CERN Ditches Microsoft to 'Take Back Control' With Open Source Software (omgubuntu.co.uk) 236
CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit's next major experiment will be with open-source software. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible.
Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.
Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.
Emergency! (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty big titted blonde Microsoft sales girl immediately dispatched to CERN to offer a two year discount on the commercial licenses back to the level of the former academic pricing.
CERN falls for it.
You know it happens.
Re:Emergency! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it does. A friend of mine watched a fellow student in his networking class at the community college get hired by a major network equipment and services vendor straight of of the class. It sounds like she was hired for sales. She wasn't an idiot, but she has no industry experience. What she does have is the vibe that makes most of the men in her vicinity want to screw her brains out, whether she's consciously giving off that vibe or not.
Frankly she probably has a lucrative career in sales ahead of her; the stereotype of grown men losing their shiat over sales girls is true. The only major counter is to bring the older woman in the organization along, she's not only immune but can act as an effective party-pooper.
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For the duration of this topic, could you change your sig to read "Do not look into particle beam with remaining eye"?
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I could.
I won't, but I could.
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Blondes are a dime a dozen in Switzerland. They'd get more out of sending a chick with long black hair.
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty big titted blonde Microsoft sales girl immediately dispatched to CERN to offer a two year discount on the commercial licenses back to the level of the former academic pricing.
CERN falls for it.
You know it happens.
Cue Swiss police responding to call at CERN's visitor office finding an out-of-retirement Steve Ballmer in blonde wig screaming about developers.
This would be the Microsoft approach to implementing your idea
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"I'm going to fucking kill LHC!"
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Funny)
Happens all the time. Once my team was asked if we needed a very expensive network storage based device. We said no. Management said they valued our input. Then next day the vendor sent in team Tits and Ass to meet with management. The next team meeting, Hey we just bought a very expensive network storage based device that we didn't need.
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty big titted blonde Microsoft sales girl ...
This is one of those cases where adding a comma, say, after "pretty", kinda changes things ...
Punctuation matters people!
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Funny)
This is one of those cases where adding a comma, say, after "pretty", kinda changes things ...
Punctuation matters people!
Punctuation is the difference between, "Let's eat, Grandma!" and "Let's eat Grandma!"
Capitalization is the difference between helping your uncle jack off a horse and helping your Uncle Jack off a horse.
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This is one of those cases where adding a comma, say, after "pretty", kinda changes things ...
Punctuation matters people!
Punctuation is the difference between, "Let's eat, Grandma!" and "Let's eat Grandma!"
Capitalization is the difference between helping your uncle jack off a horse and helping your Uncle Jack off a horse.
Or context... For example, "Back at the ranch, Grandma was still beating off the Indians."
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Punctuation is the difference between, "Let's eat, Grandma!" and "Let's eat Grandma!"
Those could still mean the same thing - in that case, the first sentence could be interpreted as a warning to Grandma.
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Interesting)
Big-titted needs to be hyphenated as well because it's a compound adjective.
Of course any CERN folks who fall for this ploy probably don't even write well.
Meanwhile they've committed to a CentOS repo so they're playing into IBM's hand instead. Debian or Arch would be their better move. Maybe even Gentoo if they had the staff to eek out some extra performance.
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Mildly shocked yesterday ... downtown Toronto yesterday, Microsoft trying to demonstrate why we should use Azure through a demo ... after the first break, the MS leader came back in, slightly stunned - she had been told the coffee machine in the open break-area, just outside the conference room, was for employees only. Yeah, nothing like stiffing the clients a few dollars when trying to sell a multi-million dollar deal to set the tone ...
Or is that 'tone-deaf' ?
Re:Emergency! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Emergency! (Score:2)
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It would be fun to watch them try that sexist crap. Allow me to introduce CERN's director general [wikipedia.org].
You know for sure she doesn't like blonds?
Embrace Extend Extinguish (Score:2)
So standard operating procedure for MSFT.
MS to backtrack in 3... 2... 1... (Score:5, Insightful)
And it makes perfect business sense for them: if CERN were to actually start using FOSS for everything (not just ultra-specialised things, that exist only at CERN) that will quickly (within 3-4 years) start sending effects through the academic world, and that will eventually reach the students. And once the students get used to FOSS, it will be close to game over for Microsoft unless they come up with something revolutionary.
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My Alma Mater was widely FOSS ages ago. Do not worry. Plus, in physics, Linux is quite hard to avoid. ;)
But once we reach the corporate shores, well you could as well have landed on another planet. Engineers and scientists familiar with FOSS do not count as much as corporate types who love their commercial contracts and the "support". Corporate people tend to trust corporate stuff.
Re:MS to backtrack in 3... 2... 1... (Score:4, Interesting)
Engineers and scientists familiar with FOSS do not count as much as corporate types who love their commercial contracts and the "support". Corporate people tend to trust corporate stuff.
I work in IT, and with scientists.
I would say the majority of scientists DO NOT have an interest in which OS their software runs on, as long as it does what they need it to do.
There are a few that are geeky and like the *nix, and we in IT greatly appreciate them.
Re:MS to backtrack in 3... 2... 1... (Score:4, Interesting)
But once we reach the corporate shores, well you could as well have landed on another planet. Engineers and scientists familiar with FOSS do not count as much as corporate types who love their commercial contracts and the "support". Corporate people tend to trust corporate stuff.
To be fair, I've also seen some train wrecks where you're stuck with a homegrown franken-solution where the core developers have left and you're left with a mish-mash of custom code that's bleeding your budgets dry every time you need to make a small change. It's not that they're so afraid of open source as such, it's ending up at a dead end where you don't use products like RHEL or PostgreSQL or Wordpress anymore but "our homegrown solution based on StackOverflow and whatever library was the first hit on Google either stuck in VB6 for IE6 or written in ruby on rails because that was the current fad". Bonus points if you've taken a semi-shitty system, outsourced it to reduced cost and have now hit the wall where it's just hacks upon hacks until it's a wobbly Jenga tower where they quote you 10x a sane cost and nobody in-house wants to touch it ever again.
Remember, most companies must deal with an entirely average set of employees they're not in the position to create an elite team. Or if they do that team is busy making your next-gen product, not unclogging the toilet. On a corporate level buying some product like Salesforce and being able to throw a bunch of MSCEs at a problem to have it fixed is often a good thing, even if it's not an optimal solution. I think that's why also SaaS is taking off, you know you're getting an average service and even if you're a bit miserable the grass is probably not greener on the other side. Sure there are many horror stories about outsourcing, I also know a few that were happy to finally get rid of internal IT. There's a reason Dilbert has Mordac [dilbert.com] as a character.
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One nitpick... to say MS not ready to make a profit... but MS ALWAYS makes a profit selling licenses for software and OSes and whatever. It's just all cherry on top money.
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Not so sure anymore. these days the windows os is only a small part of income for MS.
Now, what i can see them do is make sure they get CERN on O365 or some other MS SaaS.
Re:MS to backtrack in 3... 2... 1... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Even if Microsoft backs down now, they've revealed that they are a liability to CERN, that at some point it's possible Microsoft won't back down. Considering CERN's resources and the talent they have, frankly, if I was MS, I'd be rather worried that what they cook up may actually end up being a FOSS competitor to Outlook/Exchange.
These are the guys, after all, who invented the web. This isn't some Fortune 500 company who some municipality that can be brought back into the Backoffice fold with hookers, blow and license discounts. This is a pretty damned forward looking organization with a pretty significant pool of talent.
Wait, CERN used Microsoft products? (Score:1)
I've worked in the sciences at Universities, and it's never been terribly Microsoft dependent. I'm a bit shocked they would use something as ugly as Exchange for email.
It seems they got a bit addicted to the "academic pricing" model, kind of like a... virus. Yes, Microsoft is a bit like a virus. Now where have I heard that comparison before with regard to software? It sounds a bit familiar.
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Exchange is an unwieldy beast. But it's the most featurful and capable email (and more) server in the world.
Re:Wait, CERN used Microsoft products? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exchange is an unwieldy beast. But it's the most featurful and capable email (and more) server in the world.
Anymore Exchange is a gateway drug to O365/EOL.
On Prems are going away.
Re:Wait, CERN used Microsoft products? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exchange is an unwieldy beast. But it's the most featurful and capable email (and more) server in the world.
No, it's a crap email server. The reason it gets deployed is because it's unmatched as a calendaring server.
Quite frankly, I wish the open source calendaring options didn't suck quite so badly
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It does, but since other solutions worked well, why should they have futzed around with something that annoyed them. I suspect bad documentation, at least for their purposes, since many apparently get MSExchange to work acceptably. But why bother? Personally, I've never set up a local Linux email server. I don't have a need for one, so why bother.
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Every Exchange org I know is outsourcing it to O365. I'd have to assume there's a reason for that.
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That comparison has its limits: viruses are usually efficient.
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Right, Windows is more like a slime mold, or kudzu.
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Right, Windows is more like a slime mold, or kudzu.
Microsoft is still a criminal racket that makes me sick, as evidences by sending their slimeball toadies out to attack criticism on social media sites.
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I suppose "good" as in does a lot of stuff. Not "good" as in having to administrate it, not "good" in having to support it, not "good" as in trying to fix it when it goes down. It's a massive kludgy monster that with each iteration has stacked features on top of a creaking framework.
Honestly I miss the olden days when emails were stored in the mbox format. Every email client I used could read the format, even if it was to import it in to its own custom mailbox format. Backing it up was trivial. Restoring ju
I hope they succeed. (Score:2)
I wish them good luck. It is not like they are deprived of competent engineers/computer scientists. It would be cool if they ended up developing software which would end up being used by civil services everywhere.
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My comp/sci buff buddies keep telling me CERN did way more than invent the WWW.
What i meant is if they succeed in developing software that meet their administrative needs i would be delighted if they ended up helping wean off civil services of their addiction to the Microsoft ecosystem.
Re: I hope they succeed. (Score:2)
CERN is leaving Windows because of COST (see above summary), it is never CHEAPER to hire programmers to recreate the things that Windows ecosystem offers for FREE.
Wait until they discover the pet desk cost of a management suite of tools to mimic the control over their environment that System Center and Active Directory already offers.
I bet per-desk management costs will likely exceed Windows license fees and costs they are hoping to avoid.
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That control present in AD is there in large part because of the way Windows configuration works. *nix uses a lot of conf files, which are pretty damned easy to distribute. You don't have to run a *nix network like you do a Windows one. And honestly, Group policies may be powerful, but they can also be insanely tricky, and many features don't have a single setting. I had to set up some kiosk-like units, and all I wanted to was turn off screen blanking and password lock screens. Well, that's like three or fo
Never change just to save money (Score:2, Interesting)
Munich switched to Linux for same reason, Windows was too expensive. Few years later they switched back to Windows. Whole adventure probably costs them more then if they just upgraded Windows.
Because government is arbitrary and capricious (Score:2, Informative)
When you get to play with other people's money, you get to be reckless and unprincipled. Of course they changed a few years later; that interim involved a lot of lobbying by Microsoft.
CERN is governmental.
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Few years later they switched back to Windows. Whole adventure probably costs them more then if they just upgraded Windows.
Maybe, but it got Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich.
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The main reason they switched back was they couldn't hire anyone to maintain their systems
You pulled that claim straight out of your pustulent Microsoft ass.
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The main reason they switched back was they couldn't hire anyone to maintain their systems
You pulled that claim straight out of your pustulent Microsoft ass.
Microsoft trollmod astroturders are out in force today. See, same old Microsoft, same old toadies. Nothing changed whatsover, don't be fooled by the new story.
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They probably never stopped paying their Windows admins. They are a government after all, it's not like they could lay them off.
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Supporting Open Source software pays bills too, so your point lacks validity.
It's not as though Munich was expecting Linux sysadmin to work for free.
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Microsoft of course reacts quickly when a government embraces Linux to ease them back to Windows. They do this because they want to put off the day Linux replaces their software.
Ballmer hasn't run Microsoft in close to a decade. Microsoft isn't looking to maintain its monopoly in localized OS software. They're going to migrate to a cloud services company. Instead of having to waste time constantly patching an OS on a constantly mutating PC, they're going to make money providing OS services in the cloud.
I believe the day will come when Linux really is the "king" of the desktop computer. But that day will be when everyone subscribes to Microsoft's OS and runs off of a thin client
They could afford the expensive Nextstations (Score:2)
New experiment (Score:2)
I love the new experiment: accelerate OSes and collide them!
Already do a lot of open-source (Score:3, Interesting)
Cern is the current maintainer (and have been for a few years now) of KiCAD, an open-source PCB design tool.
http://kicad-pcb.org/about/kic... [kicad-pcb.org]
https://home.cern/science/comp... [home.cern]
https://kt.cern/open [kt.cern]
and so on...
They are even into open-source hardware.
https://ohwr.org/cernohl [ohwr.org]
Does this really save money? (Score:2)
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The cost of retraining everyone to use different software greatly exceeds the license fees.
Honestly, I'm not convinced, not if your people are reasonably computer-literate to begin with. If they're not, maybe you have a separate problem.
Piracy Works (Score:2)
https://www.techrepublic.com/a... [techrepublic.com]
Same old Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Anybody spouting rhetoric about teh Microsoft is teh newz un-evil Satya Microsoft can just stop it right now. Obviously, Microsoft is still a corrupt, cynical racket, just a slimy as it ever was. The only thing that changed is, Microsoft got weaker and less effective at laying waste to the technology world in its sunset years. It's not that Microsoft doesn't want to do evil, it's just that it got harder for them. I guess, Microsoft could move on to beating up homeless people, that might get some of the old
Reminds me of the time... (Score:2)
Say YES to KiCAD (Score:2)
Why don't more Agencies do this? (Score:2)
Honestly, it's really surprising to me that more governmental agencies, especially non-American agencies, haven't migrated to Linux yet.
Do They Need Help With This? (Score:2)
Maybe 2019 will be the year of the... (Score:2)
Maybe 2019 will be the year of the super collider.
Seems like a dickish move on Microsoft's part... (Score:2)
Did CERN suddenly stop being a not-for-profit research agency?
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Re:More eyes. (Score:5, Funny)
<SARCASM>
Yeah, because CERN has NEVER contributed anything to the community. I wish they'd be more like the guys who invented the WWW.
</SARCASM>
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I wish they'd be more like the guys who invented the WWW.
I was hoping they'd contribute something useful.
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The WWW was pretty useful until US corporations got into it.
Some of them still doing good things but there is a common trend where, the bigger a company gets, the more user unfriendly it gets.
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PP of my original said that they hoped CERN would contribute back to the community.
I should have quoted it.
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It's required under the Americans With Disabilities Act to assist the sarcasm-impaired.
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This is just part of bargaining. (Score:1, Insightful)
All companies do this; they just use FOSS as leverage in license negotiations.
Re:This is just part of bargaining. (Score:5, Insightful)
And then discover that they are getting more work done with less hardware while not aggravating users with endless reboots and not getting owned by malware?
Re: This is just part of bargaining. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is about cost, nothing more.
Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.
Is CERN classified as a non-profit educational institution in the eyes of the Swiss taxation authority? Does CERN offer classes as it's primary function?
CERN has a Billion US Dollar Budget, the argument they can't afford to use Windows is laughable - they don't want to pay what other organizations pay.
Boo Hoo.
Have any of these big dramatic exits from the Windows OS ever actually gone as planned? I can't think of one that hasn't gone "casters up."
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This is about cost,
No shit sherlock
nothing more.
And that's where you're wrong; cost was merely the trigger that made them decide to go ahead with this multi year project
from their site, explaining the rationale:
The project’s principles of engagement are to:
Deliver the same service to every category of CERN personnel
Avoid vendor lock-in to decrease risk and dependency
Keep hands on the data
Address the common use-cases
You must be one of those people who only read the headline and think you know what's going on.
Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.
Budgeting must be hard for you, so reduce the numbers to something within the realm of your usual lifestyle:
If your electricity provider decided to raise your bill to 10x what it was last year, you would be also want to shop elsewhere, or
CERN status (Score:3)
>Is CERN classified as a non-profit educational institution in the eyes of the Swiss taxation authority?
You're trying to cram US-specific terminology to describe something which is under Swiss jurisdiction, but yes CERN is legally a research organization, not a company.
Does CERN offer classes as it's primary function?
You're aware that education goes past grammar school, are you?
Although the CERN *itself* isn't a University (itself can't hand out credits) [careers.cern], it provides lectures and provides a workplace/research place for PhD students (done in partnership with their own Universities).
I can't think of one that hasn't gone "casters up."
I can't think of a single high peformance cluster (HPC) that runs on Windows
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I was just looking up some technical data (on Coelacanths, as it happens) and discovered that one of the major researchers in the field had died. The last time I met him, he was working at the Natural History Museum nhm.AC.uk - that's an establishment in the UK's ACacademic domain (equivalent to the US's whereever.EDU.us EDUcational). They never run classes
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And then discover that they are getting more work done with less hardware while not aggravating users with endless reboots and not getting owned by malware?
Citation required. For the less hardware bit anyway. I have no doubt you can find citations of incompetent system admins that can't setup an enterprise Windows 10 system not to reboot or enforce basic restrictions on users that prevents users from voluntarily attempting to install malware on their machines.
Re:This is just part of bargaining. (Score:5, Funny)
Easy!
~ $ systemctl start lhc
Ahem -
~ $ sudo systemctl start lhc
They don't let just anyone start the large hadron collider.
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I use Linux on the desktop because I want to get shit done without aggravation.
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That's not what they said, you made up your own version, less scary for Necrosoft.
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All companies do this; they just use FOSS as leverage in license negotiations.
Yeah just not in this case. First, CERN isn't a company, and this isn't "leverage": if it reached the public then it's goodbye MS, see you again... never.
Anyway, CERN already contributes to CentOS and has it's own distro (Scientific Linux CERN, a distro using Scientific Linux framework... that in turn is based on Red Hat, so... that CentOS contribution feeds back into this).
But this isn't about a scientific desktop environment, this is about MS Exchange, it is about Skype for Business, etc. It's about core
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IIUC, they've decided to drop Scientific Linux, and instead use, I think it was Fedora.
Swiss tax policy (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF are you smoking?
"Gun to the head" ?
You're aware that Switzerland practices direct democracy, right ?
We - the people - voted our current taxation policy into place.
And we're more or less happy with it, because we get to have quite a few affordable services out of it.
Like affordable education, instead of heaving the largest part of the population crumbling under student loan debts. (and CERN is part of that academic education system, no matter what Microsoft thinks).
(things are a bit more complex for the politics of the other European members of CERN. But the financing of academic institutions is *not* the reason why the French are demonstrating in Yellow Jackets )
The troll is strong in this one (Score:3)
seriously, talking about body integrity in a discussion about taxation politics ?
Expect this to devolve into anti-vaxx ramblings in 3... 2... 1...
Go away (Score:2)
If you aren't happy here, then just move to some other place where you won't pay any taxes.
(though your options are quite limited.
It's either Monaco (and that's only for peronal income tax. You'd be still paying taxes through VAT whenever you buy something), but they won't necessarily accept you.
Or some island in the middle of nowhere without any infrastructure to rely upon.
You know, the kind of infrastructure that states build - using the money they got from the taxes that you don't want to pay).
CERN already Linux-based (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd love to hear MS's argument for CERN not being an academic institution though. It's a crazy decision given that CERN is by any sensible criteria an academic institution. However, it's also crazy from a commercial point of view given that CERN has a huge impact on how we do things in particle physics world-wide and that often bleeds over into other areas too. If they develop viable alternatives for much of the things people use windows for it is going to make non-Windows machines a lot more attractive to a lot of people beyond CERN.
Re:CERN already Linux-based (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to hear MS's argument for CERN not being an academic institution though.
Pick one (or more):
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I'd love to hear MS's argument for CERN not being an academic institution though.
Someone at microsoft hardcoded a .edu registration address into their licensing database and there's no one left at the company who remembers how to edit the visual basic macro in the MS access file.
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Mr. Dollar Ton is best known for being a dumb cunt (Score:1)
CERN is best known for discovering and confirming new physics, you retarded git.
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He's jealous that America hasn't got a CERN.
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Well, his point, such as it is, is valid. CERN per se is the bureaucratic machinery that keeps everything else working. And the hardware. The researchers are not properly a part of CERN, they just work there while really attached to some university or some such somewhere else.
That said, I've acknowledged and explained every way in which he was accurate. Oh, Yes, and CERN is expensive to run. He doesn't seem to acknowledge that administration and coordination has any value. In fact he seems quite irrit
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The SuperConductingSuperCollider would probably have come in so hugely over budget, and taken so long to build, that it would have been canceled during construction.
FWIW, the proper place to build a huge collider is in outer space. Probably orbiting L1 or L3. That way you can have extremely long tubes of vacuum without problems. And they could be straight to eliminate bremsstrahlung. That way you could handle ions and electrons in the same machine. And no need to correct for gravitational bending. But
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There could also be waste heat distribution issues running the collider in space.
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There are engineering issues wherever you do it. The ones in space are different. But I think we're coming near to the limits of what can be done under gravity, with unstable supports (which are inevitable). Also every electron accelerator is too short, because you can't accelerate them in a ring without continually losing energy.
That said, I agree that currently it's too difficult. I'm not saying it should be attempted today, and if someone comes up with a room temperature superconductor that's good fo
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In my book they can do whatever they see fit, they are CERN.
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Microsoft has become untrustworthy scum anyway.
Huh? I've been dealing with them from Win3.11/DOS days up till the XP to Win7 migration (left my last job in 2010 to retire)
and as far as I'm concerned they've ALWAYS been untrustworthy scum.. Its just that since they rolled Windows 10 using ideas
cribbed from malware writers, they've jumped the shark on untrustworthy-ness...
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I have instructions to our attorneys here in from of me to commence a lawsuit against you to recover the difference between the license fees you paid based on blah blah burp fart puff puff wheeze omg burp...
A Microsoftie's wet dream. Dream on, slimeball.
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Microsoft will either do nothing, or restore the academic pricing. Microsoft is not Oracle.
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Anyway, I have seen benchmarks of Windows Server vs Linux and BSD and 90% of the time Windows is way behind the competition.
You're a fanboy idiot. Nobody cares if Microsoft OS services are slightly or significantly less efficient than linux or competing OS. Microsoft's selling point, in this instance, is its application ecosystem. Scientists want to science, not do programming and maintenance on mission critical applications. While I don't see a problem moving to linux, there's going to be a slew of niche applications, written and maintained by small companies, that are popular with researchers. Heck, even video editing and
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No, a hard Mexit.