SCO News Roundup: 11/7 SNR II

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

11/7 SNR II

More fun from around Usenet, including several extremely dusty corners:

Comp.unix.unixware.announce is an Ex-Newsgroup. This post on IV includes lyrics to celebrate the occasion.
Bob Mims's request for layoff info on c.u.s.m. gets a snotty response from some SCO diehard, which gets a calm and reasonable reply from Mr. Mims. The SCO guy posts with a Compuserve email account. In 2006. These SCO folks, they sure know how to live on the cutting edge of technology.
A recent, as-yet-unanswered plea for help on sco.public.tarantella. Yeah, I didn't know it (or any other sco.* newsgroup) existed before either.
A late October thread on comp.unix.pc-clone.16bit. The poster somehow ended up with a 286 box recently, and wanted to know what sort of Unix he could put on it. Minix and Xenix seem to be the leading candidates, although nobody bothered to point out that the former is free, while the latter is a SCO product. I expect the questioner will find out soon enough, though. Poor old SCO, losing business to open source even in the 286 world.

On the other hand, if you go with Xenix, and later decide to upgrade to a quad-core Xeon when they come out, you can put OpenServer 6 on it and keep all your Xenix apps. SCO made a really big deal about this when OSR6 launched. Even your Xenix games should work, according to SCO. They claim they tested it and made extra-sure about that. Isn't that special?
And a canonical example of how not to get your question answered: Someone was having trouble with a SCO Unix app called "Trinity", and started a whole new Google group just to ask the question. It's been over a year, and no answer yet.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

At least one SCOX bagholder is still accumulating shares.
As you may have heard already, Bruce Perens isn't too happy about the Novell-MS deal.
Some new Novell PR about the deal, responding in part to questions from the F/OSS community.
Gateway has some new Opteron boxes out. I mention this only because it mentions SCO Unix as one of the OSes you could, in theory, install on it.
It's election eve, and I don't see any news stories with the word "Boies" in them yet, so hopefully that's a good sign. Whether you dislike the guy for taking Gore's side in 2000, or you (like me) dislike him for botching the case, I expect we'll all be happier if the election doesn't end up in court again.
OSDL has realized that if they want decent kernel documentation, they'll have to pay people to write it. You know, for those bozos who can't figure it all out by looking at the kernel source tree.

Ahh, we engineers can be an inscrutable and difficult bunch....
In a surprising new direction for Intel, they've ventured into the brave and ultra-glossy new world of Web 2.0. Runs on Windows and various Linuxes. It seemed pretty mysterious until I saw this bit:

The components of SuiteTwo will be optimized for Intel's client and server chips, including its 32-bit and 64-bit Xeon processors and future products, the company said.

The move will also create demand for SpikeSource and Six Apart, which Intel Capital has invested in. It also has an option to invest in other participating companies, once they seek funding, Lambert said.

Aha. That sort of explains it.
From Slashdot, yet another Linux Smartphone. I see PR for these things at least once a week, but I've never seen one in the flesh, not even once.
In other Linux widget news, I was down at Fry's the other day and played around with one of those Nokia 770 "web tablet" thingys, and I started seriously thinking about getting one, just as a fun toy to play around with, especially since there's a new GPS module for it. But then I see this spy report about a rumored successor, which people are calling the "Nokia 870". Dear Santa...