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Fedora news: F12 release name is "Constantine", Josh Boyer appointed to the board
Some miscellaneous Fedora news from over the weekend includes the results
of the Fedora 12 release name vote; the winner is "Constantine". Also,
Josh Boyer has been appointed to the final
seat on the Fedora board by Fedora project leader Paul Frields. "Josh is well known around
the Fedora community for his work with release engineering and many
other development-oriented groups, as well as his past work with FESCo
and as a maintainer of Fedora on PPC architecture. I hope the
community will join me in welcoming him to the Board where we hope he
can help achieve some of the goals put forward during the town hall
meetings earlier this month." The new board will be meeting for the
first time on Thursday July 2, in a public IRC meeting.
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Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 17:22 UTC (Mon) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link]
The democratic naming scheme is cool and all, but I think I like Debian and
Ubuntu's names better. "Constantine?" I guess nerds like names that sound epic, eh? For instance, some nerd will name his server "Thor" after the Norse god of thunder... and then you find out his gnarly server is actually just a Pentium III with 256 megs of RAM and 20 gigs of storage that he keeps under his bed... in his mom's basement. I prefer to name my servers after pastries.
Wikipedia says Constantine I was the first Roman emperor, that he issued
On a serious note, I'm always impressed with release cycle for Fedora. I
I hope Fedora is still around in 1000 years ;)
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 18:17 UTC (Mon) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
I just named my new workstation 'milhouse.' I was thinking about Nixon for some reason.
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 18:54 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] For instance, some nerd will name his server "Thor" after the Norse god of thunder^^; I named one of my servers Thor... and it's just a Linode VPS. Granted, it _is_ part of a naming scheme: Norse mythological characters in general. My service is named Asgard, mostly because that was part of the only ****ing available domain name I could find that wasn't just a stream of random syllables. To be honest, I'm willing to bet more Fedora users voted for Constantine thanks to the comic-based movie with Keanu Reeves than for the Roman emperor, just like I'm sure the comic-based movie 300 with Gerard Butler inspired votes for the Leonidas moniker more than the actual Spartan king. Most of them are nerds after all, by your words. ;) I will not be surprised at all if the following release is Ozymandius. Fits the respectable "historical leader" theme while still appealing to the mass of comic-reading nerds thanks to Watchmen.
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 23:08 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I hope they spell it right, is all: Ozymandias.
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 19:18 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Wikipedia says Constantine I was the first Roman emperor, that he issued a proclamation of religious tolerance, and that he founded the Byzantine empire (which lasted 1000 years). """
Augustus was the first Roman Emporer, and lived much earlier. Though a good arguement can be made for Julius Caesar having be the first de facto Emporer of Rome, since the Senate was pretty much stifled during his "reign".
Constantine was the first *christian* emporer of Rome. He moved the capitol from the city of Rome to Byzantium, which ended up getting renamed to Constantinople, IIRC. And things started going downhill from there. Once you let those christians get their foot in the door... there goes the neighborhood! Every time.
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 19:23 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
I'm running an alpha distro and my spell checker is broken. Apologies.
Emporer? Arguement? I've gotten lazy and expect the spell checker to think for me!
Funny names Posted Jun 30, 2009 6:15 UTC (Tue) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link]
I typed my comment in links... so a broken spell checker is no excuse ;)
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 23:10 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Um, the Byzantine Empire lasted another thousand years, and turned out
some truly astounding stuff.
That's not failure in my book. Sure, they didn't rule a vast empire
Funny names Posted Jun 29, 2009 23:39 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Things went downhill for the *western* empire. Which is, I guess, what I have paid attention to.
What astounding stuff did the Byzantine Empire turn out? My history is a bit weak as we move east.
Funny names Posted Jun 30, 2009 5:38 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Well, most of what survived is artworks, because, well, it *was* around a
thousand years ago. Most things don't survive that long, especially given that the city was sacked and all.
Funny names Posted Jun 30, 2009 6:59 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] What astounding stuff did the Byzantine Empire turn out?The first thing that springs to mind is the "Greek fire", a kind of flamethrower, which helped the Empire to maintain naval supremacy... It was so secret military tech that historians still don't know how it exactly worked. (Saw once a British documentary where they tried to reconstruct it, not quite succesfully).
modern civilization? Posted Jun 30, 2009 19:34 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]
What about the whole modern Western civilization? The Eastern Roman Empire preserved the classic civilization and knowledge from the Greeks and the Romans and provided the seeds for the birth of the modern Europe during Renaissance in the 14th Century (think of Venice and its treasures taken from Constantinople).
modern civilization? Posted Jul 1, 2009 7:50 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]
<python>
Alright, alright, *Apart* from classical artworks, "Greek Fire", the preservation of the philosophy and literature of the ancients, the communion of saints and the life everlasting, what has the Eastern Roman Empire ever done for us? </python>
Seriously -- the Greek-speaking Christian Eastern Romans may have preserved some of the glorious art, literature and philosophy of ancient Greece, the Levant, Rome and Egypt, but much was also destroyed in the name of religious orthodoxy. Some of those brilliant old Greek and Persian ideas were better preserved by translation and commerce with Arabia than in-situ in Athens, Alexandria or Constantinople, re-entering the Western consciousness through translation via Arabic and Hebrew, North Africa and Iberia rather than via Greece itself.
Imagine, for instance, if the Academy of Plato at Athens had continued as a living, working school until the Turkish conquest, or if the library at Alexandria had never burned.
Ah...
Funny names indeed Posted Jun 30, 2009 6:07 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]
Well the Byzantine empire was not the correct name; the real name was the (Eastern) Roman Empire. The name Byzantine was a degraded name given to the Constantinople-based Roman Empire by the Western half of the Western World.
Funny names indeed Posted Jun 30, 2009 19:16 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
And that empire was only finally destroyed by the First World War, so it lasted a VERY long time.
The Western empire seems to have been destroyed by smallpox. That erupted as a "new" disease about 200AD (ie before Constantine) and basically disrupted the economic underpinnings of the Empire. Okay, it still lasted another 200 years or so but the decline can be clearly attributed to this plague. And then like the Soviet empire of last century, it just suddenly imploded under the burden of bankruptcy economics and external threats.
Cheers,
Funny names indeed Posted Jun 30, 2009 19:29 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]
You're getting the Byzantines confused with the Ottoman Turks, who conquered[1] Constantinople in 1453 and made it the capital of their Empire, which did indeed last until the end of World War One.
Funny names indeed Posted Jul 1, 2009 1:53 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
So... if there was some sort of plague around Ben Franklin's time, we could attribute the current decline of the U.S. to that? I don't buy it. When talking about ancient history "another 200 years" rolls easily off the tongue. But when talking of more recent history, one really has to think about the significance of 200 years.
Funny names indeed Posted Jul 1, 2009 14:07 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
There's something economic that says it's VERY hard for bureaucracy to go in reverse, and I think there's only one known example of an empire successfully going from highly civilised back to agrarian without imploding or being destroyed.
Before smallpox, the Roman economy was working well, funding the legions, defence, etc etc. In excessively wiping out the administration layer, this plague disrupted the *efficient* functioning of the empire, and things just went downhill until it imploded. Taxes boomed, the currency devalued, legionnaires disappeared and were replaced by mercenaries ...
I'm worried that the same thing could be happening now. Roosevelt's new deal got us out of the depression, but started the idea of governments borrowing massively (yes I know they've borrowed for years ...) SEVENTY years later, we are, I hope, on the verge of surviving a debt-fuelled crunch. But unless we actually resolve the causes (unlikely), we'll just have another one. And at some point, it could well destroy OUR civilisation. Might take 200 years...
Cheers,
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