SCO News Roundup

Not a lot of actual SCO items today. I've been accumulating these for a couple of days waiting for a SCO-related lead item, but no dice. Oh, well. This is probably a good time to point out that the "SCO" in the title doesn't necessarily refer to a certain Lindon-based entity. It could just as easily mean "Stuff I Care AbOut". Actually that's probably what it means, since the other meaning of "SCO" is part of said Lindon-based entity's precious intellectual property and all that.

• On GL, a minor but amusing SCO filing in the IBM case.
  
• A Vista item that's not entirely off-topic: A product announcement by a company that does terminal emulation apps. One of the many archaic, proprietary terminal types supported by their new Vista app is "SCO ANSI", which you saw a lot on pre-OSR6 OpenServer boxes, and I think Xenix before that. If I understand correctly, it's the term type that lets your Unix apps look like crufty old DOS apps. So now you can use your new Vista box as a dumb terminal to talk to your crufty old SCO box. It's like a marriage made, well, somewhere.
  
• A piece by a guy who gave up on Linux, mostly because it has trouble talking to MS Exchange. Because, y'know, it's all Linux's fault that Exchange uses a proprietary and undocumented protocol. Yeahhh.
  
• On eWeek, a response to the previous item.
  
• The latest weirdness from japan, the Frepar POD. I don't get the "Clippy" analogy, it's more a sort of human Tamagotchi that shows off MS Office 2k7. Sort of a virtual, portable "booth babe", I guess. Possibly they couldn't find any real spokesmodels who were willing to put their careers at risk this way.
  
• At the Inquirer, Charlie Demerjian reviews Vista, or more precisely, Microsoft's Vista PR, and finds a lot to make fun of. *Snort* *giggle*.
  
• Details on Microsoft's OpenXML / ODF translator.
  
• Some random study has named MS the "most reputable company" in the US. If MS really is the most reputable company, what are the others like? Yikes!
  
• To further demonstrate their reputable-ness, MS concealed their sponsorship of IDC's recent TCO study.
  
• A bit about the tech behind the Super Bowl. Seems those funky Cablecam gadgets that zip around overhead run RTLinux. My only question: What is this "Super Bowl" of which you speak? It is intuitively obvious that all real sports involve ice skates and a puck. Everybody knows that.
  
• Enderle babbles on again about Vista (loves it), iPhone (hates it), etc.
  
• Computerworld: "Windows Vista: The 'Huh?' starts now"
  
• Dell's facing an investor suit over a secret deal with Intel. So now we finally learn why they never use AMD chips.
  
• Playfuls: "Windows Vista's nasty surprises"
  
• PC Advisor is already "Bored with Vista"
  
• Fresh on c.u.s.m: A controversy over selling SCO backup products with spam.
  
• Elsewhere in the becobwebbed corners of Usenet, a comp.unix.ultrix thread from last September about the Ancient Unix release from SCO/Caldera. Ultrix was a *nix from DEC, way back in the day, so this thread involves people who may actually have the right hardware to run those old V32 Unix binaries. It really is amazing the stuff you can find on the interwebs sometimes. If you're really hot on this, you can probably pick up an old VAXstation or MicroVAX on eBay for a few hundred bucks.
  
• Also from last september, a SCO-related question on Google's unix-basics board. Apparently on SCO OSes /bin/sh and other shells are built without large file support (which is usually a simple matter of adding -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE to the compiler flags in your makefile), so file redirection fails mysteriously with files >2GB. And naturally you don't have the source so you can rebuild the shells the right way. Niiiice.
  
• The computer museum in Munich sponsors a site where you, yes, you, can play around with their collection of vintage supercomputers. Awesome. If you've ever wondered whether the open source app you maintain runs on a Cray, now's your chance to find out.
  
• More trouble for Jack Thompson, the nutty anti-gaming lawyer out of Florida. Seems there's a vast shadowy global conspiracy out there that's preventing him from chasing ambulances in peace. Well, there is if you believe his side of the story, anyway.
  
• And in Utah, the ongoing saga of Overstock.com takes another fun turn. Seems SCO isn't the only Utah company that's owed countless gazillions of dollars. Well, if you believe their side of the story, anyway.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech