Let's allow robots at the Olympics and laugh at the poor athletes losing! /s

There is nothing wrong with the desire to be smart, actually succeeding at being smart, and then expecting some recognition for that achievement.

Or another way.

I enjoy seeing the fastest human on earth run.

But I'm still getting in my car to go to the shop.

I actually love the analogy that mathematicians will be the equivalent of olympic athletes.

Nobody needs to throw a rock far, or run fast, nobody gets any value except entertainment.

I think your own analogy is actually much worse than my point.

I keep my cables hanging on an old coat rack. Each hook holds one category of cable: USB cables, ethernet cables, power cables, analog cables, digital data cables (other than USB and net), proprietary cables, etc.

It's much easier to find a cable than searching in a box or plastic bag.

Ambulance and rescue helicopters, if there are any left, and the crew didn't just take the helicopter and run as far as possible...

Which will almost certainly be military, because civilian helicopters and staff aren’t equipped or trained for that kind of environment except for perhaps a every couple of years hazmat/mass casualty training.

Unobtainium.

There's several listings on eBay. The listings for laptops are in a range I'd consider...

The tricky bit is usually there's a proprietary connector for the specific laptop, but I recall taking a laptop cd drive for another project and it was basically a drive with standard 44 pin mobile ide connector plus a little board to go to the proprietary connector wrapped in a line specific case. I'd guess the ls-120 drives are the same deal.

Back in the day when I had an ls-120 drive, it was much superior to a regular floppy drive for reading floppy disks. So I'd definitely try to get that going as a first step.

Too expensive.

It was getting better until they integrated IE in Win98.

This stuff is a lot worse:

https://gizmodo.com/chlorine-trifluoride-the-chemical-that-s...

Maybe courtrooms need a new job/position: fact checker ?

Too late now. Anyone could see this coming since they added a whitelist for bluetooth obex in 2009. Nobody said anything.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Blue...

They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.

I'm a Gentoo dev and work at CERN since a while. Of course I jokingly suggested that to my colleagues. I think it could actually work pretty well, though. Many physicists use Gentoo.

We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix.

A good intersection of CERN and Gentoo is EESSI. They use CVMFS, which is a FUSE filesystem used for software distribution from CERN, and Gentoo as part of their software stack. See links below for more info:

- https://www.eessi.io/docs/filesystem_layer/

- https://www.eessi.io/docs/compatibility_layer/

The issue imo with Gentoo is the compiler flag explosion, the giant case statement I had long ago for packages that would fail to compile on even simple standard -Werror= was huge.

Not a Gentoo dev, but also at CERN. I've been using (headless, I'm not going down the GUI toolkit building rabbit-hole again) Gentoo for the last 15 years of development (both at home and at work). Great OS :)

Yeah, I'm really not sure that's a joke; binary packages, optionally combined with a prefix install, seem like a great fit.

Honest question, what would be different from doing the same with Debian packages? Building packages from source is trivial in Debian. It is literally one command, not much different from installing binary packages. Hosting internal repositories is completely expected and well tested.

Personally I have used Gentoo for many years, though never professionally. Its secure extensions were very well tested and documented back in the day, before SELinux pretty much took over. The kernel build system was terrific.

But never once did I consider setting compiler flags an important feature. The person who knows what flags are best used with an individual package, that -Os is more important than -O3 for this particular loop, is either the packager (who knows the system architecture) or the original developer (who wrote the code). Never the end user.

Debian is comparably a more mature system. The downside is perhaps that its packages are a bit more complex than they should be. Functionality-wise it can do anything you could wish for. But if you are a big institution with a lot of competent people in house, go right ahead. You can't possibly go wrong with a well tested system and the knowledge to improve the bits you need.

They are the ones that reported having problems with compiler flags. What use is binary distribution OS if it needs rebuilding everything?

I believe NetBSD would be better for these machines. NetBSD supports old systems quite well and have a release cycle that in cases are longer than Debian.

But, CERN may have some proprietary applications on those systems that force them to use a specific setup which is hard to replicate in other distros.

Most software at CERN is open source. But you are right, for things which are quite specific to CERN, like the control systems of the accelerator, there's also some proprietary code. Same for hardware actually, CERN develops open hardware too.

https://opensource.web.cern.ch/

I had the exact same thought! One guy could maintain their OS. No forced compiler flags, internal binhost, everything else same as what they had.

There's even a thing called GRS (Gentoo Reference System) - a predefined Gentoo configuration that predictibly generates identical Gentoo installations. It's probably a chore to set up (that is, more than an ordinary Gentoo), but I expect it would make it very easy to maintain hundreds of installations based on that GRS.