SCO News Roundup

• SCO's announced that Ed Iacobucci (the Dayjet guy) is not running for reelection to the company's board. Too busy, other commitments, yada yada yada. So they've got at least one job opening now. Wanted: Empty suit. Successful applicants will be skilled in not asking tough questions, and in meekly signing off on whatever cockamamie notions the CEO and Chairman come up with. Prior business or family ties to current management strongly preferred. Not a technology job (anymore) so prior experience in the tech sector is not required. Great hours, no heavy lifting.
  
  
• You might've noticed the recent rash of hardware problems at GL and Zen's. And then Blogger was being surly and uncooperative for much of the day, leaving me unable to post this thing until just now. What's the deal? Sunspots? Toad voodoo?
  
  
• SCO's HipCheck gets a quickie rave review. In related news, man bites dog.
  
  
• In what may be a first, we've actually got two Me Inc items today. PDA news site Brighthand has a short blurb about Shout Postcard.
  
  
• Stocks in China are tanking, affecting shares worldwide, including the Dow. Unsurprisingly, SCOX didn't budge. But perhaps it should have. They've been making a lot of noise lately about how they're placing a big bet on the so-called "BRIC" (Brazil, Russia, India, China) market. So if they're betting the farm on that, and the Chinese economy goes into a slump... Well, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
  
  
• Enderle has a cow about the potential Dell Linux thing. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but this FUD plus the persistent Y! trolling suggests that someone, somewhere, is really worried this might pan out. If you believe in conspiracy theories, at any rate.
  
  
• A press release concerning yet another lawsuit involving Microsoft. This time they're up against an ex-ISP named FutureLink, and they're apparently fighting over something related to WebTV. Putting out a press release to advertise one's pending litigation is an unusual practice, so my spidey sense tells me there's more to the story than what the release tells us.
  
  I don't see any news items about the suit itself, but you can get a sense of the MS-FutureLink relationship from these stories from (mostly) happier times, around the tail end of the dot-com era:
  
  
  
  • "ASP Pulse: Microsoft Invests $10 million in FutureLink"
    
  • "Microsoft Plans Joint R&D Lab for Hosted Application"
    
  • "FutureLink Finds Insight in the Channel"
    
  • "FutureLink becomes a thing of the past", including this fun tidbit:
    

    
    At its peak in November 1999, it was valued at $250 per share on Nasdaq (market capitalisation $2.44 billion), however the euphoria of the Internet boom did not last and the company has since lost 99.8% of its market value, and now trades at less than 40 cents at the time of writing (market capitalisation $3.7 million).
    

    
    Yow!
    
  
  
• Seems that Ralphie's decided he needs some friends in high places -- check out these campaign contributions of his from last year. Ok, technically some of them aren't legally his since they're made in the names of several of his kids, in order to get around that pesky $2000 donation limit. It's a nice loophole, especially if you have lots of kids. The McCain-Feingold act actually included provisions to close that loophole, but the matter seems to be tied up in court at present. I don't know if he just decided to chance it and hope he doesn't get caught, or what, exactly.
  
  Anyway, he seems to really like Sen. Hatch, who (let's not forget) is the daddy of one of SCO's top lawyers. Since this isn't a political blog, I'm not going to offer an opinion about the senator, although it may be worth noting that Rep. Cannon (the other recipient of Ralphie's largesse last year) had himself a bit of an Abramoff problem.
  
  
• Ralphie's not the only Yarro with "IP" interests. Here's a recent patent application by one Justin Yarro. For some sort of dubious lawnmower-weed whacker combo contraption. Yikes.
  
  Of course, given past history the point of this is not to actually produce this beast, but as an excuse to sue people. Another reason I'm glad I don't have a yard.
  
  
• The latest on the Y2K7 front: the weapons lab at Los Alamos is issuing a warning about non-DST-aware coffee makers. Actually that headline is kind of unfair. They're advising people to watch out for problems, and the coffee maker thing was part of a much longer list of things to look out for. But it's always more fun to take stuff out of context to get a cheap laugh at someone's expense. That's what the news media's for, right?
  
  The original piece is here.
  
  
• SJVN rolls his eyes at "showusthecode.com"
  
  
• On the BS&F front, they've finally managed to take over that weird Halliburton case I mentioned a while back, ejecting the previous firm.
  
  
• Boies has given Tulane University (in New Orleans) a cool $1.5M, so they're naming a chair after him. I would imagine the donation is in cash and not SCOSource licenses, but you never know.
  
  
• And on the heels of Al Gore's big win at the Oscars, the inevitable humor piece: Supreme Court, Boies, recount, dangling chads, etc.
  
  
• Seems that IBM's not real keen on Oracle's Linux. Gee, could DB2 have anything to do with that?
  
  
• A review of Linux on the PS3. Which sounds nice, although the odds of me buying a game console of any kind aren't exactly high. Ok, ok, I was pretty good at Tetris once, back in the day, but that was years ago. I also spent a lot of time on Adventure, but I don't think I ever actually finished it.
  
  
• FWIW, an article on Linux in Iran. Please, no "Linux terrorist" wisecracks. That just isn't nice.
  
  
• IDC's Q4/06 server marketshare numbers are out. Do a quick search and you'll see all sorts of takes on this, some declaring Sun the big winner, others giving the grand prize to HP. It all seems to depend on how you define "server", and whether you're counting boxes sold, CPUs sold, raw dollars earned, growth compared to last year, growth compared to competitors, or what have you. You can slice-n-dice it a zillion different ways. One constant though: Nobody ever mentions SCO. Never.
  
  
• Sun's making nice with the FSF. They're even teasing us yet again with the prospect of a GPL'd Solaris.
  
  
• A piece about the latest dev snapshot of KDE4.
  
  
• A review of FreeBSD 6.2, which came out recently. If you decided a while ago that everything after v4.x is teh suxor, you wouldn't be alone. The review asserts that things are finally improving, though.
  
  
• Here's a blast from the past for ya: Corel (remember them?) is previewing a new Web 2.0-ified WordPerfect. Believe it or not.
  
  
• If you're a Windows developer (you know who you are), M$ would like to gently suggest
  that maybe you could consider not using that nasty DDE garbage anymore, if it's not too much trouble. To which i can only add: please, do as they ask, already. Oh, the humanity!
  
  Of course, in the usual Windows fashion, not using DDE isn't enough. You (and Explorer) still have to tiptoe around just in case someone else out there hasn't gotten the memo. Bah. Humbug.
  
  
• From HPCWire, two takes on the future of supercomputing, from
  AMD and Intel. AMD wants to jump on the "heterogeneous HPC" bandwagon, although it looks like their definition of "heterogeneous" means Opterons plus GPUs from their new ATI subsidiary. So we're basically talking single-vendor heterogeneity here.
  
  
• Another piece on that quantum computing thing from last week. For some reason the article is bookended by some loopy new-agey stuff, which sadly is a common occurrence with any news items containing the word "quantum". You can avoid nearly all of it by scrolling down until you stop seeing the word "holistic", though.
  
  
• In other quantum news, researchers have figured out how to place six whole photons in a "Schrodinger's cat" state. Insert lame "Blepp's suitcase" joke here.
  
  
• Stupid IP litigation isn't limited to the tech industry. Seems that the USPTO is now letting people patent ideas for tax shelters. So now any money you don't owe to the IRS, you'll probably just owe to some stupid patent troll.
  
  
• The latest twist in the HD format wars: The triple-layer HD-DVD, which overcomes Blu-Ray's advantage in storage capacity.
  
  
• the mean, mean haters at the Inq have another piece about Itanic, er, Itanium. They really enjoy this stuff far too much, if you ask me.
  
  
• Today's fun gadget: The beer-launching fridge! Sadly, the thing runs on a puny 8-bit microcontroller (yes, I checked), so it's not going to run Linux or even NetBSD in its present form. Still, it's a freakin' fridge that catapults beer through the air. Which counts for something in my book. One big problem with this is finding canned beer you actually want to drink. I'm not going to drink Coors Lite even if a robot tosses it to me. I mean, I have my standards. Fortunately there are a few options, one of which -- coincidentally -- is the Pale Ale from Oregon's own Caldera Brewing (i.e. the Caldera with real products). For the big SCO BK party, I'd like a Linux-based beer catapult that flings Caldera through the air. Yeah, ok, that's sort of a stretch. Ok, a big stretch. Whatever. Still, it's a beer-flinging robofridge. How cool is that?
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 7:10 PM