Re: Have to laugh
the difference is that the alpha versions have a channel, this means that you can have "nightly alphas" where you can fix a bug in a released alpha very quickly, instead of waiting until the nightly channel is safe (or stopping development work just to fix a stupid little bug).
instead of a nightly "tree" with an alpha "branch" coming off every now and again, its more like there are 2 trees, but every few months the second tree is shipped off to beta and an exact duplicate of the first tree is made to replace it... ok, not the best metaphor.