Monday, October 23, 2006
10/23 SNR
Just a couple of items to pass along today:
- Jeffrey Leitzinger, BS&F's damage$ expert (i.e. the guy who's paided to come up with enormous pie-in-the-sky damage numbers), seems to be SCO's latest liability. The ever-relentless Panglozz has dug up some fascinating tidbits about his record with BS&F, his financial dealings, and even a bit about his marlin-fishin' hobby. And it's true, he's no match for Esker. Esker has a mega-yacht at least 10x as long as the boats this guy uses. Understandably, SCO would love to have a coverup of the guy's financial particulars; GL has the motion here.
- Leitzinger isn't the only SCO partisan with serious credibility issues. Just in time for Halloween, here are a few fun articles that touch on Laura DiDio's prior career as a paranormal researcher, and specifically her role in the so-called "Amityville Horror" thingy. Granted, Hollywood made a movie about it, plus a whole bunch of sequels and remakes, so clearly the ooky-spooky ghost hypothesis must be true, therefore I guess we can't really criticize DiDio too much for that. On the other hand, there was all that easy-sleazy Tinseltown dinero floating around back in the day and she didn't grab her share of it, so that now she's reduced to shilling for Microsoft. That's kind of sad, and it's a sign of really poor business sense. Readers should keep this in mind whenever she tries to play economist.
- Right now, DiDio's stoked about something Microsoft calls a "Virtual Hard Disk", where "virtual" means virtualization, this year's fancy PHB buzzword. MS is (yet again) embracing & extending someone else's technology, and for some reason ol' Laura thinks this means MS is turning over a brand new leaf. Ok. Riiiiiiiight.
- A bit about the latest IP suit, this time IBM vs. Amazon. My position is that this stuff should not be patentable, period, and therefore I'm not rooting for either side.
- For those who want to follow Jeffro's antics in the Wikipedia community, you can keep tabs on the guy here.
- "Paul Murphy" rambles on and on, ostensibly about identity management. Take a random bit about Solaris 10, a random passage about MacOS, even a goofy bit about Plan 9, mash them all together in a wacky stream-of-consciousness way, and voila, instant "Paul Murphy" post.
- SCO's former Canopy stablemate Linux Networks has scored some tasty VC moolah.
- On this, the 5th birthday of the iPod, a retrospective of analyst comments about the product launch way back in '01. Enderle had this to say:
It’s certainly a high-end product, both in terms of price and in terms of capability… Short-term, I think they’re going to sell every one they build.
One of the great things about being an analyst is that you only deal with the trade press, and they're too lazy to ever ask you to define "short term". If asked now, I'm sure Enderle would say 5 years is "short term", and M$-Zune is a surefire iPod killer, any day now. But that's probably not what he meant by "short term" at the time he said it. - Lyons is back on the warpath again. Linux-bashing is so 2003, but he hasn't gotten the memo. He seems to think the GPL3 thing is a super-huge "wedge issue" and has a new piece out titled "Torvalds the traitor? Huh?".
- Meanwhile, Adobe has concluded that e-Books have a future, and that future is a mutant offspring of (recently-acquired) Flash and Acrobat Reader. Run away! Run away!!!
The problems with e-Books are many. First, I just plain don't want to read books on a PDA, because reading actual books is easier, and even the best PDA screen makes my eyes water if I sit there reading it for hours on end. Oh, and physical books have as much "battery life" as you need, which is awfully nice. Second, actual, physical books don't have weird and intricate and threatening DRM arrangements. If you want to lend a real book to a friend, you can, at least for now. If you want to borrow a book from a library, you can, for the time being. If you're done with a book and want to give it away, or sell it, you can. In the e-book bizarro world, none of these things are possible. Recall that back in 2000, Adobe was the company that released a DRM-ified e-book version of "Alice in Wonderland" (a public domain work), with a license agreement forever barring you from reading the book aloud. You know, because people who listen to a public-domain work being read aloud, instead of buying their own copy, are evildoers who steal precious money from poor little Adobe. And there's no site license provision, so if you want to read the thing to your kid at bedtime, your kid needs to go buy his or her own "Alice in Wonderland" license, and even then you still can't read it aloud to your kid, or else it's off to Guantanamo for the both of you.
By brx0 @ 11:49 PM 
