I'm not indian but I've read a little bit about languages and language families so I can partially answer your question. There's 3 language families in india and several languages within each family. The 3 families are: 1) Indo-European - spoken in northern india. And as the name implies these languages are distantly related to almost all european languages including English. 2) Dravidian - spoken in the south of India. 3) Munda - which is spoken in a few very isolated areas and may be related to some southeast asian languages. As far as what the languages in each family are and how closely related I don't know. Since you brought this up though I have a question for the indian people here. I understand that Hindus believe in being nice animals in general but why are cows in particular well ..... sacred cows to hindus?

ragnaroknrol wrote:

Most of the stuff is obvious TODAY because of this book. At the time it was not so, and in writing these things it made them better known.

While I agree that many things seem obvious in hindsight I have disagree this time. Every civilization seems to have arrived at the same basic conclusions and strategies independantly. Even in the first battle ever recorded in detail the battle of Kadesh they clearly understood many if not all of his basic ideas. And I doubt Maurice knew anything about Sun Tzu and yet his book doesn't even bother explicitly stating many of the things that Sun Tzu says but instead goes strait to how best to acheive the objectives because he clearly assumes you already know the importance of things like secrecy/disinformation ect... .

ragnaroknrol wrote:

The book details unconventional warfare tactics. Overloading a side, using terrain to bolster a side or dictate the enemies' actions, and attack tactics are all in there.

I'm not sure what's unconventional about that, hasn't every half way competent general in history done that.

ragnaroknrol wrote:

Hell, I read the book, picked up a Tau army for Warhammer 40K and proceeded to use the tactics to good effect. If a book can give you a good idea for how to use terrain, conserve strength and how to strike, it is probably a good book to learn for warfare.

Never played that game, I'll have to check it out :)

I didn't know there was another translation of Strategikon or do you know Latin or Greek (whatever it was written in originally)? I've heard of Taktika but never read it. Checked gutenberg.net and no luck but I found this on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Taktika-Leo-Dumbarton-Oaks-Texts/dp/0884023591/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271867821&sr=1-1[^]

I'll have to check it out.

Several years ago I had a job as a security gaurd and lets just say this gave me LOTS of time read and I like reading history, science and technology books. Anyway it has always amazed me that Sun Tzu's book gets so much attention and praise (I recently noticed the history channel has a series based on his book). My problem with the book isn't that the advise is necisarily wrong it's that all the advice is vague and obvious. It's so vague that even after reading the book I still have almost no clue what a chinese army of that era would have looked like. From the very few details in the book it's also obvious that he wasn't talking about or inventing guerilla warfare and it's even more obvious that he wasn't talking about how to win in business. Although his advice is so vague that it can apply to almost anything. Personlly I liked the book Stategikonhttp://www.amazon.com/Maurices-Strategikon-Handbook-Byzantine-Military/dp/0812217721/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271823050&sr=1-1[^] by the Byzantine Emporer/General much better because it's loaded with all sorts of historical and tactical details. Anybody else have an opinion on this? ps There's no particular point to this post. Sometimes it's just fun to debate stuff. :-D

Basically the way to approach this is to draw a rectangle like you did before but put some conditions in to determine if you should print a star or a blank. First to get the width: Notice that except for the top line the triangle's width increases by 2 for each line it goes down. Therefore: Width = (Height * 2) - 1 To determine whether to draw a star you need to find if you are close enough to the center of the triangle. Center = Width / 2 On each line the triangle gets one wider in each direction so you need 2 variables to hold the range where stars should be drawn. So if you use Min and Max as your variable the should initally be set to Center and then subtract 1 from min each line you go down and add 1 to max each line you go down. You can then use these variable to test if your loop counter is between these 2 variables. Hope this helps, Mike

Pretty cool. Sounds like you're making alot progress, I figured it would take longer than that for one person to get where you are. I'll have to read your articles.

So how long have you been working on your OS? How many lines of code does it have?

I like to check the tiobe index http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html[^] every once in awhile to see what the trends are and usually it's pretty easy to explain why a language is rapidly gaining in popularity. For instance Objective-C is benifiting from the Iphone and Go is a new language so probably people are curious/trying it out. But I was suprised to find Fortran has almost doubled it's share since last year and is in the top 20 now. Is "real programming" coming back in style or something http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html[^] :laugh:?

Pretty cool. What CAD program did you use to make that?

That's possible but it's not like she's the only one who has reported that happening. One guy who crashed was going over 100+ mph and actually had time to call 911 about it before crashing.

That still sounds more likely than the floormat explaination. :laugh:

The floormat explaination always sounded like a load of crap to me and although a gas pedal getting stuck is a little more plausable I still doubt that is the explaination. The reason I say this is alot of the people said their car took off like a rocket. If the cause was the gas pedal getting stuck then you should only accelerate as much as when you last pressed it. Take this crash that happened yesterday http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/video?id=7243578[^]. This woman was parking her car when it took off and went through what was partially a brick wall. And the witnesses said she was going very fast when it happened. I don't know about you but I usually am not pressing the gas pedal very hard when I'm parking so why would it have accelerated so much in that short distance? My bet is they have a software bug they can't find or a problem with some sensor although I think the first one is more likely.

modified on Thursday, January 28, 2010 11:26 AM

Thank guys for all the helpfull suggestions. Mike

I want to practice some database programming and also do a little web programming while I'm at it and I was hoping some of you could recommend some good web hosting companies/plans or tell me which ones to avoid. I was thinking of using PHP & MySql and if it has Java, Ruby, Python or anything else that's a plus but not necisary and I'm not looking to spend too much money on this. I'm not doing anything serious here it will just be a personal screwing around and trying stuff type of web site. Thanks for the suggestions, Mike

Actually I think he might be better to just use a seperate module for his public data. The forms should only contain data that is very specific to that particular form (which usually means it doesn't need to be public). Everything else such as functionality should be in modules or classes.

_Mohammad_ wrote:

Most of the film before 2000 didn't have any cool visual effects !

I'd have to say the opposite. All of the post 2000 sci-fi movies with the exception of the the later Terminator movies seem to overuse computer graphics. Maybe it's just me but all the CG effects look unrealistic and cartoonish to me and I can always tell when a movie uses them. I hate to say it but the original Star Wars (before Lucas remade it) had better special effects than any of the prequals or for that matter any of the advertisements for Avatar and Star Wars was released in 1977!

I'm not a huge movie watcher so I probably missed some but these would be my picks for just last decade: Action Sci-Fi Drama ect... Termintor 3 The Butterfly Effect Gladiator The Matrix Longitude (TV movie but still pretty good) Terminator Salvation (not as good as T2 or T3 but still a good movie) Comedy Wedding Crashers Idiocracy Borat Talladega Nights Blades of Glory

Was this meant as a question or a comment?

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

In my 30 years of programming, I've never once experienced a stack overflow, until today.

Wow, either you're a really good programmer or you must not have written many recursive functions in that time.

Yes Mike Judge is a genius. Have you seen his other great film "idiocracy"? It a satire about a guy that travels 500 years in the future and because the dumb people had more children than smart people over that time everyone in the future is about as dumb as Beavis and Butthead (another one of his creations). If you haven't heard of it don't be suprised because apparently fox tried to kill the film because it would have ruffled alot of feathers.