I posted a little fun countdown in the bottom of the right column. It is titled Beefy Miracle. It is the name and date of the next release (version 17) of the Fedora Linux distribution. The following (next) version already has the name “Spherical Cow“.
There is a complex method of how these release names are selected. I am not getting into the details here, but if you want to know, you can do some research on the Fedora website. The round cow also has a tie with spherical chickens and it all has to do with the way some engineers simplify a problem to engineer a solution. It begins as in, “My solution only works if we assume cows are spherical, then ten cows will…” The joke is that cows (or chickens) are never spherical. Yes, the humor is a bit weird, but imagining what a spherical cow would look like is funny to me… oops.
I have been trying to use Linux for most of my normal computing chores as I want to feel secure if I start to recommend the OS to any of my friends wanting a low cost software solution for a home computer. So this came to my attention. Do I worry about release names?
The weird release names are simply a way for the code writers to have a little fun with naming conventions. Some folks think it may detract from the “serious business” of writing a computer operating system. These same folks probably don’t have much of a outside life anyway, so they despise any form of “inside” humor, hehheh… 🙂