When is the LHC supposed to fire up? I thought it was this summer? I wonder if CERN is a sweet place to work, as a physicist or even as a research assistant or programmer. One never hears too much about working at physics labs.
I know one guy who got an offer from Google but chose to stay in CERN, so obviously he must like it. On the other hand, some of the stories he tells are not very reassuring. For example, someone recently decided that CERN would be a Microsoft-only shop, to the extent that the NNTP server news.cern.ch has been shut down because MS doesn't sell NNTP servers. However--this is sweet--the department where my friend works writes software that actually operates the detectors in the colliders, so it hastowork so their department is exempt and they're still using Unix (Linux and LynxOS.) Another guy I know had to implement web applications using Oracle cartridges. Also, some say there's a lot of nasty politics going on there, my friend's wife quit CERN because of that. My guess is this also depends on the department.
Its hard to imagine them being an all windows shop. I've yet to meet a physicist that used windows. They all use linux as far as I've seen. Most math profs I know either use linux or os x. The only people I know who use windows are either in CS or engineering.
Every new xkcd gets posted and voted up here... even the bad ones. Maybe s/he doesn't like the hero worship and voted down the comments because there's no way to vote down the post. Kinda cheap, but there you go.
