I have a 12 24in monitor setup at work when I'm on shift. The guy next to me has 6 24in + 4 40 inch monitors. Its very nice :) Although the heat they kick out is insane. We do actually need it as well so this card is of interest to us

To prove it, heres a web cam, my station is the big one at the end. That said I imagine we are a fairly unique case, I dont think many people need to monitor and control the triggering and data acquisition of a large particle physics experiment. But just pointing out there is a use case for the card :P

When I first saw that link, my first response was "My Car!!!", as I was sitting in the control room on shift at the time. Second thought was "this is going to be an awkward e-log entry" :)

See its this exact type smart arse reply that degenerates slashdot so. Explain what is incorrect rather than making anonymous side remarks. I'm only talking about colliders which annhilate their particles, eg LHC, Tevatron, LEP, CLIC, ILC which are type of particle colliders associated with particle physics. Sure you you have cyclotrons but I dont really consider them particle physics and not really in the scope of colliders like this article was talking about.

My appologies, it came out wrong. I meant before somebody says to me "but the LHC is proton-proton, you suck". It was a slight tongue in cheek reference to the usual level of slashdot responses by people who know nothing about which they are talking about :)

And just to add to this. All particle colliders are mater-antimatter colliders, it just doesnt work otherwise (charge conservation) Thats right, every single particle collider where you are annihilating the particle is matter-antimatter.

Now before somebody says, but the LHC is proton-proton, you suck, the LHC is actually a quark-anti quark or gluon-gluon collider. Protons are not just 3 quarks, due to the strong interaction there is also a sea of gluons and quark-anti quark pairs which carry the momentum of the proton. At the energies of the LHC, this sea becomes important.

The article is terrible and horribly confused. Reads like something from the Sun (a gutter British newspaper for non Brits).

oh my god - its full of stars!

come on people, at least read the summary, I know this is slashdot but still :) They used a golf ball and sent it 600 yards. I bet it's pretty easy for the kid to get some more.

Nah its possible. I started WoW in the last week of June and I'm level 57 currently. And its very possible to level without running instances so you wont know how to fight bosses.

That said, I've had a much better experience than the OP and its very easy to read guides on ten ton hammer, wowwiki etc that fill in the knowledge you need.

Well when you find the Higgs, you want to measure its properties and see if you really have a Higgs and not some random new particle. And then if it is the Higgs, you want to see which Higgs it is. All this takes time and lots and lots of data.

And unless we are very unlucky, there should hopefully be lots of other werid and wonderful things to find. I'm personally not interested in the Higgs at all but much more exotic things. But for the media, its easier to say "we are looking for X" rather than we are looking for "X, Y, Z oh and dont forget about B but to be honest, we dont know what happens at these energies and would like to find out"

I'm with you, the game is good but god damn its buggy as hell. I've lucked out in that its playable for me but its still a little ropey. Graphical artifacts occasionally on the far right (a dial appears there flickering), occasional crashes to desktop (relatively rare although molerats seem to cause it frequently) and alt-tabing means instant hang. I've noticed that if it starts crashing, it will become much more frequent untill a reboot.

Again this is on a fairly standard high end build (at the time) that has no problems with any other games (8800 GTX + Q6600 + vista).

So Bethesda, its a great game but I'm not buying any DLC untill the main game is a lot more bug free.

Exactly, you're spot on, a lot of this style work is done by students of some description under supervision from a more experienced physicist. The student is told by her supervisor, go find out which jet algoritm is the best using these and these criteria. She looks at it, finds a minor issue and solves it.

These undergradutes are members of the collaboration working under supervision of experienced physicists so they have full access to everything. Anyway consulting the technical design reports will give you some hardware info on CMS but its not really presented in a way accessable to a non physicist.

its not really a design flaw. Basically its a minor bug in the algorithms (if I'm reading it right, the article is very confused to say the least) which allow physicists to reconstruct the energies of hadronised partons. Now we can do it a bit better and make slightly better measurements. This software we know isnt optimal, it requires a great deal of knowledge to write and to be honest a major part of the effort in the earily days of an experiment is improving the reconstruction software with fixes such as this. And there will be many more such improvements. Bugs here do not pose any danger because the software is run *after* the event has occured so it cant effect the event, just our understand of what actually happened.

Also just to make clear that the LHC and CMS are very different things. The LHC is the accelerator and its what makes the particles go very fast. CMS is a detector, it just sits there and records what happens in the collision. CMS is built and designed by a completely different set of people to the LHC. CMS doesnt need the LHC to function and the LHC doesnt need CMS to function but they are a bit pointless without the other.

yeah its just an algorithm bug (having just checked this out), its no biggy at all. Its good that its fixed but CMS (and other particle detectors) are very impressive peices of kit which are very difficult to understand. It takes hundreds of scientists years to fully understand such a detector, continously making small improvements such as this. Its good and it clearly shows she has the smarts to do a PhD but its not exactly the earthshattering stuff the article makes out.

Its not actually amazingly impressive, its made to sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. One the meeting in question was "CMS week", one of several weeks a year we get all our collaborators together at CERN not CERNs annual meeting. She's basically improved our jet algorithm (as far as I can tell, the article is woefully lacking in details), a decent job for an undergraduate and will certainly help her walk into a PhD place as a shes clearly good enough but she's certainly not the only undergradute to have made a contribution such as this.