SCO News Roundup

• GL summarizes the huge and rather shoddy pile of SCO filings we've seen lately.
  
  
• Via Panglozz on IV, a fascinating blog post about how Blakey and his underlings at SCO tried to turn the screws on SD Times after an unflattering editorial last year. Throwing your weight around as an aggrieved potential advertiser can work sometimes, if you have weight. If you're a real company with real products to advertise, and a significant advertising or other PR budget, sometimes it works. (See this for example). But if you're SCO, not so much. They aren't exactly experts in making credible threats, or in making good on those threats. And as the editor of a trade press publication, you'd have to balance the paltry amount of ad revenue you might get from SCO, with the number of subscribers you might lose by running SCO ads, and all the bad PR you'd get by knuckling under to SCO.
  
  
• A remarkably non-clueful piece by InformationWeek's Paul McDougall, who only just now found out about the IBM-iBiblio funding thing SCO's partisans have been bleating about for years and years. It certainly makes for a nice, lurid accusation, which drives page views, which in turn sells banner ads, so I guess the piece succeeds in at least that one respect.
  
  
• Ars Technica covers the recent SCO v. IBM hearings.
  
  
• The Age asks "Is computer science dead?". Their argument has two parts that don't entirely mesh up. First, software tools are so sophisticated these days that you don't need a CS degree to land a nice, cushy IT job. Second, kids don't want to study CS, and their parents don't want them to either, mostly because of the dot-com crash.
  
  I'm not sure they quite make their case, but it's an interesting article anyway.
  
  
• Here's a new one: Digital TVs that lock up when you try to watch an ill-behaved program.
  
  
• Don't ask me why I've got so many tech articles from .AU today. It just sort of worked out that way somehow. The Age describes the new AppleTV as a "ride-on chainsaw". You've just got to love those colorful antipodean metaphors.
  
  
• The WSJ likes the AppleTV too, albeit without peculiar turns of phrase.
  
  
• Also from The Age, the latest Big Media way to stop movie pirates: DVD-burner sniffing dogs! No, really, I swear I'm not making this up. So next time you see MOG wandering your neighborhood with a yapping pack of chihuahuas, you should realize it's not for exercise, or to look glamorous and trendy or anything. They're the SCOSource Police, and they're hot on the trail of that Ubuntu CD you just burned for your mom.
  
  
• /. linked to an interesting piece on "supercrunchers" a while back, in case you haven't seen it yet.
  
  
• John Carroll on M$/Novell. When a generally pro-M$ columnist writes about how something will be good for Linux, it's good to take it with a grain of salt or two. Not because
  
  
• I try to cover new versions of various *Nix OSes, free and sometimes otherwise, but here's one that slipped under my radar last December. 2.11BSD Patch 445 came out over the holidays, and now runs on PDP-11 models without an FPU. I didn't realize there was still an actively maintained *Nix for the PDP-11, or any non-32-bit hardware for that matter, but apparently there is.
  
  
• In the same vein, last August there came news of the rediscovery of LSX, a tiny single-user *Nix based on 6th Edition Unix that can run on a PDP-11 with just 48k memory. If you don't have one of those, and want to enjoy some of SCO's precious IP circa 1976, you can always try it in an emulator, such as SIMH. Or check eBay regularly, I suppose.
  
  
• An astute reader clued me in on an SL Trib photo from the Dutch oven world championships. A contestant from American Fork, UT -- just down the road from Lindon -- entered with apple & cranberry-stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon. Mmmm.....
  
  This may help explain why it seems like every time someone down there suffers an untimely demise, by default it's immediately chalked up as an "apparent heart attack"...
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 8:38 AM