Monday, October 30, 2006
10/30 SNR II
- Greetings, Boies, Schiller & Flexner employees! Thanks for stopping by again. I tend to cover your boss's adventures fairly extensively here, due to his involvement in the SCO saga, so feel free to check back regularly. And if you'd like to pass along any hot tips or juicy gossip, the identity of anyone who sends me stuff is always held in the strictest confidence. Or better yet, get a Yahoo or Hotmail or other account -- using an anonymous proxy to log in if you're paranoid -- and mail me from there, so you don't have to rely on any assurances from me. So thanks, and I hope you enjoy the show.
- Gartner's encouraging people to check out Oracle's Linux. Gartner's never taken an evenhanded approach to Linux, so this announcement suggests that someone in up Redmond isn't totally opposed to the latest Oracle move.
- A thread from comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware (!!!) mentioning that Firefox 2.0 is available for AIX. In a sad note for retrocomputing fans, it seems that, Firefox 2 will not build on AIX 1.3 for PS/2, circa 1992. One poster describes AIX 1.3 as an "antique", which is obviously true, and suggests using Linux or SCO OpenServer instead. OpenServer!?! Sheesh. Talk about trolling.
It's not often remembered that once upon a time there was an x86 version of AIX. IIRC there was also a mainframe version, and I heard somewhere there was even a version for the AS/400, although I don't think it was ever very popular. So all this nonsense about AIX being nonportable until SCO came along and worked some Itanium-o-licious Monterey magic is just crazy talk. Incidentally, the previous link informs us that AIX stands for, or once stood for, "Advanced Interactive Executive". So now you know. And knowing is half the battle. - A piece about the shiny new Fedora Core 6.
- A thing I didn't realize: Back in the mists of time, MS Word was born as a Xenix product. So really, it's fair to say that Darl and Clippy share a common origin.
- Some uber-schweet-sounding boxes & networking gear from a startup called Liquid Computing
- The Age (the local paper in Melbourne, Australia) has a piece about IBM mainframes. In what must be a bit of perplexing Aussie dialect, they've titled it "IBM tries still bangs profit out of mainframe business". Huh? The article itself is rather interesting, and (better yet) is written in standard English, so I don't know where that title might have come from.
- A new mega yacht for Esker, thx. to ruidh on the boards.
By brx0 @ 6:04 PM 
