I absolutely agree. It is astonishing how much attention Yu Suzuki and his team put into all the details that make Shenmue such an experience. It would be nice to see it ported to modern consoles.

The Yakuza series is probably the best that we can get in the meantime http://www.sega.com/yakuza/index_us.php and Yu also posted that he has been working on Shenmue City for Mobage-Town of Yahoo! Japan. http://sunsoft.jp/shenmue-gai/index2.html

Hopefully we will see Shenmue III one day.

I agree with VMWare being a likely candidate, as they recently strengthened their partnership with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware(R) earlier this month:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/vmware-and-novell-deliver-suse-linux-enterprise-server-for-vmwarer-2010-09-01?reflink=MW_news_stmp

I wonder what this means for the future of OpenSUSE, as VMware has a rather proprietary range of software products.

Only that what we are interested in here are not (solely) opinions but rather arguments and their refutation.

You can take a look at the links to packages.ubuntu.com and koji for yourself, and the launchpad situation described by Parent cannot be easily dismissed.

Although, somehow I think your reply should modded Funny if it is a clever pun on the "opinion" status in launchpad.

In the blog entry, Mark writes about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there." From my experience, problems are not chased down but rather the Ostrich algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm is applied.

While running karmic (9.10), I noticed a bug with the network-manager pertaining static IP addresses and wireless connectivity, which made it unable to connect to certain configured wireless access points. Lets take a look at the network-manager released with 9.10: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/network-manager , it is (0.8~a~git.20091013t193206.679d548-0ubuntu1).

Now lets look at the updates for karmic at http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/net/ , there is not a single one (!) for network-manager. For the whole six months until the next release of 10.04, not a single update for it has been provided! They just took the git snapshot and left it in 9.10.

Just compare it to Fedora 12 and their updates on http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=172857 , karmic (9.10) was released at October 29th, and one can see the fixes and updates through Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan for F12.

I do not care about the marketing strategies and public image of Linux distributions, but rather about exactly what Mark said, about " ... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there."

For me, Ubuntu did not deliver that.

Is there a way to integrate R programs with another high level language like Java, for example to bind a R object to a Java interface? I have basic familiarity with R, and I would like to use programs written in R directly with other programs written in a object-oriented language, as opposed to do file i/o for the bridge between them.

The general idea is to be able to take Java objects and pass them to R and do all the stats numbercrunching with smaller R programs, that are somehow integrated with a Java program. The results then get back as other objects that can be further processed in Java.

Are there any possibilities for that?

Is "Cryptonomicon" in any way inspired by Thomas Pynchons "Gravity's Rainbow"? While reading "Cryptonomicon", I noticed that some aspects of the book resembled some parts of Thomas Pynchons book "Gravity's Rainbow", they share parts of the humour (Cryptonomicons Giant lizards during the drug/dilerium trips) or the WW2 timeline, and both are written in a postmodernistic style. After searching a bit on the net I saw that many other people noticed this. While "Cryptonomicon" being not so philosophical and linguistic complex structured as "Gravity's Rainbow" (and thus IMO not in the same class as "Gravity's Rainbow"), it still gives a feeling of allusion to "Gravity's Rainbow" to me.