SCO News Roundup: January 2007

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

2/1 SNR

MS is offering a seminar called "Your Future Beyond SCO", which shows you how to migrate to Windows from SCO OSes. I suppose this means the PIPE fairy won't be showing up again anytime soon.

And it gets better: To offer the seminar, MS has partnered with DTR Business Systems, a company SCO recently crowed about as one of their big partners.
They even refer to their segment about Small Business Server as a "Deep Dive". Cheeky, that.
CBR about the 10K: "Has SCO seen the end of the line?"
And if you'd like to watch 15-year-old dweebs try to play financial analyst -- and who doesn't? -- here's Slashdot's piece about the 10K.
El Reg, also on the 10K: "You'll have SCO to kick around for another year". The piece notes in passing that SCO's website is borked again. Someday they'll get the hang of this newfangled Interweb thingy, I'm sure of it.
On the other hand, Netcraft now says SCO's website actually runs on "SCO Unix". Which could mean either UnixWare or OpenServer, I suppose -- and that's assuming the returned server info is accurate. What's more interesting, in my mind, is that SCO's not operating out of an NFT netblock anymore. Here's Netcraft's list of sites within SCO's netblock.
The SL Trib has a brief mention of SCO's big launch party in Russia.
From InfoWorld, via GL: "The demise of Unix is exaggerated". By Unix the article seems to mean traditional big (and non-x86) servers running some os descended from SVRx, which these days essentially means Solaris, HP-UX, & AIX.
Regarding that article, PJ asks If Unix isn't dying, why is SCO?". I have a few theories about that:
- For one thing, if you're shelling out six figures for a big server box, the cost of the OS is negligible (if they charge you separately for it), and the OS comes with the box. With SCO, you're paying potentially thousands of dollars for an OS that runs on cheap commodity hardware. Not a very attractive deal, especially with all the other OS options out there.
- And even if SCO OSes were priced competitively, it doesn't appear that they've been enhanced in any significant way since the early 1990s. It's just been minor dot releases for years and years.
- I actually think their distribution model is obsolete in this day and age, with all these multiple layers of integrators and resellers, most of whom are small mom-and-pop operations that nobody's ever heard of. If you just need more boxes for the server room, and you need them ASAP, most vendors let you buy online. Last time I checked, there wasn't anywhere on SCO's site where you could order a box preloaded with OSR6.
- They don't understand their market, and they don't have a clue about why they keep losing marketshare. They lost lots of ground to Windows even before Linux really took off, and even now they don't seem to have a strategy to compete with MS, even though MS is quite happy to compete against them (see top item.)
Symantec is acquiring ex-Canopy co. Altiris. Sure is funny how having actual products that customers want really helps close the deal, if you're looking to sell the company. And no, Darl, I really don't think HipCheck falls into that category.
A rather idiosyncratic series called "The Linux Project". The author is a newcomer to Linux, and details his experience both good and bad. In 5 parts so far: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. A couple of these posts focus on a distro called "PHLAK" that I've never heard of before.
A piece about Novell's huge new SuSE deal with PSA Peugeot Citroen, the French automaker. This ought to give Esker an aneurysm.
A post arguing that Gentoo doesn't belong on your server. Does anyone actually do that? Gentoo has a nice niche as the distro of choice for bleeding-edge ubergeeks. I don't think the people behind it really intend for you to dump RHEL in favor of Gentoo any time soon. And even if they did, recompiling everything from source is not a generally recognized IT best practice, to put it mildly.
Rumor has it that MySQL AB is headed for an IPO. I mention this because SCO gets a mention, in connection with Caldera's IPO way back when. The MySQL-SCO deal isn't mentioned, nor is the ongoing litigation over the Caldera IPO.
ZDNet UK: "Microsoft's bold march towards open source". Sorry, kids, it's just satire, at least for now.
Today's batch of Vista thrills, chills, and spills:
- BBSpot: Top 11 headlines you won't see on Vista launch day.
- "Theatrics Surround Windows Vista Debut".
- "No Huge Crowds for Vista Launch"
- Kaspersky Labs on Vista security, such as it is.
- Other security folks have similar comments about the new OS. The guy from F-Secure speculates that the OS inside the Xbox 360 is probably more secure than Vista. Ow!
- PC World NZ says "Wait! Don't buy Microsoft Windows Vista"
- The UK's Green Party is concerned that Vista will mean lots of suddenly "obsolete" PCs will be junked in the near future.
- A man-bites-dog story about a Mac user who's switching to Vista. The story comes to us via MSNBC, always your #1 unbiased source for Microsoft news.
- Seems Vista has issues with virtualization. Ok, the EULA has issues with virtualization, as in, you're only supposed to do it with the more expensive versions.
- Be that as it may, here's a bit about running Vista under Parallels on an Intel Mac.
- The fun new Vista security model means that a lot of games don't work anymore.
- LXer: "A dystopian future - looking beyond Windows Vista"
- And here's a fun Vista exploit involving its speech recognition feature. Personally I've always thought speech recognition is useless. It sounds great in theory, and it's a staple in your classic SF movies and TV shows, etc., but in practice it's just a novelty item, and a flaky one at that.
And a few items on the Zune front:
- The VP in charge of the Zune division has "retired" to pursue "personal interests". It's a strange quirk of the modern English language that "pursuing personal interests", and "wanting to spend more time with one's family", generally mean one has screwed up royally.
- Turns out the Zune is prone to screen cracks if you let the battery charge for too long. Yikes!
- But don't worry, Zune fan(s)! The Zune Phone is on the way!
Another BBSpot item, about the feds' new interest in faith-based firewalls.
The UK computer chain PC World will no longer sell floppies. Although as the article notes, MS Word 2k7 still uses floppy as "save file" icon.
LXer on porting KDE to Mac OS X, and Windows too.
Sony settles with the Federal Trade Commission [US] over the recent rootkit debacle.
A New York Times piece on why gamers seem to prefer Nintendo's Wii over Sony's PS3, despite the latter's glitzy graphic abilities and fancy Blu-ray drive.
Some handwringing about creaky old PalmOS.
An OSNews piece on BeOS, part of their continuing "Forgotten Tech" series. Some people lament that it wasn't chosen as the basis for Mac OS X. I have to disagree there. I liked BeOS and everything, but it's good to have a real BSD under the hood.
This is OT, but it may explain a great deal. Seems there's a species of snake that has figured out how to eat poisonous toads & reuse their venom.

By brx0 @ 8:30 AM [permalink]. 1 comments

Saturday, January 27, 2007

1/29 SNR

Woohoo, a new SCO press release! Seems that the all-encompassing suite of super-featureful Me Inc. apps is now available in Russia. Or at least HipCheck is; that's the one they babble on about the most, anyway. The PR insists HP is involved somehow, but doesn't specify exactly how. HP's mentioned in the title, and in the first paragraph, and nowhere else.
Mr. Cringely at InfoWorld insults the world's NASCAR fans by asserting Darl may have a new career in stock car racing.
The ever-relentless Panglozz has figured out that Royce's Micro-Cap fund sold its remaining SCO stock a while back. More here.
If you haven't seen it already, you must, you simply must watch this promo video for Windows/386, circa 1987. As the Inquirer notes, it really gets fun around 7 minutes in, so if you get tired of the corny Mission Impossible crap, feel free to fast forward a bit. When our heroine starts rapping about spreadsheets and databases and such, it's time to stop, watch, rewind, and watch again in amazement. The 80's truly were a dark and primitive time, and Windows 2.x was only a tiny part of it.
Speaking of the 80's, I recently broke down allowed a Microsoft product into my home. My usual policy is to give any MS product at least a quarter century so others can find all its vulnerabilities before I'll let it cross the threshold. In this case it's been only 24 years, so I'm going out on a limb a little here. But I've had the thing for about a month now and it hasn't been pwn3d yet, so I guess that's an encouraging sign.
And while we're on MS, there's a whole passel of Vista stories out there on the interwebs right now, since they're finally launching the damn thing at midnight. I think they're hoping there'll be lines out the door, people desperately waiting to have all their OS dreams fulfilled with tasty Vista goodness. I don't claim to have a finger on the pulse of the non-techie general public, or even most of the techie general public, so I really couldn't guess whether there'll be lines or not. Somewhere there's probably a Wal-Mart with a couple of paper-hat-wearing junior MCSEs out front who've been camped out for the last three weeks without a single shower break (for fear of losing their spot in "line"). That's if security hasn't shooed them away for frightening the other shoppers.

Anyway, here's a selection of Vista coverage.
- The Houston Chronicle asserts people won't be waiting in line for Vista. Which begs the question: Has anyone waited in line to buy Windows at midnight, any version of Windows, since Win95 came out? I don't recall there being lines when XP launched, and XP really was a genuine advance over Win9x.
- ZDNet, on "upgrading" existing hardware to Vista: "Buying Vista? Get a guarantee."
- The Star, on Vista's fine print.
- Ars Technica on the upgrade version of Vista. Seems that MS is now taking a hard line on upgrades, and for the first time the Vista upgrade will absolutely refuse to install unless it finds an existing copy of a previous Windows OS installed. So if your Vista box ever gets so hosed you need to nuke and repave the thing, you'll need to first reinstall the old OS, and then install Vista, assuming you kept the install media for the old OS. Nice! And what could be more convenient?
- Ok, well, at least Daniel Lyons has a few nice words to say about Vista. Although even he says he prefers Macs better, and he'd like to point out all the nice things he's said about Linux over the years, while he's at it.
- This is actually an Office 2k7 item, not a Vista item, but it can be hard to say where Windows ends and Office begins. If you're used to HTML email in Outlook, you're in for a supremely rude surprise in Outlook 2k7. It uses the ultra-lame HTML rendering engine in Word, instead of the one in IE7, so most reasonably complex HTML emails won't be rendered correctly anymore. Now, one might argue that since the Word engine does so much less, it's potentially more secure. Where the IE engine would get confused and hand over the keys to the kingdom, the Word engine will just throw up its hands and not even try. On the other hand, the IE engine has been patched and repatched over the years, much more often than its cousin in Word. The Word engine just hasn't undergone the same trial by fire, so who can really say what its vulnerabilities might be?
- A bit about Vista's DRM & driver signing scheme. The executive summary version is that it's rather less ironclad than MS led everyone to believe. Film at 11.
- And this chilling threat from Steve Ballmer himself: "Vista won't be last client OS from Microsoft".
- On the other hand, the Financial Times argues Vista is the end of an era for M$.
- And in what may signal the shape of things to come, GL covers a new M$ patent regarding modular operating systems. Ok, sure, the basic idea isn't new. And the idea of selling the OS modules separately isn't new either; IBM practically invented the art of unbundling, decades ago. But I've never heard of anyone using DRM to make sure nobody's swiping any precious OS modules. That's new, so far as I know, so maybe BillG's entitled to a software patent on that. I mean, to the degree that anyone is entitled to a software patent on anything, which is highly debatable.
In a non-Vista item, Microsoft's IPTV software has major issues.
Elsewhere, Adobe's decided to make PDF an open standard. Word is they're a bit worried about MS's new "PDF-killer" XPS format, and they'd like the blessing of a standards body, please. Now, recall that the original design goal of PDF was to make it possible for people to share formatted documents without sharing any of Adobe's precious (i.e. "sold separately") Type 1 PostScript font files. Which worked rather well, as it turns out. A lesson here is that if you're going to insist on having an antipiracy scheme, it's best to have one that makes piracy unnecessary.
More on why Apple didn't tie up with Verizon to launch the iPhone.
An NYT piece on lavish birthday bashes among the ultra-rich. Boies's recent 65th b-day gets a quick mention.

By brx0 @ 2:04 PM [permalink]. 0 comments

1/27 SNR

SCO's 2006 10K's out, finally. Edgar has it here.

Groklaw has coverage here, and there's discussion on the boards too. Not a lot of media coverage elsewhere that I've seen, which I guess is one of the nice little benefits to releasing the thing late on a Friday afternoon. Heck, even I was a bit late on the coverage; it was reasonably warm and sunny yesterday, which is really rare for January in Oregon, so I was outside and completely missed the big 10K release party. (What, there wasn't one?)

The unexpected fun bit in the 10K is that the old Caldera IPO shareholder suit may be heating up again. I'm not an expert on how class action suits work, so you'll need to go read the GL coverage if you want to know more about that.

On the downside, the SuSE arbitration thing doesn't happen until December '07. So we should probably stop holding our collective breath waiting for that particular deus ex machina. Oh, well...

By brx0 @ 1:34 PM [permalink]. 0 comments

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

1/26 SNR

The most recent SL Trib story on SCO: "Is SCO's Fate 'All' Up to Judge?"
The MS-Novell deal bears fruit already, in the form of an IT deal with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's moving from Red Hat to SuSE, with a little help from our friends in Redmond. No, seriously.
The latest about Leo Stoller, that trademark troll guy I mentioned a few days ago. Now Google is suing him for racketeering. Heh, heh.
Open source doing great in India.
...and maybe not so great in Brazil.
OnLamp: Inside PC-BSD 1.3. This item would be further down the page, except that SCO gets a quick mention. One of the release engineering teams started out on *nix using SCO Open Desktop (he admits to this rather sheepishly). From there it was a quick jump to Red Hat, and then to FreeBSD after the RH 7.0 fiasco ( including the abomination that was "gcc 2.96" ). Among longtime Linux & BSD users, the SCO thing is probably less unusual than you might expect. People play around with it for a bit, and it dawns on them that Unix on commodity PC hardware is something one can reasonably hope for. But then they see the laughably exorbitant price tag, and there's no way they'll ever be able to justify that kind of money, especially since there's no discount for poor, starving CS students.

People go on and on about how Linus willed his OS into being all on his own, but Linux wouldn't have taken off the way it did if there hadn't been a huge amount of pent-up demand. SCO and the era's other SVRx-on-x86 vendors were asleep at the wheel and totally missed the opportunity, and the rest is history.
The BBC wants to do a head-to-head battle between Linux, Vista, and OSX, and they're looking for devoted users of all 3 OSes. Seems they plan to pick one person from each camp to participate in the battle royal. It's unclear whether this is an online thing, or they're actually doing a TV show. If it's the latter, it's probably not a reality show, at least -- as fun as that might be. I can see it now: Everyone's locked in a house full of TV cameras, or maybe marooned on a tropical island, and every week there's an increasingly difficult tech challenge to perform on your chosen platform. One week there's a bit of system administration, the next you have to cobble something up in Flash, etcetera.

In a shocking omission, the BBC failed to solicit comments from diehard SCO OpenServer users. Possibly because they've never heard of OpenServer.
Andy Tanenbaum comments on making OSes reliable, or "granny-friendly" as he puts it. Seems that one great example of the Right Way in OS design is... (drum roll please) ... his very own Minix 3.0. These comments quickly resulted in Mr. Tanenbaum being chased down the street by angry mobs of Plan 9, GNU/Hurd, and BeOS users.
A piece about the LiMo Foundation, a new industry alliance to promote Linux on mobile phones.
In Linux security news, seems there's a privilege escalation flaw in Trend Micro's antivirus scanner for Linux. And until now I didn't realize you could mark an individual shared library as suid root. I guess that makes sense, but it still seems rather alarming.
The Register has a chuckle about the new Sun-Intel alliance.
If that seems way too vanilla and corporate for you, and you'd prefer something with a bit more of an outside-the-mainstream homebrew feel, how about OpenSolaris on PowerPC? Hmm....
The latest earnings numbers from Microsoft. Earnings up, profits not so much. Oh, and their Zune business unit lost $289M last quarter. Dang.
Fortune reviews Vista and concludes it's an improvement over XP, kinda sorta.
People in Korea have been advised to avoid Vista for now.
A Vista review at the Dallas Morning News advises caution for the time being. It starts out "It's easy to make fun of Windows Vista". Among other things, apparently MS OneCare doesn't quite work with Vista just yet. Ha, ha.
From the same paper, a horror story about signing up for Verizon's FiOS high speed internet service. Seems that not only does it take weeks to get the thing installed, but they disconnect your DSL and landline phone well in advance, so you've got no service at all in the interim. Nice.

From the piece, after he'd finally gotten the service installed and running.

The FiOS digital television signal runs from the same box as the Internet service, though, so once you have one of the services installed, getting the second is pretty straightforward.

But that's like saying that once you've amputated your own feet, giving yourself a pedicure is a breeze.
A fun new undocumented Zune feature: Individual copyright owners can prohibit sharing ("squirting") for individual songs, and Universal & Sony are going to town with this exciting new capability.
But that's OK, really. Gizmodo reports on having lived with a Zune for 3 months. So far, in 3 months they haven't run across any other Zune users to share songs with unsuccessfully.

About the Zune's subscription model for its music store:

Being able to hop online and download as many songs as you want off their library is extremely freeing, in the same sense as walking in your underwear at your in-laws' house and letting one rip.
Symantec on yet another new "zero day" flaw in MS Word.
Boies hasn't been in the news much lately, but there's continuing fallout over that elbowed Picasso we all got to snicker about a while back. It's ended up in court now. Boies isn't involved in the case (that I'm aware of); he's merely a dinner guest (and witness) in this particular story. Oddly, the bumbling fool with the elbows is the plaintiff in the case, and he feels very, very aggrieved. Which just goes to show yet again that we plebes couldn't possibly comprehend all the dreadful problems ultra-rich people have to deal with on a daily basis.
There is one BS&F item to report. In a recently-filed suit, they're helping go after a company called Quixtar, which is apparently some sort of Amway knockoff.
While we're being all higbrow for a moment, here's a news tidbit from a recent gallery opening in NYC. Seems the artist spent a rather large chunk of time in jail for a minor drug offense, and the show is a benefit for efforts to change drug laws in New York. I mention this because of the following passage in the article:

I've been a longtime supporter and admirer of Anthony Papa and his work," said Lawrence Goldfarb, CEO of LRG Capital Group, Baystar Capital. "I am honored to lend my time and energy to support the work of my friend, Anthony, and The Lower Eastside Girls Club."

Mr. Goldfarb and LRG Capital Group will host a reception at the end of the show.
More trouble for the iTunes DRM model, this time in Norway.
A piece about Palamida and the open source compliance sector. This is one of the extremely rare situations where the SCO situation has actually resulted in real, live tech jobs.
From c.u.s.m., in case you're curious, here's how to update your old OpenServer box for the new daylight savings tweakage that takes effect this year (in the US).
Other hot topics on c.u.s.m: users having problems with mysql and samba. at the bottom of the samba thread, someone mentions hearing at SCOForum that some Samba functionality was stubbed out because it wouldn't compile right on OSR5 & 6. Supposedly there's an OSR6 Maintenance Pack due out Real Soon Now to fix that.
Meanwhile, on comp.unix.xenix.sco, a query from a guy who just acquired a copy of Xenix and installed it on a 286 box he had lying around. Now he's looking for the dev tools package for the thing. So if you've got a copy you don't need anymore (which I suppose isn't very unlikely), I expect he'd be happy to take it off your hands. Retrocomputing is usually not very "useful", strictly speaking, but my gut sense is that one wins good karma points for breathing new life into ancient hardware. So be kind to a brother and give the guy a hand, if you can.

Of course, the real problem here is that he's working with an OS from the dark, primitive, bygone era when OSes didn't ship with compilers. Ohhh.... wait....

By brx0 @ 4:55 PM [permalink]. 1 comments

Monday, January 22, 2007

1/23 SNR

Another big SCO v. Novell hearing today, this time about the "constructive trust" thingy. SCO may be in a world of hurt if the motion succeeds. Although we've seen plenty of thing billed as the "last nail in the coffin" over the years, and SCO's still twitching and drooling away, so I'm not going to get my hopes up over this. Not yet, anyway.
In what sure looks like a CYA attempt, Ralphie's trying to ingratiate himself with local Utah politicos, pushing CP80 in the state legislature. I suppose that after the last election the odds of Yarro getting his mandatory-CP80 bill through on the federal level have diminished somewhat, so he's trying it locally instead. And I suppose the notion of the Utah legislature having jurisdiction over the entire Internet is only slightly more silly than the US Congress having such jurisdiction.
While it's not so likely the CP80 bill will make it through Congress, Orrin Hatch was demanding a federal pr0n crackdown last time the AG went before his committee. There's no mention about whether he uttered the phrase "CP80", but unless you've been following the SCO saga, that name probably wouldn't seem all that significant.
Ralphie's really staying busy, it turns out. He's now joined the board of his local chamber of commerce, in his ThinkAtomic persona. Not a word about the SCO thing.
Here's something new: a federal conviction for spamming.
A piece about IBM investing in R&D. What a concept.
ITWire: "The Age of Vista – does the ‘ow’ start now?"
The weird, ongoing tale of the Cisco iPhone and the GPL.
El Reg: "2007: the year of...?", which mentions the SCO suit as a "personal pension plan" for SCO execs. Not a very good pension plan, if you ask me.
A new Tom Yager piece about SCO, which is actually more about the MS-Novell deal.
G'bye OSDL, g'bye FSG, howdy there Linux Foundation.
Linus is in no hurry to replace the 2.6 kernel. Or as Dana Blankenhorn puts it, "There will be no Linux Vista". He argues that not updating your OS constantly may be an advantage. Although if that's true across the board, SCO should be in great shape. They haven't done a significant upgrade for ages.
A troll on the boards linked to this piece about the state of Linux installers.
Reasons why OOXML, the newly "standardized" MS Office 2k7 file format, is teh sux0r. On the other hand, it's bug-compatible with previous Office file formats, which is something you just can't say about the document formats in OOo.
A recent study claimed that datacenters account for 38% of US power consumption. Yikes.
If you really care about saving the world, you could always change your web page's background color. Apparently this makes a difference, at least if you're Google. Golly, and I recently changed this blog's template to make the background whiter. I suppose I ought to feel really guilty now.
In case you're curious, Sun and Intel are friends now. Apparently Sun's x86 boxes were all AMD-based until now. Well, unless you count the old Sun 386i from wayyy back in the Stone Age.
From Slashdot, a bunch of ugly Vista stories.
On Wikipedia, the very latest thrilling hairsplitting IP brouhaha, featuring one or more people you might've heard of before.
ZDNet: "Vista at the tipping point?"

By brx0 @ 10:29 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Friday, January 19, 2007

1/19 SNR II

SL Trib: "SCO takes another hit in its lawsuit against IBM".
Another Dan Goodin piece at El Reg: "SCO faces new setback in IBM case".
Another CC piece at InternetNews, "In Defense of SCO?". The title refers to the weird, sudden appearance of a (purported) Bear Stearns analyst who was all gung-ho about the lawsuits, all of a sudden. I expect Darl's wondering where this guy was back in 2003.
That Blankenhorn guy asks "Are open source obsessions healthy or useful?". Seems he gets a lot more hits when he talks about SCO & Microsoft, and he thinks this is a little pathological. Which I suppose it is, and I suppose I'm contributing to the phenomenon by linking to his piece about it. Oh, well.
An oldie-but-goodie you might have seen before: a Slashdot post about Darl's ignominious days at Franklin-Covey's ill-fated dot-com division.
An announcement about a Linux software suite from Unisys. Just a few short years ago, Unisys was a diehard Microsoft ally, back when they thought Win2k/2k3 Datacenter would help sell some of their way-cool 32+ processor x86 boxes. That would've been great, if Windows had been up to the job. But no. The announcement mentions they're targeting commercial Unix users, specifically including UnixWare. And surprisingly, SCO hasn't sued them yet.
FWIW, a Y! troll posted this comparison of Windows vs. Linux security vulnerabilities.
Is Sun going to relicense Solaris under GPLv3? It's a definite maybe at this point. Until there actually is such a thing as GPLv3, further speculation may be a tad premature.
If you're like me (unlikely), you have a deeply conflicted love/hate relationship with Trusted Solaris. The security model is simple and elegant, but using the thing in practice fills you with total, unreasonable anger. Sun's trying to integrate this weird branch of Solaris into the mainstream OS, but they're running into a few snags on the way.
HP-UX 11i v3 is getting ready to launch, supporting both Itanium and the older PA-RISC platforms. Recall that OldSCO & HP briefly partnered up to port SVRx to Itanium way back in the late 90's, in a project with the weird codename of "Summit 3D". When that deal fell through, Project Monterey with IBM was SCO's backup choice, and then that fell through, too. And the Itanium itself hasn't been doing that well in the marketplace either, come to think of it. OldSCO bet on the wrong horse over 10 years ago, and NewSCO is still dealing with the ugly aftermath. Holy inflexible business model, Batman!
You probably don't care about HP's wierd and unfriendly NonStop OS (which they got from Tandem, via Compaq), but your bank and stock exchange do. FWIW, HP's NonStop group is making a big foray into data warehousing. Yes, yes, I know you're yawning, etc. I only mention this because I almost got roped into porting a Unix app to the Tandem NonStop OS some years ago, and the project got just far enough for me to regard the prospect with great fear and loathing. On the other hand, the NonStop platform is reputed to be extremely reliable, which is something, certainly.
A company in Spain has announced Linux+Solaris codecs for various Window Media formats. So now you can finally migrate your gigantic pr0n collection to your Linux box. Or, alternately, use it for something boring and respectable.
From a couple of days ago, a SearchOpenSource piece titled "IP attorney: Bankrupt or not, SCO case is 'boring'". Speak for yourself, buddy. This baby is like "Days of Our Lives" for nerds. I have this cynical feeling that when a lawyer says a case is boring, it's because he isn't getting paid to work on it. If money starts coming in, suddenly, magically, the case isn't boring anymore.
From TechNewsWorld, "Linux and Open Source: One Step Closer to the Mainstream". I've been seeing this headline for years now. Reaching the "mainstream" is starting to seem annoyingly asymptotic.
New from Motorola, and actual Linux phone for the US market. The big deal here is that it apparently contains a Linux port of Windows Media Player. And all this time MS said it would be impossible. Feh.
Also in the mobile arena, word is that the other iPhone, the one from Cisco, is a GPL violator. You'd think they'd have learned how to play by the rules by now, after their Linksys troubles and whatnot.

By brx0 @ 3:59 PM [permalink]. 0 comments

1/19 SNR

More on SCO's ugly, ugly financials
- ITJungle says SCO's bleeding red ink
- CBR: SCO denies its demise is imminent
- CNET: SCO revenue, income continue to drop
The ever-relentless Panglozz has discovered that back in August '05, Ralph Yarro transferred a pile of real estate to his wife's name. Now, I suppose there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for that, like maybe it was a birthday present or something. But it sure smells like an attempt to shield assets, maybe from IBM, maybe Novell, maybe even Canopy. This could get interesting, if anyone decides to go after these "shielded" assets.
Another ruling yesterday in the IBM case. Wells ruled that contrary to SCO's allegations, IBM didn't destroy any evidence. No surprise there. She also said that IBM can't ask Mr. Leitzinger about his source(s) of income at the moment, but this doesn't bar them from cross-examining him about it at trial, if the case gets to trial. So a couple of mildly interesting side issues have been resolved now. This has gotten a bit of coverage:
- Groklaw has all the gory details, naturally.
- Forbes(!): New Blow to SCO
- Inquirer: SCO gets another kick in the teeth
Computerworld on SCO's ongoing Unix plans -- although the body of article just has Darl saying they "remain committed", which is CEO-ese for "I don't want to talk about it".
Sort of OT, but check out the sleek new LG Prada phone. Looks kind of like an iPhone, except it's actually for sale right now. Oh, except in the US of course. But we're used to that.
A piece about Novell's new Vista vs. Linux site. The best part is that they base it around Didio's old bugbear, TCO (or Total Cost of Ownership). Come to think of it, she hasn't said a word about that for quite a while now. Must've quietly dropped off the list of Redmond-approved talking points, or something.
Pieces about the recent Me Inc. in India PR, from TechWhack and CommsDesign.
Computer Weekly says Linux is now a "hot skill". No, this is not a 1999 article. Some people just catch on a little slower than others, I guess.

By brx0 @ 8:56 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Thursday, January 18, 2007

1/18 SNR II

Here's the latest batch of articles about SCO's Q4 financials. In brief, more losses, more layoffs, no announcement about moving the office. Darl admitted the financial situation over the last few years has been "not a real pretty picture". Well, duh.

So anyway, here's the coverage so far:

ZDNet: "SCO's financial situation worsens"
ITPro: "SCO revenue drops on Unix competition"
Salt Lake Tribune: "Lindon's SCO Group cuts jobs as revenues decline"
Groklaw: "SCO Loses More Money - Darl: 'It's not a real pretty picture.'"
Techworld: "McBride fiddles as SCO burns"
InternetNews: "SCO Loses Revenue and Employees"
LinuxWorld: "The SCO Group continues its downward slide"
VirtualLinux.org: "SCO punts on Novell bankruptcy claim"

By brx0 @ 10:52 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

1/18 SNR: CC edition

Ok, not enough material for a proper SNR post yet, but here's some mostly CC stuff to tide everyone over.

So SCO had their CC today, and their latest batch of ugly numbers is here

El Reg already has an unflattering piece up about the call

And a Techworld story about SCO v. Novell, dated January 17th, but which reads like it's older. I mention this because it ends with this great line: "SCO spokesman Blake Stowell denies that SCO is in dire straits." That's why he makes the big bucks, I guess.

By brx0 @ 3:14 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Saturday, January 13, 2007

1/17 SNR

Ok, the big news is SCO's long-awaited conference call scheduled for this afternoon. They still have a few hours to back out of it, so I won't believe it until I hear it. But it ought to be a real barrel of laughs if they have the guts to go through with it.

A few thrilling items to tide everyone over until the aforementioned blessed event. I've been accumulating these for a couple days and really ought to have posted them yesterday, but it snowed in Portland (somewhat unusual) and I was busy with other stuff. I have a few winter photos here if you're interested. Anyway:

SCO's announced the formation of Me Inc. India. Once again seriously downplaying the SCO name, which is certainly understandable. But it's also a bit sneaky and underhanded; customers ought to have that bit of information before deciding whether to enter into a contractual relationship with the company.
Also on the Me Inc. front, an IV post by hamjudo2000 linking to reviews and comments about "Shout Postcard", plus an actual photo of SCO's CES booth.
A reseller news site in NZ says SCO's on its last legs.
On GL, the recent big batch of filings in SCO v. IBM. Mostly mundane stuff, but #930 makes some rather inflammatory remarks about Linus. Like he's really going to care about anything SCO says about him. Yeah, right.
An irritating trademark troll gets squished by the Federal court system.
As mentioned previously, HD-DVD DRM has apparently been pwn3d. The latest here, and some interesting comments about how the DRM scheme works here.
The exciting new "Ribbon" user interface in MS Office 2007 is getting decidedly mixed reviews. This month's MSDN Magazine has a developer's guide to the fancy-schmancy new RibbonX api. All this fuss, and it's still a bunch of buttons and toolbars. As far as I can tell, the main point of the UI makover is so that Office 2k7 looks less like OpenOffice. MS, predatory monopolist that it is, has some sort of licensing program for the Ribbon UI "look and feel" that tries to specifically prohibit you from making competing products with a similar UI. In a rational world there'd be no danger of this happening, but there's an odd tendency in the F/OSS community to try to clone the look of Microsoft products, down to every quirk and annoying tic, so that (for example) KDE and Gnome both have "start menus" in the same place on screen that Windows does. I don't really understand the rationale behind this tendency, and maybe if MS gets sufficiently nasty and proprietary about this latest UI stuff, the F/OSS world will finally reconsider.
Even more iPhone stuff:
- NY Times: iPhone -> iHandcuffs.
- More bashing at the other Times (London, not L.A., I mean), and Bloomberg
- A writer at the Business Standard (a business paper in India) is skeptical about over-featureful smartphones, based on his unhappy experiences with an Ericsson p910.
- And on the otherhand, a fanboi-ish post that tries to dispel 10 iPhone myths.
- A pile of iPhone & Mac stories on Slashdot.
  more iphone + mac stories:
- Oh, and here's the inevitable Enderle piece about the iPhone. Not quite as negative as I expected, although he makes the surreal suggestion that Apple must've swiped some precious (but unspecified) Linux IP to get the phone out so fast. He's got no actual evidence to back that up, but in his mind it just stands to reason. Sure, whatever.
This isn't exactly new, but here's a piece about Alan Cox's DRM patent application.
MS stands accused of using undocumented APIs in its products. Well, duh!
More proof the UK's House of Lords is useless: They're taking security advice from Microsoft.
Get your free Solaris 10 media while it's hot. If you're interested, I mean.
An intriguing, upcoming academic paper about short selling, arguing that shorts often identify corporate misconduct before regulators do. I wouldn't be surprised if SCO eventually provides yet another data point to support the paper's thesis. (And in case I haven't mentioned this before, I have no money riding on SCO's stock, either short or long, and I haven't in the past, and won't in the future.)

By brx0 @ 11:58 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

1/13 SNR

You can't count on SCO for much, but they usually manage to do something interesting right when I'm in the middle of a cold. So here's what's going on in the SCO universe these days -- and if the post isn't up to my usual standards of wit and wisdom, you can blame the Benadryl. If it is up to my usual standards, there's only me to blame. Well, whatever. Here's the dirt:

SCO's filed a weird new 8K, actually a nice, cozy, optimistic personal note from Darl to SCO's remaining partner(s) and friend(s). It's not clear to me why they filed this with the SEC, unless the true intended audience is someone other than the alleged addressees. Someone like, oh, I dunno, the SEC, or certain federal judges, or the PIPE fairy. Just as random examples off the top of my head, I mean. Possibly our old friend the "safe harbor" provision makes it safer to do it this way. A thing that would be a baldfaced lie when told directly to a reporter is merely a "forward looking statement" when stated in an 8K filing.

The letter appears to be in response to the "imminent bankruptcy" story from a few days ago. The story got a surprising amount of play, considering it was just Novell saying some mean things about SCO's finances, and nothing material has actually occurred. But it got a lot of play, and SCO apparently felt this couldn't wait until the CC on the 17th. SCO's been maintaining strict radio silence for months now, and there's been nothing but rumor and innuendo about what's going on at the company these days. Maybe they're starting to realize that radio silence in the face of vocal opposition wasn't such a super-genius plan after all. I guess that would be a useful, if sadly belated, lesson, insofar as they're capable of learning from past mistakes.
As for that Novell story, a few more stories to cover:
- SJVN's take on the story.
- Lamlaw on same.
- The Register, likewise.
- A blog post about the latest excitement.
- The AntiBrokers ask "How much time does SCO have left?". Their graphs suggest about 6 months.
Don't think I've forgotten the thrilling new Me Inc. whatzit they announced for CES. Here's some fresh Me Inc. PR from India. Which for some reason contains the immortal lines:

MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "maildirect.qlc.co.in" claiming to be www.me-inc.com.
MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "maildirect.qlc.co.in" claiming to be www.shoutpostcard.com

So they're resorting to spam to advertise their spamming service. I guess that's consistent, if nothing else.
Here's an actual technical article mentioning SCO Unix. It talks about writing Mesa 3D graphics drivers for advanced, custom video cards for a DOD project. Of course this was like 10 years ago, and the piece has a distinct tone of reminiscing about the old days.
An ex-SCO employee about the mess that is NewSCO.
Elsewhere on the court front, SCO's asking for a do-over on the recent "final" deadline for expert reports and such.
Ask Technologies, the folks who brought you the big Me Inc corporate rollout at Musco Foods (you remember that, right?) has gone global. Not with Me Inc., silly, with some sort of SCO-based system clone/backup tool, to help out a cement company in the Netherlands. No mention of Me Inc. in there at all, actually, and I'm sure you're just as shocked as I am about that.
The Inquirer has a fluffy puff piece about SCO BOD member Ed Iacobucci. Ignorant observers might assume Dayjet is an aviation company, since that's basically what they do, but he sets us straight:

Dayjet, he says, is "an intellectual property company." But there's no way to pirate the software by distributing millions of unauthorised copies. "The whole notion of vertically integrated systems that provide differentiated value in some unique way is really where a lot of the next round of successful start-ups will be."

This doesn't necessarily mean that new frivolous lawsuits are on the horizon, but then again it might.
He's not the only SCO BOD member who's keeping busy. According to a blurb for a recent seminar at the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum, "Dr." J. Kent Millington "recently returned from teaching at the University of Science and Technology in Heifi, China". I suppose it's possible, in theory, that he could be providing close oversight of SCO management on the shareholders' behalf at that distance, because that's what BOD members are supposed to do. I'm certainly not suggesting that SCO doesn't have its BOD members' full attention, and I certainly wouldn't want to imply that's why they were selected for the job in the first place. Oh, no, I certainly wouldn't want to do that.
A piece about a patent troll outfit called "Fenner Investments". Seems they think that they own precious IP connected with game console joysticks, so they're suing all the big game console companies. The second link compares them to SCO.
Patent trolls suffered a blow recently, when the US Supreme Court ruled you still have standing to challenge the validity of a patent even if you'd previously been bullied into paying royalties.
Want to see some more of SCO's precious super-secret proprietary methods & concepts? You know, stuff they didn't invent and don't use in their own products but want to control anyway. The O'Reilly book "Linux Kernel in a Nutshell" has now been released as a free download under a Creative Commons license. Read it, if you dare.
Acrobat Reader 7.09 for Linux, Solaris (Sparc), & HP-UX is now available. There's an AIX version of Acrobat Reader too, but it's not clear if it's been updated as well. No word on any ETA for an OpenServer or UnixWare version, so it's best not to hold your breath.
Learn Linux programming with a series of simple Flash-based tutorials. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I suppose it's high time Flash was useful for something.

Meanwhile, the OpenServer tutorials now come packaged as a set of tastefully inscribed papyrus scrolls, suitable for framing. if you've ever wanted to know what the hieroglyph for "file frivolous lawsuit" looks like, now's your chance. A spokesman described the papyri as similar to the existing cave-painting-based format, with added portability for today's busy on-the-go lifestyle.
We just met Microsoft's "Home Server" product, now meet the "Sync" OS for cars. This kind of announcement is a real problem, since the cheap shots basically write themselves. Some combination of "Windows" "cars" and "crashing", or possibly "virus". I'm dealing with a virus of my own at the moment, so let's just pretend that I've come up with a clever new cheap shot about this and take it from there. My actual point with this is that the Windows-in-your-car idea is not new, not even close to new. Some years ago they tried something they called AutoPC, which was just a headless form of Windows CE. I don't think it ever came preinstalled in anyone's car, but it briefly showed up in a handful of car stereos, IIRC. The MS way tends to be to keep retrying a poorly-executed idea long after everyone else has written it off, in the hope that they'll eventually come up with something the public won't reject. WinCE itself has gone through a long series of unsatisfying upgrades, and has found a niche as a mobile phone OS. I don't know anyone who actually likes it, but it syncs with Outlook reasonably well, and kinda supports most Office document formats, sorta, which makes it Good Enough. WebTV didn't pan out in the end, but look how long MS stuck with it, long after the public abandoned the thing. And I don't think we've seen the last of Windows-on-your-TV. Some people have predicted the demise of Zune in 2007, but past history suggests we'll see a Zune 2.0 instead. And a 3.0 soon if 2.0 doesn't take off.

In related news, it's reported SCO's working on a competing product that targets "them newfangled horseless carriages", with advanced compass-and-sextant-based navigation, and a media player compatible with most major wax cylinder formats. The purchase price includes a free BuggyWhipSource license, which permits you to use SCO's advanced, proprietary methods of motivating the horses you don't have.
Still, Zune schadenfreude is fun. Here's a piece calling it Microsoft's new paperweight.
A CES day 3 report at core77.
CES is one of two concurrent trade shows in Vegas. Gizmodo has a brief comparison of the two. You'll never look at a Bluetooth headset the same way again.
Bloggers gone wild about the iPhone. Inexplicably, this blog is not mentioned anywhere. Maybe I didn't go wild enough or something. I'm keeping my blogowildness in check for the time being, until I find out whether the thing runs Emacs or not. Besides, I'm stuck with my Blackberry for the time being. And I'm quite happy with my Blackberry, honestly, but that iPhone sure is purty.
Another iPhone piece at InternetNews
Steve Jobs gets in a fun cheap shot about Jim Allchin's recent Mac comments.
A list of unanswered questions about the iPhone.

Word is that iPhones will be locked down and you can't add your own apps. It's not clear whether they'll actually run existing OSX apps anyway; Steve said it ran OSX, but didn't say what kind of CPU it has. The OS itself is highly portable; it started out as NeXTStep on Motorola 680x0 hardware, then went to x86, then was ported to at least Sparc and PA-RISC, then moved to PowerPC after the Apple buyout, and now it's back on x86 again. Which isn't that unusual, really. Windows NT-based OSes have run on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium architectures at various times, and I heard once there was a PA-RISC variant that never hit the market, too. Solaris runs on x86 and Sparc, and there was a brief PowerPC foray in the Solaris 2.5.1 days. Besides the POWER architecture, AIX has run on x86 and mainframe systems in the past, and briefly ran on Itanium during the infamous Project Monterey. And Linux runs on just about anything, and if it doesn't, NetBSD probably does. Everybody seems to manage the porting trick except for SCO. They'd rather just sue people.
Microsoft expresses its frustration that PC vendors are allowed to preinstall whatever they want on a Vista box, because of those awful, awful antitrust regulators. They do have a point, sort of; they call these programs "craplets", although a lot of people call them "shovelware", but whatever the terminology, preinstalled software tends to be lacking in both quality and features -- well, at least that's true if you're on Windows, anyway. But their proposed alternative is to give the convicted predatory monopolist more power. Um, no thanks. If a box comes with awful, buggy shovelware, I can simply delete it, or ignore it.
An amusing LKML thread wherein Linus talks trash about the O_DIRECT flag for file I/O. And it sure would be nice if Linux doesn't need something like this, because direct I/O is a real pain. OTOH, engineers working on at least one *Nix OS told me that it was essential if you wanted to improve disk I/O performance on their OS, and timing tests I ran bore that out. So I think the jury's still out on this one.
An argument, apparently, that windows will turn into linux, or vice versa.
Your retrocomputing fun for the day: Someone wants to update SCO Unix 2.1.3 for the recent daylight savings time changes. By that name I think they may mean either UnixWare 2.1.3 circa 1995, or Xenix 2.1.3 from 1987. If you're in that sort of tight spot, good luck! You'll need it.
The latest spy scare, this time involving microchipped Canadian money. Supposedly. Yikes, eh.
For the geek contingent: What's wrong with Make.
And: Is this the best compiler error ever? I just report, you decide.

By brx0 @ 12:29 PM [permalink]. 0 comments

1/10 SNR

In the lastest SCO v. Novell filing, Novell asserts that a SCO bankruptcy is both "inevitable" and "imminent", and they ask the judge to please order SCO to fork over all that money they got from M$ and Sun a couple of years back. GL has the story here, and Slashdot picks it up here. Another story at InformationWeek. Even DailyKos has a diary piece here. Then there are a couple of opinion pieces, from InternetNews and Dana Blankenhorn, the latter including a nice vintage still of Bela Lugosi, from Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Which is actually a fun movie if you're into old monster flicks, btw.

I should point out that, while it's enjoyable to hear the things Novell's saying, nothing has actually happened yet. Until there's a ruling on the money, it's all just words. And while the latest words are quite blunt, Novell's said essentially the same thing in previous filings, including (a couple of months ago) an in-depth explanation of exactly why SCO's own numbers prove they're doomed. So today was not the end, and not even the beginning of the end. And I expect the true beginning of the beginning of the end has already happened. So maybe this is about chapter 3 of the beginning of the end.

(And to continue the monster movie theme, you might enjoy The Beginning of the End, in which giant grasshoppers attack Chicago. Or you might not.)
In the day's other exciting news, Apple's shiny new iPhone is out. This is the "real" iPhone, not that pretender from Linksys/Cisco. Pics here. Apparently the thing actually runs OS X inside. OS X is a BSD, and SCO's occasionally claimed it owns BSD-based OSes. This is where I'd usually make a wisecrack about people who buy product X also needing to buy a $699 SCOSource license -- although I think that joke is starting to wear a little thin. I do sort of wonder if those super-exciting, mega-advanced Me Inc. apps will ever be ported to the thing. That would be fairly amusing to see.

Not everybody loves the iPhone, though. A columnist at The Register "explained" several weeks ago why the iPhone is absolutely guaranteed to be a disaster of incredible proportions. And I can only imagine the angry, drunken rant we're about to see from Enderle about it.

Oh, and Greenpeace crashed the party, for reasons of their own.
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Linux invades the CES show.
Also at CES, the debut of "Windows Home Server", although not everyone is impressed.
Again from CES, Sony has a new 82-freakin'-inch LCD TV. In their words: "You don't need a wall to hang it on, it is the wall." This sounds more than a bit excessive to me, quite honestly, but I liked the quote.
Via one of the message board trolls, a piece about vendor lock-in in the world of accounting software. If anyone tries to tell you that .NET is somehow a cross-platform technology, point them at this article.
A weird new WIPO proposal that would give broadcasters broad IP rights to the stuff they carry, even though they didn't create it. Great. Just great.
Because CES is a.) in Las Vegas, and b.) filled with hordes of male geeks, it was inevitable someone would post a "booth babe" gallery. Sadly, no photos in said gallery from the grand Me Inc. ("please don't ask us if we're SCO") booth. We can all speculate and make crude remarks about what SCO spokesmodels would be like. Personally, I suspect that as a money-saving measure, they'd just have a few SCO execs there in drag, greeting everyone with a hearty "Hello Sailor" and inviting them to get familiar with SCO's viral IP. But hey, that's just my theory.

By brx0 @ 12:34 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Monday, January 08, 2007

1/8 SNR

The big news is that SCO's finally announced a CC, currently scheduled for January 17th. I wasn't sure this would ever happen, and it technically still hasn't happened, I guess, but at least we've got a specific date on the calendar now. My sense is that after all the anticipation, the CC itself will be anticlimactic. The numbers will be ugly, as usual, and after that they'll only take questions about Me Inc., which nobody cares about. Cue crickets.wav, etc.
Here's the SLC Trib's take on the CC announcement.
Today's other press release concerns the latest thrilling, cutting edge SCO product, "Shout Postcard". Which is your basic "Shout" app, but now it can send images too. Woweee!!! Think of it as SCO's bold step into the brave new world of the 1990s. One interesting thing is that today's PR once again refers to the ever-impending release of DT4, the co-branded Daytimer app they keep promising to an expectant world.

One fun thing is the Shout Postcard EULA, which basically begs you, repeatedly, not to use the app to send out image spam. If they have to lecture you in the EULA, that suggests the app itself contains no controls to prevent its being abused in this way. This ought to be interesting.
Remember how I said SCO didn't appear on the CES exhibitor list? Turns out they registered simply as Me Inc, as if that was the company's name. No mention of SCO anywhere. Which I guess is a rational decision from a marketing perspective, since "SCO" is about the most poisonous brand imaginable in the tech industry. But trying to slink into CES under a pseudonym, hoping nobody will notice... That just looks sneaky, not clever.
NYT on the plague of Windows botnets.
On GL: Bryan Sparks (now of Solera fame) on Caldera & Linux back in the day.
Here's a surprisingly readable piece about SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) and embedded real-time programming in Linux. I mention this because the article dares to discuss -- in public, no less -- how RCU works. So here's your golden opportunity to see one of SCO's precious super-secret methods & concepts. If you dare.
Some handwringing about the Gates Foundation.
The founder of Amaranth Advisors, the recently-cratered hedge fund, plans to climb back in the saddle, and continue on his merry way as if he hadn't just lost $6.4B of his investors' money. Naturally, Boies is his lawyer.
2007: Year of the Penguin?
The Linux-based Nokia 800, the long-rumored successor to the Nokia 770 webpad gizmo, is on sale now. It hasn't been officially launched, but they'll sell you one anyway, if you can find one. Just don't get ahead of me in line, or there may be trouble. Of course, the thing sells for $399, but you'll also need one of those nifty $699 SCOSource licenses if you don't want SCO to sue you. Sure, the N800's kernel isn't going to include stuff like RCU, NUMA, big iron stuff like that, but you still owe SCO nearly double the device's purchase price, just because.
A report about record job losses among US CEOs.
Rumor: An 8-core MacPro is on the way, Real Soon Now. No "Beowulf cluster" comments, please. Thx. Mgmt.
Gartner: Vista isn't done yet. But something tells me that when Service Pack 2 rolls around, the MS shills at Gartner wil be dancing with glee like it was the second coming or something.
Now here's a useful resource: A 3rd party archive of SCO press releases, dating back to when they changed their name from Caldera. The Caldera ones are probably in the system somewhere too, but nobody's found them yet.
The latest FUD from "Paul Murphy" (not his real name). It's more of his usual incomprehensible word salad, so you won't learn anything useful by following that link. You might've noticed I've added his ZDNet blog to the Pro-SCO grouping in the sidebar, but it'd be more accurate to call him the world's angriest, nuttiest Solaris bigot. Don't get me wrong, I like Solaris. I have a Sun box at home, fer chrissakes. But this guy's really out there.
Oh, and here's that Ralphie sighting I posted on IV earlier. Clearly, he's back in "to our utter destruction" mode again.

By brx0 @ 9:31 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Friday, January 05, 2007

1/5 SNR

Stop the presses! A brand new SCO press release has been spotted in the wild! While the existence of a new press release is sort of a big deal these days, the content of the PR is a bit underwhelming. They're pleased as punch to announce this new deal where Team1 Systems will sell you "white box" hardware with SCO Unix installed. Well, "you" if you're a SCO reseller, not just some schmoe off the street. If you're a schmoe off the street, talk to your friendly neighborhood SCO reseller, and they can go buy a Team1 SCO box on your behalf and then resell it to you. It may sound complicated to the uninitiated, but that's just how SCO's distribution model works, for whatever reason.

Team1 is an existing partner, and the "white box" thing is an existing SCO program that started up with other vendors back in May '05. So nothing all that new here. And the whole thing's moot if nobody buys any boxes, of course.

More about the deal in this Y! post by span1sh1nqu1s1t1on.
I wouldn't quite call this "media coverage", but SCO's latest PR merits a small blurb here.
The Mozilla Corp. (not to be confused with the Mozilla Foundation), took in $52.9M last year. Which, as the article points out, is more than SCO managed.
A /. story about modernizing the COBOL language got a user comment mentioning a commercial IDE for that language. Contrary to popular belief, you don't program by clicking on "virtual punchcards" or anything. Or if you do, the docs carefully avoid disclosing the fact. I mention all this because the product does run on SCO OSes, or as the commenter puts it SCO (yeah, yeah, I know). But get it while you can; the vendor's website says they're dropping SCO support in the next release, due the middle of this year. Dumped by a COBOL vendor. Ouch.
Griping about the practices of a company called Spam Arrest. The company has an unusual approach to stopping Spam: If you send mail to a Spam Arrest customer, and you aren't on that customer's whitelist, the mail will only be delivered if you agree to a fairly harsh set of "terms of service". SCO gets a mention towards the bottom of the article:

Spam Arrest is the only third party white-list vendor that I ever receive gripes about, and it's now always due to its very objectionable sender agreement. It's hard to understand why Spam Arrest believes such overreaching terms are necessary in its business unless it does plan an SCO-like move into litigation as a main source of revenue.

I actually think that's kind of an unfair analogy. SCO is a legal and financial scam, while the worst Spam Arrest has done is emit a bunch of irritating legalese. The piece's author seems to have a bug in his bonnet about Spam Arrest, and I think he's calling them "SCO-like" partly because everyone knows that's a major insult. In the tech industry, you can't get much worse than that without breaking Godwin's Law.
A highly amusing bit about bizarro patents. Seems the "artificial anus" has already been patented. Tough shakes, Darl. Keep it up and you'll owe Shosaburo Abe & friends a lot of money.

At least the diagrams are reasonably tasteful, considering the circumstances.
Three more articles about the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war. You might wonder why this is relevant on a blog that's supposed to be about SCO, since it's not likely that any SCO OS will support either format anytime soon. Well, it does touch on a number of related issues: DRM, standards, proprietary formats, litigious copyright holders, vendor lock-in, stuff like that, so it seems sort of relevant. Plus, if I stuck to the SCO theme too strictly I usually wouldn't have enough material for a post, most days.
Notes on the upcoming "iTV" from Apple. Hmm.
"9 Tools Every Technician Should Have". Among them, besides the usual stuff (extra cables, anti-static bags, air-in-a-can): A Knoppix CD (although I imagine Ubuntu would work too). So I guess if you tally up the number of IT people and anyone else who might be tinkering with hardware at all, and multiply by $699, that's a huge pile of potential SCOSource revenue right there. Or not.
Oh, and Happy Stevemas, one and all! Or not, if that's not your bag. I try to keep things pretty ecumenical here at SNR. Well, with one obvious exception, of course.

By brx0 @ 8:40 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Thursday, January 04, 2007

1/4 SNR

The very last day SCO can file its 10-K and not be delinquent is January 29th. And the clock is ticking...
Is Novell looking to buy XenSource? ( article mentions SCO)
A piece about MySQL (the company). The recent partnership with SCO is mentioned as a black mark on the company's reputation.
The former president & COO of Realm Systems (Anderer's old outfit) has moved on, and is now doing entertainment law. As opposed to "law as entertainment", which is what SCO practices.
Jonathan Cohen's TICC outfit is paying dividends now. TICC is completely separate from Cohen's investment in SCO, if I recall correctly, which is probably why they have the money to pay dividends.
The geniuses at Gartner think it's Linux vs. OS X for the non-Windows part of the desktop market, with Macs squeezing out Linux over time.
But meanwhile, other analysts see a surge in Linux deployments over the next year.
What's rarer than a SCO-related product announcement? A vulnerability in OpenBSD. Don't panic, though; it's only a local 'sploit, and you need your kernel configured just so for it to be possible.
From ServerWatch, an overview of enterprise Unix in 2006. The article mentions the demise of IRIX, and discusses the uncertain future prospects for AIX & HP-UX, but not a word is said about SCO's OSes. Being called an also-ran is one thing, but falling off the radar entirely... Ouch.
...and if you care, a piece about the mainframe universe in 2006.
HP's pages about supported OSes includes this page about their residual partnership with SCO.
SCO's events page lists four trade shows, 3 recent and 1 upcoming. Note that the link to the CES show is broken. Of the four shows listed:
- The MobileOffice.fr show site doesn't list SCO as an exhibitor.
- Neither does the World of Mobility show's site.
- The PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) had a conference in SLC in November but already info about conf is mostly expunged from their site. So maybe SCO was listed once, and maybe they weren't.
- And (you may notice a pattern developing here) the Consumer Electronics Show also doesn't mention SCO either.
A bit about using Linux grids to emulate old mainframes, Cobol, PL/I, the whole works.
An oldie from Daemon News: "Memoirs of a Unix Bigot".
A marketing article on "asymmetries" in the IT market. According to the article the Superpowers are taking over, conquering or co-opting everything in their path, and the little guy have no chance.
What's new on Linux: ext4 and Samba 4.
The Inquirer: "Time for the Wintel Endgame". I'm not holding my breath about that, especially the Intel part. The author's well within his rights to raise aesthetic objections to the x86 instruction set, but when was the last time you had to do significant work in assembly code? I haven't for close to 10 years now, and I've never missed it for a moment.
A peek at the software side of the OLPC, better known as the $100 laptop project
An interview with Jeremy Allison @ RedHerring.
Enderle's still shilling those Forrester iTunes numbers. He can't ever give up on an attractive factoid, whether it's technically "true" or not. He probably thinks Saddam's still hiding those pesky WMDs, too.
On the heels of the Ferrari laptop debacle, the trade press delivers an ethics lecture to those pesky bloggers.
On IV, some vintage Caldera & OldSCO PR.
A collection of MS parody videos.
Two pieces about the botch that is EnchantedOffice.
Plus an eWeek piece that describes Office 2007 as "off-putting".
For those who weren't marking their calendars, IE6 was in a known vulnerable state for most of 2006.
LG has a combo HD-DVD & Blu-Ray player on the way. Yay!

By brx0 @ 9:43 AM [permalink]. 0 comments

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/3 SNR

MOG has a new subscriber(s)-only article titled "SCO May Be Warming Up To Get the Judge Recused". I'm not a subscriber, so I don't know the precise details of what she's on about, but in the past she's had a direct line to SCO management, so this is probably not just a rumor out of left field. Threads speculating about the story on Y! and IV. I doubt they have a realistic chance of anything, but it may help them drag this circus out even longer -- although I'm not sure why they're bothering at this point.
Some interesting research from Panglozz about SCO's friends at Morgan Keegan, and their ongoing preoccupation with the IP troll industry.
CBR says one of their top traffic-generating articles in '06 was about SCO.
The local weekly in SLC mentions SCO, as part of the year's weird events.
Yet another mention of the SCO DDOS attacks in this security article.
More on the Ferrari laptop situation. SCO gets a mention, for some reason.
"SCO" is a fairly common acronym, as it turns out, which leads to a neverending stream of fun cheap shots. The latest: In the retail world, "SCO" can also stand for "self check out", a new money-saving feature that's understandably become popular with shoplifters. This leads to passages like "it's possible the point-of-theft just shifted to SCO" and "more than one third of the stores saw increases in theft after SCO was installed". *Snort* *Giggle*
Vista: Not an option
Vista: Not faster than WinXP.
More about Vista.
A piece from here in Portland, about a local WiFi controversy, from Bojack, a prominent local curmudgeon.
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu is dumping Microsoft for Linux. More here.
In case you hadn't heard already, HD-DVD encryption has been pwn3d.
And yet, DRM is still on the march, despite all its flaws. You'll pay more, for products that do less, and you'll like it, Or Else.
CIOs like Linux...
...and they aren't hot on Vista.
A look back at 2006, from LinuxDevices.
A piece about that critical QuickTime bug.
More griping about OSX bugs.
Linux on Zune!?
Hot on the heels of the lamentable Ms. Dewey, the tards in Redmond try to be hip yet again, this time with a "web comic" shilling the virtue(s) of MS Office, believe it or not. From a post on Y!
If you prefer real web comics, check out these recent bits from xkcd concerning Linux and Firefox.
But it gets better. Try the tiny "Live It" icon at the bottom of the EnchantedOffice page. It takes you to MS's new Digg/del.icio.us ripoff. Unlike those two, it presents you with a cert that Firefox doesn't recognize, then resizes your browser window, and demands that you sign in using your Hotmail, Passport, or Windows Live account before you can see diddly. Feh....

By brx0 @ 2:27 PM [permalink]. 0 comments

1/2 SNR

So my naming convention doesn't include the year. So sue me. If we're lucky, the SCO situation will be over before this blog's been around for a year. If not, the month & year are encoded in the URLs for individual posts anyway.

In any case, here's the news:

As noted on IV, SCO stopped issuing security advisories back in July, and hasn't released a new issue of its monthly newsletter for SCO partners since October. Gee. It's almost as if the people responsible for these things were, I dunno, laid off or something. And all this time SCO's been telling us the Unix business is thriving, making buckets of money, assured of long-term viability, the envy of the entire industry, etc. I'm almost starting to wonder whether maybe they weren't telling the strict absolute truth about that.
Also, it turns out that there's a new OSR6 update available as of December 21st. Meet OSS706c, a new Supplement to Maintenance Pack 2. So this tells us that someone is still keeping the lights on somewhere in the Unix division.
FWIW, Vista and WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS: Not the bestest of friends.
A bit about those free Vista laptops MS gave out to a bunch of bloggers. This will come as no surprise, but for the record, nobody's offered me one of those, and if they had, I would have said no. Even if you wipe the thing and put a real OS on it, it's still one of those silly Ferrari laptops. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with one. Enderle thinks they're great, and maybe they are if you're having a midlife crisis, and can't afford a real Ferrari.
More on that weird class-action suit where the plaintiff was trying to fire their current law firm in favor of BS&F, for some reason.
Meanwhile, BS&F loses another case, this time their defense of a sleazy bank in Miami that was doing a little money laundering on the side.
From c.u.s.m, yet another printing issue. It amuses me how often you see these, since SCO has argued repeatedly that the SVR4/UnixWare print system is one of those super-advanced, ultra-valuable things that IBM has misused and abused in some unspecified way. I have to say the evidence suggests otherwise. In fairness, this is not a SCO-specific situation, but for the kind of money SCO says their print system is worth, simply having a SCO box on your network ought to magically straighten out this kind of thing without any human intervention.
PC-BSD 1.3 is out now.
Another piece on the ongoing $100 Linux laptop project. This time the focus is on the software, which the article argues may end up being more important than the laptop hardware itself. Maybe. Of course, all those disadvantaged kids in the developing world are going to need to buy SCOSource licenses to go with those laptops, at $699 a pop, or face the wrath of SCO (such as it is).

By brx0 @ 12:26 AM [permalink]. 1 comments

SCO News Roundup