Friday, October 06, 2006
10/6 SNR
- We lead off yet again with an Astute-Reader-Contributed item. I swear, you guys have way better Google-fu than I could ever hope for. Remember Cymphonix, the SLC-based network gadget maker who tied up with SCO for a few press releases a while back? Well, um, it turns out they're focusing on Linux instead, these days. D'oh! Well, "Do'h!" for SCO, anyway. Cymphonix gets my applause for waking up and having a bit of common sense.
- A few SCO-related items on Flickr to relate. First, a vintage ad for SCO Unix 3.0, circa 1993-94. The ad proclaims SCO Unix to be the ideal operating system, and at that point it wasn't an unreasonable assertion. Linux had barely gotten started at that point, and Windows 3.1 & MacOS 7.x still stalked the earth, and the rest of the field belonged to various proprietary and incredibly expensive Unixes. It's kind of a time capsule, from the tech industry's horse-n-buggy era.
- Another vintage ad, this time for SCO Open Desktop 2.0. The word "Open" is used in the pre-Linux, pre-FSF sense, where the API is documented, and the kernel source is licensed to selected 3rd party hardware vendors, but absolutely not provided to the general public.
- You know the OldSCO logo with the stylized, windswept tree? Apparently it's based on an actual tree somewhere on the California coast, and here's a photo of said infamous tree. Even if I knew exactly where the tree was, I wouldn't disclose the exact location. I saw how people reacted after Steve Irwin kicked off, going around killing innocent stingrays for revenge, and I won't be part of that. This tree has no brain, no neurons, and it has absolutely no idea of the ugly business it's gotten wrapped up in. So be nice, ok?
- A pic of a t-shirt promoting SCO's SCAMP initiative. SCAMP, as you may recall, is just like LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+Perl/PHP), except with a SCO OS substituted for Linux (thereby making SCAMP vastly more expensive than LAMP). There was a (sorta) big push for this a few months ago, but now all we hear about is Me Inc., so I figure they must've blown all their marketing budget on these t-shirts. I'd hate to say anything politically incorrect here, but that anthropomorphic bulldog on the SCAMP logo makes me want to belt out a rousing chorus of "YMCA". I'm just sayin'. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm a very broadminded person, and I'm 100% in favor of SCAMPs having the right to cluster with a highly scalable number of other SCAMPs, in any way that's technically feasable, or even just theoretically possible.
- SCO and the EFF next door at a trade show. Sadly, there's nothing on YouTube about the resulting knife fight.
- Here's SCO's HipCheck PR verbatim. I can't help notice their use of the phrase "Proactive Mobile Administration". Back in the dot-com era, I had to go through the Franklin-Covey "7 habits" program, which was supposed to make me a better PHB if I wanted to go down that road, which I didn't. "Proactive" is one of the major buzzwords they hammer at you in the Coveystan madrasa, and I suppose it's no coincidence that Darl himself is a former F-C exec.
I have to dispute SCO's use of the word in this case, though. The HipCheck client app waits passively until something bad happens, and then alerts you, and sorta lets you try to do something about it, a little. I hate to play semantics police here, but that's not "proactive", it's "reactive". I'm not saying the reactive approach is wrong, or inadequate; I'm just arguing that it helps to call things what they actually are, without any content-free buzzwords obscuring the way. - The WinInfo short takes are kind of amusing this week. I like the bit about BestBuy's new iTunes competitor. Yeah. Good luck with that.
- At one time SCO Unix was popular enough to earn its own O'Reilly book, SCO Unix in a Nutshell. It's a real shame the OS never became popular enough to merit a "for Dummies" book, because that would've been really funny in retrospect.
- Our very own Stats_For_All appears in a rather intellectualized flamefest on the blog of some M$-droid who allegedly works on open source projects. If MS can afford to pay former English or social science majors to bloviate about open-source metaphors, they obviously have far too much money. Disclosure: I'm a former social science major myself, but nobody's paying me to bloviate. I do this entirely on my own dime, thanks.
- According to Google Trends, the #1 place on earth for Google searches for "SCO" is Nantes, France. I have no idea what Esker would make of that. Despite all my SNR efforts, Portland doesn't even crack the top 10. SLC itself only ranks third, after Nantes and Mumbai, which is kind of sad.
By brx0 @ 10:22 PM 
