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Linux Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Boson
An anonymous reader writes "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu had a vital role in the discovery of the new boson at CERN. Linux systems are used every day in their analysis, together with hosts of open software, such as ROOT. Linux plays a major role in the running of their networks of computers (in the grid etc.) and it is used for the intensive work in their calculations."
> On the computational side, BSD, Windows, Aix, Irix, Solaris could have all done exactly the same thing.
In theory yes, in practice, no. As a former astrophysicist we used to use Linux and Solaris for our computing despite the fact that most of the non-computing competent people used Windows on their desktops. The reason we used Linux is that it is a vastly superior development environment than Windows (Visual Studio was not useful for our purposes) and is also vastly superior (that is, easier and more open to us) for hardware integration than Windows. We also were producing and analyzing huge amounts of data, so were using 64-bit Linux while Windows users were still figuring out how to get their 16-bit legacy apps working on their 32-bit systems.
We also wanted uptimes of months whereas with Windows of the time you crossed your fingers that you'd go a day without some kind of fault happening. I'm sure fellow scientists at CERN developed a lot of software themselves and also found Linux far better for this purpose. That is why techie people prefer Linux over Windows - for practical reasons rather than 'religion' as you suppose. The reason you fail to understand this is probably because you are not trying to develop software for 'big data' problems. That's ok, please just understand that this colors your personal view with an inaccurate picture. Best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about.
Apple did not play any role in the discovery of the Higgs because it is too busy launching new patent troll lawsuits.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
[AC, as of some mod points spent]
ROOT, Data Analysis Framework