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Comment Re:configuration languages (Score 4, Insightful) 141

It's faster than the scanned rule lists in iptables, and the remaining alternative is compiling to native code into a module every time you change a rule.

I know that seeing "bloat" everywhere and griping is an honored /. tradition, but someone has to add a dash of reality.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What new technologies to learn to keep yourself "employable"?

An anonymous reader writes: Hi, I've been a software engineer for about 15 years most of which I spent working on embedded systems (well they are small custom systems running Linux so far as the embedded part) developing in C. However, web and mobile technologies seem to be taking the world over, and while I acknowledge that C isn't going away anytime soon, many job offers (at least those that seem interesting and in small companies) are asking for knowledge on these new technologies (web/mobile), which incidentally I am interested in anyway.
The thing is that there are so many of those, Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android), Javascript/CSS (for the web), Qt for cross-platform, etc. for the "front-end" part (not counting UX -ie: GUI design-), and then there's the "back-end" part, which has MySQL/NoSQL, Node.js, Ruby, and many seem equivalent like PHP/Python; and then there's a bunch of new languages and programming paradigms (functional programming, etc.). So it is very hard to pick (at least without prior knowledge) which ones are worth investing in for somebody with a limited amount of time, yet there seem to be a growing bunch of under 25 wiz kids that seem to know every one of these new technologies and get to change jobs like changing shoes!

Where would you suggest to start with to somebody that wants to learn a few of these kind of things to be employable again? How long do you think it should be devoted to learning this? Like, what would be the smallest set of "new technologies" that one should know to be employable these days?

Submission + - Physicists explain 'gravity-defying' chain trick (nature.com)

ananyo writes: Leaping up out of a jar in an arc before falling to the floor, the fountain-like motion of a chain of beads has puzzled millions around the world with its apparently gravity-defying behaviour. Now physicists think they have an explanation.
British science presenter Steve Mould, who made the experiment famous, explained the phenomenon as simply one of inertia: the falling chain has downward momentum, causing an upward momentum in beads leaving the pot. This, in turn, makes them leap before gravity can slowly reverse their momentum.
Mould’s explanation was clever, but wrong, says physicist John Biggins of the University of Cambridge, UK. The only way to account for the rise is for the chain to receive a 'kick' from the pot from which it is being pulled. This challenges not only the explanation given by Mould, but the conventional mathematics of chains, Biggins says.

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