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.
By brx0 @ 5:18 PM 
