I think that universities not having a return on investment as such may go at least part of the way to explain someweird university behaviors around staff. The core issue is that withoutan ROI it becomes difficult to see the cost of how staff spend theirtime.

(With a ROI for projects it is easy to see how having staff spend theirtime on a lower-ROI activity more or less directly costs you money.)

Not only does this effectively make staff into a constant sunk costregardless of what you have

Normally, one of the things RPM bases dependencies on is package names.The problem with doing only this is packages that want to depend oncapabilities instead of specific packages; for example, that there issome mailer installed, not specifically that Sendmail is installed. Todeal with this, RPM introduced the Provides: directive, which lets anRPM package tell the overall RPM system that it is providing somethingthat is not obvious from its name, its files, and so on.

In implementing this, RPM has chosen to

I recently read a great explanation of thegeneral Apache 2 preforking server model ,and found it so lucid and simple that I was immediately inspired toimplement a generic preforking server myself. Their approach has a bitof overhead in parent/child communication, but it does mean that you donot have to pass file descriptors between processes; all you need issome way for the parent to talk with its children.

(Since Python's standard library doesn't have support for filedescriptor passing, the pragmatic advantages of