The reason that C/C++ is choosen for efficiency is because large programs require it. It would be surprising to see a large program written in perl and running as a cgi. Commonly Python is substituded where scripting is required or C++ is used for a compiled language. Perl is harder to maintain than either of those for large programs.
What perl excels at over those two choices is text processing and that it typically a small part of a large application.
I think the sweet spot is: Use perl for small, stand alone or simple database lookup cgi's Use Python for any cgi, but especially more complicated ones Use Python/C++ (via CORBA or another comm enabler) for larger applications
The Python/C++ combo is especially appealing since it breaks the binding between your application and the web. You can test without the complexity of the web being involved. For that matter you can build different front ends (like we've done) for Java, Python, web based on the needs of the end user community.
We have portions of our code that has all three of those front ends, but because the business logic (or in this case, physics logic) is in the C++ CORBA server, the front ends are a few dozen lines of fairly trivial code.
I'd really like to see Athlon's scalability in the real world. What? You can't?
I was referring to the scalability of the core and the fact that AMD has room to grow, while INTC doesn't. It is true that you can't run several Athlons on the same mobo. Yet.
I also doubt that anyone cares how old a CPU's core is
See above. Investors (which was the subject;) should/do care about this stuff. Heck INTC was resorting to overclocking tricks to get their last chips to run at speed.
Like I said though. Even in the event that AMD stumbles, this stuff is great for chip heads everywhere.
The referenced review basically shows that Intel once dropped to.18 and clocked 5% faster can pretty much keep pace with AMD's shipping product for $150 more.
Add to that Coppermines OLD core, Athlons scalability and Fab30 coming online soon and it is clear that INTC is going to have to do more than in the past to stay relevant.
If it isn't great news for AMD investors, this is at least great news for CPU buyers as INTC will have to WORK for it's money for a change!
It is unfortunate that the same guy who just recently was venting about how society should accept us geeks as being different but not dangerous would so quickly adopt the other position when dealing with a group that he doesn't personally belong to.
In a confrontation with those who don't share your belief structure it is best to keep in mind that they are just doing what they think is best for their community. In the case of Christian versus Atheist there are thousands of things that you will agree on. For example, the Bible is quite explicit about how you should treat your fellow man and it seems to say exactly what I believe. The difference is that the Christian claims that you should do it because the is one truth that God set down and you should follow and I think you should do it because otherwise society crumbles and life sucks for everyone. Either way we agree on how people should be treated.
Regardless of motivation, referring to them as 'moral guardians nuts' is as narrow and counter productive as assuming that all 14 year old basement hackers are proto-killers just biding their time. Just as not every teenage hacker is a danger to society so too is not every Christian a moral guardian nut looking to impose his will on everyone around him.
It is also a tremendous failing to say things like "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along" when in fact some of the finest organizations on the earth are based in religion. The Christian community (the religion that as a resident of the US I am most familar with) works unflaggingly to lower opression in China, was instrumental in the removal of slavery from the US and is the motivating force behind Habitat for Humanity (which I am happy to support regularly via my consulting www.objenv.com in spite of being an Atheist myself).
It isn't really that deep. People can only form perceptions about what they are exposed to. There are many, many more articles and programs that get the term wrong than get it right. As a result, the meaning becomes more established as a pejorative.
Call it linguistic evolution or call it a corruption of the truth. Either way society at large believes it.
Yeah, you're darn right these kids should be able to dress however they want, chat with whoever they want and never ever use ID to prove they belong there. After all that is exactly how it is in the real world.
I've never once been told who to talk with and when (except while on site anyway).
I've never been told how to dress (not even on special days, like Friday)
And most important, I've never had to wear an Id (or two).
Should the SSN be on there, probably not (not even on my drivers license here in IL anymore). But that is really the only issue here. Come on and grow up a bit people. It's time to stop confusing reasonable and prudent safety/administrative measures with facism.
Because that speed is very different than the speed of the surrounding area and, since gravity falls off so quickly with distance, (Newton is sufficient here) the fact that the particles in question are moving so quickly is amazing.
Re: No big deal... Havent they goten particals up to 10% the speed of light before in mass accelerators.
I don't know the term mass accelerator, but if you mean particle accelerator then yes, they have gone faster than 10%. Much. The percentage of the speed isn't really important at the level of most detectors but it is more than 99.99%. What is measured is the energy of the accelerator, which for Fermilab is ~2TeV and in the future CERN will run at ~7TeV. See either site for great intros to high energy physics pages.
They typically don't open an IPO to inexperienced traders?
Not to flame people here. I'm learning from this sequence of events too, but the amount of folks saying E*Trade sucks, let's hack their site and I'm getting screwed may be EXACTLY why they had the kind of tests in place that they did. Folks with big bucks and experience in trading probably a) have been around long enough to understand the way these things work and b) won't feel screwed and start looking for revenge if they miss the window on this one specific equity.
Burkhard, the guy who is running the tsia website, and one of it's only strong supporters, was out a few weeks ago for a presentation. I was profoundly unimpressed.
The paragraph of buzzwords was mentioned by another/. poster, so I won't dwell on it. It was not well backed in the presentation though. When pressed for more details on security, for example, Burkhard was unable to do much more than mumble about Fortran and never gave a reasonable (e.g. security related) answer. Even when I threw him the soft ball of Java Applets and their sandbox as being either an analogy to what he was doing or a direction to head he seemed oblivious to the point.
He is seems completely convinced that TSIAs are the next big thing in computing. Specifically the relationship implied in 'The Third Advance in Application Support' should be taken literally. He thinks that what has happened since the compiler is basically tool using, but TSIAs are such a profound paradigm shift that they represent a complete redirection of development.
Page 2 of paper.pdf has a great line at the top. "TSIAs suitable for most applications don't exist yet" If a TSIA approach is to be taken seriously as the next great advance then why is it application specific? Seems like to be on par with OSs and compilers you would, at least, need to be general purpose.
Check out page 9 of paper.pdf. The TSIA paradigm does not allow inter-task communication ("During its execution, a task does not communicate with other tasks"). That pretty much settles the issue for most jobs. Burkhard says that almost all tasks can be completed without communication, I remain unconvinced.
Page 18 "As described in section 2, a TSIA provides an application with transparent[,] reliable, distributed, heterogeneous, adaptive, dynamic, real-time, interactive, parallel, secure or other execution". Section 2 only treats that ranging subject to the extent of saying look at the next section. Then section 3 has a list of applications that are alleged to be TSIAs (including Apollo) without explanation for how they answered the laundry list. Hint, the TSIA architecture doesn't accomplish any of the buzzwords, but a task oriented approach (and a sufficiently motivated programmer) can be used to implement any of them so by extension TSIAs provide those capabilities. At least that is the arguement in the paper.
On the list of computing revolutions, TSIAs are pretty far down there.
One the other hand, you young turks have never had the experience of having to fit real functionality in 140k, and that often shows.
The folks I talk with (and I'm unemployed, I mean a contractor, so I talk with a lot) don't seem to think that is such a valuable skill. In fact, they view bragging about it as a red flag.
The important forces in application development change over time. In the days of TSRs and the small machines they ran on a small footprint wasn't just cool, it was a requirement. It cost money, but that was OK because machines cost more. It was never about how cool and efficient it was to write a small program in the abstract. It was about how cool it was to spend 15K in labor to save 150K in machines costs. That is the only reason why folks were 'allowed' to spend some much time tweaking applications.
From that perspective, I agree that "It's Money".
However, times have changed. So have the relevant forces. I've been programming on micros since 82, so I know the constraints associated with underpowered machines trying to do too large a task (insert appropriate Sagan quote here). They simply don't apply in most applications today. The forces have changed. The 15K that was spent optimizing a routine a decade ago is time wasted on a machine that executes the critical path in a blink of an eye anyway. In fact, the forces resolve in the opposite direction.
The 'elegant' solution in todays world is frequently the bloated over architected one that allows for the application to be crystal clear in it's functionality at the expense of cycles used to process the load. This means applying software patterns, having design reviews and implementing code that the dude fresh out of school (you know, the poor goof who is going to be maintaining the code base when you move on to more interesting things) can undestand it and respond quickly in the face of downtime (HELLO EBAY!) or changing requirements (HELLO AMAZON!).
Of course, I'm making a complex subject simple. The main point is that it IS about money as you assert, but the variables used to calculate cost change over time and older programmers sometimes miss the transition.
Finally, let me state, for my own piece of mind and those other over the hillers, that those old timers that DO make the transition are frequently worth their weight in code. They have the experience AND have learned a bit about sorting out when to apply which bits.
So has Linux. This new device is a bit different from the CM11A that most people use. I'm thinking the firecracker kind of a neat toy, but it isn't a replacement for the CM11A.
The CF article mentions the neutrino deficit as supporting evidence that we don't understand how many neutrinos should be produced in a reaction, therefore we shouldn't worry so much about them missing from CF experiments. They also claim that "we just can't measure them accurately enough". This is a half truth.
Current theory is that neutrinos have mass and oscillate from one type to another. In some ways this would be as significant a discovery as CF. It changes the standard model and introduces a lot of information into our understanding of the world. If you check http://www.hep.anl.gov/NDK/Hypertext/numi.html you can find information about the MINOS (2.1.3 of the project paper talks about the solar deficit, BTW). More on neutrino mass at http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/ which is doc about the Super-K project published last year. MINOS is cool because the neutrinos will be created at Fermilab of a known flavor, so if the composition has changed by this time they hit the detector in Minnesota then we'll know the nature of the change quite precisely.
The donation of goods and services (Cisco and Qwest spring to mind) and federal money dwarf Microsoft's donation. Not to worry here folks, they just want a piece of the limelight. They won't have any say in what is done.
TAO looks nice, but it still doesn't come with anywhere near a full complement of the common services.
I need a freely-available ORB that implements DII, DSI, POA, and Security
Looking at the TAO website (and having worked with it last year for a bit), it seems like TAO is pretty near a full compliment. You specifically mention DII, DSI and POA (none of which are services, BTW) all of which TAO has (in fact TAO was the first orb that had POA AFAIK). They don't have security according to their docs, but the security spec isn't terribly complicated. Why not help them implement it?
I work on the data access systems at Fermi and here is some skinny.
1) All of the work I have been seeing is going to be done on farms. As stated elsewhere on slashdot the problems being solved here don't really get much help from many CPUs working on the same data set concurrently. The problems are shipped out essentially an event at a time and the analysis (e.g. event reconstruction) is sent back an event at a time. These reconstructed data sets are then used for lots of analysis processes but the worst part of the workload is the reconstruction, which is where the farms are used.
2) There will be lots of machines in the farm, but I'm not sure it will be 2000 machines, that seems pretty high. In all likelyhood these boxes will be Linux based dual processor machines.
3) For cooperative computing there are lots of multi-processor SGI boxes (O2K's).
On the 'interesting bit of trivia' side, the data volumes we are talking about are on order of petabytes. Pretty interesting challenges! It's kind of fun when your thumbnail information approaches the limitations of most relational databases.
In recent years I've noticed that certain people have fanatically expounded the idea that the contents of an email message are private and cannot be quoted without permission from the author. [...] Excepts from email clearly fall under the Fair Use doctrine in copyright law.
You may be legally correct, I'm not a lawyer. However, I believe the violation of etiquette, not law, is what people complain about most.
Most folks I talk with think that the further you get from your first job, the less the piece of paper matters. I agree. I see college as a way in the door for some people, but experience and good references as a way to move ahead from there. I seriously doubt if I will have a problem in 15 years (when I'm 45 with 27 years work experience) getting any job my skills make me qualified for, with or without a diploma.
Why do you think it will be valuable when you are 45?
Much of what JonKatz says is true. Particularly that you cannot overthrow a government by air strikes alone.
One thing is questionable, the reference to elements of this conflict going back hundreds of years. It's true that the Serbs and Albanians have lived in the space for hundreds of years, but the conflicts are largely modern. 19th and early 20th century saw a few problems, but more recently things were quiet (remember that Kosovo had constitional autonomy).
My main criticism is that this was mostly a sociology of war piece, and not a terribly good one because he kept trying to work technology into it.
Maybe I've lived a sheltered life, but I've not seen anyone here in the midwest use the broad variable definition average that you accurately point out to be true.
I assumed (bad idea, I guess) that the author was speaking of mean since I have seen that done in error far more than intentionally (e.g. ask most people the difference between mean and median and you usually get a blank stare).
Also note that I also pointed out that the two measurements should be essentially equal in this case. I was just trying to enourage more precision in the broadcast of statistics.
Normally I wouldn't post simply to say that, but the bulk of the messages seem to be:
a) Unix is supposed to be hard b) You can't have power without making things hard
Point (a) is the hot rod mentality (which I tend to share, BTW). That is, I fool around with my Linux box a lot for no good reason. I just enjoy making a tweak here and there to make it run faster, be more secure or whatever. I would probably have raced cars if I were born 20 years earlier.
Point (b) I simply disagree with. As the previous post points out it is quite possible to have a great deal of power without making a system senseless.
Slashdot Mirror
In the CGI level anyway.
The reason that C/C++ is choosen for efficiency is because large programs require it. It would be surprising to see a large program written in perl and running as a cgi. Commonly Python is substituded where scripting is required or C++ is used for a compiled language. Perl is harder to maintain than either of those for large programs.
What perl excels at over those two choices is text processing and that it typically a small part of a large application.
I think the sweet spot is:
Use perl for small, stand alone or simple database lookup cgi's
Use Python for any cgi, but especially more complicated ones
Use Python/C++ (via CORBA or another comm enabler) for larger applications
The Python/C++ combo is especially appealing since it breaks the binding between your application and the web. You can test without the complexity of the web being involved. For that matter you can build different front ends (like we've done) for Java, Python, web based on the needs of the end user community.
We have portions of our code that has all three of those front ends, but because the business logic (or in this case, physics logic) is in the C++ CORBA server, the front ends are a few dozen lines of fairly trivial code.
I was referring to the scalability of the core and the fact that AMD has room to grow, while INTC doesn't. It is true that you can't run several Athlons on the same mobo. Yet.
I also doubt that anyone cares how old a CPU's core is
See above. Investors (which was the subject ;) should/do care about this stuff. Heck INTC was resorting to overclocking tricks to get their last chips to run at speed.
Like I said though. Even in the event that AMD stumbles, this stuff is great for chip heads everywhere.
The referenced review basically shows that Intel once dropped to .18 and clocked 5% faster can pretty much keep pace with AMD's shipping product for $150 more.
Add to that Coppermines OLD core, Athlons scalability and Fab30 coming online soon and it is clear that INTC is going to have to do more than in the past to stay relevant.
If it isn't great news for AMD investors, this is at least great news for CPU buyers as INTC will have to WORK for it's money for a change!
It is unfortunate that the same guy who just recently was venting about how society should accept us geeks as being different but not dangerous would so quickly adopt the other position when dealing with a group that he doesn't personally belong to.
In a confrontation with those who don't share your belief structure it is best to keep in mind that they are just doing what they think is best for their community. In the case of Christian versus Atheist there are thousands of things that you will agree on. For example, the Bible is quite explicit about how you should treat your fellow man and it seems to say exactly what I believe. The difference is that the Christian claims that you should do it because the is one truth that God set down and you should follow and I think you should do it because otherwise society crumbles and life sucks for everyone. Either way we agree on how people should be treated.
Regardless of motivation, referring to them as 'moral guardians nuts' is as narrow and counter productive as assuming that all 14 year old basement hackers are proto-killers just biding their time. Just as not every teenage hacker is a danger to society so too is not every Christian a moral guardian nut looking to impose his will on everyone around him.
It is also a tremendous failing to say things like "Religion and freedom have never really gotten along" when in fact some of the finest organizations on the earth are based in religion. The Christian community (the religion that as a resident of the US I am most familar with) works unflaggingly to lower opression in China, was instrumental in the removal of slavery from the US and is the motivating force behind Habitat for Humanity (which I am happy to support regularly via my consulting www.objenv.com in spite of being an Atheist myself).
It isn't really that deep. People can only form perceptions about what they are exposed to. There are many, many more articles and programs that get the term wrong than get it right. As a result, the meaning becomes more established as a pejorative.
Call it linguistic evolution or call it a corruption of the truth. Either way society at large believes it.
That's why my card says Magician.
rw2
Yeah, you're darn right these kids should be able to dress however they want, chat with whoever they want and never ever use ID to prove they belong there. After all that is exactly how it is in the real world.
I've never once been told who to talk with and when (except while on site anyway).
I've never been told how to dress (not even on special days, like Friday)
And most important, I've never had to wear an Id (or two).
Should the SSN be on there, probably not (not even on my drivers license here in IL anymore). But that is really the only issue here. Come on and grow up a bit people. It's time to stop confusing reasonable and prudent safety/administrative measures with facism.
Geez. Don't people get tired of having these tests last only a few minutes before something goes wrong.
The main site www.hackpcweek.com isn't responding.
Because that speed is very different than the speed of the surrounding area and, since gravity falls off so quickly with distance, (Newton is sufficient here) the fact that the particles in question are moving so quickly is amazing.
Re: No big deal... Havent they goten particals up to 10% the speed of light before in mass accelerators.
I don't know the term mass accelerator, but if you mean particle accelerator then yes, they have gone faster than 10%. Much. The percentage of the speed isn't really important at the level of most detectors but it is more than 99.99%. What is measured is the energy of the accelerator, which for Fermilab is ~2TeV and in the future CERN will run at ~7TeV. See either site for great intros to high energy physics pages.
They typically don't open an IPO to inexperienced traders?
Not to flame people here. I'm learning from this sequence of events too, but the amount of folks saying E*Trade sucks, let's hack their site and I'm getting screwed may be EXACTLY why they had the kind of tests in place that they did. Folks with big bucks and experience in trading probably
a) have been around long enough to understand the way these things work
and
b) won't feel screwed and start looking for revenge if they miss the window on this one specific equity.
Hope everyone gets rich though!
rw2
Burkhard, the guy who is running the tsia website, and one of it's only strong supporters, was out a few weeks ago for a presentation. I was profoundly unimpressed.
/. poster, so I won't dwell on it. It was not well backed in the presentation though. When pressed for more details on security, for example, Burkhard was unable to do much more than mumble about Fortran and never gave a reasonable (e.g. security related) answer. Even when I threw him the soft ball of Java Applets and their sandbox as being either an analogy to what he was doing or a direction to head he seemed oblivious to the point.
The paragraph of buzzwords was mentioned by another
He is seems completely convinced that TSIAs are the next big thing in computing. Specifically the relationship implied in 'The Third Advance in Application Support' should be taken literally. He thinks that what has happened since the compiler is basically tool using, but TSIAs are such a profound paradigm shift that they represent a complete redirection of development.
Page 2 of paper.pdf has a great line at the top. "TSIAs suitable for most applications don't exist yet" If a TSIA approach is to be taken seriously as the next great advance then why is it application specific? Seems like to be on par with OSs and compilers you would, at least, need to be general purpose.
Check out page 9 of paper.pdf. The TSIA paradigm does not allow inter-task communication ("During its execution, a task does not communicate with other tasks"). That pretty much settles the issue for most jobs. Burkhard says that almost all tasks can be completed without communication, I remain unconvinced.
Page 18 "As described in section 2, a TSIA provides an application with transparent[,] reliable, distributed, heterogeneous, adaptive, dynamic, real-time, interactive, parallel, secure or other execution". Section 2 only treats that ranging subject to the extent of saying look at the next section. Then section 3 has a list of applications that are alleged to be TSIAs (including Apollo) without explanation for how they answered the laundry list. Hint, the TSIA architecture doesn't accomplish any of the buzzwords, but a task oriented approach (and a sufficiently motivated programmer) can be used to implement any of them so by extension TSIAs provide those capabilities. At least that is the arguement in the paper.
On the list of computing revolutions, TSIAs are pretty far down there.
That said, to build on your example.
new char a[100];
and
new char a[100000];
I guess I would argue that the code bloat and innefficiency of
std::string a;
is probably the appropriate balance. Trading off runtime speed and memory re-allocation with not easily being able to screw things up.
And if you're not in C++. Well, that might be a red flag too.
rw2
The folks I talk with (and I'm unemployed, I mean a contractor, so I talk with a lot) don't seem to think that is such a valuable skill. In fact, they view bragging about it as a red flag.
The important forces in application development change over time. In the days of TSRs and the small machines they ran on a small footprint wasn't just cool, it was a requirement. It cost money, but that was OK because machines cost more. It was never about how cool and efficient it was to write a small program in the abstract. It was about how cool it was to spend 15K in labor to save 150K in machines costs. That is the only reason why folks were 'allowed' to spend some much time tweaking applications.
From that perspective, I agree that "It's Money".
However, times have changed. So have the relevant forces. I've been programming on micros since 82, so I know the constraints associated with underpowered machines trying to do too large a task (insert appropriate Sagan quote here). They simply don't apply in most applications today. The forces have changed. The 15K that was spent optimizing a routine a decade ago is time wasted on a machine that executes the critical path in a blink of an eye anyway. In fact, the forces resolve in the opposite direction.
The 'elegant' solution in todays world is frequently the bloated over architected one that allows for the application to be crystal clear in it's functionality at the expense of cycles used to process the load. This means applying software patterns, having design reviews and implementing code that the dude fresh out of school (you know, the poor goof who is going to be maintaining the code base when you move on to more interesting things) can undestand it and respond quickly in the face of downtime (HELLO EBAY!) or changing requirements (HELLO AMAZON!).
Of course, I'm making a complex subject simple. The main point is that it IS about money as you assert, but the variables used to calculate cost change over time and older programmers sometimes miss the transition.
Finally, let me state, for my own piece of mind and those other over the hillers, that those old timers that DO make the transition are frequently worth their weight in code. They have the experience AND have learned a bit about sorting out when to apply which bits.
rw2
So has Linux. This new device is a bit different from the CM11A that most people use. I'm thinking the firecracker kind of a neat toy, but it isn't a replacement for the CM11A.
The CF article mentions the neutrino deficit as supporting evidence that we don't understand how many neutrinos should be produced in a reaction, therefore we shouldn't worry so much about them missing from CF experiments. They also claim
that "we just can't measure them accurately enough". This is a half truth.
Current theory is that neutrinos have mass and oscillate from one type to another. In some ways this would be as significant a discovery as CF. It changes the standard model and introduces a lot of information into our understanding of the world. If you check http://www.hep.anl.gov/NDK/Hypertext/numi.html you can find information about the MINOS (2.1.3 of the project paper talks about the solar deficit, BTW). More on neutrino mass at http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/ which is doc about the Super-K project published last year. MINOS is cool because the neutrinos will be created at Fermilab of a known flavor, so if the composition has changed by this time they hit the detector in Minnesota then we'll know the nature of the change quite precisely.
rw2
What's wrong with the Video4Linux project (http://roadrunner.swansea.uk.linux.org/v4l.shtml) ?
The donation of goods and services (Cisco and Qwest spring to mind) and federal money dwarf Microsoft's donation. Not to worry here folks, they just want a piece of the limelight. They won't have any say in what is done.
I need a freely-available ORB that implements DII, DSI, POA, and Security
Looking at the TAO website (and having worked with it last year for a bit), it seems like TAO is pretty near a full compliment. You specifically mention DII, DSI and POA (none of which are services, BTW) all of which TAO has (in fact TAO was the first orb that had POA AFAIK). They don't have security according to their docs, but the security spec isn't terribly complicated. Why not help them implement it?
I work on the data access systems at Fermi and here is some skinny.
1) All of the work I have been seeing is going to be done on farms. As stated elsewhere on slashdot the problems being solved here don't really get much help from many CPUs working on the same data set concurrently. The problems are shipped out essentially an event at a time and the analysis (e.g. event reconstruction) is sent back an event at a time. These reconstructed data sets are then used for lots of analysis processes but the worst part of the workload is the reconstruction, which is where the farms are used.
2) There will be lots of machines in the farm, but I'm not sure it will be 2000 machines, that seems pretty high. In all likelyhood these boxes will be Linux based dual processor machines.
3) For cooperative computing there are lots of multi-processor SGI boxes (O2K's).
On the 'interesting bit of trivia' side, the data volumes we are talking about are on order of petabytes. Pretty interesting challenges! It's kind of fun when your thumbnail information approaches the limitations of most relational databases.
Actually the data is crunched for hours typically.
The stream off level 3 is ~20MB a sec.
You may be legally correct, I'm not a lawyer. However, I believe the violation of etiquette, not law, is what people complain about most.
Most folks I talk with think that the further you get from your first job, the less the piece of paper matters. I agree. I see college as a way in the door for some people, but experience and good references as a way to move ahead from there. I seriously doubt if I will have a problem in 15 years (when I'm 45 with 27 years work experience) getting any job my skills make me qualified for, with or without a diploma.
Why do you think it will be valuable when you are 45?
Much of what JonKatz says is true. Particularly that you cannot overthrow a government by air strikes alone.
One thing is questionable, the reference to elements of this conflict going back hundreds of years. It's true that the Serbs and Albanians have lived in the space for hundreds of years, but the conflicts are largely modern. 19th and early 20th century saw a few problems, but more recently things were quiet (remember that Kosovo had constitional autonomy).
My main criticism is that this was mostly a sociology of war piece, and not a terribly good one because he kept trying to work technology into it.
Hey,
/.ers think that by next year I could have a preferences button to remove April Fools stories. That would be cool.
You
Maybe I've lived a sheltered life, but I've not seen anyone here in the midwest use the broad variable definition average that you accurately point out to be true.
I assumed (bad idea, I guess) that the author was speaking of mean since I have seen that done in error far more than intentionally (e.g. ask most people the difference between mean and median and you usually get a blank stare).
Also note that I also pointed out that the two measurements should be essentially equal in this case. I was just trying to enourage more precision in the broadcast of statistics.
I second this thought.
Normally I wouldn't post simply to say that, but the bulk of the messages seem to be:
a) Unix is supposed to be hard
b) You can't have power without making things hard
Point (a) is the hot rod mentality (which I tend to share, BTW). That is, I fool around with my Linux box a lot for no good reason. I just enjoy making a tweak here and there to make it run faster, be more secure or whatever. I would probably have raced cars if I were born 20 years earlier.
Point (b) I simply disagree with. As the previous post points out it is quite possible to have a great deal of power without making a system senseless.