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Giant Penguins Once Roamed Peru
Douglas Roberts points out as "obvious Linux fodder" the coverage of a study just published in PNAS claiming that, on fossil evidence, giant penguins once stalked the plains of Peru. One species goes back over 40 million years and its members were as large as modern king penguins. They were warm adapted. Members of another species, 30 million years ago, stood 5 feet high and made their living spearfishing with their 1-foot beaks. Here's an artist's impression.
I, welcome, overlords, etc.
Now that that's out of the way, we can actually have a serious discussion about this
(just kidding)
Obviously the end result of an unpopular fork.
We're hopelessly desperate, aren't we.
Damn.
Stalked the plains of Peru ?? WTF ? Penguins ? Hunting what ? Wilder beasts ? At least the article says that they just 'roamed' the deserts .
did they run Linux? ;-)
"made their living spearfishing"
Oh is that so???
And in other more recent news fossil evidence found England has indicated that 60 million years ago
apples grew to a astounnding circumference of 2 metres...... Fodder for Mac-Fanboys
"Drawing closer to world domination, keystroke by keystroke."
First Old Woman: Well, what's on the television then.
Second Old Woman: Looks like a giant 5 foot tall prehistoric penguin.
First Old Woman: No No No not what's on the television set - I mean what programme?
ugh. so the ancient giant penguins got around.
Linux has been around longer than I thought!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
Let's call it BigOldLinus.
What's in a sig?
OK, anyone who wants some more penguin info can check out my sig and the associated FAQ... I just want to add that this is not the first time that penguin fossils are discovered, and some larger than the Emperor penguins (actual largest species) are known.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
for those who want to learn more about penguins check out this new book. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060891268/S mithsonian_Q__A_Penguins/index.aspx
the author is one of the leading experts on penguins.
Claus
Let this be a reverse-anthromorphic lesson to everyone in the Linux community: People care about size! Once your on-disk image gets too big (5-foot tall??) your fork will ultimately go extinct.
Error:
in soviet Russia, giant penguins roam you!
I resent that!
-Fedora
I have no doubt that these penguins no longer roam there thanks to man made Global Warming. We must immediately lower our CO2 emissions and cripple our economic growth.
There's nothing funny about this, it's terrifying!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
An upright posture frees the forelimbs from walking duties. Imagine if these had evolved to be tool users then tool makers. They might have developed computers, and an OS with a mostly hairless ape for a mascot.
At the bottom of the
I'll take a dozen, please! :)
Can they be taught basic police dog techniques?
Or, better yet, martial arts?
I mean, you put a sharp metal edge on those... wings and you've got, well, something that rocks.
Hah! Marching Penguin Bladed Wing Attack! Pow!
Because they were depicted as penguins the artist decided for black-and-white. However common these are as animal colors around the polar circle. If these creatures were adapted to living in a hotter environment, most likely they would have followed a color scheme that would better hide them from predators.
Or else they would have gone extinct. Oh wait. Never mind.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
...frickin' laser beams on their heads!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...giant penguins once stalked the plains of Peru
But did they sing or tap dance to a Prince soundtrack or have Morgan Freeman, God Himself, provide narration?
I hope they were. Giant electric penguins.
See Ensign Oates' frank adult death struggle with the spine-chilling giant electric penguin...!
Oates looks up in horror, a shadow crosses him. Reverse shot of model penguin (quite small, about a foot) which lights up and looks electric. The penguin is close to the camera in the foreground and appears huge. Oates looks around desperately then starts to undress. Shot of penguin throwing tentacle. Half-nude Oates struggles with it. Intercut a lot of phoney reverses. Oates by now clad only in posing briefs sees a stone. He picks up the stone, then camera zooms into above-naval shot; he removes his briefs, puts the stone in the briefs, twirls it like a sling, and releases stone. The penguin is hit on beak, and falls over backwards.
It's a Bagel.
found amongst the Cyclopean ruins beyond the Mountains of Madness!!
I'd hate to be the first one to have welcome whatever Overlords might be involved here..
when Cameron Diaz insulted them with another one of her bags.
Summation 2
of course, a 1.5 meter tall Baldy jumping around the stage at a keynote doesn't seem very foreboding.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
So, this proves that the penguin species, just like Linux, is getting smaller and less significant as times passes.
The Chatow brothers are behind this...
blenderking.com over 50,000 blenders can't be wrong
They appear to be Pkunk. I wonder where their re-incarnations will respawn?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
The graphic in the NG is just screaming out for a caption - any ideas?
The main evolutionary advantage of the Peruvian penguin was their flexible rubber-like feet and strong ligaments. When a predator sneaked up in order to push them over and gorge on their flesh, the penguin would rather flex itself, spin around, spring up and stab them in the eye.
Any self-respecting geek has read some Lovecraft, and At the Mountains of Madness makes it quite clear that Giant Penguins roam the antarctic. Indeed, the entrance to part of the City of the Old Ones is described as "That nighted, penguin-fringed abyss". Oh, and overlords, I for one, welcome, you know the drill.
All I want is a giant penguin with a laser beam on its head. Do they live near rivers of liquid hot magma?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Why does the larger penguin look similar to a galapagos flightless cormorant with an elongated beak? Plus the location would seem to fit...too bad I'm basing this entirely on an artist's rendering and not hard evidence like...bones.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
whoa! that was definitely the year of the linux desktop!
Damn! I got here too late!!
There was even Monty Python reference and "did it run Linux?"...
So say we all
with Hot Grits.
Best Slashdot Co
Don't forget:
And:
Netcraft confirms that all giant penguins are dead.
And last but not least:
The last one was killed after Steve Ballmer threw a chair at it and swore "I'm going to f***ing kill the giant penguins"
Those were a lot funnier in my mind. And they weren't even very funny there...
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
If the archaeologists had found some evidence of what distro they preferred.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Linux predates Microsoft's patents.
I guess there is no way we're going to have a serious discussion on this subject.
.. you'll need a Giant Penguin License...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Too bad we messed up our planet or we could still have giant penguins in Peru!!! =(
Kids all over the world can now play Planet Penguin Racer during their history lessons due to this discovery.
I have several RSS feeds on my start page.. including CNN, Slashdot, and The Onion.. Some times.. The Onion looks more like the news site..
s/©//g
"... and its members were as large as modern king penguins"
So, not 'Giant' but Penguin size then.
Bah, there goes the mental image of a 50ft Penguin climbing the Empire State building with Faye Ray tucked under one flipper!
I gotta stop reading slashdot just after i wake up....
I saw that artists rendition and immediately envisioned a horde of these things rampaging through a hilly region, where they surrounded me and began to make some bone chilling squawk right before their leader came out to parley with me. It was a very well spoken individual, offered me amnesty if I would join them.
I told them i would never accept them as my new penguin overlords. They then killed me and i decided to post.
Coming to you live from another dimension.
Once they have a name for these giants, expect a new distro named after them. Hmmm, on the other hand, maybe we can name them after an existing distro.
That explains why the time-less daemons carry pitchforks - for protection from 1 foot beaks.
Of course they'd publish their findings in the journal my colleagues and I refer to as "PENIS." Five-foot phallic birds with giant beaks...
Why was everything in the past so big? Just about all the animals were bigger at some previous point.
Is this the natural selection process or something? Things start small then being big is an advantage so things just keep getting bigger and bigger until it collapses with a medium size winning out?
SOYLENT LINUX IS GIANT PENGUINS!
lameness filter etc. leave it to slashcode to ruin a perfectly cromulent jokememe.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I find it humorous that many people who think the environment is too complex and nonlinear to model (and hence that it's impossible for us to be really sure about anthropogenic global warming), seem to think that the economy is such a simple, linear beast that it's obvious lowering CO2 emissions will "cripple our economic growth". We on Slashdot have a phrase for this kind of biased reasoning - FUD. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
These days, however, giant squares roam the halls of corporate IT.
Nobody has managed to work Batman into the picture yet...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Will this be the end of patent problems unless they find a window which is more than 40 million years old?
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
is that they tasted just like chicken.
1) Nuclear transfer DNA of giant penguins with existing penguins, and in several generations have %88 genetic compatibility.
2) Breed and let frolic 'free range'.
3) Stir fry.
4) ?????
5) Profit!!!
I think you just did...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Tuxis Holyshitticus.
It does explain the heretofore mysterious moai of Easter Island, where residents once feared and worshipped their sphenisciformesian overlords.
Have any of you seen the six foot albino penguins in Antarctica? They guard the Plateau of Leng, just beyond the Mountains of Madness. Beware the Elder Things, beware!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
...found the blind, albino relatives of these critters at the Mountains of Madness in the 1920's. I thought this was common knowledge.
v.m
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
Yep that's a penguin alright.
how big were the *penguins?*
I always thought we Linux people picked the Penguin for our mascot because it lives in a tough world.
Five (5) feet high! This is a big bird! So what is Microsoft's mascot? A fish perhaps?
You CAN have one as a pet! Apologies... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empoleon
in fact, our two main weapons are sharp long beaks, disgustingly cute builds and Linux zealots who'll keep us alive in their folklore till kingdom come! Three, that's three...
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
We descended from penguins.
Colby Armstrong is not impressed.
...a Magnum Opus.
rj
Yeah, you heard this before but Meg's such a good looking woman I have to repeat her dumb jokes... plus this is actually on topic!
A penguin walks into a car repair shop and says her car is losing oil as she looses her collar; it's a hot day and penguins don't like heat. Well, maybe the African Penguins do and maybe the Giant Peruvian penguins did, but this was an Antarctic penguin and she didn't like the heat at all. Never mind how much heat a beowolf cluster of them would... hold on, I'm screwing up the joke.
Any way, the mechanic says it will take maybe an hour to diagnose the car's problem, so the penguin says she'll come back later.
As it's a hot day and Antarctic penguins don't much like the heat (but I already said that, sorry), she decides to get an ice cream cone. It's a hot day (mod -1 redundant) and she dribbles a little ice cream on the front of her blouse.
She goes back to the mechanic, who's just finished and is wiping his hands on a rag. "Looks like you blew a seal," he tells her.
"Oh no," she says, "that's just ice cream!"
-mcgrew
PS- wait til the next M.A.F.I.A.A. thread comes up, I'll tell you her pirate joke!
why, were the penguins gay?
"He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker."
RUN, RUN AND HIDE, FROM THE ELDER THINGS AND THEIR ANAEBA MINORS, see HP Lovecraft "At the Mountains of Madness" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Things
You see, the sizes of animals yield different surface area to volume ratios, and therefore may be more or less prone to heat loss. A related rule is Allen's Rule, that concerns the extremities of animals, because these, being usually non-round structures, are more prone to heat loss. Thus, animals in hot climates have longer/larger extremities than their more or less direct counterparts in colder regions.
Im in ur Peru, eatin ur winderbeasts and running Linux in Beowulf clusterz for profitz in Soviet Russia.
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
No just stick a bag with large knives around their belly.
Prinny Dood!
Of course, this comes with the "well that's f'n obvious" tagline of "The oldest penguin fossils yet found suggest that at least some ancestors of modern birds survived the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs." Duhh. They're here now, their ancestors must have survived.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
But assuming his existence, we can prove his irrelevance, thus:
Either God is capable of miracles --- miracles means "changing the world contrary to the physical laws that otherwise prevail". If he cannot, then he is irrelevant, obviously.(*) If he is capable of such, then he either listen and acts (i.e, perform miracles) on at least some significant amount of prayers, or he does not. If not, he is obviously irrelevant. If he does act on prayers by performing miracles, those miracles would, at least in principle, show up as deviation to normal, observable behaviour. E.g, we should expect people that prays to got for health to be more healthy. Current research indicates that there is no such effect, and thus we can conclude that God, if he exists, is irrelevant. Q.E.D.
:p
(*) Of course, the judgement-after-death could be an argument. But given the number of religions, trying to simply live a good life is probably the best defense against this rather remote possibility.
P.S: This is, of course, a variant on the "problem of evil"-argument.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
...and they called these penguins, Linux users.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
No, it's clearly the fault of George W. Bush that they got extinct. Ok, I have no clue how he may caused it, but that doesn't matter, it must be his fault! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A giant prehistoric penguin could have constituted another best seller: "Beak". The suspenseful movie music would have to be slightly altered though:
Doo-bie....Doo-bie....Doobie Doobie Dooo
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
As an upright monkey I feel obliged to want to fight one of these extinct penguins, just to test their grit.
A man runs into a bar. He is sweating and extremely crazed. He goes up to the bartender and says, "Say buddy; have you ever seen a 5-foot penguin?" The bartender says, "No, but I hear they roamed Peru a couple thousand years ago." "OMFG!" the man says, "either I just traveled in time, or I just ran over a nun!"
Actually, the penguins went extinct after a judge slapped them with cease-and-desist & restraining orders for stalking Peru. Since at that time, this was their breeding ground, the penguins had no choice but to stop breeding or face extremely stiff fines and possible jail-time.
Peru announced a vindictive satisfaction at this result, saying "Thank Bog! Those penguins have been harassing me and my friends for ages! We can't even have a nice monkey shindig without those penguins harassing all the guests, taking phots and going through our garbage cans; it's disgusting. I hope they become extinct."
You forgot to ask to have their size related to you in Library of Congresses
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Giant Peruvian Penguins are my new Power Animal! SLIDE!
Cheers, Chris
I know the name of the next Ubuntu release: giant peruvian
Property is theft.
Oblig. futurama...
1. (paul in s03e09)It seems dark-matter is nature's sex drug. It's like a perverted trail mix of penguin estrogen, penguine Viagra and Spanish penguin fly
2. nibbler was leased accidentally and ate them all.
3. ????
4. profit!!
Doesn't this fit in the Science section more than the Linux section? Not that there is a tremendous amount of scientific discussion in this thread, but still...
Wait, I know.. I know.. Chuck Norris killed them with a single look, while they were waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to rescue them..