Tuesday, November 14, 2006
11/14 SNR
- Techdirt has a short piece about how to do IP shakedowns. The first user comment mentions SCO. They're pretty much the canonical example anymore.
- A new Berlind piece at ZDNet, mostly about M$ and spyware. SCO gets a mention here as well. It seems it's basically impossible to write about shady doings in the tech industry without at least briefly mentioning SCO. Which is as it should be.
- The latest Linux news from Lineo. You may recall that Lineo and Caldera used to be siblings, back in the Canopy Group's golden age. Blake Stowell used to work for Lineo, unless memory fails me.
- A piece at Law.com about ways to reduce datacenter costs, including the personnel budget. The article estimates you need one IT person for every 15 Linux servers. In contrast, you only need one IT person for every 100 OSR6 boxes, but you'll also need one lawyer for every 4 or 5 boxes, for when SCO gets around to suing you.
- What (supposedly) really happened with all that "edgy" Ubuntu artwork. So long as there's no Clippy, I'm a happy camper.
- If you're stuck with Windows, you may as well try out Microsoft's BSOD screensaver.
- Here's another icky patent troll case for ya. Check out the JMRI saga. JMRI is an open-source project dealing with model railroad stuff. Seems that a greedy patent troll actually swiped code from JMRI, patented the ideas within it, and then sued the developers for violating "his" precious IP. What a complete evil bastard. More on this at InformationWeek and Groklaw (back in mid-May). Bruce Perens mentions the case here.
- If you'd like to have your vestigial faith in the USPTO shaken a bit further, check out this recently granted patent about data compression. Seems the inventor has found a way to compress random data to an unlimited degree, even though that's mathematically impossible. Wowsers.
- Just bought a Mac? Today's your lucky day, if you haven't recycled the box yet. Turns out you can sell the empty box on eBay! (try doing that with a Dell)
- IBM's not so sure about Sun's GPL Java thing. I have to say I think IBM and various others are off base here. Asking Sun to contribute to the Apache project's Java clone is just silly. For good or ill, Sun's JVM will always be the gold standard, so far as Java goes, at least until there's an ANSI standard for the language.
- An article at El Reg insisting that C# is pulling ahead of Java. I don't have anything against C#, other than that it's another proprietary language, and a "cross-platform" language from a predatory monopolist. On a strictly technical basis, C# is just fine. Too bad the world doesn't work on a strictly technical basis.
- Speaking of l33t programming languages, here's a new K5 piece about Eiffel. The article makes it sound like it's an elitist, academic language reserved solely for the discerning cognoscenti, but I think that's just a bunch of spin to make Eiffel sound more appealing to the K5 crowd. I do like the idea of enforced pre- and post-conditions. It's not the be-all-end-all of software engineering, but it's a nice touch.
- More delays for DayJet. If you're new here, DayJet is the pet startup project of Ed Iacobucci, one of SCO's BOD members. Which is not to say that DayJet is a shady company or anything. It could be perfectly legit as far as I know. But over time I've learned that any business involving anyone connected to SCO ought to be regarded with great suspicion.
- Here's a crackpot detection toolkit from the physics world. Much of the test is equally useful when applied to the ravings of SCO message board trolls. And SCO itself, for that matter.
- SCO doesn't feature employee pics and bios on their site, presumably because their employees are too ashamed. So if you want to know what SCO employees are like in real life, you'll have to make do with this video. Rumor has it that the Theremin-heavy music in the clip is actually SCO's new corporate theme song.
By brx0 @ 12:56 PM 
Comments:
<< Home
My favorite line from the Berlind comment:
"Just supposing SCO is able to continue operating after its current legal engagements with IBM and others, will you really want to do business with such a litigious company?"
Post a Comment
"Just supposing SCO is able to continue operating after its current legal engagements with IBM and others, will you really want to do business with such a litigious company?"
By 
: 3:01 PM
: 3:01 PM<< Home
