It is, or at least was when I was at university, the migration up until the period when Finno-Ugrians were in the Southern Steppes that was unclear. In other words, the initial movements West from the Urals, and the split that saw some go North and others to the steppes - where as you describe, they settled for a considerable amount of time before moving on to the sparsely populated Carpathian basin. I'm going to try and get up to date by reading Cartledge's recent history of Hungary "A Will To Survive" soon, but it's sat unread on a bookshelf for several months now...
The speakers of the Uralic languages are widely disparate in terms of "race", with the very Asian Samoyed peoples contrasting with the quite European Hungarians, and the Udmurts have both within the same nation.
The difference in race is only really marked when you compare the Hungarians to other Finno-Ugrians. As I point out in another comment, the Hungarians are so mixed genetically because they've lived in a crossroads between the Western European, Slavic and Turkic regions for so long. Their language reflects this, having virtually no similarities to other Finno-Ugrian languages anymore. Many ethnic Finns from the more Northern and Eastern parts of the country still exhibit distinctly Uralic facial features, much like the Komi people and othes that still live around the Urals.
It's a shame the information *wasn't* available, as it disproves any notion of Germans being radically different in their genetic makeup from most other Europeans - including Slavic people like the Czechs and Poles.
Surprising how far "out there" the Finnish genetic makeup is, considering the long period of integration with Sweden. It's also interesting that this kind of research may give us the final pieces to jigsaw of migration that took place from the Urals to Central and Northern Europe. This great migration of the tribes is what lead to Finno-Ugrian people ending up around the Baltic and in Hungary, but it's still unclear where the tribes "split up", one lot heading north and the other west. The closeness of the Hungarian genetic makeup to other Central Europeans must reflect the massive amount of migration and conquest that occurred across that region (by various Slavic and Turkic peoples in particular), along with a fair bit of Germanic immigration through trading.
Well, gotta admit the XServe hardware is pretty slick, at least.
No it isn't. On our sole Xserve (bought by my predecessor because he claimed "it's better for graphics" - essential for a headless server) there's no way to fit a second power supply, no Integrated Lights Out, no hardware RAID by default and mounting it on rack rails is a pain in the arse. Slick to look at, but shit to work with.
Daisy wheel and golf ball? They're not loud when compared to a barrel printer. We had one at the place I started my programming career, where it was used to print invoices. It was so loud that it had its own room and an acoustic hood (a fibre glass lid lined with several centimetres of sound proofing material). When the printer was finally decommissioned I reused the acoustic hood to cover my Atari megafile,which is the loudest hard drive I've ever known.
it [C++] remains the language of choice for real complex scientific and engineering challenges
Really? The scientists I've worked with use Fortran and occasionally Perl. The engineers all used C and Java - even if they compiled with a C++ compiler, they were actually writing C rather than using C++ features.
Amazon's first rewrite (circa 1999 - 2000) was in C and C++. I was interviewed for a role on that project but declined, having just quit Yahoo! in disgust at what their C++ codebase was like. I understand that since then Amazon have rewritten much of the system again, but this time in Java, while Yahoo! now do much of their development in PHP.
There was certainly some crap in the codebase, but it was largely well written and fairly portable (it was originally developed with DEC's compiler for Tru64, and then ported to GCC). What we were really stung by was the drawn out standardisation of C++, and the compilers long catch up with the resulting standard. And I can't help feeling that any attempt to rectify the problems with C++ now are going to be too little, too late. They'd really need to break backwards compatability to fix some of the poor decisions made in the past, and I can't see Stroustrup and friends having enough balls to do that.
Yes, because the pain of no new feature releases while we rewrote it were worth it in the long run. We ended up with something that was much more stable and maintainable, plus, we were able to use much better tools and libraries. It was easier to design decent API's and classes because we weren't worrying about C++ gotchas all the time, and in those places we got things wrong it was much easier to refactor. We were also able to reuse code written for the backend on portable devices like handheld scanners that can run a Java VM - quite important to us in the warehouse automation industry.
And how many times has that 20 year old code been modified so that it still compiles? I once worked on a largish (100,000+ LOC) project written in C++. It compiled without warnings in GCC 2.95, but when I attempted to compile it under GCC 3.0 the number of warnings were in the thousands, and it failed to link. Thankfully, our management allowed us to junk it and write a replacement in Java and a small amount of C.
Stoustrup probably means the binary still runs on the now antiquated system it was originally compiled for. I very much doubt he means that the 20 year old source code still compiles with a modern compiler, as the language has changed way too much. So, Stoustrup's probably being a little bit disingenuous as usual.
If your pot is stainless [...] (and these days, any decent pot will be)
I've got two of them at home, and their both aluminium ones made by Bialetti. One's quite old, but the other was bought new last year on a trip to Sicily and I don't remember seeing any stainless steel ones in the shop. I guess from your spelling of aluminium that you're American, so perhaps stainless steel ones are more common on your other side of the Atlantic. As for rancid coffee, I'm probably accustomed to it as I became a big coffee drinker while living in Finland. Over there they often leave it brewing all day, by which time it's like mud.
You're not supposed to keep them clinically clean. As any Italian will tell you, only wash a cafitiere with warm water - no washing up liquid or other kind of detergent. Not only will this increase the life of the rubber sealing ring, it improves the taste over time as the jug becomes coated with a coffee residue (even the Wikipedia article mentions this). As for burning the coffee, what are you using to heat the thing, a flamethrower? As the water reservoir heats, steam is passed through the ground coffee, meaning it can't burn unless you're heating the sides of the cafetiere.
Not if it's a legitimate company, as being ordered to do something illegal constitutes constructive dismissal. The bad press from a tribunal over this kind of thing can sink a small company through loss of customer good will.
Queen Elizabeth II takes a supply of toilet seats covered in hand stitched kid leather on every royal tour. This information became public knowledge when the itemised accounts of a tour to Australia were released to the press. Not quite as good as a gold plated toilet, but probably quite a bit comfier.
For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well.
Hmm, and that would have nothing to do with the lack of free elections, state controlled media and secret police would it? It also was decidedly not a Communist state, more of a totalitarian one with a Socialist tinged economy, as it had a limited free-market economy. As for "going to shit" after Tito died, it was already headed that way with the Croatians openly protesting against the Federal Republic since 1971 (read up on the "Croatian Spring" for example). The 1974 constitution granted increased autonomy to the federal states, but this would only appease the non-Serbians for a short while, and even gave the legal right to secede which eventually triggered the collapse of the Federal Republic.
Having just added support for Japanese to a Java based system I'm working on, how does Java "not do [it] well"? For me it "just worked", once we made our translation house use the same Japanese Unicode font as us.
The fact that you directly benefit from the book is a plus if it means there's more of an incentive for you to work on ANTLR, so I've just been to Amazon to order a copy.
The figure most widely accepted by historians in both the West and the former Soviet Union for those who died in Gulags between 1930-53 are 1.9 million, which doesn't include the 1.8 million believed to have been shot without being sentenced to the camps. That's 3.7 million already. The brief access to the KGB and state archives that occurred during the Yeltsin era reinforced these conclusions, although the records are missing for a number of periods and regions. An additional 20 to 25 million Soviet citizens are believed to have died of all causes in World War II. As for the motives of individuals in siding with the invading forces, bear in mind that for many they were seen as the lesser of two evils - especially for the Balts and Ukrainians, of whom the latter had died in their millions during the famine of the 1932-3. It's also worth remembering that most citizens of the Soviet Union had not chosen to live under that regime (the only relatively free election under the Bolsheviks had resulted in a clear win for the Social Revolutionaries, and was promptly annulled by Lenin).
And by the way, only a stubborn apologist for Stalin would confuse my original comment for some sort of "glorification" of Nazi ethnic ideology.
There are countries all over Europe who were occupied by the Nazis and who had some population willingly side with the Nazis.
Including large number of Soviet citizens, including ethnic Russians. The SS raised a number of Ukrainian divisions, and large numbers of Don Cossacks, Azeris and other nationalities fought against the Red Army in more ad-hoc units. This is not to forget the large number of non-combat personnel that were employed in anti-partisan and police roles. The Nazis ideology limited their willingness to use those dissatisfied with Soviet rule on a larger scale, which was a major mistake - many Soviet citizens, particularly Ukrainians who had suffered a massive famine in the early 1930s, welcomed the invaders as liberators. This was largely forgotten in the aftermath of WWII, as the Western allies had agreed to repatriate any Soviet citizens (even those from areas like the Baltic states). Of course, almost all those who were repatriated were shot or died in the gulags. Remarkably, a large number of Ukrainian SS volunteers did survive to become British citizens by claiming to be from formerly Polish areas (when Red Army officers came to a major POW camp to find Soviet citizens they pissed off the British commandant so much that he refused to repatriate any of the prisoners - the Red Army officers were not interested in taking only Soviet citizens, they wanted anyone who had fought on the Eastern front and made it plain they would be summarily executed).
Those youth organisations still have a use. They were recently employed to picket the premises and harass the employees of the British Council (the Wikipedia article includes information on the Russian difficulties. This is part of an attempt to intimidate the British government in the ongoing diplomatic shenanigans surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
The racial makeup of Stalins henchmen changed over time - quite dramatically. The Cheka (the first incarnation of the KGB) was principally staffed by people of Latvian and Polish descent until the mid-1930s when it was purged for the first time. The next "generation" of operatives had a much more mixed ethnic background. The Politburo itself contained a veritable mix of nationalities from Russians like Molotov and Voroshilov to Ukrainians like Kruschev (even Beria was from a different ethnic group to Stalin, albeit one that is classed as a Georgian sub-group). This is to be expected, as the revolutionaries (at least during their slightly more idealistic phase) were internationalist in outlook. As for the Georgians in Stalins immediate circle, with the exception of Beria they were as likely to end up with a bullet in the back of the head or in a Gulag as anyone else. The assumption that "Soviet citizen" means "Russian" or that "Stalin henchman" means "Georgian" is a somewhat gross misconception.
A good book on this subject is Stalin and His Hangmen, which includes a fascinating account of how the heart condition of a former Stalin favourite was deliberately mistreated. This mistreatment was on Stalins orders, but ten years later it was used as "evidence" for the doctors purge that was mercifully cut short by Stalins death.
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It is, or at least was when I was at university, the migration up until the period when Finno-Ugrians were in the Southern Steppes that was unclear. In other words, the initial movements West from the Urals, and the split that saw some go North and others to the steppes - where as you describe, they settled for a considerable amount of time before moving on to the sparsely populated Carpathian basin. I'm going to try and get up to date by reading Cartledge's recent history of Hungary "A Will To Survive" soon, but it's sat unread on a bookshelf for several months now ...
The speakers of the Uralic languages are widely disparate in terms of "race", with the very Asian Samoyed peoples contrasting with the quite European Hungarians, and the Udmurts have both within the same nation.
The difference in race is only really marked when you compare the Hungarians to other Finno-Ugrians. As I point out in another comment, the Hungarians are so mixed genetically because they've lived in a crossroads between the Western European, Slavic and Turkic regions for so long. Their language reflects this, having virtually no similarities to other Finno-Ugrian languages anymore. Many ethnic Finns from the more Northern and Eastern parts of the country still exhibit distinctly Uralic facial features, much like the Komi people and othes that still live around the Urals.
It's a shame the information *wasn't* available, as it disproves any notion of Germans being radically different in their genetic makeup from most other Europeans - including Slavic people like the Czechs and Poles.
Surprising how far "out there" the Finnish genetic makeup is, considering the long period of integration with Sweden. It's also interesting that this kind of research may give us the final pieces to jigsaw of migration that took place from the Urals to Central and Northern Europe. This great migration of the tribes is what lead to Finno-Ugrian people ending up around the Baltic and in Hungary, but it's still unclear where the tribes "split up", one lot heading north and the other west. The closeness of the Hungarian genetic makeup to other Central Europeans must reflect the massive amount of migration and conquest that occurred across that region (by various Slavic and Turkic peoples in particular), along with a fair bit of Germanic immigration through trading.
Well, gotta admit the XServe hardware is pretty slick, at least.
No it isn't. On our sole Xserve (bought by my predecessor because he claimed "it's better for graphics" - essential for a headless server) there's no way to fit a second power supply, no Integrated Lights Out, no hardware RAID by default and mounting it on rack rails is a pain in the arse. Slick to look at, but shit to work with.
Daisy wheel and golf ball? They're not loud when compared to a barrel printer. We had one at the place I started my programming career, where it was used to print invoices. It was so loud that it had its own room and an acoustic hood (a fibre glass lid lined with several centimetres of sound proofing material). When the printer was finally decommissioned I reused the acoustic hood to cover my Atari megafile,which is the loudest hard drive I've ever known.
it [C++] remains the language of choice for real complex scientific and engineering challenges
Really? The scientists I've worked with use Fortran and occasionally Perl. The engineers all used C and Java - even if they compiled with a C++ compiler, they were actually writing C rather than using C++ features.
Amazon's first rewrite (circa 1999 - 2000) was in C and C++. I was interviewed for a role on that project but declined, having just quit Yahoo! in disgust at what their C++ codebase was like. I understand that since then Amazon have rewritten much of the system again, but this time in Java, while Yahoo! now do much of their development in PHP.
There was certainly some crap in the codebase, but it was largely well written and fairly portable (it was originally developed with DEC's compiler for Tru64, and then ported to GCC). What we were really stung by was the drawn out standardisation of C++, and the compilers long catch up with the resulting standard. And I can't help feeling that any attempt to rectify the problems with C++ now are going to be too little, too late. They'd really need to break backwards compatability to fix some of the poor decisions made in the past, and I can't see Stroustrup and friends having enough balls to do that.
Yes, because the pain of no new feature releases while we rewrote it were worth it in the long run. We ended up with something that was much more stable and maintainable, plus, we were able to use much better tools and libraries. It was easier to design decent API's and classes because we weren't worrying about C++ gotchas all the time, and in those places we got things wrong it was much easier to refactor. We were also able to reuse code written for the backend on portable devices like handheld scanners that can run a Java VM - quite important to us in the warehouse automation industry.
And how many times has that 20 year old code been modified so that it still compiles? I once worked on a largish (100,000+ LOC) project written in C++. It compiled without warnings in GCC 2.95, but when I attempted to compile it under GCC 3.0 the number of warnings were in the thousands, and it failed to link. Thankfully, our management allowed us to junk it and write a replacement in Java and a small amount of C.
Stoustrup probably means the binary still runs on the now antiquated system it was originally compiled for. I very much doubt he means that the 20 year old source code still compiles with a modern compiler, as the language has changed way too much. So, Stoustrup's probably being a little bit disingenuous as usual.
... for an equally partisan view from another perspective, the C++ FAQ.
If your pot is stainless [...] (and these days, any decent pot will be)
I've got two of them at home, and their both aluminium ones made by Bialetti. One's quite old, but the other was bought new last year on a trip to Sicily and I don't remember seeing any stainless steel ones in the shop. I guess from your spelling of aluminium that you're American, so perhaps stainless steel ones are more common on your other side of the Atlantic. As for rancid coffee, I'm probably accustomed to it as I became a big coffee drinker while living in Finland. Over there they often leave it brewing all day, by which time it's like mud.
You're not supposed to keep them clinically clean. As any Italian will tell you, only wash a cafitiere with warm water - no washing up liquid or other kind of detergent. Not only will this increase the life of the rubber sealing ring, it improves the taste over time as the jug becomes coated with a coffee residue (even the Wikipedia article mentions this). As for burning the coffee, what are you using to heat the thing, a flamethrower? As the water reservoir heats, steam is passed through the ground coffee, meaning it can't burn unless you're heating the sides of the cafetiere.
Seriously. You got hired to do his biddingm
Not if it's a legitimate company, as being ordered to do something illegal constitutes constructive dismissal. The bad press from a tribunal over this kind of thing can sink a small company through loss of customer good will.
No, I'm saving up for a gold-plated toilet.
Queen Elizabeth II takes a supply of toilet seats covered in hand stitched kid leather on every royal tour. This information became public knowledge when the itemised accounts of a tour to Australia were released to the press. Not quite as good as a gold plated toilet, but probably quite a bit comfier.
'Great Britain' and 'United Kingdom' are also not interchangeable.
Yup. Just to clarify things, Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain, but is part of the United Kingdom.
For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well.
Hmm, and that would have nothing to do with the lack of free elections, state controlled media and secret police would it? It also was decidedly not a Communist state, more of a totalitarian one with a Socialist tinged economy, as it had a limited free-market economy. As for "going to shit" after Tito died, it was already headed that way with the Croatians openly protesting against the Federal Republic since 1971 (read up on the "Croatian Spring" for example). The 1974 constitution granted increased autonomy to the federal states, but this would only appease the non-Serbians for a short while, and even gave the legal right to secede which eventually triggered the collapse of the Federal Republic.
Having just added support for Japanese to a Java based system I'm working on, how does Java "not do [it] well"? For me it "just worked", once we made our translation house use the same Japanese Unicode font as us.
The fact that you directly benefit from the book is a plus if it means there's more of an incentive for you to work on ANTLR, so I've just been to Amazon to order a copy.
The figure most widely accepted by historians in both the West and the former Soviet Union for those who died in Gulags between 1930-53 are 1.9 million, which doesn't include the 1.8 million believed to have been shot without being sentenced to the camps. That's 3.7 million already. The brief access to the KGB and state archives that occurred during the Yeltsin era reinforced these conclusions, although the records are missing for a number of periods and regions. An additional 20 to 25 million Soviet citizens are believed to have died of all causes in World War II. As for the motives of individuals in siding with the invading forces, bear in mind that for many they were seen as the lesser of two evils - especially for the Balts and Ukrainians, of whom the latter had died in their millions during the famine of the 1932-3. It's also worth remembering that most citizens of the Soviet Union had not chosen to live under that regime (the only relatively free election under the Bolsheviks had resulted in a clear win for the Social Revolutionaries, and was promptly annulled by Lenin).
And by the way, only a stubborn apologist for Stalin would confuse my original comment for some sort of "glorification" of Nazi ethnic ideology.
There are countries all over Europe who were occupied by the Nazis and who had some population willingly side with the Nazis.
Including large number of Soviet citizens, including ethnic Russians. The SS raised a number of Ukrainian divisions, and large numbers of Don Cossacks, Azeris and other nationalities fought against the Red Army in more ad-hoc units. This is not to forget the large number of non-combat personnel that were employed in anti-partisan and police roles. The Nazis ideology limited their willingness to use those dissatisfied with Soviet rule on a larger scale, which was a major mistake - many Soviet citizens, particularly Ukrainians who had suffered a massive famine in the early 1930s, welcomed the invaders as liberators. This was largely forgotten in the aftermath of WWII, as the Western allies had agreed to repatriate any Soviet citizens (even those from areas like the Baltic states). Of course, almost all those who were repatriated were shot or died in the gulags. Remarkably, a large number of Ukrainian SS volunteers did survive to become British citizens by claiming to be from formerly Polish areas (when Red Army officers came to a major POW camp to find Soviet citizens they pissed off the British commandant so much that he refused to repatriate any of the prisoners - the Red Army officers were not interested in taking only Soviet citizens, they wanted anyone who had fought on the Eastern front and made it plain they would be summarily executed).
Those youth organisations still have a use. They were recently employed to picket the premises and harass the employees of the British Council (the Wikipedia article includes information on the Russian difficulties. This is part of an attempt to intimidate the British government in the ongoing diplomatic shenanigans surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.
The racial makeup of Stalins henchmen changed over time - quite dramatically. The Cheka (the first incarnation of the KGB) was principally staffed by people of Latvian and Polish descent until the mid-1930s when it was purged for the first time. The next "generation" of operatives had a much more mixed ethnic background. The Politburo itself contained a veritable mix of nationalities from Russians like Molotov and Voroshilov to Ukrainians like Kruschev (even Beria was from a different ethnic group to Stalin, albeit one that is classed as a Georgian sub-group). This is to be expected, as the revolutionaries (at least during their slightly more idealistic phase) were internationalist in outlook. As for the Georgians in Stalins immediate circle, with the exception of Beria they were as likely to end up with a bullet in the back of the head or in a Gulag as anyone else. The assumption that "Soviet citizen" means "Russian" or that "Stalin henchman" means "Georgian" is a somewhat gross misconception.
A good book on this subject is Stalin and His Hangmen, which includes a fascinating account of how the heart condition of a former Stalin favourite was deliberately mistreated. This mistreatment was on Stalins orders, but ten years later it was used as "evidence" for the doctors purge that was mercifully cut short by Stalins death.