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.

There is everything wrong with this. With recording as with all things, handsome is as handsome does. I have a photojournalist friend, recently returned from Afghanistan, whose primary camera is a little Canon point-and-shoot. You could scoff and talk about Good Enough, except that he's used a similar camera to provide a nice two page spread in Vanity Fair. Yes, he also walks around with a vintage Leica pano camera and a few other bits of exotic kit as well, but when it comes to getting shots, sometimes the best camera is the one you have in your hand.

If you look at other 'serious' films that Verhoeven has directed, you'll quickly see that he's got a major bee in his bonnet about the effects of Nazism on his birthplace, the Netherlands. Take a look at Soldier of Orange or The Black Book. They're brilliant, subtle and morally complex treatments of life (and death) in a time when the world was turned upside down by a sadistic totalitarian regime.

Clearly, Verhoeven appropriated the frame that Starship Troopers provided for his own purposes: to satirise not only fascism and the incipient militarism of American society, but also the wanton war-porn that Hollywood loves so much. It is a bitter, bitter film.

Puts the Zune squirt in a whole new light, doesn't it?

The fact that you've been modded Flamebait for offering an honest, unvarnished (and embittered) opinion is, ironically, the strongest supporting evidence you could have asked for.

It's hard for some of us to come to terms with a world where much of what we do and say isn't dictated by deterministic, defined and empirically measurable phenomena. It takes a great deal of effort and learning to begin to understand what motivates people, how to deal with the vagaries and, importantly, how to get money from them.

But nothing I've seen convinces me that business school is a better place than any other to learn these things. Assuming you're a smart, agile-minded person with a modicum of dedication, most MBA programs won't challenge you in any serious way. So if you're willing to devote a year or two to really coming to grips with the world around you, I'd recommend working overseas, as far from home as you can reasonably go. It will pull you so far out of your frame that you'll see humans and their motivations in a different light. Learning how money comes from these insights is a pretty straightforward thing once you've got that.

So Mac developers are used to crappy UIs with shitty-looking APIs?

(I kid, I kid. I just get these Sheldon moments from time to time...)

Clearly, they were watermelons.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. I predicted it back in 2011. Money quote:

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

That's pretty much the argument being made in TFA, but I'm not going to try to take credit for oracular powers or anything. It's been pretty obvious for some time that they were on the wrong track.