Thursday, September 28, 2006
SNR for 9/28
A couple of items courtesy one of this blog's many keen-eyed readers:
And a few more media accounts about the 9/25 PSJcalypse:
Overall, the media's portraying this as IBM trying to finally drive a stake through SCO's shrivelled little evil heart. SCO filed a big pile of PSJ motions too, but they aren't getting so much attention. Everyone knows they're frivolous, and even the media isn't that gullible, at least sometimes.
Other:
- USA today gets misty eyed about some conference, with nostalgic
quotes from SCO BOD member Ed Iacobucci. - Michael Anderer (one of SCO's "MIT rocket scientists") has updated his resume to note he's no longer a
director of Realm or Forum.
And a few more media accounts about the 9/25 PSJcalypse:
- IT Jungle
- TechNewsWorld. This story quotes someone named Phil Albert, described as a "software legal expert", who says people are surprised this thing is still going on, and says "I don't think anyone's paying any attention to it anymore." Ahem. Excuse me.
- CBR
- Daily Tech
Overall, the media's portraying this as IBM trying to finally drive a stake through SCO's shrivelled little evil heart. SCO filed a big pile of PSJ motions too, but they aren't getting so much attention. Everyone knows they're frivolous, and even the media isn't that gullible, at least sometimes.
Other:
- Here's a good piece from a few weeks ago about the impending demise of SGI's IRIX operating system. SCO's wares merit a mention at the bottom of the page, as another couple of slowly dying commercial Unixes.
- On a sadder note, the end of the line's coming soon for HP's AlphaServer line, and Tru64 along with it. I really liked Tru64, it was one of my top 2 or 3 favorite *Nixes, and I'm sad to see it go.
- And for those of you running on Itanium, there's now a way to run your Solaris SPARC apps via emulation. Transitive Corp. is the same company behind the PowerPC emulation layer in x86 MacOSX, so this may be a fairly schweet piece of software. You have to wonder what the world would be like now if SCO and Transitive had made friends back when SCO was working on Project Monterey.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
SNR for September 27, 2006
- The only news item for about the 9/25 PSJ storm is another GL article. It may have gotten all the trade press coverage it's going to get. That's not so surprising, really, since nothing was actually decided on the 25th, and nothing will be resolved for quite some time yet. So if you're in the "wake me when it's over" camp, you can hit the snooze button again. Pleasant dreams.
- The story's also showed up on Digg, if you're into that.
- A few PSJ-related items from the blogosphere, from E-Scribe News, OrangeCrate, CBR's Open Source blog, Limulus (check out those kewl graphics, and the reference to the Boston molasses flood).
- Ooh, another huge pile of docs on PACER. I'll get to 'em once I've read the earlier ones, so it may be a while yet.
- A blurb at AntiBrokers about the stock tanking. "Let it die in peace", they argue.
- Tony Lawrence is no longer following SCO.
He mentions this while responding to a question about an especially nasty behavioral difference between OpenServer 6 and 5.x. And by 'nasty' I don't just mean because vi is involved. Vi, or some versions of it, has this misfeature where you can encrypt files from the editor in a highly non-intuitive way. People have been accidentally garbling files and losing data for years, no, decades, with this misfeature. You couldn't do it with OSR 5.x, but OSR6 now lets you really shoot yourself in the foot with vi. Fantastic.
My short and unhelpful answer to the hapless user: Next time, don't use OpenServer, and don't use vi. - From comp.unix.sco.misc, a tale of woe about UnixWare's broken large (>2 GB) file support. Sure, the filesystem supports large files, but the shell doesn't. It must've been compiled without large file support enabled, and since the thing's closed source there's no easy way to fix it. I don't know how large file support works on SCO OSes, but on every platform I've used it's not exactly rocket science. You just pass a couple of #defines to the compiler (LARGEFILE_SOURCE, LARGEFILE64_SOURCE), make sure your code doesn't assume off_t is a 32-bit value (and surely you weren't doing that, were you?), and you're good to go.
Sadly, the poster's stuck with SCO, or at least his company thinks it is:
I'd love to just go all Linux, cos bash seems to be more manly, but my company has agreements with SCO, and we all know what is going on there, don't we....... - An unanswered UW question from back in August, a guy wondering if/how to run SCO binaries on Linux or BSD, since OpenServer doesn't support his new laptop's chipset. I would guess the answer involves the iBCS package on Linux, except that I don't know whether anyone's maintaining it anymore. Lack of demand and all, ya see...
- Daniel Lyons has a new article up, titled "The New Barbarians". I'm not ready to say the guy's finally seen the light, but the article is about open source and commodity hardware transforming the industry, and (unless I missed) it he went the whole article without calling Linux users minions of Pol Pot or any nonsense like that. So there seems to be some progress here. Forbes as a whole isn't bashing Linux and pumping SCO like they used to. Must've dawned on them there was no percentage in it.
- In case you're (morbidly) curious about running an old copy of OpenServer under VMWare, the answer is here, sort of. At least from a technical standpoint. Legally it's anyone's guess. Maybe if you do you're in violation of the EULA and SCO sends the mattress tag police after you.
- From PacketStorm: This is what a st00pid buffer overflow exploit looks like on UnixWare 7.1.3. Because using a keyboard under X11 is just so cutting edge and untested and complicated and all.
- I saw a seemingly-new item titled SCO updates Unix product, open-source attitude, which caught my eye to say the least. And no, there's no updated product, and no adjusted attitude. The piece is from December '04, and only showed up as new because a blogspammer posted a "reply" a couple of days back. This all seems very fitting, somehow.
- Another bit that came up as a current news item for some reason: If you're using SCO Unix (version unspecified), and you really, really want to print yourself some bar codes with your SCO Unix box, today is your lucky day. Here's a site where you can download a free demo of a $700 commercial barcode printing app. So for all you poor SCO users out there (yes, both of you), you can't say I've never tried to help you out.
SCO News Roundup for 26 September 2006
I decided I'd start a new blog devoted solely to the latest SCO Group excitement, since the message board situation remains in flux. I'm resolutely agnostic on the InvestorVillage vs. Yahoo thing, and I'm not, not, not going to take sides in the occasional GrokWars.
I figured this was a great time to start this, since yesterday was the PSJ deadline in the SCO vs. IBM case, and there's all sorts of excitement going on right now. The anti-SCO community isn't even close to digesting all of the filings yet. I've barely read any myself yet. So we live in interesting times, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.
So without further ado, here's today's SCO News Roundup:
I figured this was a great time to start this, since yesterday was the PSJ deadline in the SCO vs. IBM case, and there's all sorts of excitement going on right now. The anti-SCO community isn't even close to digesting all of the filings yet. I've barely read any myself yet. So we live in interesting times, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.
So without further ado, here's today's SCO News Roundup:
- We begin with the media coverage of yesterday's PSJ storm. Bob Mims at the Salt Lake Tribune has been covering the SCO saga for a long time now, and here's his take on 9/25, with quotes from PJ, Enderle, and Blake.
- InformationWeek covers the action (briefly) here, merely quoting an unnamed SCO spokesman.
- An analysis of the latest activity at Ars Technica.
- Internetnews.com suggests the case may never make it to trial, because everything will be decided by the duelling PSJ motions. I doubt that. I've learned over the last few years to always bet on whatever will drag the case out the longest.
- GL has all the latest motions here.
- If you're curious about what the world's 15-year-olds think about yesterday's excitement, the Slashdot story is here.
- Also a short blurb at Technocrat.net.
- But not all is bleak in the SCO universe. Here's the rarest of things, a new product announced for OpenServer. So now, when your primitive, obsolete OS panics, at least maybe you won't lose all your data. I'm sure that must be really comforting. The PR mostly talks about the equivalent product for Solaris, and mentions SCO as an afterthought. But that shouldn't be surprising, anymore.
- In the few scant moments when he isn't 100% focused on SCO's jihad, David Boies has managed to eke out a minor procedural victory for that AIG guy.
- Yesterday's Oregonian profiled a guy who grew up (sorta) Jewish, converted to Islam, got in bed with the evildoers, then became a Christian fundie neocon, and is now flogging a book about his thrilling life experiences. Unsurprisingly, this wingnut is a Boies, Schiller, & Flexner employee.
