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.
By brx0 @ 10:50 AM 
