<story><title>Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of &apos;Higgs boson&apos;</title><url>http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/linux-played-crucial-role-in-discovery.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cushman</author><text>There are interesting facets to it, I think. What would they be using if Linux didn&apos;t exist? How much longer would it have taken if they&apos;d had to use BSD? Or Windows?&lt;p&gt;How many of those millions of man-hours contributed to this discovery? How many other major breakthroughs have they enabled? How much amazing potential is locked up in proprietary software, utterly useless?&lt;p&gt;A major discovery like this is a perfect chance to blow the horn for publicly-funded research, and open source software is a huge part of that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Do we still need to point things like this out? Who here thought Linux &lt;i&gt;didn&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; play a major role at CERN? Linux is the norm in large data center applications. What percentage of US commodities and securities transactions are touched by Linux? My guess is &quot;most&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mechanical_fish</author><text>&lt;i&gt;How much longer would it have taken if they&apos;d had to use BSD?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No longer, because software was not the bottleneck.&lt;p&gt;The hard part about finding a Higgs boson is designing the gigantic particle accelerator and the detectors, then getting the funding to build them, then building them, then running them for &lt;i&gt;N&lt;/i&gt; hours and analyzing the data. These things took &lt;i&gt;decades&lt;/i&gt;. They started in the 1980s, years before Linux.</text></comment>
<story><title>Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of &apos;Higgs boson&apos;</title><url>http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/linux-played-crucial-role-in-discovery.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cushman</author><text>There are interesting facets to it, I think. What would they be using if Linux didn&apos;t exist? How much longer would it have taken if they&apos;d had to use BSD? Or Windows?&lt;p&gt;How many of those millions of man-hours contributed to this discovery? How many other major breakthroughs have they enabled? How much amazing potential is locked up in proprietary software, utterly useless?&lt;p&gt;A major discovery like this is a perfect chance to blow the horn for publicly-funded research, and open source software is a huge part of that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Do we still need to point things like this out? Who here thought Linux &lt;i&gt;didn&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; play a major role at CERN? Linux is the norm in large data center applications. What percentage of US commodities and securities transactions are touched by Linux? My guess is &quot;most&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boop</author><text>&amp;#62; How much longer would it have taken if they&apos;d had to use BSD?&lt;p&gt;Macs (BSD-based) are popular at CERN as well:&lt;p&gt;Smashing Research at CERN
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