Wednesday, October 11, 2006
10/11 SNR
As I've noted on that other blog, I'm in the middle of a nasty cold right now. I'm still trying to keep up with current events, since it looks like the Baystar story has legs after all, but I may miss a link or two. As always, if I've missed anything, feel free to post it here as a comment -- anonymous is just fine -- or mail me about it and maybe I'll fit it into the next SNR. Also, let me know if there's anything I should add to the Links sidebar.
MS-BS items:
- There's now an AP story about the MS-Baystar thingy. OregonLive has it (among other things) here. As you can see in the above photo, the Big O's dead tree edition has the story as well.
- A couple more pieces in CBR's great continuing coverage of the MS-BS debacle.
- A predictably weird and clueless take on the story at The Register. They argue that all the MS "conspiracy theories" have now been conclusively debunked, and sneer at anyone who thinks otherwise, all because MS welched on their verbal agreement to guarantee Baystar's investment. Apparently it would've been bad if the $50M was actual MS money, but because MS got someone else to spend their own money instead, it's all perfectly fabulous, in the eyes of Mr. Orlowski. What a maroon.
- Another slice of the blogoverse, concerning MS-BS: ITWorld Today, LinuxToday, digg, Ted's Radio Weblog, Jeremy's Blog @ linuxquestions.org, FreeRepublic (unsurprisingly, many commenters there take the MS/SCO side), Jeran's Den, LWN, ITToolbox blogs, tuxmachines.org.
News from Boiestown
- In other news, when he's not burning the midnight oil on SCO's behalf, David Boies is busying himself with a sleazy Hollywood family feud.
- Convicted Tyco baddies Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz are appealing their guilty verdicts. Among other things, the jailbirds are attacking Boies' testimony in the case. I really can't find anyone to root for here, but the battle itself ought to be interesting.
- Boies's wife, Mary McInnis Boies, a lawyer with the firm Boies & McInnis, is also a member of a creepy-sounding group called Business Executives for National Security, which to me just screams "military-industrial complex". Seems the group toured East Africa recently. In the article, Mrs. Boies is amazed that Africa is full of poor people. Who knew?
- Stephen N. Zack, one of the BS&F lawyers on SCO's case, is now an offical member of Miami Beach Senior High School's Hall of Fame. If he's made the Hall of Fame, what are the school's other graduates like?
- BS&F's NYC offices are in this ugly building, which has just been sold for $400M, to the same guy who paid beeelions for the WTC shortly before 9/11. So please, no snarky user comments about history repeating itself or anything like that.
- And here's a piece about software that's supposed to support the discovery phase of complex litigation. An ex-BS&F guy has jumped into the field, which is kind of ironic, since BS&F never seriously attempted to analyze all the stuff IBM sent them in the SCO case. If you've built your law practice around harrassing people with expansive and frivolous discovery requests, you aren't really going to need this software, now are you?
- A piece about one of the guys who helped David Boies lose Bush v. Gore, in which he dispenses his wisdom about the Supreme Court, and admits he actually knows more about Texas Hold-Em than about the Supremes. Seems he's argued 16 cases before the SCOTUS, and has won the last 4. Obviously, Bush v. Gore was not one of the last 4.
- I'm sure this is just a weird coincidence, but the Pennsylvania state capitol features a large statue of a very large man named (creepily) Boies Penrose. Ugh. From the article:
As recently as 20 years ago, a Democratic state lawmaker suggested in floor debate that Penrose's statue be taken down because he was corrupt. A GOP lawmaker responded that Penrose may have been corrupt, but he's part of history now and the statue should stay.
Other News
- In yet another case of stupid IP litigation, a local Portland nightclub is about to be litigated out of existence, because a cover band played there a while back, and the club didn't pay exorbitant royalties to the record industry.
- The latest of those exceedingly rare birds, new product announcements that mention SCO. Seems that now you can access Visual SourceSafe from your SCO box. That's, like, a marriage made, um, somewhere. I hate, hate, hate SourceSafe. Suuuure, your source is safe, except when it crashes and corrupts your whole source tree. Even ClearCase is an improvement over SourceSafe, although that's not saying much. OTOH, Subversion is your friend, plus it's free.
- Yet another Anderer bit, another doc about Realm Systems' mobile widget patent [PDF]. To be clear on this, I'm not arguing that Mikey & friends are currently associated with SCO. As far as I can tell, they got burned by SCO and moved on, but it's still kind of an interesting sideshow to keep tabs on.
- From c.u.s.m, a question about how to enable large file support on OSR5 (*snort* *giggle*), and how to run circa-1993 SCO Unix 3 under VMWARE.
- And from c.u.s.p (comp.unix.sco.programmer(!!!)), a bit of STREAMS-related ugliness.
- A photo of an old UnixWare t-shirt, from wayyyy back when it was still ok to be seen in public wearing UnixWare schwag. In other words, back in the days when Univel stalked the earth. Wait, here's another t-shirt, from the same era.
- And some fun archaic Unix ads, direct from Bell Labs.
- XENIX user(s), rejoice! Here's aclock a Curses-based analog clock app that's been ported to many, many platforms, even XENIX. I can't vouch for the XENIX port, but the MacOSX version works as advertised. It may yet displace xclock in my retrocomputing affections.
- There's a site in Italy called unixware.it, which doesn't seem to be devoted to UnixWare, generally. I don't read Italian, but this funny photo requires no translation.
By brx0 @ 2:33 PM 
