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 
