Well, let's hope they are better at keeping up with PHP versions with 7 than they were with 6. Using Drupal 6 with PHP 5.3.2 was worse than any beta I have ever participated in. Core features failed, plugins would not run, things just did not work. Still it was the most promising environment we have encountered for integrating Lucene, Solr, and Alchemy for an advanced NLP research workstation. If 7 is well behaved enough then we may even attempt a GATE integration.

The email leader said:

"Just Where Is The Lincoln Memorial, Anyhow?
        from the those-naughty-republicans dept.
        posted by timothy on Friday August 27, @23:28 (Google)"

For those who are unaware, Glenn Beck is an Independent NOT a Republican and his Honor rally was NOT political.

The thing that people fail to understand in general about Glenn Beck is that he dislikes the Republicans as much as the Democrats. He provides historical context for the fundamental ideas on which the US was founded. Then he goes on to report on how our leaders measure up against those ideals. And for those who just discovered him, he did the same to Bush.

Actually, not true in the least. Every employment application includes a "Have you ever been arrested/convicted?" question. Check yes, and watch the doors slam shut.

Kudos to Heap. Anyone applying technology to oppose oppressive regimes gets an A+ from me. Notwithstanding that such news is uplifting for us, Heap has probably put his life in jeopardy to do this. I hope we are not adding to that jeopardy by exposing it here.

"They boasted an elegant design and an extremely sophisticated and astonishingly modern technology,"

I find the premise of the article arrogantly modern. "They" didn't boast modern technology at all but rather demonstrated the of the state of the art in Egypt 3000 years ago. Perhaps the appropriate view is that today's engineering despite all its plastic and glitter has not advanced significantly beyond that of ancient Egypt in some areas. I do wonder why it is that we do so often equate ancient with stupid and marvel that those stupid old folk could actually have come up with a "modern" idea (which is the underlying theme of the article)?

I've been watching the slow decline of Ubuntu on Dell for the past year. This current move is no surprise. First then towers disappeared, then the XPS M1530 line disappeared, then only the Cannonical notebook remix was available on the Mini, now they remove the last holdout. It could be that they are simply responding to unit profitability requirements as some have suggested in here. I would be more inclined to believe that if Microsoft was not involved in the business decision. MS's business model demands exclusivity and it will bully or buy any technology that threatens even the slightest margin of its market share. Make no mistake, MS hates Linux with a passion as it does any competing technology it cannot control to its exclusive benefit. There remains little doubt that MS weighed heavily in Dell's decision to pull back on, if not out of, their Linux offerings. Dell is only responding to protect it's own market share and leading product line. The Linux community should work to make the competing distros better and easier to install/use/maintain across all hardware environments and expand the number of Linux only hardware distributors by supporting them with your purchases.

Think about it. Point 1: Companies may require certain education and experience levels neither of which they pay for. So, what's the difference between that and requiring a certification? Point 2: If a company paid for your certification can you use it to qualify for employment elsewhere. i.e. who owns the cert, you or them?

The date jumped from 09 to 16 when the digits went from 09 tp 10. So what programmer in his right mind interprets any part of a date in HEX? Y2K was caused by programmers seeking to save space. This bug was caused by a programmer interpreting the last two digits as HEX! This was just a bonehead mistake not a space saving measure. So I really do not understand all the comparisons to Y2K. Just because they were errors in date fields does not make them the same at all.