before we run out of uranium!!

Well, what about: "OMG that sounds hideous. I'm _never_ going to buy that track." :-)

Our experiment (LHCb, not to be confused with the collider, called the LHC) looks for specific types of particle collisions. The rate of the collisions determines the frequency of sampling the sensors, and the number of sensors (and the number of bits read out from each sensor) determines the size of each sample. But with a combination of some really fast electronics and a large cluster of general-purpose servers we end up getting this rate down to somewhere between 150 to 300 MB/sec. This is (designed to) read out about 8-9 hours a day for 9 months a year. The design was quite interesting, mainly because at each level, you had to have a team that had people with deep knowledge of detectors, physics, electronics, and computer systems to decide what to retain, how to retain, and how to discard what. I've been told that it's been a long time since we just read out everything that came out of a detector and analysed it later. (IANAP)

I worked for one of the detectors at CERN, and I strongly agree with the notion of Science being a data management problem. We (intend to :-) pull a colossal amount of data from the detectors (about 40 TB/sec in case of the experiment I was working for). Unsurprisingly, all of it can't be stored. There's a dedicated group of people whose only job is to make sure that only relevant information is extracted, and another small group whose only job is to make sure that all this information can be stored, accessed, and processed at large scales. In short, there is a lot that happens with the data before it is even seen by a physicist. Having said that, I agree that very few people have a real appreciation and/or understanding of these kinds of systems and even fewer have the required depth of knowledge to build them. But this tends to be a highly specialized area, and I can't imagine it's easy to study it as a generic subject.

1. If the work you do allows you to dabble in a few areas and enables you to get a lot of experience in a couple of them, then your work experience may be just as valuable or more valuable than master's studies done for the same period. 2. If the work you do is basically mundane, run-of-the-mill stuff (say maintaining a very stable project with limited scope for engineering work and/or development) , it certainly won't give you the depth of knowledge that you could possibly be getting if you go back to school. 3. Someone else has also said this a while back - a master's degree is sometimes a pre-requisite for some jobs and certainly helps if you ever think of migrating to a different country for work.

In SuSE, gcc is not installed by default, and is not even on their online repository. What good is a laptop that doesn't have gcc?