SCO News Roundup

• Life Insurance Corp. of India is replacing its Windows desktops with Linux boxes. The article mentions that two years ago they landfilled their remaining SCO boxes in favor of Linux. I seem to remember when that happened. It probably showed up in a daily SNR back when they were just Y! board posts. Wow. This goofy SCO saga's been going on for forever and a day, hasn't it?
  
  The piece mentions that RHEL does a better job running their crufty old legacy Cobol apps than Unix could, and I assume they're referring to SCO Unix there. Ouch. Legacy app support has been pushed as one of OpenServer's big selling points, so that's got to hurt a bit.
  
  
• In "Yes, there is a PJ", SJVN responds to yesterday's flurry of PJ fud, saying he's sure PJ exists because he's met her several times. Which would seem to be pretty conclusive -- assuming, of course, that he exists.
  
  
• An SL Trib story on Blakey's departure.
  
  
• IDC says the Linux "ecosystem" will be worth $40B (US) by 2010. Any guesses about what the SCO "ecosystem" will be worth then?
  
  
• I've been getting a regular stream of hits from people looking for info on updating their old SCO boxes for this year's silly daylight savings tweakage. As noted in these threads on comp.unix.sco.misc and comp.unix.unixware.misc, SCO's being somewhat less than helpful on that account. In some cases they want to charge an arm and a leg, and in others they just aren't supporting the new DST at all. While I detest SCO, I don't extend that animosity to poor beleaguered sysadmins who happen to be stuck with old SCO boxes, so here's the info I've been able to find. It looks like you just need to tweak /etc/TIMEZONE, as noted in the aforementioned c.u.s.m thread, and this thread at WebServerTalk. If I can spare anyone from having to pay SCO another $2000 for this rather trivial fix, I'm happy to help out.
  
  In fairness, SCO isn't the only Unix vendor that isn't supporting the timezone changes on old OS versions. If you're running Solaris older than Sol8, here's a thread on how to do the update. Unlike SCO OSes, timezone info on Solaris is compiled into a binary format (for speed, I guess), so the update involves an obscure tool called zic, which the man page describes as a "time zone compiler". Who knew there even was such a thing? You learn something every day, I guess.
  
  
• Speaking of Solaris, Sun's released a patch for that nasty Telnet vulnerability someone found the other day. Although as others have noted, the real fix is to turn off telnetd. And turn off all those stupid Berkeley 'r' commands, while you're at it. Sheesh.
  
  
• And HP-UX 11i V3 was released today. Recall that OldSCO teamed up with IBM on Project Monterey only after their earlier Unixware-on-Itanium partnership with HP (oddly named "Summit 3D") didn't work out for some reason. HP doesn't seem to have suffered very much because of SCO's absence.
  
  
• A few links found on Slashdot:
  
  
  
  • A piece wondering if Blackberries are chaining people to their jobs 24/7. Speaking as a Blackberry owner, I have to say that's basically true, but when you're sitting at home waiting for a repair person to show up -- as I am today -- that's not necessarily a bad thing.
    
  • The OLPC, the $100-ish Linux laptop we've been hearing about for years, has topped 1 million pre-orders.
    
  • The latest news in quantum computing, an update to the piece I linked to a few days ago. Seems the demo went well, and you'll be able to rent time on a real live quantum computer by early next year. Supposedly. The current machine is a proof-of-concept box, but it plays Sudoku, which I guess is something.
    
  
  
  
• Windows: Snooze-inducing. (Warning: link goes to Cute Overload, so if you follow it you may be there for hours. Unless you don't like cute animals, that is, in which case you're probably a SCO employee or something.)
  
  
• Apple has branched out again. First mobile phones, and now swimwear. (Warning, fairly NSFW).
  
  
• If you have fond memories of the old Acorn/Archimedes RISC machines from back in the day, you might be interested to know that RISC OS is going to a nearly-open-source license.
  
  
• A new, ugly Firefox flaw. I figure this is worth reporting here because a.) FF is an open source app, and b.) if my hit counter's browser stats are accurate (a big if), Firefox is used by roughly 2/3 of all visitors to SNR (or its sibling blog, since they both share the same counter). Almost 1/3 of you are on FF 2.x, and slightly more are still on FF 1.x, with another 4% still using Mozilla 1.x. IE has a paltry 22% browser share here (7% IE7, 15% IE6), plus 5% for Safari and 4% for Opera to round out the stats.
  
  As for reported OS share, a bit over half of you use Windows of some sort, and a bit over 1/3 of you use Linux. The rest is mostly OS X, although I've gotten a surprisingly large (i.e. nonzero) number of hits from OS/2 boxes recently. Weird.
  
  I look at browser and OS stats about once in a blue moon, but it's been fairly consistent over time. Occasionally I've seen hits from ancient versions of Netscape or IE, but it's quite rare. It's nice to think that people are generally smart enough not to run old, unpatched browsers.
  
  
• Enderle on M$ and Linux. He argues that M$ has done a poor job so far competing with Linux, and offers his unique insights on what they might do differently. Oddly enough, it doesn't involve calling people commies or terrorists, or filing baseless lawsuits, or any of the usual stuff. Maybe he's realized that's been tried already and it didn't work out too well.
  
  
• Over on the boards, Ed Almos suggests that PJ is somewhere in this photo
  
  
• This is completely OT except for the funny name: A boy scout camp in New Jersey called Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. If the place wasn't 3000 miles away, and they were willing to rent it out when the scouts weren't using it (they aren't, I checked already), it'd be a nice spot for an anti-SCO victory party. Hey, it's never too early to start planning. At minimum, there'll have to be brewskis from Oregon's own Caldera Brewing, a.k.a. the Caldera that has real products that people actually want.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 2:13 AM