Wednesday, December 27, 2006
12/30 SNR
The holiday lull continues, with very little to report. Friday the 29th came and went with nary a word about a conference call. This is apparently the first time SCO/Caldera has ever gone without a Q4 call in December, so you have to wonder what's going on, just a little. Not a peep out of SCO, and no new juicy rumors to report either. As I've said before, I'm usually not interested in rumors, but that's about all we've got right now.
Before we get to the news, you might've noticed the new color scheme here at SNR. I decided I was sick of all those ugly orange and brown tones, and it was time for something a little more soothing. I'm trying for a simple, straightforward, and non-annoying design here. Feedback is always welcome, of course.
There is one juicy bit to report. Last week SCO filed a couple of redacted documents that weren't really redacted. Instead of removing the sensitive passages, they left the text in and made it invisible, so that it was child's play to highlight the super-secret stuff and copy and paste it into, say, an emacs window for example and see the illicit info. Given SCO's history of trying to leak sealed information by, for instance, reading it aloud in open court, my working assumption is that this was a deliberate move. The pseudo-redacted text does mention a few internal IBM and Novell emails in passing, so perhaps SCO thought they could get a leg up by getting this info out there. The emails would've been mildly embarrassing if SCO had leaked them a couple of years ago, but at this point they just seem irrelevant. Everything else seems either innocuous, or actually damaging to SCO, so if this was a deliberate move, it was a stupid deliberate move. If you want to take a look for yourself, GL's taken the dodgy PDFs down, but this IV post shows where you can find the two PDFs in question, IBM-907 and IBM-908.
Meanwhile, SCO's stock rose a bit toward the end of last week, for no obvious reason. Call me cynical, but I wonder whether the markets are rewarding the company for the long-term decline in its stock price, since that makes it less likely SCO will see an Apple-style backdated options scandal. That's probably not the real reason, but I just thought I'd toss that thought out there to the peanut gallery, FWIW.
Only a handful of other news items to relate right now:
Before we get to the news, you might've noticed the new color scheme here at SNR. I decided I was sick of all those ugly orange and brown tones, and it was time for something a little more soothing. I'm trying for a simple, straightforward, and non-annoying design here. Feedback is always welcome, of course.
There is one juicy bit to report. Last week SCO filed a couple of redacted documents that weren't really redacted. Instead of removing the sensitive passages, they left the text in and made it invisible, so that it was child's play to highlight the super-secret stuff and copy and paste it into, say, an emacs window for example and see the illicit info. Given SCO's history of trying to leak sealed information by, for instance, reading it aloud in open court, my working assumption is that this was a deliberate move. The pseudo-redacted text does mention a few internal IBM and Novell emails in passing, so perhaps SCO thought they could get a leg up by getting this info out there. The emails would've been mildly embarrassing if SCO had leaked them a couple of years ago, but at this point they just seem irrelevant. Everything else seems either innocuous, or actually damaging to SCO, so if this was a deliberate move, it was a stupid deliberate move. If you want to take a look for yourself, GL's taken the dodgy PDFs down, but this IV post shows where you can find the two PDFs in question, IBM-907 and IBM-908.
Meanwhile, SCO's stock rose a bit toward the end of last week, for no obvious reason. Call me cynical, but I wonder whether the markets are rewarding the company for the long-term decline in its stock price, since that makes it less likely SCO will see an Apple-style backdated options scandal. That's probably not the real reason, but I just thought I'd toss that thought out there to the peanut gallery, FWIW.
Only a handful of other news items to relate right now:
- First, in the wake of their blockbuster MS deal, Novell has coined a new phrase to describe their business model: "mixed source". Now, I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude toward their new friendship with the Beast of Redmond, but the phrase itself sounds rather alarming. One of the more annoying chores for programmers these days is making sure you aren't commingling code with incompatible licenses. It's annoying, but important. At minimum, "mixed source" is something that goes on your annual performance review, and not in a good way. You don't want to use GPL'd code in your closed-source app, and you don't want to open-source any code you're supposed to keep confidential. And then there's the forest of incompatible F/OSS licenses: GPL, BSD, CDDL, APSL, Mozilla, Apache, blah, blah, blah. In an ideal world, programmers would never, ever have to get a lawyer's approval before doing their job, but sometimes you have to if you're serious about respecting copyrights. It's the right thing to do, but it's a damn shame nonetheless.
- Processor Magazine compares the new SCOoffice Server 4.2 with MS Exchange 2007. If David and Goliath were both bad guys but had a tiff anyway, it would be a lot like this. The piece does actually quote a real, live SCO employee, so we know there's at least one left, or at least there was when the interview happened. The key bit from the article, to my mind, is that SCO hasn't announced a product roadmap for SCOoffice Server past the new release.
- Here's another of those year's-end pieces, this time a preview of what 2007 may hold for Linux. The article says the Novell and IBM cases will go to trial in 2007, and I wish I could share in that confidence, but I've long since stopped trying to predict when/if that will ever happen. It's dragged out for so long now that the safe course of action is to predict it'll continue to drag out, at least into 2008. And when we get closer to 2008, we can reassess whether we think there'll be a resolution in 2009, and so on, and so forth.
- Another year's-end piece, about what happened and what didn't in the desktop Linux world this year. Actually the title is something of a misnomer, since about half of the piece is about Firefox and various web technologies, which aren't really tied to Linux at all. I was disheartened to learn of a project called "Tamarin", which is supposed to be a glorious melding of Flash and JavaScript. I mean, they can do that if they like, if they really think it's wise for some reason. But naming it after a cute-n-cuddly rainforest primate? That's just wrong, that is. I don't know, call it "Flashenstein", or "JavannoyingScript" or something, but leave the poor little tamarins alone, ok?
- From InfoWorld, a trade press reporter explains "Why bloggers will never replace reporters". And really, I have to admit this is true. I've met a few reporters now and then, and there's just no way my liver would withstand the kind of abuse reporters' livers experience on a daily basis. But seriously, I'm not going to say I'd turn down a chance to chat with BillG. A lot of what I do in RL is Windows-based, and I'm as curious as everyone else about what's supposed to come after Vista and Longhorn. I might ask the guy about SCO, or I might not. But regardless, my opinions are not for sale, and quite honestly I haven't had any serious inquiries anyway. That's kind of a shame, really, since having high-minded and inflexible principles is no fun at all unless you get a chance to be all outraged and self-righteous every now and then.
- Yet another Linux-based smartphone. And by "yet another", I mean yet another article. I've never actually seen one in real life, and I'm not sure anyone else has either. What gives, guys?
- A piece about Linux in the SMB space. (Where SMB == "small & medium-sized business", not "server message block"). Seems it may not be quite ready to displace Windows, but it's getting there. And when it does, well, small niche businesses are one of SCO's few remaining markets where they have any presence at all. They were already getting clobbered by Windows in that area, so having Linux join the pigpile doesn't represent a fundamental shift, but it would be a nice bit of poetic justice. Plus any stories about businesses migrating from SCO to Linux are guaranteed SNR fodder, so I like to encourage that sort of thing.
- From InfoWorld, a normally pro-MS columnist says "New year's resolution No. 1: Get OpenBSD". And I mostly agree; OpenBSD is da shiznit, just maybe not da fast, modern shiznit. But definitely da secure shiznit.
Friday, December 22, 2006
11/26 SNR
The big SCO news right now is that there isn't any. The company may not be good at much of anything, but they're world-class pros at maintaining radio silence. Not a peep out of anyone for quite some time now, other than a few brief and noncommital remarks from Blake about the continuing re-re-re-reconsideration circus.
When asked about the layoff rumors, SCO said they weren't going to comment until the conference call in December. Now December's almost over, and there hasn't been a conference call announcement yet. In the past, SCO always held them in late December, as close to Christmas as they could manage, I suppose to ensure that they wouldn't get a lot of publicity. This year, no call, and no announcement about the lack of a call. My understanding is that they aren't legally obligated to have a call, it's merely a widespread practice. And furthermore, they don't actually have to say anything about Q4 numbers until their 10K is due at the end of January. I'm starting to think we won't hear a single peep out of SCO until then, at the earliest. If there are 10K problems like last time around, they might be able to string it out even longer.
On an unrelated note, I was out shopping today and saw a real live Zune. Ok, I saw a Zune box, which I assume contained a Zune. The Borders bookstore in downtown Portland had it on a small display rack in an out-of-the-way and rather dark corner of their music section. Most of the rack was taken up with iPod accessories, but there were some Zunes and Zune-related items, and a stack of brochures. I took one out of curiosity. It's very earnest, wordy & complex, and tries oh, so hard to be hip and happening, and doesn't quite succeed. Sort of like the device itself, in other words. There'll be some photos of the brochure later further down the page, if you're curious what Zune propaganda looks like, but first here's today's batch of news:
Ok, here's that Zune propaganda I mentioned earlier. Enjoy!
Yikes. This would be even scarier if it was less blurry. Just look at those snappers!
When asked about the layoff rumors, SCO said they weren't going to comment until the conference call in December. Now December's almost over, and there hasn't been a conference call announcement yet. In the past, SCO always held them in late December, as close to Christmas as they could manage, I suppose to ensure that they wouldn't get a lot of publicity. This year, no call, and no announcement about the lack of a call. My understanding is that they aren't legally obligated to have a call, it's merely a widespread practice. And furthermore, they don't actually have to say anything about Q4 numbers until their 10K is due at the end of January. I'm starting to think we won't hear a single peep out of SCO until then, at the earliest. If there are 10K problems like last time around, they might be able to string it out even longer.
On an unrelated note, I was out shopping today and saw a real live Zune. Ok, I saw a Zune box, which I assume contained a Zune. The Borders bookstore in downtown Portland had it on a small display rack in an out-of-the-way and rather dark corner of their music section. Most of the rack was taken up with iPod accessories, but there were some Zunes and Zune-related items, and a stack of brochures. I took one out of curiosity. It's very earnest, wordy & complex, and tries oh, so hard to be hip and happening, and doesn't quite succeed. Sort of like the device itself, in other words. There'll be some photos of the brochure later further down the page, if you're curious what Zune propaganda looks like, but first here's today's batch of news:
- SearchOpenSource has a year-end piece about Linux in 2006. SCO gets a brief mention, understandably after the Oracle & MS-Novell stories.
- As mentioned recently, Red Hat announced their Q4 numbers recently. Besides covering the numbers in detail, this article also reports a couple of jabs Mr. Szulik (RHAT's CEO) took at MS, Oracle, and SCO. Actually the SCO bit is more of a mention in passing than a jab. I guess they didn't merit a full jab in Szulik's book.
- One of those extremely rare birds, a review of a product that runs on a SCO OS (among other platforms).
- SCO also gets a quick mention in this "Sector Snap" bit about the Linux market.
- A piece about the recent DDOS against CafePress. SCO gets a mention with regard to the DDOS they suffered some years ago. You'll recall that at the time, SCO announced the Linux community was behind the attacks, and nobody with the company has ever apologized for that, even though it's pretty certain now that Russian organized crime elements were the real culprits. Apologizing would've been the decent thing to do, but it's a little late for that now. I'm not holding my breath.
- An in-depth analysis of Vista's extensive DRM "features".
- I haven't had a PalmOS or other PDA item for a while, but this looks interesting. Access, the parent company of PalmSource, has released what they currently call the "Hiker Application Framework", the latest step in their ongoing PalmOS-on-Linux efforts. The thing's under the Mozilla license, even. There's no way to know if that means the whole Palm OS will eventually go the open source route or not, but we can certainly hope.
- The latest development in the icky Hans Reiser situation. Seems he wants to sell Namesys, his ReiserFS company, to raise money for his defense. I guess this means he couldn't find a publisher for his "If I Did It" book.
- The city of Amsterdam is looking into replacing their current Windows+MS Office setup with Linux and open document formats.
- FWIW, if you find yourself on a *nix box without gdb installed, and you need to do some debugging, here's a quick tutorial on how to use dbx, an older debugger from the crufty mists of time.
Ok, here's that Zune propaganda I mentioned earlier. Enjoy!
Yikes. This would be even scarier if it was less blurry. Just look at those snappers!
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
12/22 SNR
- Yet another piece about the MS-Novell deal, expressing the minority view that the deal is actually good for Linux and the F/OSS community.
- Here's another one, this time anti-deal. These things pretty much always mention SCO, and never in a good way.
- New rules from the Federal Trade Commission regarding paided blog posts. If someone's paying you to tout their company or products, you have to come clean about it. Which is obviously a good thing, as far as it goes, but why just blogs? I will never take a cent from anyone to say anything, good or bad, but if I did, I'd have to disclose it. Rant-For-Rent Rob, however, is an "analyst" instead of a "blogger" and therefore doesn't have to disclose anything, despite all the stupid b.s. he gets paid big bucks to repeat, to a vastly wider audience than I could ever hope to get here. It's quite the amusing regulatory patchwork we're developing here.
- The latest way to sell Vista: SPAM. Jeez, that's really sad.
- A couple of fresh pieces about Steve Ballmer vs. Linux:
- Redmond Channel Partner Online asks "Linux Deal: Too Good to Last?"
- And Dana Blankenhorn calls it "Ballmer's Macaca Moment". Ouch.
- Redmond Channel Partner Online asks "Linux Deal: Too Good to Last?"
- The latest on the Symbian 9 OS. For those unfamiliar with Symbian, it's the third player in the smartphone/PDA OS market, along with Linux and Windows Mobile. Ok, four players if you count PalmOS these days. If you're a longtime gadget geek, you might recognize the OS as the latest incarnation of Psion's old EPOC OS of yesteryear. Sure, it isn't Linux, and it isn't anything like Linux, but I remember thinking it was a fairly schweet and well-designed system. Certainly much more so than the abomination that is WinCE / Windows Mobile. Blech.
- I hate to rat anyone out to the Man, but this post on alt.folklore.computers indicates the current free market valuation of SCO's precious Unix SysV "IP":
I did find Unix System V on a set of 5.25" floppies for $2 at a thrift store once, though, don't anybody tell SCO. - On c.u.s.m., some stupidness involving SCO's proprietary C++ compiler on OSR6. Gee, I sure want a compiler flag that generates references to functions that don't exist. That sounds wonderful, and useful, too.
- In this support thread the questioner has a customer with a SCO box. Said SCO box just hosed the customer's Informix database, and the guy's looking for pointers on what to try to recover as much data as possible.
The thread includes this classic exchange, which I'm sure you've seen before:
> P.S.: The customer does not have backup.
Thats very bad.
Part of the support problem here, no doubt, is that Informix has been an IBM product since 2001. D'oh! - SCO and friends can whine all they want about how it's impossible to make money on Linux, but it appears someone forgot to inform Red Hat and IBM.
- The first real live Linux coupons from Microsoft have hit the streets. I wouldn't mind having one jof those, actually, just to frame and put on the wall. But only if I'm 100% sure that woudn't bind me to some sort of unholy and restrictive Redmond contract. There's got to be a catch, or they wouldn't be doing this, obviously.
- An update on a certain spinach lawsuit out of Utah.
- And finally, a brief fable about electrical engineers vs. computer scientists.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
12/19 SNR II
- If it's really true that SCO's packing up and moving to Holladay, UT, as reported in the previous post -- and that's just an unconfirmed rumor at this point -- there's a really fun "coincidence" here: Holladay is also home to EdgeLink Solutions, a SCO partner and employer of a certain Andrea McBride (a.k.a. Mrs. Darl).
- The EdgeLink address, along with Gary J. Cooper (EdgeLink's COO) also show up in a pair of Excel docs from the state government. Seems that when he's not burning the midnight oil on EdgeLink's behalf, the ultra-versatile Mr. Cooper is a state-licensed mortgage lender with "Utah Capital Mortgage". The docs list him as "principal lending manager" at that company. Perhaps not coincidentally, Utah Capital Mortgage is the "client" for the EdgeLink/Me Inc. spam that showed up on a SuSE mailing list back in March. None of this is actually new info, but I thought I'd pass it along for context in case SCO surfaces at that address or one nearby.
- The building EdgeLink operates out of, at 6465 S 3000 E, Salt Lake City, is also home to Century Software, a maker of terminal-emulation and thin-client software. SCO's site says they (by which they mostly mean OldSCO) have been partners with Century for 18 years, and that statement was dated 2004.
- Despite the thin-client thing, I haven't seen an obvious Negris-Century connection. Although by an odd coincidence, the words "Negris" and "Haerr" (Century's CEO) both appear in what is allegedly the world's longest palindrome. I swear I am not making this up.
- For standards geeks out there, say hi to Unix 03, the latest & greatest standards document from the Open Group (the owners of the "Unix" trademark). SCO can claim they own Unix all they want, but in the past they've had a great deal of trouble getting their products certified, so don't expect a press release about it any time soon. The article doesn't even mention SCO anywhere. In addition to Sun, IBM, and HP, the word is that the next Mac OS X release (10.5) will be Official Unix too, the first BSD variant to be certified that way. Of course, any Unix greybeard will tell you that nothing past 7th Edition is the real deal, so this item is offered on a "FWIW;YMMV" basis.
- Another fun Vista item: MS has released a draft of the new API that lets you (or your antivirus vendor) bypass Vista's fancy (and controversial) new PatchGuard feature. And people wonder why OS kernels tend to bloat up over time. Well, it's always the path of least resistance, that's why.
- A piece from IBM's DeveloperWorks on why JavaScript doesn't suck. Ok, so maybe it doesn't totally suck, but I'm not ready to change specialties just yet.
- Another fun Vista item: MS has released a draft of the new API that lets you (or your antivirus vendor) bypass Vista's fancy (and controversial) new PatchGuard feature. And people wonder why OS kernels tend to bloat up over time. Well, it's always the path of least resistance, that's why.
- Tip of le chapeau to bill_beebe for a pair of Zune items:
- Your shiny new Zune will talk to your shiny new Vista PC after all, thanks to a patch MS is rushing to market. No cause for alarm here, of course. Rush jobs in Redmond always turn out really super-duper well.
- The Zune is also the subject of a typically ham-fisted MS astroturfing campaign. I've always wondered, what do astroturfers call what they do? It's not quite "viral marketing", that cherished phrase the dorks in your company's marketing department are always using. Extending the analogy to the breaking point, if "viral marketing" is when people praise your product and tell world+dog out of their own free will, inflicting your product on the world with a fake "viral" campaign is sort of like using bioweapons. So really, if you buy a Zune, the terrorists win. Well, they might, and you can't be 100% sure they won't, so why risk it?
- Your shiny new Zune will talk to your shiny new Vista PC after all, thanks to a patch MS is rushing to market. No cause for alarm here, of course. Rush jobs in Redmond always turn out really super-duper well.
- And to round things out, a picture of Darl from those carefree days back in April '05, happily golfing away like a good little CEO.
Monday, December 18, 2006
12/19 SNR
- SCO's new strategy of filing objections to anything and everything isn't going so well. Seems they botched the attempt to get Judge Kimball to reconsider, filing a "request" when it should have been a "motion". So now they have to go back to square one and refile the silly thing. I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine that the basics of how to file a motion correctly are covered in first-year law school. I would further imagine that federal judges have more important things to do than handhold clueless BS&F attorneys who skipped class the day they covered this stuff back in school. The refiling business is probably not a huge deal in the larger scheme of things, but still, in the immortal words of Nelson, "Ha, ha!.
- The objections get a little media play in this new SL Trib piece. A thread over on IV debates whether the need to refile means the clock's run out on the opportunity to object. If so, I expect we'll be hearing from the judge about it before long.
- Ok, there's also an InformationWeek article and an earlier Mims piece about the current fun.
- Updated: Here's a Techworld story about the ongoing re-reconsideration, titled "Microsoft's poodle about to be scalped". Ouch.
- SCO gets a mention in this piece about the year ahead for open source. Right off the bat, the article hopes the SCO saga will be put to rest some time next year, but wisely hedges with an "if we're lucky". Right now I'm not optimistic about that -- I'd guess it'll drag out into at least 2008, and we'll see at least one new infusion of bagholder cash so they don't go bankrupt before the case goes to trial. Based on past history, that appears to be what's most likely to happen.
- They also get a mention in this piece about the top 10 tech lawsuits of 2006. Articles like this are a very sad commentary on the tech industry these days.
- Yet another mention of SCO, in an article about the document format controversy. It mentions the Novell-MS deal, which means SCO has to get a mention too.
Come to think of it, we've never heard from SCO about where they stand on the document formats thing. Perhaps this is because there aren't any apps (commercial or otherwise) for SCO's OSes that use any of the competing document formats. Unless you want to stick to plain ASCII text, you're pretty much out of luck in the SCO universe. - You'll be pleased to know that Ralphie's keeping himself busy. Thanks to an astute reader, yet another ThinkAtomic tentacle comes to light:
Business Name: VOONAMI, INC.
Entity Number: 6237026-0142
Registration Date: 06/05/2006
Registered Agent: BRENT CHRISTENSEN
Address Line 1: 1485 E 840 N
City: Orem
State: UT
Zip: 84097
who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=voonami.com
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc.
Domain Name: VOONAMI.COM
Created on: 30-May-06
Expires on: 30-May-07
Last Updated on: 31-May-06
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.THINKATOMIC.COM
NS2.THINKATOMIC.COM
Now why on earth would they register this domain (plus voonami.net and voonami.org, as well) through Domains By Proxy? You'd almost think they were trying to hide something.
The only mention I've found of the word "voonami" comes from this forum post about the Burning Man festival, which seems like a distinctly non-Ralphie source of inspiration. Apparently it's a place name, but it's not clear what sort of place, or where that place is. - Could SCO be moving? That's the latest rumor, albeit from a, shall we say, highly uncorroborated source:
Also, we are taking over SCO's office space after the first of the year,
since they have no one left. We will try to get that annoying eyesore of
a sign taken off the building as soon as possible. They moved to
Holliday, UT (or are moving there at present).
All we can say for sure right now is that there is a real town of Holladay in Utah. The company hasn't said a word about moving, and their current lease (from Canopy, it should be noted) isn't up for another year.
OTOH they did move the Santa Cruz office to smaller quarters some time last year, so it's something they've done before -- although I seem to recall they announced it ahead of time, and that office wasn't the corporate mailing address. So we'll have to wait and see on this one. They're running late on the usual December conference call, with no explanation given, so I'm not sure exactly when we're likely to find out. Hopefully we'll get the latest juicy bad news soon; I could use a nice dash of Christmas cheer.
- Enderle's been in the news a bit lately:
- He responds to the Register article from a few days back. Apparently he's the world's biggest victim, grievously wronged again and again every single day, for absolutely no reason. Well, that, or he's really good at the self-pity game. I'm betting it's the latter, quite honestly.
- It was a foregone conclusion that he'd pop up to gloat over about the recent Forrester numbers showing a decline in iTunes music sales. The guy's just so predictable. As I noted before, we'll probably never know for sure how accurate those numbers are, since there's basically no market for "unbiased" anything in the tech industry. Nobody knows that better than Rob, and it shows, as always.
- A bit on IV about his peculiar (but unsurprising) take on DRM: Microsoft DRM gooooood, Apple DRM baaaaaaaad. If Linux had DRM, presumably that would be baaaaaaaad too, and naturally its lack of DRM is also baaaaaaaaaad.
- He responds to the Register article from a few days back. Apparently he's the world's biggest victim, grievously wronged again and again every single day, for absolutely no reason. Well, that, or he's really good at the self-pity game. I'm betting it's the latter, quite honestly.
- Seems BS&F is no stranger to getting stiffed on large legal bills. Northwest Airlines didn't want to pay up, but the BK court decided otherwise, handing the firm $1.2M for their trouble.
- I usually don't touch on the antivirus industry much, but the latest scare tactics are just too rich. Virus gangs, recruiting people with KGB-style tactics. Who knew?
- The latest Vista schadenfreude: Apparently there's a desktop version of SQL Server (who knew?), and apparently it doesn't run on Vista right now. Ok, maybe it's not the biggest schadenfreude story out there, but I see 'em, I pass 'em along.
- Want to sell that PS3 on eBay? Anecdotal evidence suggests you'll attract more interest if you spice up your product photos with some cleavage. Big surprise there. If you'd rather skip the article and go straight to the gallery, you'll want to go here.
Friday, December 15, 2006
12/17 SNR
- GL: SCO's objections to the November 30th order by Magistrate Wells. Well, objections in the sense that they're giving themselves a 10 day window to dream up some objections. We'll have to wait & see how that turns out. I expect an enjoyable display of desperate tap-dancing.
- A similar take on that filing at Lamlaw.
- Another day, another MS-Novell article that mentions SCO.
- SCO gets a brief mention in this piece about the last 10 years in IT. A brief and unflattering mention, way down the page.
- Dana Blankenhorn asserts we're now seeing SCO's Last Stand. It's been a long time since I've been willing to make any predictions about that; every time it looks like they're getting close to the brink, some clueless bagholder shows up and plows fresh cash into the company. So we'll have to wait and see on this one.
- While we're on the subject of predicted demises, here's the first I've seen predicting the MS Zune will go away some time next year. Which would probably be true if it was any company other than MS, but over the years the media's been full of predictions of the demise of various stupid MS products. Go back and read just about any old press about Windows CE PDAs, and now look at all the Windows Mobile phones out there. Nobody really likes them, but they're stuck with 'em anyway, or at least they've been persuaded to think they are.
- A new MS spoof of those "Get a Mac" ads. You'd think with all that money, MS could afford at least one or two marketing or PR people who have at least some vestige of a clue. But sadly, no.
- From the boards (& /.), a piece about Microsoft's mythical Cairo OS from back in the mid-90's. The piece argues Cairo was nothing but a con game from the beginning.
- A Usenet thread about trying to diagnose an SMB headache. Even though the poor IT guy's saddled with a bunch of Win98 boxes, it's the lone SCO box that seems to be behind the misbehavior.
- An article about the ongoing non-GPL kernel module controversy.
- For any Skype users out there, there's an interesting new plugin that lets you run a voiceprint analysis on whoever you're talking to, sort of like a remote lie detector. I mention this because SCO is supposed to hold another quarterly conference call in the near future, and this sort of technology might be useful for adding additional, er, context to what the SCO folk have to say.
- This humble blog gets a rare mention from outside the SCO-o-sphere at Nelson's Linkblog (look for the 11-18-06 section). Not quite a link, but a mention, which is something, I suppose.
- Some benchmarks on Intel's new tasty quad-core goodness. Unsurprisingly, it compiles the 2.6.19 Linux kernel rather quickly, and the more memory bandwidth it has, the faster it goes. Dear Santa...
Thursday, December 14, 2006
12/14 SNR
- GL: "SCO Fights for Survival". The latest motion by SCO is a real doozy. Back in July, the magistrate judge said they had no case. So they appealed to the district judge, who recently said they had no case. So now they're appealing to the district judge again, the guy who just slapped them silly. I suspect this is more about public relations, as in investor relations, rather than about any realistic chance in the courtroom.
- Stop the presses: SCO's latest whining is up on PACER now. Details here. Three new items:
- IBM-897, in which SCO presents a laundry list of frivolous complaints, and asks to introduce some new "evidence". The doc ends with the usual obsequious legal boilerplate, which seems oddly appropriate these days:
- IBM-898 is the inevitable memorandum in support of the previous item. In it, SCO argues that tossing out its claims due to lack of factual support would be predjucial. Well, I would certainly hope the courts would work that way, generally speaking.
They go on to argue that things would be going their way if only a.) Wells had considered the wise and sober testimony of Messrs. Marc Rochkind and Evan Ivie (whoever he is); b.) They're given permission to harrass IBM developers about methods and concepts again; and c.) They get another chance to re-argue much of their discarded "evidence" again. - IBM-899, in which they say they're objecting to Wells' ruling on November 30th, claiming they'll be able to say just what it is they're unhappy about in no more than ten additional days. Which given their history means they'll be dumping a fresh glob of idiocy on the court's lap late on Christmas Eve. Wow. Classy!
For the foregoing reasons, SCO prays that this Court will reconsider its Order of November 29, 2006, and grant relief as requested.
Yeah, good luck with that. - IBM-898 is the inevitable memorandum in support of the previous item. In it, SCO argues that tossing out its claims due to lack of factual support would be predjucial. Well, I would certainly hope the courts would work that way, generally speaking.
- BillG has a "candid" chat about Linux IP, etc. Seems he's never heard of Baystar, knows diddly about SCO, etc. Which may be true, really. It's called "plausible deniability". If you need some dirty work done, you don't tell the boss about it. If you're going to trade arms for hostages, Ronnie shouldn't know anything about it. If you're going to trade money for litigation, BillG shouldn't know anything about it.
- Some fresh hand-wringing about the many "risks" of free & open-source software. It's not completely off base, since it spends a lot of time on the confusing proliferation of source licenses. Those of us who write code for a living find it confusing, so I can only imagine how scary it seems to the PHB crowd.
On the other hand, the article mentions SCO as if they still pose any sort of threat at all, which is so 2003. - BS&F pops up in a case over municipal bond naughtiness.
- More criticism of the MS-Novell deal, and Microsoft's recent IP fud.
- Two pieces about Microsoft's alarming new foray into the world of robotics. Eek! The cheap shots are just too easy. The obvious Asimov and TNG references are taken already, but the world of pop culture is full of um, less than perfect robots. Like, say, the Gunslinger from Westworld. Or that creepy freeze-ray robot in Logan's Run. And that guy in Alien who turned out to be an evil white-blooded robot. Yikes. And further back, Ro-Man in the classic film Robot Monster. And Bender, obviously. Oh, and there's Ahhhhnold, of course. Today's the day we learned that our future nemesis is not Skynet, it's Sky.NET.
- Yet another thread about printing problems over on comp.unix.sco.misc. Seems that the poor guy's saddled with an ancient COBOL program on SCO Unix 3.2, and said COBOL program wants to talk to /usr/bin/lpr, except that there isn't one on the box, and he doesn't know what to do. If this was a Linux problem, someone would tell the guy where to grab the current lpr (or more likely CUPS) source, but in the world of SCO it's all about unsatisfying workarounds.
Ironically, the SCO Unix box in question is almost certainly IBM hardware. The guy posted the output of uname -x on the box, and it appears to be an ancient 486 with a MicroChannel bus. Wow. And no, the guy is not posting from a "smithsonian.edu" address.
In case you're wondering, yes, you can run Linux on an old MCA box. Your crufty old COBOL app, though, that may be another matter entirely. - The clowns over at Gartner are predicting that blogging is set to peak next year, and it'll decline after that. Apparently the entire blogoverse will run out of of anything new to say within 12 months, and so we'll fold up our tents and go back to being nice, mute Big Media consumers, grateful for whatever content MSN and AOL deign to offer us. Well, anything's possible, but one could argue fairly that the blogoverse ran out of anything new to say years ago, and that hasn't even slowed it down.
- Ubergeek tool of the day: Plan 9 from User Space, a set of Unix tools ported from Bell Labs' fabled (and uncommmon) Plan 9 OS. I'm not yet sold on acme as a replacement for Emacs, but it's rather fascinating stuff. If nothing else, it may be the only OS I know of with an actively maintained quote db for fortune(1). Which is something, certainly.
- A piece about why free software isn't on the activist agenda. Possibly that would be because there are much bigger issues out there than mere software. I'd just like to remind people about that, because we tend to forget. And even if all the world's life-and-death issues were resolved, I'm not sure there's a single coherent & unifying ideology behind F/OSS. I'm just not seeing it.
- Today's MS cheap shot revolves around Mr. Allchin's recent comment that if he didn't work for MS, he would have bought a Mac instead. In reality I think he was just trying to motivate the drones with a little tough love, but comments like that play differently outside of Redmond. So "Ha, ha!".
- The binary module brouhaha continues on LKML. Linus is Not Enthusiastic about the new proposal.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
12/13 SNR II
- SCO gets a mention in this year-in-review article about Enterprise Unix in '06, over at ServerWatch. They show up in the "Squeezed Out" section. And they aren't even first there, coming in behind SGI.
As a fun bit of trivia, the article mentions that Yahoo is believed to be the largest FreeBSD user in the known universe. FWIW. - The ever-relentless Panglozz digs up the gory details about Ms. Dewey.
- More MS-Novell speculation from InfoWorld's Tom Yager: "Payback time for Novell". He argues that the deal is really about SCO, specifically MS trying to avoid a lawsuit with Novell over SCO. Could be. Although if that's the case, I'd prefer to just let the lawsuit happen, all things considered. A highly choice passage from the Yager piece:
Novell has exhibited the patience and cunning of a trap door spider. It waited for SCO to taunt from too short a distance. Then Novell would spring, feed a little (saving plenty for later), inject some stupidity serum, and let SCO stride off still cocksure enough to make another run at the nest. That cycle is bleeding SCO, which was the last to notice its own terminal anemia.
Niiiiice. - A bit of fun on LKML about binary-only, non-GPL kernel modules. Linus resorts to ALL CAPS at one point. Andrew Morton comes out in favor of banning non-GPL modules entirely.
- A new object lesson about the analyst community: A while back, Forrester Research released some numbers indicating that iTunes music sales were way down this year. Now they're having to backpedal. They insist their numbers are correct, but they're backing away anyway, because people with money don't like those numbers. Whether their numbers & methodology are spot-on doesn't even enter into it. This is sort of the flip side to the Enderle saga. The markets don't reward you for telling the truth as you see it, and sometimes they punish you for it big time, so why bother? Apparently there's no constituency for good statistics, at least no constituency with serious money behind it.
And people wonder how irrational tech fads and dot-com manias get started and perpetuate themselves. - According to Slashdot, MySQL AB has (allegedly) dropped support for Debian in the latest release. Or maybe they didn't, and it's all a big misunderstanding on the part of the Slashdot kiddies. The outraged throngs naturally had to mention the company's recent tie-up with SCO as proof of their infinite perfidy.
And sure, doing a biz-dev deal with SCO is icky, even if no money changes hands. - The NY Observer has a warm-n-fuzzy profile of the Boies dynasty. I guess I've ever been a big fan of dynasties, myself. As usual, the inevitable list of high-profile clients makes no mention whatsoever of the Beast of Lindon. Curious, that.
Also no mention of anything about Florida landscaping companies. There is a mention of the Amici scandal, though, so I guess that's something. - If you're of a more historical bent, Boies also gets a mention in this article about Vietnam and the CBS vs. Westmoreland case.
R.W. Apple, Jr., who figures in that article, passed away a few months ago. He was apparently quite a character, if even a tenth of this Calvin Trillin piece is true. - Yet another brief Boies tidbit, from his local newspaper's "Business people in the news":
David Boies, Bedford, a principal at the law firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner, Armonk, was honored at A Matter of Taste 3, Westchester ARC's gourmet fundraiser at the Westchester Country Club in Rye. Boies, who has dyslexia, has been a longtime champion of people with disabilities. For the past four years he has employed people with developmental disabilities to run the mailroom operations of his law firm.
I'm not feeling quite meanspirited enough to make a cheap shot about that last bit, although it would explain a lot. - Another refugee from the Windows world.
- In the Windows world, a piece pondering the future of MS's "Live Clipboard" and mashups and sleek Web2.0 goodness and such. No big surprise here. "Live" is the new "Active", or ".NET" for that matter, a marketing tag to stick on all sorts of unrelated products and services to create the illusion of a coherent strategy. Golly, another hugely-hyped and then quickly orphaned API? From Microsoft!? I'm shocked! Shocked!!
Besides, if the guy's complaining about the lack of tasty Web2.0-ness, clearly he hasn't met Ms. Dewey yet. - A recent product announcement from DirectPointe, a Canopy tentacle and former SCO sibling.
- A brief and unscientific survey of mentions of Ralphie's CP80 in blogospace, specifically the religious blogospace: See A Good Choice... for Ohio, et.al., White Collar Sideshow (main page here), Fill Up, and MORALERT. and Jimmy'z Journal.
Overall it doesn't look like Ralphie's idea has legs, not outside the usual suspects at any rate. Either they don't realize the guy's a complete charlatan, or they don't care. - Speaking of Ralphie initiatives, it seems his "Hydruga" idea may have hit a small roadblock, namely that someone else already owns Hydruga.com. The site's about leopard seals, it's hosted w/ Apache on Linux, and the contents are Creative Commons licensed. Take that, Ralphie-boy.
- Meanwhile, Anderer has a new patent (via J. Sizz on IV, who found it on GL here ). (See also here.)
The SL Trib blurb reads:
"System and method for enabling the originator of an electronic mail message to preset an expiration time, date, and/or event, and to control processing or handling by a recipient, patent No. 7,149,893, invented by Jon N. Leonard of Tucson, Ariz.; Charles H. Seaman of Richmond, Calif.; Michael Anderer of Salt Lake City; Peter B. Ritz of Meadowbrook, Pa.; Michael Bernstein of Tucson, Ariz.; and Robert J. Schena of Wayne, Pa.; assigned to Poofaway.com, Inc. of Tucson, Ariz. "
Curiously, I'm not seeing any whois results for "Poofaway.com". A google search says they used to be in the Tucson Yellow Pages, but they aren't there anymore. The cached listing gave a different domain name, perfect-wireless.com, but that domain is now unregistered and up for sale too.
One other mention of the company I ran across, where the president of the company was a guest speaker at the University of North Dakota's big "Engineers Week" banquet, held at the Ramada Inn in Grand Forks, ND. But that was way back in 2000. Seems the company isn't keeping quite as high of a profile these days, assuming it still even exists. - That patent is #7,149,893 at the USPTO. Poofaway also has an earlier and closely related patent, #6,721,784, with just two of the later patent's inventors listed (Leonard and Bernstein, amusingly enough). Both patents were applied for wayyy back in 1999 (the first in September, and Mikey's one in December). So it took 7 years for the new patent to work its way through the system. The other one was granted back in '04, so only 5 years on that one. So all of this stuff predates the SCO situation by quite a while.
- And let's not forget the weird Java-related patent SCO got last year (#6,931,544). Sun recently GPL'd Java, so does this mean SCO's going to sue 'em. Enquiring minds want to know.
- There's a new and somewhat more capital-intensive version of the old 419 scam. So if Darl sends you a crate full of Nigerian money orders, just say no, and don't take the bait. Not even if it comes Christmas-wrapped.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
12/13 SNR
No major SCO stories in the past few days, but here's a selection of SCO-related, or at least vaguely SCO-related stuff I ran across here and there:
- The recent tankage in SCO's stock price has attracted the attention of the usual penny stock crowd. Here's what a "Buy SCOX" stock pick looks like these days. The guy expresses contempt for the company, but thinks the stock will wander up a bit in the short term. And in truth, that's probably what's going to happen. It's always happened before after previous big stock drops: The volume dries up, and the stock starts creeping up with that familiar pattern of 100-share trades at the end of the day. But my advice, as always, is what the kid told his parents at the end of Time Bandits: "Dont touch it, it's evil!"
- A few fun niblets about Vista:
- Deep Sleep mode is seriously borked.
- The fancy new product activation scheme is spoofable. Now, I'm 100% against pirating software; MS is the copyright owner (presumably), and if you really want Vista that badly, you'd better be prepared to play by Billg's rules. If you don't like the rules, pick an OS with rules you like better. But still, it's funny to see all those layers upon neurotic layers of "security" fall apart this easily.
- But will all that security stuff actually matter?
- On the bright side, Vista's gonna create a whopping 100,000 jobs. Which again reminds me of a scene from a movie:
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg: Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene and boring. But if it is...
[pushes glass off table]
Zorg: destroyed...
Zorg: [robot cleaners move to clean broken glass] Look at all these little things. So busy now. Notice how each one is useful. What a lovely ballet ensues so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who'll be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny weeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain... of life.
Zorg: [Desk prepares a glass of water and a bowl of fruit] You see, Father, by creating a little destruction, I'm actually encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business. Cheers.
[drinks water with cherry, only to choke on cherry stuck in throat. Zorg frantically presses all buttons on his desk in an attempt to get something to clear his throat]
Priest Vito Cornelius: Where's the robot to pat you in the back? Or the engineer? Or their children, maybe?
[Desk brings out Zorg's pet Picasso; Zorg motions it to try and help him]
Cornelius: There, you see how all your so-called power counts for absolutely nothing? How your entire empire of destruction comes... crashing down. All because of one little... cherry.
[Slaps Zorg in the back, causing him to spit the cherry at Picasso]
- Deep Sleep mode is seriously borked.
- The MS-Novell articles keep on coming. This one dissects all the recent weird alliances and business moves in the F/OSS world. SCO gets the usual brief and dismissive mention.
- And a John Carroll post at ZDNet argues "Stop bashing the Novell / Microsoft agreement". Not sure I agree, but he makes some interesting points.
- Oh, and on the heels of Ballmer's patent FUD, questions about whether Windows also has an IP-related "undisclosed balance-sheet liability". This is a response, in part, to the previous item.
- The headlines are full of people rushing to bash Vista and Zune, but those aren't the only gobs of fresh Redmond Quality Software to hit the interwebs. Oh, no, far from it. They've got a new search engine (yes, another one) which I guess is supposed to be the anti-Google, by getting wrong everything Google gets right. I present to you Ms. Dewey, the latest tardware from Microsoft's "Live Search" initiative, whatever the hell that is. I guess the idea is to show that Bill and Steve and the gang are hip and totally down with that newfangled "Web 2.0" thingy the cool kids keep talking about. The result: Clippy with cleavage. Well, not too much cleavage. Too much for the office, not enough to get excited about. Unless you're a lonely 15-year old dweeb, which I assume is the target audience here. I haven't tried this myself, but reports have it that if you attempt to talk dirty to Ms. Dewey, you might get a mildly amusing response from her. Oh, yippee. For the record, I don't want to know anything at all about the dev team behind this botch, or what it was like developing it, or any fun anecdotes about late nights in the QA lab, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
- Over on IV, a great post full of what Wallybass calls OT links. Maybe over there they're OT, but here they're only Semi-OT at best.
- Also from the boards, seems Kevin's law firm's website has gone down.
- And Canopy tentacle MTIC has gotten its 2nd delisting notice.
- We haven't had a good Baystar item here for a while, and the latest isn't quite a Baystar item, but one of their close colleagues in the PIPE community has just been nailed for some serious naughtiness. The scheme worked like this: First, take out a short position in some random stock, let's call it FOO. Someone loans you a billion shares at a dollar each. You sell these and hope the stock goes down so that when it's time to replace the shares, you can buy back at a lower price and pocket the difference. Normally that can be kind of risky, to put it mildly. If the stock goes up instead of down, you have to buy back at the higher price, no matter how high it is. So the nice folks at Gryphon figured out a neat trick: Go to the poor saps who run FOO and offer them a PIPE deal, where they give you a boatload of stock for cash, usually just pennies on the dollar. (Note: It's best not to mention that you're shorting their stock when you do this.) Then you use those shares to replace the ones you borrowed, and pocket the difference between the discounted PIPE price and fair market value. It seems like a reasonably clever scheme, as far as these things go. But as the complaint mentions, this practice is, ahem, specifically prohibited under securities law. Which tells us that someone else thought of this before, tried it, and got caught.
- On IP-Wars, speculation about why Caldera really bought all those crufty old Unixes from OldSCO.
- The War on Christmas Beer continues. This time, the state of Maine has banned a beverage called "Santa's Butt", as usual in the name of "protecting the children". Now, the recent New York case attracted the attention of BS&F, who took time out of their busy schedule (i.e. working night and day on SCO's behalf, 24/7) to make some threatening noises and get the state to back down. No word on whether they'll get involved here, too, but I kind of doubt it, just because it's Maine this time and not New York.
- The "big" SCOoffice Server 4.2 announcement shows up again on the interwebs. I've covered the announcement before, but I'm not sure I'd actually seen the official PR or not, until now. I like the bit where they advertise the product's antivirus and antispam features. I wonder if the latter feature filters out Me Inc. spam or not.
- I don't usually venture into religion or politics here. People in the anti-SCO community come from all walks of life, which I think is great, most of the time, except when political threads get in the way of real news. But I couldn't resist this one, because it also deals with buggy and truly dire grade-Z software, in this case the new "Left Behind" shoot-em-up game. A droll tidbit from the review:
Units can be set on an auto-proselytizing mode where they can be ordered to recruit on demand, but the artificial intelligence isn't as committed to Christ as you might expect. If you set units on autopilot, they respond by just standing around, which forces you to do a lot of hands-on conversions to keep up with the Antichrist. Even if this function did work, you would still have to take over units on occasion because they regularly get stuck behind lampposts and parked cars.
- The Register only now noticed the bit about the New York Times parting ways with Enderle, and in large part they take Enderle's side and argue he's being singled out and treated unfairly.
Couple points about that. First, ElReg itself is part of the trade press. They don't see the problem, because they're part of the problem. Everyone's known for decades that analysts are often nothing more than PR flacks for hire. The viability of the analyst industry hinges on having compliant media outfits who happily turn a blind eye to the practice and refuse to tell their readers what's what.
And point #2, sure Enderle's being singled out, but he's not being treated unfairly. Your average garden-variety analyst merely rattles off an inoffensive and pointless HappyQuote(tm) or two about, say, the latest SQL Server release, takes the check to the bank, and leaves it at that. When it comes to competitors, the usual analyst sounds a note of caution and concern, letting you know their client is the safe choice. But they generally leave it at that. Calling people terrorists for merely using the "wrong" computer program is not typical. Well, not unless you're Enderle, but for him it's pretty much his stock in trade. Keep that act up long enough and you're not likely to have huge reserves of public goodwill out there when things go badly for you.
Oh, and there's a point #3, a very simple one. He worked for SCO, and kept working for them long after everyone knew their Linux jihad was nothing but a scam. Surely he had to have known, but he kept touting the company anyway. He seems to have stopped now, or mostly stopped. I assume that's just because Darl & friends can't afford Enderle's services anymore. - Oh, and finally, here's the very latest Darl McBride sighting, taken on Friday shortly after the stock markets closed.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
12/9 SNR
Mmmm, tasty sub-$1 goodness. It's been a long time coming, and we'll see how long it stays, but still, it's a nice way to end the week.
Meanwhile, other stuff just keeps on happening:
Meanwhile, other stuff just keeps on happening:
- Another piece on the MS-NOVL thing: :"Novell screws up big time".
- Another User Friendly about SCO.
- This cartoon isn't specifically SCO-related, but I can see lots of former employees taking this up as a new career.
- ECMA, Microsoft's favorite lapdog standards body, has approved "OpenXML" as a so-called standard. Recall that ECMA is the same group MS used to "standardize" C#.
- A few IBM-related items, the first two contributed by the one-n-only Biff. None are SCO-related, but the last (non-Biff) one at least relates to IP litigation, so it sort of fits here.
- A court case" in Russia.
- Some outsourcing-related job cuts.
- And another court case, this time with IBM suing over someone's Itanium-based zSeries clone.
- On a cheerier note, here's IBM's latest batch of F/OSS-related documents, howtos, tutorials, etc.
- A court case" in Russia.
- Another troll on the boards posted a link to this weird anti-GPL rant. I gather the author likes the words "commies", "fanatics", and "hypocrites" a great deal.
- Another piece on SCO, Novell, SVR4, etc., from a Mac perspective. Some weird ideas here, not the least of which is the notion that SVRx is sleek and fast and non-bloated. Sure. As if. Someone should tell the guy that as a Mac ( == BSD ) partisan, he's not supposed to say anything nice about SysV Unix, ever, especially inaccurate stuff.
- ComputerWorld has a preview of Mac OSX 10.5. And Spymac asserts Macs are gaining increasing enterprise acceptance.
- A question whether the new law-focused OSDL is even necessary.
- Today's new distro you've never heard of: Pioneer Linux.
- Scott Lemon, who was once SCO's "Chief Technologist", has a few recent posts over on on SiliconInvestor's SCOX board.
- Updates on BS&F's Qualcomm and AIG cases, and another piece about the infamous elbowed Picasso incident.
- For some reason, today I had the notion to check out SCO's unofficial stock listings in Germany, where they trade under the symbol CQUA for some reason. Yahoo Germany has a sort of root SCO page where you can find the listings for all of SCO's ticker symbols: SCOX (obviously), CQUA.BE (Berlin-Bremen), CQUA.DE (XETRA trading network), CQUA.F (Frankfurt), and CQUA.SG (Stuttgart). There are even message boards for all of 'em, although nobody's using them right now.
- You can see quotes for the German ticker symbols on US Y! too, although the default search won't find them. Here's the top page for CQUA.DE; the URLs for the other symbols are quite similar. No CQUA forums in English, for some reason, though.
- For completeness, here's the CQUA.DE page at Y! France, as well. More forums, again unused.
- A recent item mentioned ways to run Linux on your Roomba. But why do that when you can buy a robot that runs Linux right out of the box, without any kludging or other assembly required.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
12/7 SNR
Today's steaming pile of SCO-related news:
- BusinessWeek: The street turns on Novell. There's also a less negative SJVN story at eWeek.
- The stock tanked a little more yesterday (12/6). It even touched, but didn't break, the "magic" $1 mark. The ongoing implosion even showed up on today's User Friendly. If you aren't familiar with UF, you're missing out on a great thing, and I may have to revoke your Geek License if you don't go visit right this instant.
- SCO gets a quick mention in the Seattle P-I's regular Microsoft Digest (which I gather is sort of like SNR, except that it's respectable and backed by a major print media outlet and it doesn't have to scour the net and widen the definition of "Microsoft" to a ridiculous degree in order to scare up enough material for a post. So my job here is a lot harder than that "Todd Bishop" guy, and I'm not making a cent off of this stuff.
- Not all the SCO news is bad. At least they finally fixed their website, sort of. So that's something, I guess.
- A short thread about the s/clusters/clustering fiasco over on comp.unix.sco.misc.
- There's also a thread over there on how to upgrade from MS Exchange to sendmail on OSR 5.0.6. No, really. I guess if those were my only two options, I'd at least give it serious consideration. But what a hell of a choice that would be.
- Elsewhere, a wag on novell.community.chat reports on SCO's "Successes" web page, or the lack thereof.
- And a thread on comp.os.linux.advocacy about why Unixware is teh 5ux0r.
- A piece about the recent downsizing at OSDL. I'm not sure what to make of this yet.
- Darl's big brother Kevin has woes of his own. A while back I covered his foray into the patent troll industry. It's not turning out to be the most successful of forays. The ever-relentless Panglozz has the dirt here. Or if you like, just go to the Raging Bull board for Kevin's client, "Affinity Technology Group", and enjoy the show. Seems our very own stats_for_all made a cameo appearance over there recently and cued everyone in on ol' "Wrong Side" McBride.
- FYI: As a number of people have noted, the three-letter-acronym "SNR" can also stand for "Signal to Noise Ratio" and "Supernova Remnant". First, this is not entirely coincidental. Second, it just goes to show that TLAs (three-letter acronyms) are a rapidly diminishing natural resource. Unless we can invent new letters of the alphabet in time, soon all possible TLAs will have been used and reused and abused. And when that happens, our rapacious species won't bat an eye, and we'll move on to the four-letter extended acronyms (FLEAs, or FLXAs, whichever you prefer). Sure, you'll hear the head-in-the-sand crowd argue that there are 26x as many of those, but they're still a limited resource, and they'll be gone too before you know it. And once you're at five-letter ultra-extended acronyms (FLUXAs), you're practically inventing new words. People forget that "laser" started out as an acronym. Ok, well, whatever.
- For your enjoyment, Google Video offers a clip from the halcyon days of SCOForum 2005, back when SCO could still afford a real, live Tina Turner impersonator. That's SCO for you: classy and cultured.
- More retro fun from SCOForum '05, including a candid pic of Darl, "Tina", and friends. The guy sure has a way with the ladies, at least in his own mind...
- This is old, from October '04, but I hadn't seen it before: An actual, barely-retouched photo of Darl McBride and God, together at last, sort of.
- The very latest Tablet Mac and iPhone rumors.
- Esker has a shiny new toy, to go with the mega yacht.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
12/5 SNR
- Another goofy SCO filing in the IBM case. Now they're swearing up and down that they've always had the utmost respect for the GPL, and would never, ever consider breaching the thing, blah, blah, blah. It's funny, I distinctly recall them saying the precise opposite, when that course of action seemed to be the right way to go.
Maybe my age is showing, but I'm reminded of the old Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure game. At one point, you had to teleport into your own brain and remove your remaining particle of common sense, so that you'd be able to possess "tea" and "no tea" at the same time. My guess is that someone on SCO's legal team used to be extremely good at the HHGG game. - A couple of pieces about Friday's new Novell filing. One is a new Bob Mims piece at the Salt Lake Tribune, and there's an unbylined article at CBR, too.
- A new piece at LinuxWorld gives an overview of last week's legal excitement.
- Here's what Novell has to say about yesterday's "forking OpenOffice" story. According to Novell, what they're developing is a plugin to OOo, not a fork, and they think it's the cat's pajamas. They may genuinely believe that, too, but it sure looks like they're being taken for a ride.
- ElReg has a new followup on SCO's ongoing HA Clusters/Clustering clusterfuck. The original article predicted the website error would be fixed momentarily, but it still wasn't fixed as of earlier today. There are actually two "HA Clusters" links on SCO's main page, and as of right now one's ok and one's broken. If you'd like to know all about the wonderful world of HA Clusters, the correct page can be found here -- although if you go there you'll probably be exposed to dangerous top secret methods-n-concepts or something.
I thought the first post was a cheap shot, but the longer this goes on the funnier it gets. - Builder.au ran a piece recently about automatic code generation tools, eliciting a bit of skeptical feedback from one reader. The reader says, in part:
Automatic code generation tools are used in many places and are frequently very useful. A famous example is one of SCO's "proofs" that System V code had found its way into Linux: it was code generated by a code generator from a state machine definition, so of course it looked the same.
This is actually a new one to me. It'd be awfully funny if it's true. Anyone out there got a reference on this? - I mentioned this a few days ago, and sure enough, that Carpinello guy from Boies, Schiller, & Flexner is now an official nominee for the NY State Supreme Court.
- A bit about how to run Linux on your Roomba. Rumor has it SCO's going to offer a competing product in the near future. The OpenServer-based Roomba will be quite similar to the Linux Roomba, except that it may randomly attack its owner without provocation during the full moon.
- On the space shuttle, every New Years Eve is Y2K all over again. Jeepers.
Monday, December 04, 2006
12/4 SNR II
Updated: Hmm. Looks like someone's linked to this page from Groklaw. If this is your first time at SNR, what you're looking at is my ongoing effort to track current events about SCO & related malefactors in the tech universe. These "News Roundups" began over on the Y! board, but Yahoo eventually became intolerable, so I started this thing.
I'm a geek, not a legal type, and this site is not, not, not supposed to be a GL competitor in any way, as if that was even remotely possible. Posts here typically look like the following, with an assorted miscellany of recent news articles, blog posts, Usenet posts, and anything else I (or one of this site's small but merry band of astute readers) come across that looks interesting and seems vaguely related to the subject at hand. Along with the links, I generally toss in a bit of snarky and disagreeable commentary, at no extra charge.
So anyway, hi there, and welcome, etc. The main page for the blog is here, in case you're interested.
Misc. additional stuff for today:
I'm a geek, not a legal type, and this site is not, not, not supposed to be a GL competitor in any way, as if that was even remotely possible. Posts here typically look like the following, with an assorted miscellany of recent news articles, blog posts, Usenet posts, and anything else I (or one of this site's small but merry band of astute readers) come across that looks interesting and seems vaguely related to the subject at hand. Along with the links, I generally toss in a bit of snarky and disagreeable commentary, at no extra charge.
So anyway, hi there, and welcome, etc. The main page for the blog is here, in case you're interested.
Misc. additional stuff for today:
- More stories about Kimball's ruling, etc., from Out-Law and Computing [UK]. Also see this user comment thread on CNet.
- The stock closed at 1.11 today, with an intraday low of 1.05. We haven't seen numbers that low in a long time. I posted on IV earlier today about the intraday low. The 1.11 close is also the lowest since October 11th, 2002. So today was a new 4+ year low, not just a 52-week low.
- With the recent drop in the stock price, SCOX is attracting the usual motley crew of shills, pumpers, and touts, along with their usual prey, penny-ante daytraders. They're on the boards, as usual, and they're also venturing into stock spam. ElCorton researches that particular spammer here, with some interesting results. Seems we in the F/OSS world aren't the only ones who think SCO's headed for the Pink Sheets.
- A post by someone on an MSDN forum who's thinking of buying SCO stock and wants advice.
- GL on Novell "forking" OpenOffice.org. Hmm. I like OOo just the way it is, proprietary file formats not included, but thanks anyway.
- A piece at WebProNews on diagnosing mysterious system lockups, including on SCO boxes.
- That Humorix piece from last week about Microsoft competing with Satan.
- The Register is feeling meanspirited today, noting that SCO's website contains a broken link to its HA Clusters page. Even I think that's kind of a cheap shot -- not that I'm complaining. Somehow, they failed to use the word "clusterfuck" anywhere in the article. I thought that would prove irresistible, but hey, I'm not a journalist, so what do I know?
FWIW, someone's already posted the ElReg story to c.u.s.m. here. - Mostly OT & a bit NSFW: It's a four-way, if you count the lawyers. Clearly Darl & friends should've picked better lawyers, because for SCO the last couple of years have been nothing but uninterrupted Article 20, if you know what I mean.
Friday, December 01, 2006
12/4 SNR
It was an awful week for SCO, which means it was pretty cool for the rest of us. All sorts of fun stuff to cover right now. I ought to have posted most of this on Friday, but I didn't get around to it. Yes, yes, I realize that evil never sleeps. I try to keep up as best I can, but I do have to sleep now and then, plus I have errands to run, and UML diagrams to grind out in RL, and mass quantities of beer to enjoy, and so on, and so forth. So in any case, here's what's happened in our fun little world here since about last Thursday:
- The top story is Novell's new PSJ motion, this time dealing with Novell's contractual right to order SCO to waive its claims against IBM and others. It seems pretty straighforward to me. The way things have dragged on over the last few years, I'm reluctant to call anything a slam dunk anymore, but I don't see any obvious way SCO can defend against this one. Also see Lamlaw. Slashdot story here, if you're curious what the world's dweeby 15-year-olds think of the latest twist. It probably has something to do with Soviet Russia, or Beowulf clusters, or whatever.
- The stock tanking isn't as important a story in the larger scheme of things, but it has one thing the court saga conspicuously lacks: Instant gratification. Watching the stock drop last week was a lot of fun. Sure, they'll probably manipulate it back up over the next week or two, but I expect there was at least some temporary wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments down in SCO HQ, and just imagining that makes me very happy. Some stories about the stock tanking:
- The Register: "SCO shares collapse under weight of ruling"
- Forbes: "Investors Abandon SCO". (And you can read the Freepers' take on the Forbes story here, if you're into that sort of thing.)
- eWeek: "Judge Rules Against SCO; Stock Drops".
- Stock Guru: "SCOX Bombed After Losing Case".
- The Register: "SCO shares collapse under weight of ruling"
- A couple more stories about Kimball's ruling, from Techworld, Bloomberg (via an affiliate), CBR, TechNewsWorld.
- From the blogosphere, Kimball-related posts at Z Trek, Neowin Back Page, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Boycott Novell, Straight out of my skull, & Dr Bill: The Computer Curmudgeon.
- And a topical cartoon at Geek and Poke.
- Meanwhile, the earlier Ars Technica story has been updated to include coverage of the subsequent Wells ruling.
- The SLC Trib's story from a couple of days back quoted a pro-SCO "analyst" named Bill Hughes, who insisted SCO still had a strong case, blah, blah. Keen-eyed readers over on the boards noticed that Hughes was a keynote speaker back at SCOForum '06. I suppose in the tech analyst field, you're considered honest and dependable if you stay bought past the point a normal person would've jumped ship. Hughes features in this amusing piece about long-range analyst forecasts.
- A few more pieces about Vista:
- ZDNet: "Five reasons to love--and hate--Windows Vista". Despite being on ZDNet, seems aimed at non-techies, or at most quasi-techie PHBs.
- InformationWeek: "Vista: Microsoft's Last 'Big Bang' Operating System?"
- PC World: "Vista launch more whimper than bang for businesses"
- The Australian: "Troubling vista for Microsoft".
- ZDNet: "Five reasons to love--and hate--Windows Vista". Despite being on ZDNet, seems aimed at non-techies, or at most quasi-techie PHBs.
- A mini-rant about MS's odd pricing policies in the Netherlands.
- Yet another piece about the MS-Novell deal that mentions SCO in passing. I can't quite tell what the guy's thesis is here, other than that he's not a big fan of the deal.
- Not everyone loves AMD's new QuadFX. The first of those two links is to an ABC News story. It's too bad the word "kludge" hasn't entered the general public's vocabulary; if it had, the QuadFX would be much easier to explain.
- In other AMD-related news, the Feds are expanding their probe about price-fixing and other anticompetitive behavior in the graphics card industry
