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:
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.
- NY Times: iPhone -> iHandcuffs.
- 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 
