Back when I was doing real-time programming in FORTRAN-II on a PDP-11/34, I was able to very slightly decrease execution time by changing "divide by two" instructions to arithmatic shifts and "square root" operations to "power of 1/2" (because x^.5 = sqrt(x)).
Since those instructions were in a loop that was running 80,000 times per second, this meant that I could get more data when destructively testing rocket motors... in the end, I got a 40% increase in processing speed that was worth a whole lot of money to the company. AND it got me a raise;) so don't tell ME little increases in efficiency aren't worthwhile!
The answer to your question is TEST your unique combination of hardware and software, find out what works better/faster/more-elegantly, and use the most human-readable form that you can afford to given your unique requirements.
If you are doing real-time digital data acquisition involving usecond events, you will probably end up with some pretty cryptic source code, so be nice and put in lots of comments.
If you are programming an office automation application, your code should probably be readable by kindergarteners, since you won't have very difficult performance requirements.
How on earth are the ISPs (and web hosts -- like my own very small-time and humble company) supposed to enforce this?
Pardon my cynicism, but maybe you aren't supposed to be able to enforce this. For the really big players, $55,000 once in a while is nothing, and they might just see this as an easy way to drive the mom'n'pop ISPs (which typically provide better, more personal service than any mega-ISP can possibly accomplish) under - at minimum cost to themselves.
Did the big ISPs fight this legislation very hard? I didn't think so!
If "linux were to be the dominant marker" then MS would have their 50,000 developers working on value-adds for MS-branded linux.
In case you haven't noticed, Ballmer is not a total idiot. The GPL can't prevent MS from becoming a free software provider any damn time they see a need to.
Not that I necessarily believe "50,000 developers" are currently employed by MS, but... get a grip, man.
I'm sure you all never use any date notation other than the International Standard (ISO 8601, as recommended by the UN as well as the HIPAA committe and every single data processing standards body that currently exists).
However, I thought you might be amused to know that the United States is *not* the only nation that teaches children to use fundamentally stupid and broken date formats. Here are some of the moronic customs taught in other lands:
Russia, Germany, and Finland use dd.mm.yyyy, which is not entirely retarded since you can always sort it backwards.
Great Britain, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil use dd/mm/yyyy, which would be fairly sensible if they didn't also use dd/mm and dd/mm/yy. My grandfather was born in '99 and so was my son!
Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, and the Netherlands use dd-mm-yyyy which again is not completely asinine because you can sort it backwards at only a small penalty in efficiency.
Switzerland and Norway use mm.dd.yyyy which causes great confusion for their more intelligent neighbor nations. And of course any format that doesn't proceed from the largest unit (year) to the smallest (day) probably costs eight times the CPU power to sort (more if you don't zero-pad).
Italians often use dd-mmmm-yy with roman numerals for months, because apparently they don't quite "get" the whole concept of "efficient sorting" at all. This is so clabber-brained that the US notation would actually be LESS imbecilic.
The Japanese often use y/mm/dd where y is the year of the emperor's reign (currently 16 Heisei Era) which makes a completely numeric representation impossible (since you have to specify the Imperial Era if you want your work to last more than one generation). To make matters worse the proclamations that announce era changes (for instance, from Meiji to Taishou) are so couched in archaic formula that it is impossible to pinpoint exactly which day is the changeover date, and the first year of any era is never referred to numerically (it is always denoted by the word "GANNEN" instead). Many Japanese government documents are required to use this inane notation, which in the age of computers is essentially a puerile affectation.
Latin America and the USA use mm/dd/yy and mm/dd (and occasionally mm/dd/yyyy) because we can't stand to do anything the way the British do it, even though our way is inutterably boneheaded and costs us billions of dollars every year.
French Canada, Hungary, Yugoslavia,Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Poland use yyyy-mm-dd which you will note is actually the ISO standard. I guess somebody was bound to get it right, but I would not have guessed that these particular regions would do so. The Quebecois are probably doing it just to spite us.
So, I know you're all wondering, how many ways can we interpret 02/02/02?
Well, there have been 125 Japanese Emperors, so that's 125 ways right off. Then there's the whole "how irresponsible can we be with the month field" issue, so that gets us mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy and yy/mm/dd and yy/dd/mm (there's probably some culture out there that uses mm/yy/dd or dd/yy/mm, which is sort of the pinacle of thickheadedness, but I haven't yet run across any poor souls that have been so miseducated) so that's 129. Then there's that two-digit year... hmmm, we'll throw out future dates and everything BC so the number doesn't go instantly to infinity... still, that's another 21.
So we've got about 150 ways to interpret 02/02/02 (or at least 25, anyway, after we throw out the Japanese imperial poppycock as arrant nonsense) without even really trying.
I think Arnold Robbins' latest O'Reilly covers the differences between awk, nawk, mawk, oawk, and gawk - I know the author of mawk wrote the introduction.
I've heard that mawk is pretty good, but I don't think it has the network socket interface or the fixed-field processing feature of GNU awk yet. I could be wrong.
As for the ugly string concatenation syntax, I agree with you - but for a different reason! I dislike the way languages like shell and perl want to translate variables within quotes, I prefer explicit concatenation (i.e. I will use print 'total is ' . $total . "\n"; in perl rather than print "total is $total\n";) even though it's longer to type. Awk's use of the space - a so-called "invisible" character - for string concatenation is even more annoying, and it's the reason for the mostly when people say awk has "mostly elegant syntax".
OK, allow me to say that I am all in favor of trash-talking the French, and to point out that the current Government is correct to take the lead in this area.
You see, Frenchmen have got it better than the rest of us, and therefore need to be taken down a notch!
For example, the average French citizen gets more than twice as much yearly vacation as an American, despite working only 35 hours (or less) a week!
Furthermore, successful French men are expected to have beautiful mistresses, and to spend time with them nearly every day!
French women are... ok, lets just stop there. If you are an American man who has actually been to France, you know what I'm talking about.
French food is incredibly flavorful and diverse; half-a-dozen or more other nations' cuisines are derivative from that of the French. And although the French eat and drink like gluttons, they have less heart disease, obesity, and alcoholism than we do!
And this is only talking about today - we really don't want to talk about the French contributions to warfare (Napoleon invented the general staff, people!) or philosophy, or literature, or art, or the formation of the United States - let's face it, the past of the French people is even more illustrious than their present, they make us look like a sad bunch of underacheivers, especially when you consider our superior natural resources, vast land area, and distance from marauding Germans.
That's it, making uniformed rants on Slashdot without RTFM is just not enough, NUKE THE BASTARDS!
But let's pretend it has 654 entries in it, otherwise this is too trivial of a problem, you'd just use a text editor:^).
We want to translate this to a BIND zone file for use by the named daemon... so it needs to end up looking more like this:
nicebox IN A 10.1.1.1 naughtybox IN A 10.1.1.2 uglybox IN A 10.1.1.32 fancybox IN A 10.1.1.45
The BIND format has a few other things that the hosts file doesn't, like SOA records and $TTLs, but those things are all in a couple of lines at the top of the file, so we'll add those later by hand. The place where awk is going to massively speed up the job is the bulk reformatting - remember, I said this file has 600 and some lines. I frequently use gawk on files with many thousands of lines; I've re-written 500+ line/etc/shadow files with it (on running systems) occasionally too.
Here we go!
awk '(NF=2){print $2 " IN A " $1;next}{print "#bogon " $0}'/etc/hosts >/var/named/zone1
That will do 90% of your formatting for you and write the result to/var/named/zone1. Any strange lines (such as hosts with multiple aliases) will be converted into comments with the leading string "bogon" so you can find them easily.
Pop into your favorite text editor, add SOA + NS records (and hand-format any bogons) and you are done.
But you'll also need an inverse zone file... so we'll do that too:
Awk is optimized for reading files (notice how there are no OPEN or CLOSE statements needed here) and splitting them into fields on a regex. By default, the field separator is whitespace ( something like/\w*/ I guess) and the record separator is newline ("\n" on *nix boxes). Both FS and RS can be easily redefined, and awk is far more capable than perl for this particular operation (according to Larry Wall, anyway) though perl has its own specialities where it is better than awk.
All gawk programs are composed of one or more "rules" of the form:
pattern {action}
The pattern is typically a regex. The default pattern matches all input lines. The default action is print. The default thing to print is the input record, unmodified. There are few enough operators, functions and commands that the average programmer can memorize them all in two weeks or so - the language does not draw its strength from having a bazillion reserved words, instead it has a simple and (mostly) elegant grammar.
The $1 variable contains the content of the first field, $2 the second, etc ad infinitum. $0 is the entire record, unmodified. NF is the number of fields in the current record, NR is the number of records read so far. The command "next" says stop processing and get the next input record (i.e. skip the rest of the program). Semicolons or newlines end rules, but there is a continuation character that allows multi-lined rules if needed.
These example programs contain two rules each. If a program is going to have lots and lots of rules, or it is going to be used more than once, you should write it in a file instead of doing it on the command line.
When I've actually done this particular conversion, I've used much more complex code than this - because I'm too lazy to hand-edit much, so I generate the SOA in a BEGIN rule and manage edge cases like comments and multi-homed hosts in the code. But I wanted thi
Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.
on
Solaris 10 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well, as far as I can recall, there isn't anything called a miniVAX either. So we're clearly playing fast and loose with the nomenclature here, he's prolly talking about the AXP since he thinks it might fit in a flatter case.
Incidentally, dohcvtec is right - VMS hobbyist is free after media and handling charges, but you can't download it. I have a copy myself. I'm fond of VMS, it has an easily extensible and very easily taught OS for native english-speakers (which is apparently incomprehensible to swedish-speaking Finns;^) ).
In the private sector on the other hand, one thing rules: cash flow. Cash flow makes the world go 'round, and it will take precedence over scalability, modular design, and documented interfaces eleven days per week. It's not stupidity, it's really very rational. Cash flow is not about economy in the simplest sense: it would be cheaper for me to buy a one-year public transport ticket instead of buying one every month, but I don't have that ammount of cash lying around, so it's still better (in a completely rational sense) for me to get the more expensive monthly solution rather than take a loan or whatnot. That is the reason why quick fixes are sometimes the smartest way of doing things. Something else is almost always smarter than the "best" design. (Insert "cost of last 10%" rant here.)
Shortsightedness is not really the virtue you are painting it to be.
Buy the monthly right now, then eat beans and rice however many months it takes to save for a yearly. Then buy the yearly, and use the money you would have spent on monthlies to make other cost-cutting investments (and a nice steak dinner reward, of course).
For example, in my previous home I cut my water and sewer bills by 80% and my electric bill by 40% by investing in slightly more expensive appliances. Payback ended up being less than two years, because the cost of electricity and water has gone up faster than expected.
The unwillingness to take a hit now (those rice and beans meals) for a payoff later is the downfall of many businesses. Optimizing investments is not as simple as you make it out to be, and cash flow is a simplistic meter that does not apply to all business situations.
Substituting high liquidity for high efficiency is still over-generalizing; as people often say when discussing computer languages, every problem is unique and may require a unique solution. Every business likewise.
The GNU awk (which, unlike other awks, has sockets and fixed-length fields (if you don't know why fixed-length fields are important, go back to your ivory tower now please)) is superb for any process that has single input and output streams.
If you have multiple inputs that can't be serialized, or output to multiple files or sockets, you'd probably be better off with perl or python.
But within the limitations stated, GNU awk absolutely rules - concise, elegant syntax (with the exception of the string concatentation operator, which is the space - a stupid idea) and very very rapid development.
I frequently write single-line gawk commands to replace entire programs...
Sure, obviously nmap, tcpdump, and snort, (plus ethereal and etherape if you like pretty pictures). Another I don't see mentioned here is SING (which stands for "send ICMP nasty garbage").
It's a command line tool (sort of like netcat) for fabricating ICMP packets.
Talk to Dug Song or the phenoelit guys about m-i-t-m attacks, and ARP or ICMP level hacking, and you might find some uses for SING.;^)
Because you asked the question the way you did, the answer is Red Hat Enterprise (in the USA, at least; rumor has it that SUSE is better suited to European businesses).
For all its failings, RHE offers the best balance of the attributes you desire, and it's a viable option in the eyes of the PHB (unlike, say, Gentoo, which will terrify the typical PHB even more than debian).
It's unlikely that you really need the "best balance" of these features, though - you probably need some more than others. Which might give you a different answer (for example if you need solid LDAP integration). Prioritize your needs and do some research - but in a lab, not on ask slashdot.
My first job with decent pay was writing FORTRAN-2 to test nuclear missiles.
Did the job just fine. In fact, the code's still in use (as of six months ago, anyway), and was used to test several parts for the recent successful Mars missions.
You can write unreadable crap in any language (probably easiest in Perl or Lisp). You can overrun data boundaries in FORTRAN ludicrously easily - but that's also true of C.
Picking on FORTRAN is just grandstanding. Pick on a language with legions of frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic supporters (like Perl or Python for instance) if you've got the belly for a real fight.
Here I thought the I stood for INCUMBENT all these years!
Just to be clear, an "incubant" is the resident of an incubator... not a dweller in a cubicle, or a victim of the Incubus Demon (that priapic visitor to vulnerable Catholics in the night, not to be confused with Father John Thomas).
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother. Thanks for the correction.
If you are religious and you enjoy Tatsuya Ishida's daily CONGRATULATIONS you are enlightened.
I don't remember Sinfest ever missing a day, but I've only been following it a couple of years.
Hmmm, Tatsuya might not be happy about me slashdotting his site... um, here's a google cache of the first comic, that'll scare some of y'all off.
Oddly enough, for me it does. Right here in the good ol' US of A, too!
Knowledge of an enterprise's products or service will make a good manager even better.
No amount of technical no-how will make a crappy manager a good one.
Back when I was doing real-time programming in FORTRAN-II on a PDP-11/34, I was able to very slightly decrease execution time by changing "divide by two" instructions to arithmatic shifts and "square root" operations to "power of 1/2" (because x^.5 = sqrt(x)).
Since those instructions were in a loop that was running 80,000 times per second, this meant that I could get more data when destructively testing rocket motors... in the end, I got a 40% increase in processing speed that was worth a whole lot of money to the company. AND it got me a raise
The answer to your question is TEST your unique combination of hardware and software, find out what works better/faster/more-elegantly, and use the most human-readable form that you can afford to given your unique requirements.
If you are doing real-time digital data acquisition involving usecond events, you will probably end up with some pretty cryptic source code, so be nice and put in lots of comments.
If you are programming an office automation application, your code should probably be readable by kindergarteners, since you won't have very difficult performance requirements.
Did the big ISPs fight this legislation very hard? I didn't think so!
Thank you for the correction!
I've told my children's teachers that my kids will be using ISO notation, because I will not allow them to submit homework with standard USA mm/dd/yy.
Have you seen Bill's woman?
You're on crack, my man!
If "linux were to be the dominant marker" then MS would have their 50,000 developers working on value-adds for MS-branded linux.
In case you haven't noticed, Ballmer is not a total idiot. The GPL can't prevent MS from becoming a free software provider any damn time they see a need to.
Not that I necessarily believe "50,000 developers" are currently employed by MS, but... get a grip, man.
I'm sure you all never use any date notation other than the International Standard (ISO 8601, as recommended by the UN as well as the HIPAA committe and every single data processing standards body that currently exists).
However, I thought you might be amused to know that the United States is *not* the only nation that teaches children to use fundamentally stupid and broken date formats. Here are some of the moronic customs taught in other lands:
Russia, Germany, and Finland use dd.mm.yyyy, which is not entirely retarded since you can always sort it backwards.
Great Britain, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil use dd/mm/yyyy, which would be fairly sensible if they didn't also use dd/mm and dd/mm/yy. My grandfather was born in '99 and so was my son!
Belgium, France, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, and the Netherlands use dd-mm-yyyy which again is not completely asinine because you can sort it backwards at only a small penalty in efficiency.
Switzerland and Norway use mm.dd.yyyy which causes great confusion for their more intelligent neighbor nations. And of course any format that doesn't proceed from the largest unit (year) to the smallest (day) probably costs eight times the CPU power to sort (more if you don't zero-pad).
Italians often use dd-mmmm-yy with roman numerals for months, because apparently they don't quite "get" the whole concept of "efficient sorting" at all. This is so clabber-brained that the US notation would actually be LESS imbecilic.
The Japanese often use y/mm/dd where y is the year of the emperor's reign (currently 16 Heisei Era) which makes a completely numeric representation impossible (since you have to specify the Imperial Era if you want your work to last more than one generation). To make matters worse the proclamations that announce era changes (for instance, from Meiji to Taishou) are so couched in archaic formula that it is impossible to pinpoint exactly which day is the changeover date, and the first year of any era is never referred to numerically (it is always denoted by the word "GANNEN" instead). Many Japanese government documents are required to use this inane notation, which in the age of computers is essentially a puerile affectation.
Latin America and the USA use mm/dd/yy and mm/dd (and occasionally mm/dd/yyyy) because we can't stand to do anything the way the British do it, even though our way is inutterably boneheaded and costs us billions of dollars every year.
French Canada, Hungary, Yugoslavia,Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Poland use yyyy-mm-dd which you will note is actually the ISO standard. I guess somebody was bound to get it right, but I would not have guessed that these particular regions would do so. The Quebecois are probably doing it just to spite us.
So, I know you're all wondering, how many ways can we interpret 02/02/02?
Well, there have been 125 Japanese Emperors, so that's 125 ways right off. Then there's the whole "how irresponsible can we be with the month field" issue, so that gets us mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy and yy/mm/dd and yy/dd/mm (there's probably some culture out there that uses mm/yy/dd or dd/yy/mm, which is sort of the pinacle of thickheadedness, but I haven't yet run across any poor souls that have been so miseducated) so that's 129. Then there's that two-digit year... hmmm, we'll throw out future dates and everything BC so the number doesn't go instantly to infinity... still, that's another 21.
So we've got about 150 ways to interpret 02/02/02 (or at least 25, anyway, after we throw out the Japanese imperial poppycock as arrant nonsense) without even really trying.
Thank you and goodnight.
--Charlie
You're welcome. Thanks for the flowers! :^)
I think Arnold Robbins' latest O'Reilly covers the differences between awk, nawk, mawk, oawk, and gawk - I know the author of mawk wrote the introduction.
I've heard that mawk is pretty good, but I don't think it has the network socket interface or the fixed-field processing feature of GNU awk yet. I could be wrong.
As for the ugly string concatenation syntax, I agree with you - but for a different reason! I dislike the way languages like shell and perl want to translate variables within quotes, I prefer explicit concatenation (i.e. I will use print 'total is ' . $total . "\n"; in perl rather than print "total is $total\n";) even though it's longer to type. Awk's use of the space - a so-called "invisible" character - for string concatenation is even more annoying, and it's the reason for the mostly when people say awk has "mostly elegant syntax".
It seemed like a good idea at the time. --Brian Kernighan
OK, allow me to say that I am all in favor of trash-talking the French, and to point out that the current Government is correct to take the lead in this area.
You see, Frenchmen have got it better than the rest of us, and therefore need to be taken down a notch!
For example, the average French citizen gets more than twice as much yearly vacation as an American, despite working only 35 hours (or less) a week!
Furthermore, successful French men are expected to have beautiful mistresses, and to spend time with them nearly every day!
French women are... ok, lets just stop there. If you are an American man who has actually been to France, you know what I'm talking about.
French food is incredibly flavorful and diverse; half-a-dozen or more other nations' cuisines are derivative from that of the French. And although the French eat and drink like gluttons, they have less heart disease, obesity, and alcoholism than we do!
And this is only talking about today - we really don't want to talk about the French contributions to warfare (Napoleon invented the general staff, people!) or philosophy, or literature, or art, or the formation of the United States - let's face it, the past of the French people is even more illustrious than their present, they make us look like a sad bunch of underacheivers, especially when you consider our superior natural resources, vast land area, and distance from marauding Germans.
That's it, making uniformed rants on Slashdot without RTFM is just not enough, NUKE THE BASTARDS!
Let's think of a "real-world" situation...
/etc/hosts and it will look something like this:
:^) .
/etc/shadow files with it (on running systems) occasionally too.
/etc/hosts >/var/named/zone1
/var/named/zone1. Any strange lines (such as hosts with multiple aliases) will be converted into comments with the leading string "bogon" so you can find them easily.
/etc/hosts >/var/named/inverse1
/\w*/ I guess) and the record separator is newline ("\n" on *nix boxes). Both FS and RS can be easily redefined, and awk is far more capable than perl for this particular operation (according to Larry Wall, anyway) though perl has its own specialities where it is better than awk.
OK, let's suppose I've got a system running host tables for IP address lookup, and I want to convert it to using DNS on BIND.
The host table will be in
10.1.1.1 nicebox
10.1.1.2 naughtybox
10.1.1.32 uglybox
10.1.1.45 fancybox
But let's pretend it has 654 entries in it, otherwise this is too trivial of a problem, you'd just use a text editor
We want to translate this to a BIND zone file for use by the named daemon... so it needs to end up looking more like this:
nicebox IN A 10.1.1.1
naughtybox IN A 10.1.1.2
uglybox IN A 10.1.1.32
fancybox IN A 10.1.1.45
The BIND format has a few other things that the hosts file doesn't, like SOA records and $TTLs, but those things are all in a couple of lines at the top of the file, so we'll add those later by hand. The place where awk is going to massively speed up the job is the bulk reformatting - remember, I said this file has 600 and some lines. I frequently use gawk on files with many thousands of lines; I've re-written 500+ line
Here we go!
awk '(NF=2){print $2 " IN A " $1;next}{print "#bogon " $0}'
That will do 90% of your formatting for you and write the result to
Pop into your favorite text editor, add SOA + NS records (and hand-format any bogons) and you are done.
But you'll also need an inverse zone file... so we'll do that too:
awk '(NF=2){print $1 " IN PTR " $2;next}{print "#bogon " $0}'
Awk is optimized for reading files (notice how there are no OPEN or CLOSE statements needed here) and splitting them into fields on a regex. By default, the field separator is whitespace ( something like
All gawk programs are composed of one or more "rules" of the form:
pattern {action}
The pattern is typically a regex. The default pattern matches all input lines. The default action is print. The default thing to print is the input record, unmodified. There are few enough operators, functions and commands that the average programmer can memorize them all in two weeks or so - the language does not draw its strength from having a bazillion reserved words, instead it has a simple and (mostly) elegant grammar.
The $1 variable contains the content of the first field, $2 the second, etc ad infinitum. $0 is the entire record, unmodified. NF is the number of fields in the current record, NR is the number of records read so far. The command "next" says stop processing and get the next input record (i.e. skip the rest of the program). Semicolons or newlines end rules, but there is a continuation character that allows multi-lined rules if needed.
These example programs contain two rules each. If a program is going to have lots and lots of rules, or it is going to be used more than once, you should write it in a file instead of doing it on the command line.
When I've actually done this particular conversion, I've used much more complex code than this - because I'm too lazy to hand-edit much, so I generate the SOA in a BEGIN rule and manage edge cases like comments and multi-homed hosts in the code. But I wanted thi
Well, as far as I can recall, there isn't anything called a miniVAX either. So we're clearly playing fast and loose with the nomenclature here, he's prolly talking about the AXP since he thinks it might fit in a flatter case.
Incidentally, dohcvtec is right - VMS hobbyist is free after media and handling charges, but you can't download it. I have a copy myself. I'm fond of VMS, it has an easily extensible and very easily taught OS for native english-speakers (which is apparently incomprehensible to swedish-speaking Finns
Oooh, good one.
Thanks!
OK, I'll bite. I don't remember any GUIs in the 60s... what were they?
Shortsightedness is not really the virtue you are painting it to be.
Buy the monthly right now, then eat beans and rice however many months it takes to save for a yearly. Then buy the yearly, and use the money you would have spent on monthlies to make other cost-cutting investments (and a nice steak dinner reward, of course).
For example, in my previous home I cut my water and sewer bills by 80% and my electric bill by 40% by investing in slightly more expensive appliances. Payback ended up being less than two years, because the cost of electricity and water has gone up faster than expected.
The unwillingness to take a hit now (those rice and beans meals) for a payoff later is the downfall of many businesses. Optimizing investments is not as simple as you make it out to be, and cash flow is a simplistic meter that does not apply to all business situations.
Substituting high liquidity for high efficiency is still over-generalizing; as people often say when discussing computer languages, every problem is unique and may require a unique solution. Every business likewise.
The GNU awk (which, unlike other awks, has sockets and fixed-length fields (if you don't know why fixed-length fields are important, go back to your ivory tower now please)) is superb for any process that has single input and output streams.
If you have multiple inputs that can't be serialized, or output to multiple files or sockets, you'd probably be better off with perl or python.
But within the limitations stated, GNU awk absolutely rules - concise, elegant syntax (with the exception of the string concatentation operator, which is the space - a stupid idea) and very very rapid development.
I frequently write single-line gawk commands to replace entire programs...
Sure, obviously nmap, tcpdump, and snort, (plus ethereal and etherape if you like pretty pictures). Another I don't see mentioned here is SING (which stands for "send ICMP nasty garbage").
It's a command line tool (sort of like netcat) for fabricating ICMP packets.
Talk to Dug Song or the phenoelit guys about m-i-t-m attacks, and ARP or ICMP level hacking, and you might find some uses for SING.
How, pray tell, is my post flamebait?
Remind me not to bother posting next time.
Because you asked the question the way you did, the answer is Red Hat Enterprise (in the USA, at least; rumor has it that SUSE is better suited to European businesses).
For all its failings, RHE offers the best balance of the attributes you desire, and it's a viable option in the eyes of the PHB (unlike, say, Gentoo, which will terrify the typical PHB even more than debian).
It's unlikely that you really need the "best balance" of these features, though - you probably need some more than others. Which might give you a different answer (for example if you need solid LDAP integration). Prioritize your needs and do some research - but in a lab, not on ask slashdot.
My first job with decent pay was writing FORTRAN-2 to test nuclear missiles.
Did the job just fine. In fact, the code's still in use (as of six months ago, anyway), and was used to test several parts for the recent successful Mars missions.
You can write unreadable crap in any language (probably easiest in Perl or Lisp). You can overrun data boundaries in FORTRAN ludicrously easily - but that's also true of C.
Picking on FORTRAN is just grandstanding. Pick on a language with legions of frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic supporters (like Perl or Python for instance) if you've got the belly for a real fight.
Here I thought the I stood for INCUMBENT all these years!
Just to be clear, an "incubant" is the resident of an incubator... not a dweller in a cubicle, or a victim of the Incubus Demon (that priapic visitor to vulnerable Catholics in the night, not to be confused with Father John Thomas).
All it does is sit there on its two stupid periscoping legs and make green characters on a black background.
And it's using that dumb "futuristic" font from the 2001 movie, the one that OCR machines used in the 1960s.
Oh, wait, IPAQ 3270? Sorry, never mind...