Google looner x prize

The object of this project is to get a working data transmitting rover to the moon. The average team is made up of multimillion dollar companies with a lot of resources. Then there is FredNet that wants to win this project but has no real backers and needs a lot of money and is depending on people from all over the world to pull this off by donating there time, and money. It sounds interesting but with out real employees, only volunteers and no real money backers it probably won't happen. You may get a lot of good suggestions and some cool designs but when it comes time to build and launch the device, I don't see anyone donating the kind of money they will need. The commercial launch is 6 - 10 million dollars by itself, let alone everything else. Personally I think it is a waste of time and money.

How Linux kernels are numbered.

Linux kernel version numbers are in my opinion a little weird and hard to keep up with, I would almost say they are changed as frequently as Windows has updates. When the first version came out it was version 0.01 and then ver 0.02 which made since but it changed often. Sometime in 1994 they changed the way it would be done. The first number would only change when there is a major design change in the concept, the second number changes when their is a major revision to the current concept, and the third number is when their are minor changes to the current concept and the fourth is for correction or patches. Simple right, well not really. Sometimes they add letters to the very end of the version, which indicate other information like the name of who wrote the revision. All in all I would say that their is a new version every month if not every week. A perfect example is that version 2.6.32.9 was release on 2-23-10 and version 2.6.33 was release on 2-24-10 only one day difference, why not just wait one day and release 2.6.33 and forget about the other release. (Info taken from http://www.kernel.org/)