Sunday, October 15, 2006
10/16 SNR
- 2 SJVN pieces about why Debian is teh st00pid. It's not the code, it's the people. The fundie mindset always works the same way, regardless of what someone's being all fundamentalist about.
- Speaking of fundamentalism, here's a bit about "Christian Linux". Apparently it's not just a dumb joke anymore. Umm.... Okayyyyy....
- More SCO v. IBM semi-esoterica: Panglozz has put together a list of the exhibit citations in IBM's recent filings. Enjoy!
- In a bit of belated PSJ-deadline coverage, the Copyfight blog over at Corante has a new piece about SCO v. IBM. It's the usual "Is that STILL going on?" thing, and really that's not an uncommon or unusual reaction. Those of us who've followed the case raptly the whole time have got to be a tiny minority, even of hardcore geeks. The piece has a few links to IP-Wars and Zen's Den, so I figure the piece originated with the recent /. story.
- SCO merits a couple of small paragraphs in this piece about IBM's upcoming Q3 earnings. Nothing new here, but it's the rare media mention of SCO, so I'm passing it along.
- David Boies's buddy Steve Wynn, the Vegas casino impresario, managed to instanly lose a cool $40M recently when he accidentally poked his elbow through a Picasso. Kind of puts the whole SCO thing in perspective, in dollar terms, doesn't it? It's also interesting that David & Mary Boies (allegedly) agreed to help cover up the incident, since Wynn was in the midst of trying to sell the painting at the time and didn't want to lose the sale. Didn't work out in the end, though. Funny, that.
- The latest indemnification thingy: A company called OpenLogic is offering indemnification for 160 open source projects. I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm also kind of surprised the piece has no Didio quote, considering all the noise she used to make about this stuff. Maybe it's no longer on the list of Redmond-approved talking points. I dunno.
- A (sorta) cute lil' Linux doodad from a company called Gumstix. It's got a 200Mhz XScale cpu, and it's about the size of a pack of gum. Awwwwwww..... Actually, I mention this because it competes with a similar product from Realm Systems (One of Mikey's former companies). According to Gumstix's CEO, if you cluster a few of these widgets together, the result is known as a "gumwad".
- If you want a small Linux box, but the Gumstix doohickey is maybe a bit too small, how about an x86 Mac Mini? A German company is selling a PBX system that uses Mac Minis running Linux instead of OSX. It looks like they don't actually wipe the Mini, they just boot it into Linux off an iPod Shuffle. Weirdness.
- A Register piece about the oft-rumored upcoming Oracle Linux distro. I'll believe it when I see it.
- Apparently Marc Rochkind isn't the world's most stupendous C++ coder. More about Roachie's "Ux" library here.
- haven't heard much from MOG lately, which is fine, of course, but I just thought I'd mention that she's got her own Wikipedia page these days.
- Meanwhile, the Bleppster shows up on some sort of techie social networking site. I don't know more because I can't quite bring myself to join just to see the guy's full profile.
- Yet another example of SCO's ultra-advanced bleeding-edge industry leadership: Here's a posting from comp.unix.xenix.sco, from a guy looking for the PDP-11 version of Xenix. Feel free to lend a hand if you know anything about this, because I sure don't. Golly. If Xenix was portable way back in the day, I really don't see why porting to Itanium (i.e. Project Monterey) was supposedly such an intractable problem for SCO, especially with the help of IBM, and of HP before that (in the abortive "Summit 3D" joint project). It almost makes me wonder whether SCO might be lying when the rant about how Unix-on-Itanium sank their battleship. Perish the thought!
- And for your entertainment, a "thread" from comp.unix.xenix.misc relating to "fuzzy logic operating systems". I'll bet you money the guy behind this is CS undergrad, someone who just had a fuzzy logic class and still thinks it explains the whole damn universe. Note to current CS undergrads: If you sign your real name to something like this, future prospective employers will find it via Google and ask you about it during the technical interview. So if you're going to babble about it, you'd damn well better be right. Just a little friendly advice here. Thanks for listening.
By brx0 @ 1:23 PM 
