Re: OT: The end of the world in roughly 3 hours

On Sep 10, 5:15 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
BTW:

$ curl -Ihttp://www.cern.ch
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:11:05 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Location:http://public.web.cern.ch/public/
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 150

And I thought CERN was populated by intelligent and educated people who
would know not to use microsoft products.

That's only their website. I seriously doubt the physicists themselves
run it, let alone set it up. They probably hired the services of some
company to do it, but I'm not sure. Besides, their talent is physics,
not computer shopping. And how would people in this newsgroup, and any
other IT people, no matter how "intelligent", be able to pick out
equipment and set up the largest, most powerful accelerator facility
ever built? (OK, that's a slightly bogus argument, but physicists
don't give such matters a whole lot of thought. And keeping a website
running is far less important than the accelerator itself.)

As for running the accelerator itself and its detectors and what not
-- I really don't know. I know that people in the physics group I was
in at graduate school used to use VAX/VMS and recently (if not still)
use Linux to analyze their data. Places where I did experiments used
VAX/VMS to analyze data. What did they use to run the accelerators?
Some places, like the lab at Ohio U., used their own contraptions. In
fact, many of them may be like that. I think the actual equipment in
use is more important. It's been a long time since I was involved with
such stuff.

So I wouldn't read too much into this.

AEF
.