I hope the memorial succeeds. I believe Gary Gygas deserves one. I also believe Dave Arneson should get one. It is often glossed over that Dave Arneson was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. I have read different postings concerning the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, and many of them point to the main idea of it was created by Dave Arneson, and Gary came along and said that it could be made into a product. Then Garry spent a long time categorizing the rules and expanding them. What a great game it was!

(quote) Personally I find it just as distasteful to make insincere public expressions of sorrow over something that actually doesn't affect you at all because "it's what you're supposed to do" (/quote)

Perhaps a lot of people are merely working off pre-programmed social norms, like saying "how are you doing?", but speaking only for myself here; as I have grown older and experienced some tragic moments, I genuinely have empathy for others, who have to go through some of the obstacles and misfortunes of life. I also suspect that there are a lot of other human beings who think this way as well.

I probably should have put...
there are probably other theories out there besides those two. And its always important to keep an open mind to other possibilities.

Personally, I tend to favour the water interacting with olivine (serpentization). The two main plumes of methane occur at points in Mars where there are cracks to the interior, and/or have a lot of exposed olivine. Of course, I am not a scientist, so I don't even give my own opinion much weight on the matter. Its possible that the presence of olivine and water is the ingredients that life needs to hang on in the harsh martian environment. It is interesting either way.

One plume is at Elysium Planitia
One plume is at Memnonia
A similar (vaguely) plume on earth is at Petroleum Seep

"So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism."

Or C: There is some, as of yet, unidentified method of methane production.

I got into a discussion last week with an old friend about how World of Warcraft replaced Dungeons and Dragons for him. I, being a curmudgeon, pointed out that MMO's seem wholly lacking in placing the player as the sole hero of the world. And the mechanics of the game, just lead to number crunching, and acquiring loot. Even in those instances where World of Warcraft tries to thrust you into a story mode of defeating some world destroying foe, it is diminished by the fact you can do it over and over again. And millions of other people can do the same heroic world saving. Computers still have a long way to go in making up a story. Bree Yark!

Let us not forget that Borland had a pretty dominate position in the programming C/C++ IDE market way
back in the early 90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_C%2B%2B

I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.

I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.

I just want to reinforce Wee's original statement. I am not sure that he was misinformed. When RedHat changed their direction from having a RedHat 9.0 product, to Fedora for the desktop, and RHEL for the server, it left administrators wondering what should they do for a migration path from RedHat 7,8,9 to the new products.

RedHat pushed their RHEL as a paid service. Administrators were left with the impression of "now" they would have to pay $500 a year or so to get updates for the server product. Or to use the less well test Fedora.

CentOS was a risky move. How were we to know what kind of quality CentOS would have? Hell, I did not even hear about CentOS around that time. I recall doing quite a bit of research "at that time" trying to figure out what is the best, most reliable migration path. And my conclusions were that other distributions, that had been around for quite some time, with a proven record, were a better option.