I think the imagery is supposed to evoke a sense of the human-drawn caricatures and pseudo-cartoons in Time and The New Yorker, to give the article an illusion of boldness/seriousness/elegance/grandeur/something ("delusion of grandeur" might be more appropriate---I could probably come up with more innovative uses---and just to give it a shot: 1) Campus bookstore for a school famous for engineering or aeronautics. 2) Set for a science-oriented education+news show starring former astronauts. 3) Large, manned environmental test chamber, akin to Biosphere-2 but less geared toward ecological studies. There's three. Who else has ideas?)
Why run linux version 6 when you could run linux version 13????? Thats right, YOU TOO could be running the latest and greatest, instead of an ancient, dinosaur version of linux!;)
I have seen the sig "I like paying taxes; with them, I buy civilization." I do not think enough people have pondered that statement.
When I am next employed*, I will be more than happy to pay my taxes. After all, my fiance (who has a rare facial neuralgia) has benefitted from taxpayer money via state programs.
* = If you're in the delmarva / manhattan area, I'll work like a slave** for you to support myself and my fiance. Email me! 0.707107 at gmail. ** = Obviously, with all her health problems, she has still done me a world of good, or I wouldn't still be with her, so I care enough about her to work overnight shifts, overtime, etc., to make sure her healthcare costs are paid.
I got a Monster cable as a hook-up instrument cable for my bass guitar some years ago. It was what I could find with a thicker signal wire, hence less resistance; I thought it would have better SNR, as N is picked up all along the length so less attenuation of S should improve SNR. It turns out the shielding was *not as good* as the el-cheapo instrument cables I had been using, so there was actually more 60hz hum!
The poor who have rare neuropathies in their faces (like trigeminal neuralgia) do not relish the idea of being worked on by dental students. Sure, dental students working on the poor is useful, but it's not the best solution to the problem. Universal healthcare is really the best solution to that problem, although having dental students train on volunteers is still useful, though perhaps starting the training on robots would avoid some unfortunate accidents by newbies.
Or possibly utilize a surrogate mother. My gf and I have been looking at bother adoptions (adoption and surrogates) because she has to take *incredibly* strong antiepileptics for trigeminal neuralgia. Uterine transplantation seems almost like an unnecessary step---if your mother can be the surrogate, why try to move the uterus and bring additional risk on the baby? Disclaimer: didn't RTFA.
What?!?! The INTERCAL manual hasn't been rendered obselete at all! Of course, you really ought to start with fundamentals, like Brainf***, before moving on to a structured language like INTERCAL.
There's a scary amount of legacy code in VB. When I was interviewing for a job recently (PS: anybody hiring coders in the DelMarVA area?), the interviewer was asking about some porting work I had done. There were a whole pile of VB projects in use, only one or two of which the budgeters could justify examining---and that only meant re-working them in VB.net, so that they could be extended in the future without needing a legacy development environment. VB already *is* the next COBOL.
This is the sort of thing I've considered doing, but I've worried about locking myself out, if I'm trying to connect remotely and having a particularly bad case of clumsy typing. A similar example to my worry follows.... it's a very interesting idea, but I wonder what procedures you have in place to prevent the following??
---
Sancho:> Hey, orangesquid, can you check out something on sancho3 for me, in/var/log? orangesquid:> sure, let me open a shell
os@orangesquid.net:~$ mail sancho2000@gmail.com Hey, can you unblock me? Typo! . os@orangesquid.net:~$ MAIL FROM: postmaster@sancho.com You attempted to send mail to "sancho2000@gmail.com" from 99.88.77.66. This IP address has been banned. Sorry.
Since you're clearly familiar with the series, I'm curious---what did you think of Forward the Foundation? To me, it had a different feel (besides the fact that it was a prequel)---maybe a different pace, or a bit different writing style. Not in a bad way, but just something I noticed.
Can you point me to where in the series that's mentioned? I *sort of* remember something like that, but all that's coming to mind is the mind-reading human that confounded some of the best minds (outside of the monastic psychohistorians) in the Empire.
Agreed. The range of human ailments is probably beyond what the vast majority of humans can really understand; this means that, in all likelihood (and I know this *is* true, as well, from surveying a number of patients with uncommon conditions) there are lots of doctors who will see a set of symptoms that are a textbook case of an uncommon disease and still mis-diagnose it. Doctors are taught to act confident in front of patients, for the simple reason that patients *do* tend to fare better if they trust their doctors. However, I have seen too many doctors over-extend this to arrogance in the form of not investigating symptoms that they are unfamiliar with: if they have forgotten something important from medical school, they won't say, "I'm not sure---let me refer you to a specialist." Instead, they'll say, "There's really nothing wrong. You have nothing to worry about." When the patient returns in a few months, even sicker, that particular doctor is of course still too arrogant to admit wrongdoing or lack of expertise and will continue to dismiss the patient's concerns. This situation is what leads to the majority of malpractice situations, from what I have read on many online forums (thus, I cannot say for sure that my opinion is right, but it's based off of more than just a few anecdotes).
If doctors only got paid when they were able to help a patient, this wouldn't be the case. However, how do you determine, _precisely_, if a doctor has "helped" a patient?
Oh, so you mean, in the same place?;) [Note to mods: if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation series, or at least Foundation and Empire, just skip to the next post.] All humor aside, I've often wondered about 'psychohistory.' It seems to have a decently solid basis in sci-fi theory, which in the context of "good sci-fi," means that it's at least *plausible.* However, without good models and the necessary empiricism to evaluate them, we don't really know _anything_ for sure---everything is really just speculation, even if plausible. The first person to provably (by that, I mean beyond reasonable doubt, rather than beyond unrestricted skepticism---if there is a dispute, it will either go up before a committee or multiple people may be considered [I may restrict a "time will tell!" period in that case as a verifier of the model, but not beyond 50 years, and should I die, I will leave the decision to a subcommittee of peers]) develop a working model (it doesn't have to yet be a solid theory) of psychohistory by analyzing this planet's history in detail, and using simulations of periods N-X thru N-1 to predict period N, where X is a large number and the length of a period is something reasonable for human scale (let's say anything in the 10--200 year range, but other periods can be suggested, of course) will win a small monetary prize from me (depending on my income, but I'll guarantee at least $50), and probably (though I can't speak for the Nobel prize committee) a Nobel peace prize and substantial mention in history books for centuries to come. [Yes, I do realize that though I have skirted around the "pronoun is missing an antecedent" in the previous statement, I would need to re-write the statement to prevent the "generic noun missing specifier antecedent" problem---readers are welcome to do that for me, if they really feel my statement is thusly ambiguous.)
But, seriously, graphene (and some lab-precision equipment... well, *reliable* lab-precision equipment---a 20-year-old tube electrometer thrown out by a university lab for being flukey doesn't count) would be terribly fun to experiment with (at least for me). Measuring material properties is one of my interests. In terms of semiconductor experimentation at home, there's always copper oxides, but, meh... it's been over-done.
"The danger of being sued." Exactly! And the first critical lesson in copyright school is... Don't upload anything involving Metallica in any way, shape, or form.
Exactly--that's the second thing that popped into my head---land a fuel factory before sending humans. (The first thing was to land a few solid rockets that could be attached to the humans' rocket once the humans landed to enable them to return, but then I thought a fuel factory would be a better use of rocket launches, since it could be used for many go-there-and-come-back missions.)
It's funny to me that the author of the article didn't consider how we launch rockets off of the earth in the first place (by manufacturing fuel) before writing the article.
Missing comma and missing word. Try this: "They paint a picture of a Zuckerberg more sinister than portrayed in the movie The Social Network, actively out to sucker his investors that the site had, including Ceglia." Comma after "Network", and "had" after "site".
Re:I like the concept, just not the application
on
Light Painting Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Oh, I do remember that the network name was plotted in roughly the centerpoint of the area where the network was available... that just came back to me.
Re:I like the concept, just not the application
on
Light Painting Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
I did something a bit like that before by walking around with a laptop, pair of headphones, and a clipboard (I didn't have a GPS unit at the time, so I marked each intersection's corner-points as I passed them and used interpolation; the laptop played a musical sequence through the earphones to give me the data to mark on the clipboard). If I find the map images I made, I'll link to them... of course, I was tracking the number of networks, since that was a better number to use in a highly-network university town. here (9/22/2004) is one of the images generated from the data; I know I had other things, but I'm not sure where the datafiles and scripts are, now. I don't remember what the color coding on the map means, other than the green dots are probably where an open network was available. *shrug* That particular map includes network names, and I don't remember how I recorded those without a GPS (using festival to output a number corresponding to a sequence point that I could notate on the clipboard where I tracked my location, and saving iwlist scan's output to a corresponding numbered file?)
(Before I get started on my rant, I want to point out to anyone who wants to reply before reading my whole comment that I realize my experience is limited and my needs probably differ from yours. That being said, here I go...)
That's actually my experience with most easy-admin tools. They expect config files to follow very specific (and undocumented!) forms; they never have the parsing flexibility of the programs that actually read those configfiles. So, it's hands-off/etc---either do it with the easy-admin tool, or don't do it at all, because once you touch the file manually in a way the easy-admin tool doesn't expect (though it might be a perfectly valid way according to the manpages of the corresponding programs), you'll be reverting your config. Run into a limit of the easy-admin tool? No more easy administration for you---either you can try to patch the easy-admin tool (most I've seen suffer from a lack of documentation), or you can remember to never, ever use the easy-admin tool to modify certain things again, lest you hose the hand-edited config (thank god for chattr-immutable, at least).
Now, I haven't surveyed many of these tools, nor have I kept up to date on them. What I describe is what was shipping with major linux distros a few years back. It's quite possible that there's a tool out there that: (1) is designed from the start to notice inconsistencies between its own set of config data and the files it's modifying in/etc, aborting before anything gets hosed; (2) implements flexible and tweakable parsing strategies that are well-documented, so you know what you can and cannot do when hand-editing things in/etc; (3) has well-commented, modular code, with every script, file, and interface detailed carefully and explicitly in an organized, well-written set of manpages; and, (4) provides a solid cross-reference of every admin-tool-config-variable versus what it tracks in/etc.
IBM's AIX had its own approach to preventing hosed configs: on system startup and reconfigure, lots of/etc was simply overwritten by SMIT. No need to worry about confusing SMIT by hand-editing anything---hand-edits would just be reverted to the data in SMIT's database. Early versions of SMIT were notoriously inflexible, causing a multitude of headaches for AIX3/4(?) admins.
Speaking of SMIT, I should point out that SMIT and other tools (such as HP's SAM and IRIX's config toolsets) were based on easy-admin-interfaces that sat on top of a scriptable engine, so you could still use rsh/ssh, crond, and all the regular approaches to en-masse administration, provided your own scripts called the underlying engine rather than modifying things in/etc directly. You could simply look at the logs produced by SMIT/SAM/etc to make a template for your own scripts. This was a failing point of early linux easy-admin tools---the menu-driven systems didn't spit out a log of all the calls made to the underlying admin-tool scripts, the scriptable CLI engine was poorly documented, or (worse yet) the CLI call syntax was inconsistent from version to version. I did notice improvements in that over time in the linux easy-admin tools.
I have heard some good things about YaST, but I've never looked seriously into using it. For what I do with my systems, slackware's mostly-stays-out-of-your-way approach suits my needs. No, I don't admin a datacenter, just a small very-heterogeneous network, so I do realize that what works well for me isn't often going to be the best choice for others. (And, for those of you who haven't configured a slackware system in a few years, do note that the init-scripts rarely need much editing, as they source most needed info from rc.${whatever}.conf files for each rc.${whatever} script, and most everything that starts a non-trivial daemon has a init.d-style start|stop|status|restart script to facilitate straightforward/clean init-scripts.)
As some other commenters have noted, C++ and its plethora of features give something comparable to a write-only language like COBOL (remember that debugging is part of reading the code). I wouldn't retrofit things like polymorphism onto C, if I were to start over (something the guys at digital mars probably agree with). IMHO, you end up with kludginess without the brevity (sometimes called "elegance", but that's a bit debatable) of perl. Hey, we could be doing worse---at least it's not PL/I! *g*
I'm just surprised nobody has parroted the oft-quoted "obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers" yet;) captcha: innuendo
Slashdot Mirror
See http://www.techlib.com/area_50/xraydefender.htm -- tho techlib.com isn't resolving right now (server down, I'll bet), so you'll just have to try an alternate source:
http://www.techlib.com.nyud.net:8090/area_50/xraydefender.htm coral cache says gateway timed out...
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/www.techlib.com/area_50/xraydefender.htm wayback machine doesn't have it archived...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SErH8Fhj52cJ:www.techlib.com/area_50/xraydefender.htm+site:techlib.com+backscatter&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&ie=UTF-8&source=www.google.com -- you can at least read the text on google, and get thumbnails of the images on the page:
http://www.google.com/search?oe=UTF-8&q=site:techlib.com+backscatter&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
Too bad the schematic isn't readable at thumbnail-size, but maybe techlib.com will be back up soon?
"OSS/DIY medical gear!"
Measurement is already here.
Link #1 - http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
Link #2 - http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=homemade+ekg
Of course, control is another issue, but there's still some things you can do with little more than a soldering iron:
Link #3 - http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-TENS-Machine-to-Remove-Pain/
I think the imagery is supposed to evoke a sense of the human-drawn caricatures and pseudo-cartoons in Time and The New Yorker, to give the article an illusion of boldness/seriousness/elegance/grandeur/something ("delusion of grandeur" might be more appropriate---I could probably come up with more innovative uses---and just to give it a shot:
1) Campus bookstore for a school famous for engineering or aeronautics.
2) Set for a science-oriented education+news show starring former astronauts.
3) Large, manned environmental test chamber, akin to Biosphere-2 but less geared toward ecological studies.
There's three. Who else has ideas?)
Why run linux version 6 when you could run linux version 13????? ;)
Thats right, YOU TOO could be running the latest and greatest, instead of an ancient, dinosaur version of linux!
I have seen the sig "I like paying taxes; with them, I buy civilization." I do not think enough people have pondered that statement.
When I am next employed*, I will be more than happy to pay my taxes. After all, my fiance (who has a rare facial neuralgia) has benefitted from taxpayer money via state programs.
* = If you're in the delmarva / manhattan area, I'll work like a slave** for you to support myself and my fiance. Email me! 0.707107 at gmail.
** = Obviously, with all her health problems, she has still done me a world of good, or I wouldn't still be with her, so I care enough about her to work overnight shifts, overtime, etc., to make sure her healthcare costs are paid.
I got a Monster cable as a hook-up instrument cable for my bass guitar some years ago. It was what I could find with a thicker signal wire, hence less resistance; I thought it would have better SNR, as N is picked up all along the length so less attenuation of S should improve SNR. It turns out the shielding was *not as good* as the el-cheapo instrument cables I had been using, so there was actually more 60hz hum!
The poor who have rare neuropathies in their faces (like trigeminal neuralgia) do not relish the idea of being worked on by dental students. Sure, dental students working on the poor is useful, but it's not the best solution to the problem. Universal healthcare is really the best solution to that problem, although having dental students train on volunteers is still useful, though perhaps starting the training on robots would avoid some unfortunate accidents by newbies.
Or possibly utilize a surrogate mother. My gf and I have been looking at bother adoptions (adoption and surrogates) because she has to take *incredibly* strong antiepileptics for trigeminal neuralgia. Uterine transplantation seems almost like an unnecessary step---if your mother can be the surrogate, why try to move the uterus and bring additional risk on the baby?
Disclaimer: didn't RTFA.
What?!?! The INTERCAL manual hasn't been rendered obselete at all!
Of course, you really ought to start with fundamentals, like Brainf***, before moving on to a structured language like INTERCAL.
Ah, sounds sensible, then =) Hey, if you ever start up a fumble-finger wall of shame, can I be an honorary member? *g*
There's a scary amount of legacy code in VB. When I was interviewing for a job recently (PS: anybody hiring coders in the DelMarVA area?), the interviewer was asking about some porting work I had done. There were a whole pile of VB projects in use, only one or two of which the budgeters could justify examining---and that only meant re-working them in VB.net, so that they could be extended in the future without needing a legacy development environment.
VB already *is* the next COBOL.
This is the sort of thing I've considered doing, but I've worried about locking myself out, if I'm trying to connect remotely and having a particularly bad case of clumsy typing.
/var/log?
A similar example to my worry follows.... it's a very interesting idea, but I wonder what procedures you have in place to prevent the following??
---
Sancho:> Hey, orangesquid, can you check out something on sancho3 for me, in
orangesquid:> sure, let me open a shell
os@orangesquid.net:~$ ssh sancho3.sancho.com
Resolver timed out
os@orangesquid.net:~$ grep sancho3 ~/sancho-hosts
11.22.33.49 sancho3
os@orangesquid.net:~$ ssh 11.22.33.46
^C "Dammit, clumsy hands"
os@orangesquid.net:~$ ssh 11.22.33.49
Connection timed out
os@orangesquid.net:~$ ping 11.22.33.49 -c3
Ping 11.22.33.49 (64 bytes) from 99.88.77.66
---
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received
"Stupid auto-block..."
os@orangesquid.net:~$ mail sancho2000@gmail.com
Hey, can you unblock me? Typo!
.
os@orangesquid.net:~$
MAIL FROM: postmaster@sancho.com
You attempted to send mail to "sancho2000@gmail.com" from 99.88.77.66. This IP address has been banned. Sorry.
Oh, that's right! I forgot,thanks =)
Since you're clearly familiar with the series, I'm curious---what did you think of Forward the Foundation?
To me, it had a different feel (besides the fact that it was a prequel)---maybe a different pace, or a bit different writing style. Not in a bad way, but just something I noticed.
Can you point me to where in the series that's mentioned? I *sort of* remember something like that, but all that's coming to mind is the mind-reading human that confounded some of the best minds (outside of the monastic psychohistorians) in the Empire.
Agreed. The range of human ailments is probably beyond what the vast majority of humans can really understand; this means that, in all likelihood (and I know this *is* true, as well, from surveying a number of patients with uncommon conditions) there are lots of doctors who will see a set of symptoms that are a textbook case of an uncommon disease and still mis-diagnose it. Doctors are taught to act confident in front of patients, for the simple reason that patients *do* tend to fare better if they trust their doctors. However, I have seen too many doctors over-extend this to arrogance in the form of not investigating symptoms that they are unfamiliar with: if they have forgotten something important from medical school, they won't say, "I'm not sure---let me refer you to a specialist." Instead, they'll say, "There's really nothing wrong. You have nothing to worry about." When the patient returns in a few months, even sicker, that particular doctor is of course still too arrogant to admit wrongdoing or lack of expertise and will continue to dismiss the patient's concerns. This situation is what leads to the majority of malpractice situations, from what I have read on many online forums (thus, I cannot say for sure that my opinion is right, but it's based off of more than just a few anecdotes).
If doctors only got paid when they were able to help a patient, this wouldn't be the case. However, how do you determine, _precisely_, if a doctor has "helped" a patient?
Oh, so you mean, in the same place? ;)
[Note to mods: if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation series, or at least Foundation and Empire, just skip to the next post.]
All humor aside, I've often wondered about 'psychohistory.' It seems to have a decently solid basis in sci-fi theory, which in the context of "good sci-fi," means that it's at least *plausible.* However, without good models and the necessary empiricism to evaluate them, we don't really know _anything_ for sure---everything is really just speculation, even if plausible.
The first person to provably (by that, I mean beyond reasonable doubt, rather than beyond unrestricted skepticism---if there is a dispute, it will either go up before a committee or multiple people may be considered [I may restrict a "time will tell!" period in that case as a verifier of the model, but not beyond 50 years, and should I die, I will leave the decision to a subcommittee of peers]) develop a working model (it doesn't have to yet be a solid theory) of psychohistory by analyzing this planet's history in detail, and using simulations of periods N-X thru N-1 to predict period N, where X is a large number and the length of a period is something reasonable for human scale (let's say anything in the 10--200 year range, but other periods can be suggested, of course) will win a small monetary prize from me (depending on my income, but I'll guarantee at least $50), and probably (though I can't speak for the Nobel prize committee) a Nobel peace prize and substantial mention in history books for centuries to come.
[Yes, I do realize that though I have skirted around the "pronoun is missing an antecedent" in the previous statement, I would need to re-write the statement to prevent the "generic noun missing specifier antecedent" problem---readers are welcome to do that for me, if they really feel my statement is thusly ambiguous.)
Finally, my sig is relevant!
But, seriously, graphene (and some lab-precision equipment... well, *reliable* lab-precision equipment---a 20-year-old tube electrometer thrown out by a university lab for being flukey doesn't count) would be terribly fun to experiment with (at least for me). Measuring material properties is one of my interests.
In terms of semiconductor experimentation at home, there's always copper oxides, but, meh... it's been over-done.
"The danger of being sued." Exactly! And the first critical lesson in copyright school is... Don't upload anything involving Metallica in any way, shape, or form.
Exactly--that's the second thing that popped into my head---land a fuel factory before sending humans. (The first thing was to land a few solid rockets that could be attached to the humans' rocket once the humans landed to enable them to return, but then I thought a fuel factory would be a better use of rocket launches, since it could be used for many go-there-and-come-back missions.)
It's funny to me that the author of the article didn't consider how we launch rockets off of the earth in the first place (by manufacturing fuel) before writing the article.
Missing comma and missing word. Try this:
"They paint a picture of a Zuckerberg more sinister than portrayed in the movie The Social Network, actively out to sucker his investors that the site had, including Ceglia."
Comma after "Network", and "had" after "site".
Oh, I do remember that the network name was plotted in roughly the centerpoint of the area where the network was available... that just came back to me.
I did something a bit like that before by walking around with a laptop, pair of headphones, and a clipboard (I didn't have a GPS unit at the time, so I marked each intersection's corner-points as I passed them and used interpolation; the laptop played a musical sequence through the earphones to give me the data to mark on the clipboard). If I find the map images I made, I'll link to them... of course, I was tracking the number of networks, since that was a better number to use in a highly-network university town.
here (9/22/2004) is one of the images generated from the data; I know I had other things, but I'm not sure where the datafiles and scripts are, now.
I don't remember what the color coding on the map means, other than the green dots are probably where an open network was available. *shrug*
That particular map includes network names, and I don't remember how I recorded those without a GPS (using festival to output a number corresponding to a sequence point that I could notate on the clipboard where I tracked my location, and saving iwlist scan's output to a corresponding numbered file?)
(Before I get started on my rant, I want to point out to anyone who wants to reply before reading my whole comment that I realize my experience is limited and my needs probably differ from yours. That being said, here I go...)
That's actually my experience with most easy-admin tools. They expect config files to follow very specific (and undocumented!) forms; they never have the parsing flexibility of the programs that actually read those configfiles. So, it's hands-off /etc---either do it with the easy-admin tool, or don't do it at all, because once you touch the file manually in a way the easy-admin tool doesn't expect (though it might be a perfectly valid way according to the manpages of the corresponding programs), you'll be reverting your config. Run into a limit of the easy-admin tool? No more easy administration for you---either you can try to patch the easy-admin tool (most I've seen suffer from a lack of documentation), or you can remember to never, ever use the easy-admin tool to modify certain things again, lest you hose the hand-edited config (thank god for chattr-immutable, at least).
Now, I haven't surveyed many of these tools, nor have I kept up to date on them. What I describe is what was shipping with major linux distros a few years back. It's quite possible that there's a tool out there that: /etc, aborting before anything gets hosed; /etc; /etc.
(1) is designed from the start to notice inconsistencies between its own set of config data and the files it's modifying in
(2) implements flexible and tweakable parsing strategies that are well-documented, so you know what you can and cannot do when hand-editing things in
(3) has well-commented, modular code, with every script, file, and interface detailed carefully and explicitly in an organized, well-written set of manpages; and,
(4) provides a solid cross-reference of every admin-tool-config-variable versus what it tracks in
IBM's AIX had its own approach to preventing hosed configs: on system startup and reconfigure, lots of /etc was simply overwritten by SMIT. No need to worry about confusing SMIT by hand-editing anything---hand-edits would just be reverted to the data in SMIT's database. Early versions of SMIT were notoriously inflexible, causing a multitude of headaches for AIX3/4(?) admins.
Speaking of SMIT, I should point out that SMIT and other tools (such as HP's SAM and IRIX's config toolsets) were based on easy-admin-interfaces that sat on top of a scriptable engine, so you could still use rsh/ssh, crond, and all the regular approaches to en-masse administration, provided your own scripts called the underlying engine rather than modifying things in /etc directly. You could simply look at the logs produced by SMIT/SAM/etc to make a template for your own scripts. This was a failing point of early linux easy-admin tools---the menu-driven systems didn't spit out a log of all the calls made to the underlying admin-tool scripts, the scriptable CLI engine was poorly documented, or (worse yet) the CLI call syntax was inconsistent from version to version. I did notice improvements in that over time in the linux easy-admin tools.
I have heard some good things about YaST, but I've never looked seriously into using it. For what I do with my systems, slackware's mostly-stays-out-of-your-way approach suits my needs. No, I don't admin a datacenter, just a small very-heterogeneous network, so I do realize that what works well for me isn't often going to be the best choice for others. (And, for those of you who haven't configured a slackware system in a few years, do note that the init-scripts rarely need much editing, as they source most needed info from rc.${whatever}.conf files for each rc.${whatever} script, and most everything that starts a non-trivial daemon has a init.d-style start|stop|status|restart script to facilitate straightforward/clean init-scripts.)
Or:
"LOAFER, the World's Laziest Telescope, Is Finally Up and Out of Bed... Oh, Wait, it went back to bed. Never mind!"
As some other commenters have noted, C++ and its plethora of features give something comparable to a write-only language like COBOL (remember that debugging is part of reading the code).
I wouldn't retrofit things like polymorphism onto C, if I were to start over (something the guys at digital mars probably agree with). IMHO, you end up with kludginess without the brevity (sometimes called "elegance", but that's a bit debatable) of perl. Hey, we could be doing worse---at least it's not PL/I! *g*
I'm just surprised nobody has parroted the oft-quoted "obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers" yet ;)
captcha: innuendo