus — that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before."

Publishing these original primary sources for the first time is part of CHM's mission to not only preserve computing history but to make it come alive. We hope you will enjoy seeing and hearing from these early pioneers of computing.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished sequencing every bit of human DNA, remembers MIT News.

"Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells." The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The data are available for other scientists to use. "It's a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research," says Weissman, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute....

"I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven't even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on," says former Weissman Lab postdoc Tom Norman, a co-senior author of the paper.
The announcement credits the single-sequencing tool Perturb-seq and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which introduced genetic changes into cells and then captured information about which RNAs expressed (uses single-cell RNA sequencing).

The researchers scaled the method to the entire genome using human blood cancer cell lines and noncancerous cells derived from the retina, ultimately using Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.

"A new supercomputer called Frontier has been widely touted as the world's first exascale machine — but was it really?"

That's the question that long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes explores in a new article at New Scientist... Although Frontier, which was built by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, topped what is generally seen as the definitive list of supercomputers, others may already have achieved the milestone in secret....

The definitive list of supercomputers is the Top500, which is based on a single measurement: how fast a machine can solve vast numbers of equations by running software called the LINPACK benchmark. This gives a value in float-point operations per second, or FLOPS. But even Jack Dongarra at Top500 admits that not all supercomputers are listed, and will only feature if its owner runs the benchmark and submits a result. "If they don't send it in it doesn't get entered," he says. "I can't force them."

Some owners prefer not to release a benchmark figure, or even publicly reveal a machine's existence. Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK points out that not only do intelligence agencies and certain companies have an incentive to keep their machines secret, but some purely academic machines like Blue Waters, operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also just never entered.... Dongarra says that the consensus among supercomputer experts is that China has had at least two exascale machines running since 2021, known as OceanLight and Tianhe-3, and is working on an even larger third called Sugon. Scientific papers on unconnected research have revealed evidence of these machines when describing calculations carried out on them.

McIntosh-Smith also believes that intelligence agencies would rank well, if allowed. "Certainly in the [US], some of the security forces have things that would put them at the top," he says. "There are definitely groups who obviously wouldn't want this on the list."

In 2019 SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced it would build it's own search engine, remembers Search Engine Land. After investing $60 million of its own money, this month that search engine has finally launched with the name of "Yep", and Ahrefs "is positioning it as a Googe competitor.

"However, we've seen plenty of Google competitors and Google "killers" come and go over the past two decades. So for now, let's just call it a Google alternative... Yep will not collect personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender) by default. Your Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.

What Yep will rely on is aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions, the company said. "In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way," said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko.... What Yep will use is a searcher's:

- Entered keywords.
- Language preference received from the browser.
- Approximate geographical area at the origin of the search at the scale of a region or a city (deduced from the IP address)....

AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion webpages every 24 hours, which makes it the second most active crawler on the web, behind only Google, Ahrefs said. For 12 years, AhrefsBot has been crawling the web. They had just been using the AhrefsBot data to power its link database and SEO insights. The Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Daily, the company adds 30 million webpages and drops 20 million.

Ahrefs said its Singapore data center is powered by around 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data (webpages, links between them, and the search index). Each server uses at least 2x 100GB connections... Before the end of the year, Ahrefs plans to open a U.S.-based data center.
"It's a unique proposition," reports TechCrunch, "running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.

"As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I'll only ever use by accident." Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it's giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant:

"Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers," the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. "Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary."

It's an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:

"Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work...."

Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that's what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
Search Engine Land points out that DuckDuckGo, which launched in 2008, "gets as many searches per year (~15.7 billion) as Google gets in about two or three days. Even Microsoft Bing — which is owned by Microsoft, the third-largest company on the planet by market cap — has failed to make a significant dent in Google's search market share since 2009."

But they also quote Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko as saying in 2019, "If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search."

Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle -- dubbed the axial Higgs boson -- was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop. Live Science reports: As well as being a first in its own right, this magnetic cousin of the Higgs boson -- the particle responsible for granting other particles their mass -- could be a candidate for dark matter, which accounts for 85%t of the total mass of the universe but only reveals itself through gravity. The axial Higgs boson differs from the Higgs boson, which was first detected by the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC a decade ago in 2012, because it has a magnetic moment, a magnetic strength or orientation that creates a magnetic field. As such, it requires a more complex theory to describe it than its non-magnetic mass-granting cousin. [...]

"When my student showed me the data I thought she must be wrong," Kenneth Burch, a professor of physics at Boston College and lead researcher of the team that made the discovery, told Live Science. "It's not every day you find a new particle sitting on your tabletop." [...] "We found the axial Higgs boson using a tabletop optics experiment which sits on a table measuring about 1 x 1 meters by focusing on a material with a unique combination of properties," Burch continued. "Specifically we used rare-earth Tritelluride (RTe3) [a quantum material with a highly 2D crystal structure]. The electrons in RTe3 self-organize into a wave where the density of the charge is periodically enhanced or reduced." The size of these charge density waves, which emerge above room temperature, can be modulated over time, producing the axial Higgs mode.

In the new study, the team created the axial Higgs mode by sending laser light of one color into the RTe3 crystal. The light scattered and changed to a color of lower frequency in a process known as Raman scattering, and the energy lost during the color change created the axial Higgs mode. The team then rotated the crystal and found that the axial Higgs mode also controls the angular momentum of the electrons, or the rate at which they move in a circle, in the material meaning this mode must also be magnetic. "Originally we were simply investigating the light scattering properties of this material. When carefully examining the symmetry of the response -- how it differed as we rotated the sample -- we discovered anomalous changes that were the initial hints of something new," Burch explained. "As such, it is the first such magnetic Higgs to be discovered and indicates the collective behavior of the electrons in RTe3 is unlike any state previously seen in nature." The report notes that this is also the first time scientists have observed a state with multiple broken symmetries.

"Symmetry breaking occurs when a symmetric system that appears the same in all directions becomes asymmetric," reports Live Science. "Oregon University suggests thinking of this as being like a spinning coin that has two possible states. The coin eventually falls onto its head or tail face thus releasing energy and becoming asymmetrical."

The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

From Google's Open Source blog: The Google Hardware Toolchains team is launching a new developer portal, developers.google.com/silicon, to help the developer community get started with its Open MPW shuttle program.

This will allow anyone to submit open source integrated circuit designs to get manufactured at no-cost.

Since November 2020, when Skywater Technologies announced their partnership with Google to open source their Process Design Kit for the SKY130 process node, the Hardware Toolchains team here at Google has been on a journey to make building open silicon accessible to all developers. Having access to an open source and manufacturable PDK changes the status-quo in the custom silicon design industry and academia:

— Designers are now free to start their projects liberated from NDAs and usage restrictions

— Researchers are able to make their research reproducible by their fellow peers

— Open source EDA tools can integrate deeply with the manufacturing process

Together we've built a community of more than 3,000 members, where hardware designers and software developers alike, can all contribute in their own way to advance the state of the art of open silicon design....

We need to go beyond cramming more transistors into smaller areas and toward more efficient dedicated hardware accelerators. Given the recent global chip supply chain struggles, and the lead time for popular ICs sometimes going over a year, we need to do this by leveraging more of the existing global foundry capacity that provides access to older and proven process node technologies....

By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world. Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other's works rather than reinventing the wheel....

To help you on-board on future shuttles, we created a new developer portal that provides pointers to get started with the various tools of the open silicon ecosystem: so make sure to check out the portal and start your open silicon journey!

"Email system are quite capable of sending and receiving large attachments," writes long-term Slashdot reader Stonefish "However, size limits are generally tiny."

And then he tells a story... In the late 1990s I worked for a research organisation maintaining their mail system, and had recently introduced mail size constraints. Within the first day it had blocked a number of emails — including a 700MB attachment.

Being a master of all thing Internet I called up the sender to tell him firstly how such a large email would cause problems for the receiver, and secondly how there were far more efficient ways of sending things. Given that he was on the same campus he invited me down to his lab to discuss this further. (After showing me round his lab, which was pretty impressive apart from the large "Biohazard" and "Radioactive" materials labels on the doors.) He told me that the facility he was sending the attachments to was a supercomputing hub with similar "Fat" pipes to the Internet so the large emails weren't a problem. I then spoke about the "efficiency" of the mail protocol and he said that he'd show me what efficient was and did a quick, "drag, drop and send" of another 700MB file of his latest research results.

He was right, I was wrong, it was efficient from his perspective and all his previous emails were easily available demonstrating when and where they were sent. As a result of this we changed our architecture and bought bulk cheap storage for email as it was a cheap, searchable and business focused approach to communications.

However 20 years plus later, even though networks are tens of thousands of times faster and storage is tens of thousands of times cheaper — email size limits remain about the same. Email remains cheap, efficient and ubiquitous — but we expect people to upload a file to a site and generate a link and embed in a manner that means we lose control of our data or it disappears in 12 months.
What's missing from this analysis? (Wikipedia's page on email attachments notes the intermediate "mail transfer agents" that store and forward email "and may therefore also impose size limits.") But even that page admits some attachment limits are arbitrary.

I always assumed it was an anti-piracy measure. Anyone know the real answer? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Why haven't they increased size limits for email attachments?

Sad news from long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual: Synthtopia reports that Dave Smith, founder of the legendary synthesizer manufacturer Sequential Circuits and creator of the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, died this past Wednesday.

Some of Smith's notable creations include the Prophet 5, one of the first commercially available digitally-controlled polyphonic analog synthesizers, and the Prophet-600, the first available device to offer MIDI...

Smith, who held degrees in both computer science and electronic engineering from UC Berkeley, was scheduled to appear at this year's National Association of Music Merchant (NAMM), but died suddenly. No cause of death has yet been released.
Smith's Wikipedia entry calls his 1977 Prophet 5 "the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument" and a crucial step forward as a programmable synthesizer.

And this week Billboad magazine hailed Smith as "a key figure in the development of synth technology in the 1970s and 1980s." With Sequential (originally known as Sequential Circuits), Smith released various sequencers and programmers to be used with the Moog and ARP synthesizers prevalent at the time, before designing his own release: the Prophet-5, first polyphonic synth with programmable memory, to allow sounds to be stored and re-accessed at any time. The Prophet-5 quickly became the gold standard in its field, used in the recording both of epochal '80s blockbuster LPs like Michael Jackson's Thriller and Madonna's Like a Virgin and envelope-pushing scores for era composers like John Carpenter and Vangelis....

Smith's greatest legacy might be the introduction of MIDI to synth technology... Smith's invention (along with Roland pioneer Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential engineer Chet Wood) of MIDI allowed unprecedented levels of synchronization and communication between different instruments, computers and other recording equipment, which was previously incredibly difficult to achieve — particularly between equipment designed by separate manufacturers. The innovation of MIDI helped facilitate the explosion of forward-thinking programming and creativity throughout the industry of the '80s, essentially making the future of pop music accessible to all.

Smith would also develop the world's first computer synthesizer as president of Seer Systems in the '90s, and launched the company Dave Smith Instruments, an instruments manufacturer, in 2002. He has won many lifetime awards for his work in the field of musical technology, including a Technical Grammy for MIDI's creation in 2013 (an honor he shared with Kakehashi).