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 
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SCOX 10K out. Discussion on IV.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1102542/000089102007000020/0000891020-07-000020-index.htm
BTW, love your site!
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BTW, love your site!
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