Year of the Mainframe? Not Quite, Say Linux Grids 222
OSS_ilation writes "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast. At R.L. Polk and Co., one of the oldest automobile analytics firms in the U.S., an aging mainframe couldn't cut it, so the IT staff looked elsewhere. Their search led to a grid computing environment — more specifically, a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers. The mainframe's still there, apparently, but after an internal comparison showed the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs, Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."
Linux Niche (Score:2)
good for, rather than for a desktop os, where difficulty of setup would be a severe
handicap. I've always believed that open-source suffers from the in-house-tool
mentality, which assumes the end user is extremely sophistacted. As an engineer,
I can testify to my lack of desire to make the UI more than bare-bones.
Maxim
Re:Linux Niche (Score:5, Insightful)
Installing extra software was equally trivial. There is a GUI to start off the Applications menu for installing more software. It downloads and installs the software all as one step. No need to download it, run a separate installer or scroll through pages of impeneterable EULA.
To add extra applications to this GUI application installer - mainly multimedia applications - all it required was clicking on a link on Livna's web page to add the Livna repository. (Like Mac OS X, you're asked for the administrative password on application install).
Installing Fedora Core and extra applications and extra application repositories is actaully easier than doing the same on Windows, and about the equivalent difficulty of doing the same on Mac OS X.
For third-party applications, there is Autopackage: http://autopackage.org/ [autopackage.org] - which provides a distro-independent method of installing applications. It's reminiscent of things like the Mac OS X application installer (for apps you can't simply drag to the Applications folder) or the InstallShield types of installers for Windows. Except unlike InstallShield installers, it has the ability to resolve and fetch dependencies (ever tried to install Microsoft BizTalk? Complex and unweildy because you must manually install several dependencies, each with their own dependencies. Autopackage does away with this dependency hell).
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And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop? Well, go find the brand new beta development source code for your driver and compile that up (oh yeah, install the compiler and dev kits first). Do I want
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> And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop? Well,
> go find the brand new beta development source code for your driver and
Oddly enough, the last 3 laptops I've tried this on have been
absolutely no trouble at all. 2 of them weren't even purchased
with Linux in mind. They just managed to work "perfectly and out
of the box" just out of sheer luck.
> Okay, where do I set the wireless password? I know I saw that
> somewhere before. Oh, the Dlink-chip-du-jour i
Re:Linux Niche (Score:4, Informative)
And then you want to get your sound working on your newer laptop?
Worked with ALSA out of the box.
Okay, where do I set the wireless password? I know I saw that somewhere before.
Using Network Manager, there is a wireless icon in the top right of the window with a list of accessible networks. Selecting an encrypted one brings up a prompt for a password (the first time you use it).
Oh, the Dlink-chip-du-jour isn't supported out of the box, I have to go find some more development drivers for it, if I can.
Unfortunately, some hardware manufacturers give no Linux support at all, but in fact almost all wireless adapters work. Go with Centrino, and you will be fine.
Hmmmm, how do I suspend this and hibernate it properly?
Both worked perfectly out of the box.
Hmmm, where did my scrolling regions go on my trackpad?
They were enabled and working out of the box.
Now, time for a presentation; install openoffice, that works fine, good. Okay, now to switch to external monitor. Hmmm, Fn-Monitor doesn't work.
The hotkey for switching to external monitor worked out of the box, with all three modes (internal, external, both) working.
To this I can add (in response to others) that both my iPod and my Camera worked straight out of the box, as did Internet access over my bluetooth phone. The only thing I have run into which didn't work was an HP scanner - it turns out that scanners are a real quagmire with no uniform drivers and that HP give lousy support, a little Googling told me this and that an Epson would have worked...
ALSA hell (Score:2)
Yes I remember ALSA Hell which is especially true if your hardware is relatively new... Once I had to "buy" OSS drivers for a desktop as I could not get the recommended ALSA drivers to work. For wireless though the easiest method is to just connect the desktop/laptop to to a wireless bridge via ethernet.
After that, it's finding the suitable players, codecs, etc., so you can listen / watch streaming audio/video. Then comes the installation of 3D graphics drivers which usually also needs to be re-installed
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Note that if you install Windows XP on a new laptop, you have exactly the same problems - except not even the onboard ethernet NIC is supported, so you have trouble even downloading drivers to support your wireless, video, sound and chipset.
Most people are insulated from installing Windows because it comes pre-installed. XP is generally *harder* to install from scratch and get working than a good Linux distro. I've never had to man
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Anedotal evidence (Score:2)
But even if such a study showed that XP "just worked" more often th
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For the record, XP service pack 2 doesn't see (out of the box, drivers presumably exists, but as it doesn't install it is a bit hard to test...
In linux, everything worked right out of the box (and have done so for years)
Interestingly, windows ME worked reasonable out of the box... (but the gfx drivers doesn't). The biggest challenge was selecting the proprietary nvidia drivers.
I know for
Photoshop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, so if I don't want to use the most popular online music store, never google for a tutorial on how to accomplish ___ with my graphics tools, don't like books, and don't need to exchange files with people who work for a living, there's always GIMP, OO and some programmerware media app I could use, and why would I want to compose music for orchestra on my computer?
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Yeah, bollocks is it.
It's a myth until you want to use an iPod or a digital camera, surely two of the most popular consumer devices today after mobile phones. I have tried and failed to get both working on my desktop Linux system. If I can't do it, there's no way my Mum could. In the end I just bought a MacBook, and put my Linux machine in a cupboard.
Yes, I know that both of these things can be made to work, but honestly, most people just
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It's a myth until you want to use an iPod or a digital camera, surely two of the most popular consumer devices today after mobile phones. I have tried and failed to get both working on my desktop Linux system. If I can't do it, there's no way my Mum could. In the end I just bought a MacBook, and put my Linux machine in a cupboard.
For your iPod, use Amarok. It works very nicely with iPods, as well as being one of the best music players on any platform.
As for your digital camera, well, every one I've ever tried just worked, but apparently you have an obscure one that doesn't. Someday Linux will get popular enough that hardware vendors support it, but until then there's some pain that's simply unavoidable, particularly when vendors refuse to follow the established standards (for cameras, those are PTP and USB storage).
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That camera should work perfectly. What distro did you use?
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Why didn't you purchase a music player/camera that handles files as it should; as a mass storage device?
Don't get me wrong, I understand your point, and even agree with it to an extent, but I have a valid point too. The root issue is really bad commercial interests combined with bad consumerism.
On the flip side, and a better example I think, I am in the process of setting up a small recording studio. I have my choice of going computer based,
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Plug it in with a USB cable, or put the card in a card reader and plug the card reader in with a USB cable.
My four year old daughter can do it.
My cheap and nasty music player works like this:
Remove cover, plug it into the USB port.
My four year old daughter can do that too.
From other people's comments an iPod works just was well as my unbranded piece of cheap junk.
Having read the parent, does anyone who has moderated recently regret rating this comment [slashdot.org]
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12 months from today you'll either have to futz with your setup (something most users won't want to do) or stop receiving patches and updates.
This is one of the main reasons I'm moving my servers to Solaris.
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Case in point: I was recently installing Win2K (I despise XP for a number of reasons, none of which are relevant here) on a new, relatively high-end computer for my wife recently, and found that Windows didn't detect a good portion of her hardware (graphics card, sound card, etc.). My 2-3 year old Knoppix CD, on the other hand, had no problem detecting and setting up all of the hard
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You should really try looking at a modern linux distro before making a blanket statement about the difficulty of setup for a desktop machine. I've installed Ubuntu and OpenSUSE at home recently, and as long as the hardware matches up ok (which it often times does, at least on desktops), there is little manual configuration to
On everything but wireless, you're right. (Score:2)
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I've always believed that open-source suffers from the in-house-tool mentality, which assumes the end user is extremely sophistacted.
You really should try all three of Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu. Pick one, they are getting to be quite comparable to Windows on the desktop and certainly more secure and stable.
But more to the original post. Imagine if a corporation ever got their collective butts out of the FUD and had everyone use the same version of Linux and made all workstations part of a giant grid.
What are they trying to prove ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they had compared a NEW mainframe with the NEW grid, then we would have been able to draw some conclusions about which one is better. But saying "We bought a new system, its better than the old one" proves nothing.
What they wanted to prove. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most likely they didn't know how to program the mainframe to get the results they wanted but they did know how to use the solution they came up with
or
they knew how to do the mainframe side to the fullest potential of the machine but that wasn't cool enough so they redefined what good results were.
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Still, it's got to say something for the mainframe if 120 new Dell servers, running as a grid, offer only a 70% performance improvement.
it says it's 65% cheaper. how's that?
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How easy is it to get a new server that's 70% faster than a 2002 server and 65% cheaper (were they using 2002 prices?)?
Of course it's likely that IBM wants to charge people _high_prices_ every year for using a mainframe, and if that's still the case, then I wouldn't recommend using a mainframe - they aren't fast in processing (they never were- just usually had more IO) and aren't even that reliable compared to other te
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The mainframe shops I've worked in have never had issues with change itself, only with changes which are not well thought out and which don't follow due process. Those processes were put in place for a reason -- so person A's cure idea doesn't trash stuff needed by the rest of the company!!
Re:What are they trying to prove ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Actual performance numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
In comparison, our standard model mainframe (a 2084) kicks up about 1600 MPS. Assuming the performance numbers for the Dell grid were to scale (the safe money says it doesn't), that translates into almost 1450 Dells. Keep in mind, that's not even a top of the line mainframe...
Let's not even start on hardware maintenance (which would you rather do: hot swap a power supply on 1 system, or 25?), network overhead, shared DASD, coupling facilities and RRS (think: Beowulf clusters).
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_instructions
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Re:What are they trying to prove ? (Score:5, Insightful)
These "old-versus-new" comparisons are the stock-in-trade of marketing and PR departments, which are perpetually issuing press releases bragging that the latest Foowhatzit Humdinger 24-processor with thousands of GB of storage outperformed someone's 10-year old VAX or AS/400. To Slashdotters, that's a subdued "Wow!" (that they would attempt such barefaced trickery, that is) and on to something potentially interesting. But to the broad masses who know nothing about computers, it is quite impressive. PHB readers habitually skip over all the "techie details" anyway, so they probably come away with the desired message: "We need Foowhatzit Humdingers, and we need 'em now!"
People with arts degrees are big on quoting Mies van der Rohe's "God is in the details". Perhaps it's time they realised that "God is in the numbers" too.
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I recently had a request to install a new type of medical irradiator (products, not people)in lieu of an older model. The new one doesn't use a radioactive source, and instead uses xray tubes. It was the cat's ass - no radiation safety officer required, no NRC hassles, and another part of he company did an ROI and the results were great. But when I looked at the specs, the cycle time was slower, it had 1/2 the ca
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it was an OLD mainframe versus a PRESENT-DAY Linux grid
The 2066-002 was released in 2002, it's hardly an "old" mainframe. I think their biggest advantage was in getting rid of everything they had, and starting from scratch. They could have done this on the mainframe too, and probably would have seen similar gains. From the description of their job load, it sounds like a typical data-processing environment (take huge amounts of raw data, sort/filter/categorize and store it), which is what mainframes were designed for. I'll bet they could have just written a
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Even simpler... PHB: "This is almost 2x faster for under 1/2 the price? Buy it!" It happens more in IT I think because, face it, when is the last time a non-tech item doubled it's performance for half price in only a few years? You can bet the robotic welding arm the PHB bought recently doesn't have a 70% performance gain at 65% cost
Re:What are they trying to prove ? (Score:4, Informative)
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of PHB friendly resource control (CPU, IO, etc) for multiple concurrently running applications? Doubt it.
Does the grid mentioned in the article offer the same level of reliability and reproducibility of the result? I have some doubts. Most mainframes have 2+ CPUs doing the same task and either flagging a fault on differences or deciding who is right using a "voting" system. This is done on a per instruction basis and cannot be directly simulated in a grid. At best you can do per-task/procedure result comparison which is not the same as it will flag errors considerably later and has higher probability of overall error when using the same number of components.
Someone is either comparing apples and oranges, or being a fanboy or not knowing what mainframe is for or all of these at the same time.
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That's kind of like asking "how much would a brand new 386 system cost to replace this old 386?".
According to my mainframe hardware charts, my company still has a 2066, which we use for an extremely low-volume business unit. The 2066-02 is pushing 10 years old, uses a 2 engine CPU complex (think SMP), and has a processing power rating of ~77 MI
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Perhaps the parent here can help me out with a question I've always wondered about as well. The 2084 machine mentioned is described as having about 1700 MIPS. A rough estimate
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zMIPS, not MIPS (Score:2)
77 (mainframe) MIPS = 77 (IBM) zMIPS = 77000 (x86) MIPS
My apologies for not being clearer.
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New grid bests 20 yo mainfraime. News at 11. (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, I've got to check out these mainframes (Score:3, Insightful)
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right tool for right job (Score:5, Informative)
The mainframe also gives you nice IO and super-efficient virtualization.
Workload doesn't need all that? Gee, maybe it's not a workload for the mainframe.
Re:right tool for right job (Score:5, Informative)
The Mainframe discussed in the topic is an IBM one, most likely a predecessor of the current zSeries machines (OS/390).
So Linux beat it. I guess they just had tasks which weren't fit for large scale processing behemoths like mainframes anyway. I dare bet the Linux grid would be a lot slower if it had to batch processes a few hundred MB worth of data. And despite all the claims about Linux stability, mainframes boast far superious uptime (a few minutes of scheduled downtime a year and no unscheduled downtime; everything can be hotswapped, including CPU's and memory). Although the increase of real-time processing decreases the need for mainframes a bit, the ever increasing processing load still makes them invaluable to large companies.
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On a somewhat related note, I wonder how much more floor space those 200 servers take up, and how much cooling they consume, compared to an IBM z9. It's about the size of a large refrigerator. Unless they're using blades, we're talking maybe 10x the floor space.
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You can fit 200 1U machines into 5 racks. According to TFA these guys have 49 4U machines in their production grid. Still comes in at 5 racks, so cut your estimate in half.
They do belch out a lot of heat, but a standard server room A/C unit should be able to handle it.. assuming a bunch of other stuff isn't already putting a load on it.
zSeries also has lockstep (Score:2)
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No, he's thinking of standard z-series IBM mainframes. They behave as he described. HP's NonStop (prev. Tandem) is just a different operating environment with someone different HA characteristics.
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A small 4 year old 'mainframe' is slow. Ok (Score:3, Informative)
and an old cobol application is slow. Ok (Score:2, Informative)
According to this the original software was probably poorly designed:
> the mainframe took on the persona of a lumbering behemoth. This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new
> business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a
> major rework of the program
Hmmm, massive
we don't need mainframes, but standalones may lack (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider an virual operating system, that can run on one or more other operating systems. This operating system is actually a set of nodes, one node per machine (or one node per CPU), with command nodes and worker nodes.
Command nodes distribute the workload and exist for redundancy. If one goes down, all others have a backup of it's data and state, and the next most senior node takes over.
Worker nodes then take the tasks and interface with the users via a standard shell.
Files can be distributed amongst the nodes for speed and redundancy, and if a node that needs a file doesn't have it, ant can request the file and temporarily have it locally. Each node will have a list of what files exist, and where they exist.
UI tasks are written to run solely on the machine of the user, but data crunching tasks are written to be split between nodes.
Thus, a person just goes to his or her machine, and interacts with it like a normal machine, except, rather than having a logon for his machine, he or she will have a logon for the multiframe.
Also, because of this setup, a multifram could work on top of multiple operating systems (say an office that is 50% windows for the normal users, and then 35% Linux for the devs, 10% FreeBSD for other devs, 5% HPUX/Sun for some server, and all machines coudl contribute to the multiframe.
The multifram could also have recorded statistics of uptimes and drops for various nodes, performance statistics for load balancing, etc.
The caveat to this system is that it would need some pretty heavy networking, even if optimised, and there could be latency issues. Still, I like this idea better than a mainframe.
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Re:we don't need mainframes, but standalones may l (Score:3, Informative)
The caveat to this system is that it would need some pretty heavy networking, even if optimised, and there could be latency issues. Still, I like this idea better than a mainframe.
And this caveat kills the deal. The problem has always been that networks simply can't compete with the throughput of native devices. Consider this:
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So, do apps have to be written speciall for it?
I.E: an interface app is called, and it splits the work load up, and sends it to sub-apps on the various nodes?
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The idea is that instead of a company buying a $50k server, it can instead use the $50k of desktops it has for it's employees to be the server, saving them all of that money, and potentially giving them better performance, redundancy, sta
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Matt and Mindy in marketing use Windows.
Fred and Francine in Financial Management use VMS on their little alpha workstations (they are old fashioned).
Dan and Donna in development use Linux,
while
David and Denise in development use BSD
Now, Oscar and Oliva in operations use the mainfram (accessing it through their windows boxes).
What they don't know is that their mainframe is actually a distributed operating system running on Matt's, Mindy's, Fred's, Francine's, Dan's, Donna's,
Sounds like underperforming software (Score:3, Insightful)
This was especially the case when the IT staff had to accommodate new business requirements such as a car dealership adding a new type of vehicle to its inventory. Each update required a major rework of the program
Really?
Frankly that sounds like the software is in severe need of reworking! If their machines are 20 years old that's bad enough, but if they have 20 year-old software that needs to be rewritten every time a new type of car is added, it's time for a redesign.
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Wonder if they would have done as well against a well-designed application?
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>software that needs to be rewritten every time a new type of car is added
You call it poor design; they call it... job security?
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It is very clear that there applications were crappy, and that the 'mainframe' was blamed. I strongly suspect a rewrite of the apps for that same mainframe would have had greater increases in speed.
Also, they replaced it with a cluster not a grid.
We use a 30 year old mainframe to do millions of transaction daily, with no problems.
I am a fan of clusters and grids, but this is an example of people change technology due to ignorance, not any technical need.
Year of the Mainframe? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, any mainframe that can be replaced by 120 PC compute nodes isn't well utilized and/or is completely outmoded.
I had a chat with a gentleman once who participated in a replacement of multiple PC servers with a mainframe--but it entailed replacing 7,000 servers with a relatively high-end machine.
The result was that power and real estate savings alone paid for the mainframe--which had more capacity for future expansion as needed.
As always, proper implementation of the right equipment for the job is always crucial--and a shallow analysis that doesn't cover all the variables is simply misleading at best.
nice spin... (Score:2)
IBM are also heavily investing in Grids, particularly with their support of the Globus Alliance Toolkit (see http://www.globus.org/ [globus.org])
Crazy? No, they are aiming at different targets. Mainframes are controlled by individual companies, grids are hoped to eventually be the equivalent of TCP - ubiquitous, reliable and cheaply available everywhere. That means your next Windows Vista T1000, Ubuntu Beam-me-up (TM) and self-aware toaster w
Mainframes are not for everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Do they mean a cluster (Score:2)
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A big plus side to clusters is the fact that each machine in the cluster normally knows enough about its role to operate in the absence of all of the others.
I've only used grids for computationally intensive tasks. Failover and recovery is something that we just got for free
Right, this is not a grid! (Score:2, Informative)
Here, at least the first point is not fulfilled. So yes, they've built a cluster. A cluster like hundreds of others, used since the early 90s. It's 2007, isn't it? I'm impressed!
In a prior life ... (Score:2)
I was a vendor SE who had occasion to visit R. L. Polk. There are customers who are "bleeding edge" customers, always looking for ways that the latest and greatest technology can give them an advantage in their business operations, and there are customers who are "junkyard" customers, who see everything as an expense, and only have the cheapest, oldest junk on the floors in their data centers.
Cost is the only metric for such customers, of whom R. L. Polk was one such (a
Not A Big Deal (Score:3, Informative)
Even IBM will tell you that there are some applications that you should not run on a zSeries processor. I've been in meetings where IBM has said that some types of workload will not perform well on a zSeries processor and you should consider Intel or some other platform.
There is no "one size fits all". Anyone who says there is "one size" is probably selling something.
MF backending the grid? (Score:2)
And what of that old mainframe? It's still around, but Isiminger wouldn't say exactly what it was up to. It operates in a "reduced capacity," he said.
LOL... anyone else think they just created a HTTP server farm to frontend the data, using WebSphere, MQSeries, and/or DB2 Universal as the backend (all still running on the mainframe)?
This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Power consumption (Score:2)
Wait a minnit - this is a Grid how? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the key features of a grid is that it "coordinates features that are not subject to centralized control". (What Is The Grid [anl.gov], Ian Foster, ANL). Grids by definition cross organizational or management boundaries. You can't buy a grid any more than you can buy an Internet. You can buy a network. You can buy a cluster. You can't buy a grid.
Seems like a press release to me. (Score:2)
Could even be a failure being spun to look like a success- I mean look at this:
"And what of that old mainframe? It's still around, but Isiminger wouldn't say exactly what it was up to. It operates in a "reduced capacity," he said"
"reduced capacity", that smells like BS talk. Does that mean it's still doing some of its old tasks, or most of its old tasks?
Of course they might not want to get rid of the mainframe that they paid so much money for (though there is a market for 2nd hand mainfram
Sounds like they had the wrong arch. for the job (Score:2)
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http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=medial [reference.com]
2. pertaining to a mean or average; average.
The Grid is used for complex, processor-intensive tasks, I'm sure. The regular daily cruft is probably still done on the old mainframe. Those would be 'medial tasks'. If they made it into a monitor instead of a system that does processing, that might be considered menial. (I'm having a ha
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The grammar police are right here. The word the guy was looking for was "menial". I don't agree with his derogatory comments on phrases like "safe haven" (haven has had it's definition expanded to mean other things than safety, so it's a distinguisher) but I
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HOWEVER point remains!
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Please explain. These kinds of things interest me and it reminds me of Eddie Izzard's rant about American pronunciations.
"You say 'erbs', and we say 'herbs', because there's a fucking 'H' in it!"
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Take the pronunciation of "one" for instance. Not an obscure word, a fairly important word in my opinion, and one of the first few words someone learning english has to learn.
Now add the sloppiness that seems to be getting back in fashion - your != you're, have != of, it gets hard to understand what people are saying.
Back in the old days when only a few people in the world spoke English and even fewer wrote it it's not such a big deal if people keep changing the meanings.
But
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1. situated in or pertaining to the middle; median; intermediate.
and
(American Heritage Dictionary, further into that same page)
Average; ordinary.
Ordinary does not have a defintion related to mathematics that I know of. This means that medial, when not in relation to mathematics, means 'ordinary' or 'average'.
The Grammar Police may have been right, o
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What, isn't that what everyone does when finding an old forgotten idle mainframe connected to the Internet at their workplace?
Re:"medial" tasks? (Score:4, Funny)
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How about nucular [slate.com] instead?
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