Geneva, 23 November 2009.
Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

Its a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.But we need to keep a sense of perspective theres still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimisation, followed by LHCb.

This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.

It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions,said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. This is simply tremendous.

The tracks were seeing are beautiful, said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, were all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments calibrations.

You can almost hear Steve Jobs flipping out right now. Psystar, notable for its efforts to sell generic PCs with Mac OS X pre-loaded, has just released something called Rebel EFI. It’s software that allows you to install Mac OS X on generic PCs without having to Hackintosh said PC. (Hackintoshing isn’t for the weak of heart!)

How does it work? I have no idea, but Matt (or someone, it’s chaos here today) is buying it right now and should have something up in a bit. (I don’t have any PCs here, I’m afraid.)

Nearest I can tell, you download and burn the ISO, it performs some sort of voodoo, then you insert the Mac OS X DVD and install like normal.

So if you’re even remotely interested in this I’d say to download it right now because Apple’s lawyers will be all over this within a matter of seconds. You can count on that.

Update: Psystar’s site is down but here are the installation instructions if you managed to grab the trial version in time. Anyone get it to work yet?

1. Download the Rebel EFI file, available here.
2. Burn the file to a CD.
3. Insert the Rebel EFI disc into your CD drive.
4. Start or restart your computer.
5. As computer boots up select, Boot Options or Boot Menu Key
**Boot Options or Boot Menu Key differ by motherboard manufacturer.
6. Select CD ROM
7. After CD loads press enter to run the CD
8. When prompted, Eject the CD and it will ask for the Snow Leopard DVD
9. Insert the Snow Leopard DVD
10. Select Main Language
11. Click Continue, if you want to continue with the installation of Snow Leopard.
12. Click Agree, if you agree.
13. Select the disk that you want to install Snow Leopard on.
a. If no disk shows, Click on Utilities on the tool bar, then select Disk Utilities.
b. On the left you should see your hard drive.
c. If not, a disk is not connected or cannot be read by your computer.
d. After selecting your hard drive click on Partition.
e. Under Volume Scheme, click current and select 1 partition.
f. Under Volume Information, name your hard drive.
g. Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
h. At the bottom of the window Click on the Options Button.
i. Select the GUID Partition Table
j. Click OK
k. Click Apply
l. Click Partition
m. Quit Disk Utilities
14. Select the disk that you want to install Snow Leopard on.
15. Click Install.
16. When Installation completes. restart the computer
17. As the computer starts up, insert the Rebel EFI CD
18. As computer boots up select Boot Options or Boot Menu Key
**Boot Options or Boot Menu Key differ by motherboard manufacturer.
19. Select CD ROM
20. Once CD loads you will see both the Hard Disk and the Rebel EFI CD
21. Use the arrow keys to highlight the Hard Drive
22. Press Enter to boot Hard drive.
23. Launch the Rebel EFI application from the CD.
24. Follow the on-screen authentication procedure.
25. Click Continue
26. Select your Keyboard
27. Click Continue
28. Select, Do not transfer my information now.
29. Click Continue
30. If, you have and Apple ID enter it now
31. If not, Click Continue
32. Enter your Registration Information
33. Click Continue
34. Create your Account Information
35. Click Continue
36. Select Time Zone
37. Click Continue
38. Click Done