SCO News Roundup

• It's almost CC time again. Already. The announcement came yesterday afternoon, and the call's due March 1st, so mark those calendars. I hope someone remembers to ask about those headcount numbers. Oh, and the PJ thing. Someone ought to bring that up too. Mentioning PJ is always a great way to get Darl riled up, and that's when he's at his most quotable.
  
  So Thursday had a CC announcement and some product-related PR (the Me Inc. in the previous SNR), both in the same day. It's like SCO decided to pretend they were a real company for a few hours, just on a lark.
  
• M$ settles yet another patent case, this time with Alcatel to the tune of $1.5B. To most people, a price tag like that would be a real deterrent, but it's pocket change up in Redmond. It's strange how current patent law can make business prohibitively expensive for the little guys, and yet isn't a significant obstacle when the big boys decide to infringe someone's patents on a grand scale.
  
• Also on the M$ beat, it's being argued that Ballmer was misquoted when he seemed to threaten Linux users again, the other day. Which can happen now and then, of course; journalists are only human. Ok, almost human. It's funny, though, how often this happens, and doubly funny how Ballmer's always misquoted saying the same thing.
  
• Yet another school district switches to Linux.
  
• You probably don't remember this, but a couple of weeks ago I made some sort of joking reference to running Solaris on PowerPC hardware. Turns out that our lil' buddy "Paul Murphy" is really stoked about the idea.
  
• And Ms. Darrow over at Unblog has a highly relevant, hard-hitting piece about the great parties Lotus used to throw, way back in the day. I have to say the revels as she describes them actually sound kind of lame to me. A table made out of chocolate? Okayy. I'm sorry, but just because you wasted a lot of money on the thing doesn't mean anyone had a good time.
  
  Besides, if you work in the industry for any amount of time you'll soon realize that companies that throw lavish no-expense-spared parties don't stay in business for long. Often, a huge party is the first sign of trouble. Call me a cynic, if you like.
  
  
• New on Freshmeat, an updated Perl module that can talk to the new Y! Finance setup. But it just does the quote end of things, and there's no mention of message boards. Perhaps the author didn't think there was any value in it. These days I'm almost inclined to agree sometimes. Still, if you're a Perl fan and you're up for a bit of retrocomputing (things get retro real fast in this industry), feel free to submit a patch or something.
  
  You won't see a patch from me, though. Perl's not my bag. My usual Perl development methodology goes something like this:
  
  
  
  1. Estimate (= guess) about how large you expect the finished Perl program to be.
     
  2. Using dd, dump that many bytes from /dev/random to a file.
     
  3. Test the resulting file to see if it does what you need it to. If not, goto step 2, repeat as needed.
     
  
  
  It hasn't been a very successful methodology so far, but at least I don't have to memorize any Perl syntax this way.
  
  
• Oracle made quite a stir a few months back when they announced they'd sell support for a distro they didn't create (Red Hat). Not a lot of people realize this arrangement isn't unique. Since August '05, HP's been selling support for Debian, and it seems to be working out rather well for them.
  
• Elsewhere in Debianland, Nokia wants your ideas for cool stuff to do with the new N800, their sleek little Linux WiFi mini-tablet gizmo. Hint: One of your ideas should be "Sent a free one to that SNR guy". Ha, ha, just kidding. If I were to start taking free stuff, even ultra-cool free stuff, that would just invite sneers from Real Journalists, who never, ever do stuff like that. It's a red line they never cross. Ok, except for booze. And schwag at trade shows. And cash, 'natch. And stuff they can show off to look important. And anything else, so long as it's in moderation. And moderation can mean very different things to different people, of course...
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 7:58 PM