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!
By brx0 @ 2:16 PM 
