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.
By brx0 @ 5:09 PM 
Comments:
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Speaking of Ralphie initiatives, it seems his "Hydruga" idea may have hit a small roadblock, namely that someone else already owns Hydruga.com.
It's misspelled, as is Matt Yarro's graphic.
Results 1 - 10 of about 511 for hydruga Did you mean: hydrurga
Results 1 - 10 of about 48,100 for hydrurga
Though hidden behind Domains by Proxy, 5 Thinkatomic portfolio companies were registered May 5 2005
thatsatomic.com
hydrurga.com
facera.com
exoas.com
cleanport80.com
It's misspelled, as is Matt Yarro's graphic.
Results 1 - 10 of about 511 for hydruga Did you mean: hydrurga
Results 1 - 10 of about 48,100 for hydrurga
Though hidden behind Domains by Proxy, 5 Thinkatomic portfolio companies were registered May 5 2005
thatsatomic.com
hydrurga.com
facera.com
exoas.com
cleanport80.com
By 
: 8:02 PM
: 8:02 PM
Regarding the Poofaway patent, those "inventors" are Airclic guys.
See google.com/search?hl=en&q=airclic+anderer
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See google.com/search?hl=en&q=airclic+anderer
By : 8:43 PM
: 8:43 PM<< Home
