A Fine Gael TD named Patrick
Vied for the cluelessness hat trick:
He blamed anonymity
For people's affinity
To gambling, drugs and well-stacked chicks.

He represents Limerick, for Christ's sake. He had it coming.

Well, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

RedHat gains in a number of ways:

• - Build adherence to the RPM/YUM ecosystem of Linux distros (as opposed to DEB-based distros);
• - Ensure that CentOS doesn't drift too far from the mothership, making CentOS a 'gateway drug', as it were, to RedHat;
• - Major karma bump among sysadmins and other professionals (valuable when planning discussions are happening and IT gets a voice);
• - Experiment and potentially learn a lot of important lessons without sullying the RedHat brand.

You might want to re-read my last line. It's tongue in cheek, but there for a reason. I'm not disregarding your faith; I'm simply replying to your comment that 'anything that is not based in truth does not serve God'.

Best regards.

Problem is, the truth doesn't serve God:

Science doesn’t require a God of any kind to be complete.

Some people construe this to mean that they can keep God in one pocket and science in the other. But science is much more dangerous than that. In rationalising a space between the two, people implicitly accept Aristotle’s theory of the primum movens (or, unmoved mover). In other words, we can regress evolution, or cosmology or what have you back beyond the point of measurement, and beyond that resides the godhead. So Big Bang is okay, because God lit the fuse, as it were.

But the fly in the ointment is that you can actually push science past Big Bang and it still remains coherent (it’s not easily testable, but it’s theoretically coherent). Likewise, you can reverse engineer forces and causes of the evolutionary process past the origin of life. In other words, science doesn’t just end where God begins, and vice versa. No, science is complete - that is, it can conceive of the universe in its totality independently of any conception whatsoever of a Creator.

Which doesn’t leave a lot of space for God, if you’re honest about it.

(And God, for his part, says, ‘I am that I am‘ and plagues me with boils. So, swings and roundabouts, I guess.)

Fair enough. It bears noting though that this approach works equally well when reading Moby Dick, 1984, Pride and Prejudice, The Power and the Glory, and for that matter, Superman comics.

Probably just burning up unevenly. Many celestial objects are not uniform in their composition. They are composed of different materials of varying density and some also have gas pockets - or holes, or empty spaces, anyway. I've seen one meteor changing colour as it fell, and when it broke in two, it appeared to suddenly change direction, because one of the two diverging remnants was burning much more brightly than the other.

So, unless its path described a curve, or it turned back on itself, slowed or accelerated quickly... it's probably not what you fear.

Now, if you would kindly direct your eyes to this pen I'm holding in my hand....

Why ever no t? What could passably go wrong?

:-)

No, actually, that's a horrible analogy.

If we must analogize, Linux is deep water. Almost infinitely deep. So deep, in fact, that few choose to plumb it all the way down. But it remains visible and accessible to the level of every sysadmin or developer's needs. The fact that most people prefer to skim along the surface takes nothing away from the volume of information waiting to be explored.

And now, because I'm forced to indulge in silly analogies, I find myself compelled to say that Windows is a swimming pool. A large one, it's true, and a crowded one, too. But you cannot easily move beyond its (broad) confines, you have no insight into where the water comes and goes (a topic which increasingly preoccupies my thoughts as I consider the statistical likelihood of people pissing in the pool), and you have little control even over your own course as you are buffeted and blocked by the arbitrary actions of others.

Finally, to get things back on a more practical level, PowerShell may do wonderful things, but the thing that makes Bash so compelling is the environment it runs in. Bash itself is a bit awkward and limited, but it's just glue for binding together countless ingenious (and sometimes even elegant) commands and utilities that can allow you to do things in minutes you couldn't really contemplate doing on Windows in comparable time. In fact, the only way that Windows seems to be able to compete with *nix on the server side is by appropriating the very things that make *nix so compelling.

That seems to be the obvious value in this company. Phone makers have demonstrated time and again how badly they manage their own Android distros, and how much they see them as a cost-centre rather than an opportunity to better position themselves in the market.

Given the state of current MBAThink, why wouldn't they want to outsource the heavy lifting of distro management to a company that not only does it well, but does it better than their competitors? If CM play their cards right, they could start a bidding war, or at very least, make sure that their's is a seller's market.

I especially like this idea because it upsets the playing field a little. Cyanogenmod can be ported at low cost to a number of generic platforms, allowing cheap(er) phone makers to gussy up their product without much effort. So to the consumer, there won't be much to choose between an SGS4 and a KungPaoDuk Delightra XXS Happy Screen. (Visually, at least.)

Better yet, why produce software at all, if people are just going to ridicule and criticise it?

I'm writing this in the hope that you point your management to this discussion and they realise what an incredibly childish move it would be to start hiding information just because people might talk about it. As a CTO, may I say the following: If you don't produce a changelog, and your company isn't one of about three or four whom I'm forced to live with on their terms, you're not getting through my front door. No questions, no discussion, nothing.

As Hamlet famously said: 'Tis better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than to be a secretive little shit that nobody likes.

I already did that, only I had to go and look, and it turned out I didn't....

... in this universe.

I prefer to throw acid in my models' faces to ensure nobody will ever copy me again.

Okay seriously: I will never ever understand why photographers deliberately degrade their work in order to prevent copying. I say this as a photographer myself. I get a lot of business by sharing freely. Look, I get that we have to make a living, but defacing your own work is hardly the best way to advertise it. Musicians don't introduce noise or random silences in the MP3s they share. Writers don't include random gibberish in the middle of their online pieces*.

How hard is it to get that when you post something online, you have decided to share it? You can have any number of motivations: You might want to get exposure and publicity; you might want to get news services to pick it up; you might want to sell it as art. The first is free. The second, as this story makes clear, is easily managed via legal, not technical, means. The third... well, it's sufficient unto the day to solicit payment for the actual poster/book/print. If someone's too chintzy to lay out a few bucks for the real thing - they weren't your customer anyway.

In what world does it make sense? Does anyone actually believe that, just because I've seen a photo of Monet's Waterloo Bridge, I won't ever again go to the National Gallery in London? Hint: Seeing the photo makes me more likely to want to go, not less.

-----------
* Brett Easton Ellis notwithstanding. But he's hardly a real writer.

You fail at geography, but you will never go thirsty at any Tasmanian pub. :-)

...And you might want to remember Timor Leste, which is about as close as Papua New Guinea.