The Gnu

"The Gnu" (sometimes known as "A Gnu", "I'm a Gnu" or "The Gnu Song") is a humorous song about a talking gnu by Flanders and Swann.

The word gnu is consistently pronounced with two syllables as "g-noo", with the g clearly enunciated, and the n unpalatalised. The song also plays on silent letters in other words such as "k-now" and "w-ho", and adds initial g's to various words beginning with n.

As a prelude, Michael Flanders goes off into a completely irrelevant but very witty monologue about a car — "great big flashy thing, with teeth. Engine at both ends" — that is the bane of his existence since it constantly occupies the one spot in his road where he can comfortably get from wheelchair to car and vice versa. The licence number turns out to be 346 GNU. The song itself then begins, and consists of a brief piano introduction and two quite similar sung verses, each preceded by a verse spoken by Michael Flanders. Donald Swann neither speaks nor sings in this item.

In the first verse, the singer is at the zoo when he meets a man who claims to know all the animals, but misidentifies a gnu as an elk; the gnu corrects him. In the second verse, he has taken furnished lodgings, and wakes up in the night to see a stuffed hunting trophy above his bed; he is trying to decide whether the animal's head could be a bison, an okapi or a hartebeest, when he seems to hear a voice, asserting indignantly that it is a "g-nu, a-g-nother g-nu".

DotGNU

DotGNU is a decommissioned part of the GNU Project that aims to provide a free software replacement for Microsoft's .NET Framework by Free Software Foundation. Other goals of the project are better support for non-Windows platforms and support for more processors.

The main goal of the DotGNU project code base was to provide a class library that is 100% Common Language Specification (CLS) compliant.

Main development projects

Portable.NET

DotGNU Portable.NET, an implementation of the ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), includes software to compile and run Visual Basic .NET, C#, and C applications that use the .NET base class libraries, XML, and Windows Forms. Portable.NET claims to support various instruction set architectures including x86, PPC, ARM, and SPARC.

phpGroupWare

phpGroupWare, a multi-user web-based GroupWare suite, which also serves to provide a collection of webservice components that can be accessed through XML-RPC so that can easily integrate them into webservice applications.

Wildebeest

The wildebeests, also called gnus or wildebai, are a genus of antelopes, Connochaetes. They belong to the family Bovidae, which includes antelopes, cattle, goats, sheep and other even-toed horned ungulates. Connochaetes includes two species, both native to Africa: the black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu (C. gnou); and the blue wildebeest, or brindled gnu (C. taurinus). Fossil records suggest these two species diverged about one million years ago, resulting in a northern and a southern species. The blue wildebeest remained in its original range and changed very little from the ancestral species, while the black wildebeest changed more in order to adapt to its open grassland habitat in the south. The most obvious way of telling the two species apart are the differences in their colouring and in the way their horns are oriented.

In East Africa, the blue wildebeest is the most abundant big game species and some populations perform an annual migration to new grazing grounds but the black wildebeest is merely nomadic. Breeding in both takes place over a short period of time at the end of the rainy season and the calves are soon active and are able to move with the herd. Nevertheless, some fall prey to large carnivores. Wildebeest often graze in mixed herds with zebra which gives heightened awareness of potential predators. They are also alert to the warning signals emitted by other animals such as baboons. Wildebeest are a tourist attraction but compete with domesticated livestock for pasture and are sometimes blamed by farmers for transferring diseases and parasites to their cattle. Some illegal hunting goes on but the population trend is fairly stable and some populations are in national parks or on private land. The IUCN lists both species as being of "least concern".

GNU (disambiguation)

GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU Project.

GNU or gnu may also refer to:

Science and technology

Organisations

Other uses