Sugars and protiens, AFAIK, have a lot in common. It seems to me that these sugars could suggest a carbon-based-life-friendly environment, but do not necessarily prove that there is life
Sorry to say, but sugars and proteins don't really have much in common at all. Proteins are large molecular chains of many, many amino acids strung together. Sugars are on approximately the same scale of complexity as amino acids themselves; generally sugars are short, fully saturated carbon chains (5-6C is very common) with hydroxyl (-OH) groups bound to them. Also, a double-bonded oxygen is present, making the sugar either an aldehyde (the sugar is on C1) or a ketone (the sugar is not at the end). This can reversibly condense with the alcohol at the far end of the molecule, forming stable 5 or 6 membered rings. Of course these can then be polymerized to make longer carbohydrates such as cellulose, starch etc. The glycoaldehyde in the article is a *very* simple sugar molecule, even when compared to ones we deal with every day such as glucose. Having only two carbon atoms, it's far too small to even form a simple ring structure. The chances of this type of molecule forming through "normal" chemical processes in nebulae are about the same (if not better) than those of other organic molecules known to be present there.
Any new "standard" for distributing compressed audio will have to be pretty phenomenal if it's going to make any headway against mp3. If you consider the sheer volume of mp3s out there (legally or otherwise), it's pretty obvious that mp3 has become an unofficial standard. Slight improvements in quality or compression won't make a difference, especially with the increases in bandwidth and computer power we're seeing every year. Similarly, while the "openness" of the software and algorithms producing the compression are interesting for many of us here on slashdot, average people tend not to care. If you're playing and downloading illegal music files, does it really matter to you if the program you use to play (and possibly create) the files violates some patent somewhere? These are some reasons why I feel this mp3 alternative, and any other commercial alternatives are doomed to fail.
...at least Microsoft isn't sponsoring the mission...
I'm actually surprised that Microsoft hasn't gone and sponsored some large undertakings like this just to boost their public image. Maybe it wouldn't be a lunar rover, but what if they decided to "donate" the computer systems for the space station? In exchange for some giant Microsoft logos on the side of it, we'd have a space station running one of the most stable operating systems known to man!
And if logos are so bad anyhow, why don't we get rid of all the NASA ones on the space shuttles? God forbid that they advertise...;)
I caught the smiley at the end, but still, what NASA does is far from advertising. Putting their logos on shuttles (and pretty much everything they send up) is more public relations. They are trying use this to increase public awareness of their existence; without public awareness and support, NASA would cease to exist. Corporations, on the other hand, are trying to push their image just to sell their product to consumers and draw an even bigger profit.
Hey, didn't this also get featured here on/. a while back in a set of quickies? That story was looong, but really managed to crack me up. Definately bookmark worthy.
Re:What about the prior art from Apple?
on
Cleartype In Depth
·
· Score: 1
I don't think apple did this for the 80-column cards on apple-2 series, but I remember reading about something very similar to this in nibble waaaay back when. It wasn't specific for putting text onto the screen, but allowed one to put finer, more detailed hires graphics onto the display just by doing some calculations and setting the colour of the pixel right; depending on what the colour was set to, a pixel would be shifted about 1/2 to the left or right on the monitor. The upside was that it almost doubled your x-resolution on the screen. Unfortunately, you really had to turn the colour on the monitor down, otherwise you'd get some horrible colour fringes around all lines and stuff. They'd even implemented some routines in machine language to do all this quickly and were accessible from applesoft basic using the good ol' ampersand. Anyone else remember that? Fun stuff...
Fortunately (?), many ISPs that provide ADSL or cable are beginning to agree with your point of view. We recently moved here, and our ISP let us take our ADSL service with us. However, instead of just hooking us back up to the same old discontinued service with no caps, we are now on their newer ADSL service. Our top speed is still capped as it was before (1.5Mbps down), but we also now have a total monthly transfer cap of 5 gigs (up+down). If we go over, they're going to charge us $20 per gig that we use. This is a bit of an inconvenience, but I actually (sort of) agree with them. I've heard of people pulling several gigs a day on the university resnet backbone (probably warez), and it all does add up. I'm just waiting for ISPs to start port filtering out napster services to try and limit their bandwidth consumption on the high speed access.
Try nedit. You can get it at www.nedit.org. It should do what you want. The only downside to it is that it is X based, so forget using it from a console.
Like many of you out there, I dual boot to Windows. I have my reasons for doing this, the politics of which I don't want to get into here. Because I really couldn't be bothered to set up a separate/boot partition and didn't care much for LILO's super-userfriendly interface, I decided to dump it and go for loadlin instead.
I let windows (the DOS part at least) handle the booting: In my config.sys and autoexec.bat I've set up a boot menu that lets me pick between Windows, Linux, and Linux-runlevel 1. The Linux options run loadlin which boots from a kernel I have sitting in C:\LINUX. When it boots, a nice menu comes up letting me pick between the three, and after 15 seconds it defaults to Linux. Beats LILO's cryptic boot-up prompt any day. The single user mode is really nice to have for when I fsck up my system (happens once every 6 months).
I would go with LILO on a Linux-only box, but for my setup, this works much better, especially when other people want to use the computer and want to run windows.
Seriously, there's lots of people living out there in the Boonies, and even some of them aren't rednecks. I'm fortunate to live in a city where you can get ADSL, and I know most of my bandwidth doesn't go towards gaming.
And just think of the coolness factor when people talk about their connections: "I've got a 56K" "I've got a cable modem" "I've got a satellite uplink" Sounds alot like something from a Bond movie!
Who knows what OPEC will be up to then! This may be necessary to help pull N.America out of a recession; fuel prices have come down a bit in the last week or so, but it's still way above what it was one year ago.
I can't think of anything (or anyone!) that enjoys -40 weather! Even block heaters on diesels don't help all that much then. They're basically a small immersion heating element that sits in the engine block, and brings it up to a temperature where the oil isn't like jello.
Most modern diesels also have glow plugs; each cylinder is equipped with a tiny heating element that heats up just before you start the engine and warms the cylinder to temperatures that approach that of a warm engine, aiding starting. Because they actually glow red-hot, it's considered a Bad Idea to try and use ether sprayed into the air intake to try and start a diesel with glow-plugs.
A heated shop is really the only way to easily start a diesel when it's -40 outside!
Huh? Both of these things don't directly relate to the story. Timing belts (or chains) themselves generally aren't (and can't) be ajusted other than a direct replacement after 100,000 miles or whatever is required. While it's true that the timing belt/camshaft combination would be eliminated by the hydraulic-actuated valves, I'm sure that this system will need to be overhauled and maintained at least as frequently as that.
Valve adjustments themselves are still going to be necessary. As valves wear, they tend to close differently and seal improperly. Regardless of the system that is used to actually open and close them, they *will* need to be looked at after a certain amount of use.
As far as the timing of the firing of the spark plugs (using the timing strobe light), this is compeltely unrelated. Here a mechanical linkage from the crankshaft drives a rotating switch that causes the sparkplugs to fire at just the right timing (usually a few degrees before top-dead center), and this has nothing to do with the camshaft. There are already many cars out there with distributorless engines, i.e., the mechanical distributor has been replaced with an electronic crank-shaft position sensor and a small computer to control the firing of the spark plugs.
I don't see how having the scanner shared can be any more efficient than having it local to one computer (your scanning workstation) and just having it save files to a directory that is shared via samba or nfs or whatever. With a shared directory, you also have the advantage of having *several* computers get at the document from one centralized location without having to re-scan it each time.
Compare this to printing: what would you rather have (in an ideal situation), a printer queue on each workstation, or one centralized one on the computer that is connected to the printer?
My netscape bookmarks are a mess. I usually put them in their own categories (manually), but after a few days browsing I usually have a full screen worth of new ones at the bottom. Most are just crap...
What I have done, though, is put together a small html file with a table and nice colours of my most frequently visited sites. Yeah, slashdot just happens to be in there... It's set to my startup page, so whenever netscape comes up, I have a list of the sites I go to 95% of the time.
"Unfortunately", some of us already own windows versions of some of these games. In some cases, it is possible to use the data files from these along with a linux demo or point release (Quake III Arena for example) to play the game under Linux. In other cases, I doubt this is possible.
Half of me would really like to see freely downloadable game engines missing the binary data for Linux so we don't have to buy the same game twice. Unfortunately, this wouldn't help Loki (and Linux gaming in general) one bit, as they wouldn't see any revenues from those copies of the game. Basically all solutions I can think of are flawed. Bundle both Linux and Windows versions together? No publisher would go for that, and besides release dates aren't the same for most ports to the two OS's, so that can't work. Making a freely-distributable windows engine that uses the Linux binaries wouldn't go over too well with the original publishers of the game either...
So what to do? Maybe we just need to wait a while until world domination is (fully) achieved, and then we'll *only* be buying Linux ports of our favourite games!
When I can telnet into my microwave, I'll be happy.
I'm surprised someone hasn't sacrificed an old 486 to do this yet! Some newer microwaves already come with a fancy LCD panel that can display simple bitmap graphics and stuff. X would be a little rough on it, but I'm sure it could be done. You might want to add a robotic arm that can reach over to the fridge and grab your pizza, so you don't even have to get up until it's ready. The only problem I see is AOL cds mysteriously vanishing from the pile in the corner and somehow ending up nuking themselves...
I wonder if it's too late to include it in the RH6.2. Does beta mean no new stuff or major changes?
I'd be very surprised if it makes it into 6.2. Rumor has it, though, that RH7.0 will have XFree86 4.0, kernel 2.4, Gnome 1.2, and KDE 2.0, making it a major version release in all accounts. There was a thread here on/. about this just a while ago. I'm happy with my updated 6.1, and I'll probably stay with that for a while-- (tongue in cheek, as I have a strange feeling I'll be d/l-ing 6.2 in a while when it "feels ready".) If you just want X4.0, wait a day, and then go looking for rpms. Or better yet, wait a week; with lots of people jumping on it and stressing it out, 4.0.1 can't be that far off...
I have no idea what Intel's actual legal agreement for this looks like, but from that web press-release, it looks like the employees would actually own the computer. I.e., they pay income tax on its value, so it's part of their income, so it's theirs. I really don't see any reason why an employee who gets one of these couldn't sell it, install Linux or whatever on it, or even use it as a (very expensive) doorstop! There probably is some agreement with the isp that the internet service is non-transferrable, and the same might apply to some sort of intel-centric software that gets installed, but there shouldn't really be any such thing on the hardware itself...
--DP (who's wishing he knew some intel employees!)
What, then, would you suggest Slashdot's URL be? "Slashdot.com" doesn't fit, because Slashdot isn't really a commercial venture (the ads notwithstanding). "Slashdot.net" doesn't work for the reasons you just said. "Slashdot.gov" and "slashdot.mil" are obvious problems as well.
Ah, but "slashdot.mil" will become appropriate very soon with our plans for world domination. Once they are in place, "slashdot.gov" will become equally necessary. You didn't really think this was just a simple little news site, did you?
I agree that double negatives in the headline (and story) are kind of silly, but as some other people have pointed out, the real problem was that this story seemed somewhat biased. Sure, this is slashdot, and most people here agree that the RIAA is evil, but shouldn't news stories and editorials stay separate if slashdot is to keep any integrity that it has (assuming it has some)? Putting that much opinion into a headline and article is essentially preaching to the converted, and doesn't really do anything for us. That aside, I still thought it was pretty funny, though.
Here in Canada, there's another difference between Guinness in bottles and in the cans with widgets. The stuff in bottles is brewed here under license by Labbat's (I think) and the stuff in cans is imported, although I've heard that they just import the mash and use local water. As far as the stuff in kegs goes that you'd get in a pub, most of it is imported just as the mash, but some distributors do import full kegs at a premium price!
I'm not sure I like this trend in pushing out new software as soon as it hits a new major version number. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will be fairly stable, as will the new 2.4 kernel, but real rock-solid stability only seems to come a few minor versions in. Just looking at kernels, we went from 2.2.0 to 2.2.12 to the latest version fairly quickly before things reached the level of quality they are at now. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will go through the same process as it goes from 4.0.0 to 4.0.x.
My concern is that if RedHat puts too many "new" versions into their 7.0 release, people new to Linux may get the impression that the software isn't quite as stable as we claim it is. This could happen even if they see no issues with the actual software, but just see version numbers fly by at three or four per week. I know there are other distros out there, and I'm sure some won't jump onto the new kernel and X until things settle down, but RH *is* the distribution used by most newbies, and the media sometimes seems to think that RH and Linux are the same thing (but that's a whole new thread altogether!).
Slashdot Mirror
Sugars and protiens, AFAIK, have a lot in common. It seems to me that these sugars could suggest a carbon-based-life-friendly environment, but do not necessarily prove that there is life
Sorry to say, but sugars and proteins don't really have much in common at all. Proteins are large molecular chains of many, many amino acids strung together. Sugars are on approximately the same scale of complexity as amino acids themselves; generally sugars are short, fully saturated carbon chains (5-6C is very common) with hydroxyl (-OH) groups bound to them. Also, a double-bonded oxygen is present, making the sugar either an aldehyde (the sugar is on C1) or a ketone (the sugar is not at the end). This can reversibly condense with the alcohol at the far end of the molecule, forming stable 5 or 6 membered rings. Of course these can then be polymerized to make longer carbohydrates such as cellulose, starch etc.
The glycoaldehyde in the article is a *very* simple sugar molecule, even when compared to ones we deal with every day such as glucose. Having only two carbon atoms, it's far too small to even form a simple ring structure. The chances of this type of molecule forming through "normal" chemical processes in nebulae are about the same (if not better) than those of other organic molecules known to be present there.
Any new "standard" for distributing compressed audio will have to be pretty phenomenal if it's going to make any headway against mp3. If you consider the sheer volume of mp3s out there (legally or otherwise), it's pretty obvious that mp3 has become an unofficial standard. Slight improvements in quality or compression won't make a difference, especially with the increases in bandwidth and computer power we're seeing every year. Similarly, while the "openness" of the software and algorithms producing the compression are interesting for many of us here on slashdot, average people tend not to care. If you're playing and downloading illegal music files, does it really matter to you if the program you use to play (and possibly create) the files violates some patent somewhere?
These are some reasons why I feel this mp3 alternative, and any other commercial alternatives are doomed to fail.
...at least Microsoft isn't sponsoring the mission...
I'm actually surprised that Microsoft hasn't gone and sponsored some large undertakings like this just to boost their public image. Maybe it wouldn't be a lunar rover, but what if they decided to "donate" the computer systems for the space station? In exchange for some giant Microsoft logos on the side of it, we'd have a space station running one of the most stable operating systems known to man!
And if logos are so bad anyhow, why don't we get rid of all the NASA ones on the space shuttles? God forbid that they advertise...
I caught the smiley at the end, but still, what NASA does is far from advertising. Putting their logos on shuttles (and pretty much everything they send up) is more public relations. They are trying use this to increase public awareness of their existence; without public awareness and support, NASA would cease to exist. Corporations, on the other hand, are trying to push their image just to sell their product to consumers and draw an even bigger profit.
Hey, didn't this also get featured here on /. a while back in a set of quickies?
That story was looong, but really managed to crack me up. Definately bookmark worthy.
I don't think apple did this for the 80-column cards on apple-2 series, but I remember reading about something very similar to this in nibble waaaay back when.
It wasn't specific for putting text onto the screen, but allowed one to put finer, more detailed hires graphics onto the display just by doing some calculations and setting the colour of the pixel right; depending on what the colour was set to, a pixel would be shifted about 1/2 to the left or right on the monitor. The upside was that it almost doubled your x-resolution on the screen. Unfortunately, you really had to turn the colour on the monitor down, otherwise you'd get some horrible colour fringes around all lines and stuff.
They'd even implemented some routines in machine language to do all this quickly and were accessible from applesoft basic using the good ol' ampersand. Anyone else remember that?
Fun stuff...
--C
Fortunately (?), many ISPs that provide ADSL or cable are beginning to agree with your point of view. We recently moved here, and our ISP let us take our ADSL service with us. However, instead of just hooking us back up to the same old discontinued service with no caps, we are now on their newer ADSL service. Our top speed is still capped as it was before (1.5Mbps down), but we also now have a total monthly transfer cap of 5 gigs (up+down). If we go over, they're going to charge us $20 per gig that we use.
This is a bit of an inconvenience, but I actually (sort of) agree with them. I've heard of people pulling several gigs a day on the university resnet backbone (probably warez), and it all does add up. I'm just waiting for ISPs to start port filtering out napster services to try and limit their bandwidth consumption on the high speed access.
--C
Try nedit. You can get it at www.nedit.org.
It should do what you want.
The only downside to it is that it is X based, so forget using it from a console.
Like many of you out there, I dual boot to Windows. I have my reasons for doing this, the politics of which I don't want to get into here. Because I really couldn't be bothered to set up a separate /boot partition and didn't care much for LILO's super-userfriendly interface, I decided to dump it and go for loadlin instead.
I let windows (the DOS part at least) handle the booting: In my config.sys and autoexec.bat I've set up a boot menu that lets me pick between Windows, Linux, and Linux-runlevel 1. The Linux options run loadlin which boots from a kernel I have sitting in C:\LINUX. When it boots, a nice menu comes up letting me pick between the three, and after 15 seconds it defaults to Linux. Beats LILO's cryptic boot-up prompt any day. The single user mode is really nice to have for when I fsck up my system (happens once every 6 months).
I would go with LILO on a Linux-only box, but for my setup, this works much better, especially when other people want to use the computer and want to run windows.
--C
Since when is everything about gaming? ;) ;)
Seriously, there's lots of people living out there in the Boonies, and even some of them aren't rednecks. I'm fortunate to live in a city where you can get ADSL, and I know most of my bandwidth doesn't go towards gaming.
And just think of the coolness factor when people talk about their connections:
"I've got a 56K"
"I've got a cable modem"
"I've got a satellite uplink"
Sounds alot like something from a Bond movie!
--C
Who knows what OPEC will be up to then! This may be necessary to help pull N.America out of a recession; fuel prices have come down a bit in the last week or so, but it's still way above what it was one year ago.
I can't think of anything (or anyone!) that enjoys -40 weather! Even block heaters on diesels don't help all that much then. They're basically a small immersion heating element that sits in the engine block, and brings it up to a temperature where the oil isn't like jello.
Most modern diesels also have glow plugs; each cylinder is equipped with a tiny heating element that heats up just before you start the engine and warms the cylinder to temperatures that approach that of a warm engine, aiding starting. Because they actually glow red-hot, it's considered a Bad Idea to try and use ether sprayed into the air intake to try and start a diesel with glow-plugs.
A heated shop is really the only way to easily start a diesel when it's -40 outside!
--C
Huh?
Both of these things don't directly relate to the story. Timing belts (or chains) themselves generally aren't (and can't) be ajusted other than a direct replacement after 100,000 miles or whatever is required. While it's true that the timing belt/camshaft combination would be eliminated by the hydraulic-actuated valves, I'm sure that this system will need to be overhauled and maintained at least as frequently as that.
Valve adjustments themselves are still going to be necessary. As valves wear, they tend to close differently and seal improperly. Regardless of the system that is used to actually open and close them, they *will* need to be looked at after a certain amount of use.
As far as the timing of the firing of the spark plugs (using the timing strobe light), this is compeltely unrelated. Here a mechanical linkage from the crankshaft drives a rotating switch that causes the sparkplugs to fire at just the right timing (usually a few degrees before top-dead center), and this has nothing to do with the camshaft. There are already many cars out there with distributorless engines, i.e., the mechanical distributor has been replaced with an electronic crank-shaft position sensor and a small computer to control the firing of the spark plugs.
--C
I don't see how having the scanner shared can be any more efficient than having it local to one computer (your scanning workstation) and just having it save files to a directory that is shared via samba or nfs or whatever. With a shared directory, you also have the advantage of having *several* computers get at the document from one centralized location without having to re-scan it each time.
Compare this to printing: what would you rather have (in an ideal situation), a printer queue on each workstation, or one centralized one on the computer that is connected to the printer?
My netscape bookmarks are a mess. I usually put them in their own categories (manually), but after a few days browsing I usually have a full screen worth of new ones at the bottom. Most are just crap...
What I have done, though, is put together a small html file with a table and nice colours of my most frequently visited sites. Yeah, slashdot just happens to be in there... It's set to my startup page, so whenever netscape comes up, I have a list of the sites I go to 95% of the time.
--C
See also:
http://www.heavens-above.com/. They have web-based software for predicting these, and other satellite events. A cool site all around.
...not affiliated etc.
"Unfortunately", some of us already own windows versions of some of these games. In some cases, it is possible to use the data files from these along with a linux demo or point release (Quake III Arena for example) to play the game under Linux. In other cases, I doubt this is possible.
Half of me would really like to see freely downloadable game engines missing the binary data for Linux so we don't have to buy the same game twice. Unfortunately, this wouldn't help Loki (and Linux gaming in general) one bit, as they wouldn't see any revenues from those copies of the game.
Basically all solutions I can think of are flawed. Bundle both Linux and Windows versions together? No publisher would go for that, and besides release dates aren't the same for most ports to the two OS's, so that can't work. Making a freely-distributable windows engine that uses the Linux binaries wouldn't go over too well with the original publishers of the game either...
So what to do? Maybe we just need to wait a while until world domination is (fully) achieved, and then we'll *only* be buying Linux ports of our favourite games!
When I can telnet into my microwave, I'll be happy.
I'm surprised someone hasn't sacrificed an old 486 to do this yet! Some newer microwaves already come with a fancy LCD panel that can display simple bitmap graphics and stuff. X would be a little rough on it, but I'm sure it could be done. You might want to add a robotic arm that can reach over to the fridge and grab your pizza, so you don't even have to get up until it's ready. The only problem I see is AOL cds mysteriously vanishing from the pile in the corner and somehow ending up nuking themselves...
I wonder if it's too late to include it in the RH6.2. Does beta mean no new stuff or major changes?
/. about this just a while ago. I'm happy with my updated 6.1, and I'll probably stay with that for a while-- (tongue in cheek, as I have a strange feeling I'll be d/l-ing 6.2 in a while when it "feels ready".)
I'd be very surprised if it makes it into 6.2. Rumor has it, though, that RH7.0 will have XFree86 4.0, kernel 2.4, Gnome 1.2, and KDE 2.0, making it a major version release in all accounts. There was a thread here on
If you just want X4.0, wait a day, and then go looking for rpms. Or better yet, wait a week; with lots of people jumping on it and stressing it out, 4.0.1 can't be that far off...
Yeah, but we want it now! Please, mommy, please?
I have no idea what Intel's actual legal agreement for this looks like, but from that web press-release, it looks like the employees would actually own the computer. I.e., they pay income tax on its value, so it's part of their income, so it's theirs.
I really don't see any reason why an employee who gets one of these couldn't sell it, install Linux or whatever on it, or even use it as a (very expensive) doorstop!
There probably is some agreement with the isp that the internet service is non-transferrable, and the same might apply to some sort of intel-centric software that gets installed, but there shouldn't really be any such thing on the hardware itself...
--DP
(who's wishing he knew some intel employees!)
What, then, would you suggest Slashdot's URL be? "Slashdot.com" doesn't fit, because Slashdot isn't really a commercial venture (the ads notwithstanding). "Slashdot.net" doesn't work for the reasons you just said. "Slashdot.gov" and "slashdot.mil" are obvious problems as well.
Ah, but "slashdot.mil" will become appropriate very soon with our plans for world domination. Once they are in place, "slashdot.gov" will become equally necessary. You didn't really think this was just a simple little news site, did you?
I agree that double negatives in the headline (and story) are kind of silly, but as some other people have pointed out, the real problem was that this story seemed somewhat biased. Sure, this is slashdot, and most people here agree that the RIAA is evil, but shouldn't news stories and editorials stay separate if slashdot is to keep any integrity that it has (assuming it has some)? Putting that much opinion into a headline and article is essentially preaching to the converted, and doesn't really do anything for us.
That aside, I still thought it was pretty funny, though.
Here in Canada, there's another difference between Guinness in bottles and in the cans with widgets. The stuff in bottles is brewed here under license by Labbat's (I think) and the stuff in cans is imported, although I've heard that they just import the mash and use local water. As far as the stuff in kegs goes that you'd get in a pub, most of it is imported just as the mash, but some distributors do import full kegs at a premium price!
I'm not sure I like this trend in pushing out new software as soon as it hits a new major version number. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will be fairly stable, as will the new 2.4 kernel, but real rock-solid stability only seems to come a few minor versions in. Just looking at kernels, we went from 2.2.0 to 2.2.12 to the latest version fairly quickly before things reached the level of quality they are at now. I'm sure XFree86 4.0 will go through the same process as it goes from 4.0.0 to 4.0.x.
My concern is that if RedHat puts too many "new" versions into their 7.0 release, people new to Linux may get the impression that the software isn't quite as stable as we claim it is. This could happen even if they see no issues with the actual software, but just see version numbers fly by at three or four per week. I know there are other distros out there, and I'm sure some won't jump onto the new kernel and X until things settle down, but RH *is* the distribution used by most newbies, and the media sometimes seems to think that RH and Linux are the same thing (but that's a whole new thread altogether!).