SCO News Roundup

• New on GL, the "supporting" docs for SCO's new PSJ motions. The little mocking quote marks are there for a reason; one of SCO's key pieces of evidence they offer as proof they really do own the Unix copyrights is the deposition by the one and only Maureen O'Gara. SCO would have us believe that the ownership of all of Unix hinges on things a controversial tech-paparazzi journalist assumed an interviewee ( Novell's Chris Stone) meant, but didn't actually say.
  
  Folks, this is precisely why copyright law wants you to have an explicit instrument of conveyance, so the courts don't have to split hairs and try to parse various parties' vague recollections of intent years after the fact.
  
  
• Our lil' buddy Daniel Wallace has finally made it big, sort of: A mention on the front page of Slashdot. Seems that an M$ astroturfin' front group is now shilling the same antitrust angle that got Wallace absolutely nowhere.
  
  Now, if I recall correctly, the OS he said he was writing was called "SciBSD" (not a very impressive website, huh?), so presumably it was (will be?) derived from one of the other existing BSDs. All of which contain that compat_svr4/fake-STREAMS stuff SCO's started spreading FUD about lately. SCO vs. Wallace, anyone? There's an old conundrum asking who would win in a fight between red-shirted Enterprise security guards, who drop like flies at the mere suggestion of trouble, and imperial stormtroopers, who can't hit the side of a barn when they're standing inside of it. SCO vs. Wallace would be something like that.
  
  
• Panglozz on a weird Vista.com-related PIPE deal. SCO used to be an investor in Vista.com, and the murky relationship between the two has never been adequately explained.
  
  
• Treehugger suggests thin clients will save the world. I'm skeptical, as are most of the comments to the story.
  
  
• CRN says Vista sucks (performance). Well, we knew that already. If Vista was any faster than WinXP, even on unrealistic benchmarks, M$ would be shouting it from the rooftops. But no, they're keeping vewwy vewwwy quiet about performance numbers. This isn't all that surprising. Well before Vista came out I was telling people the next release would be called Windows NP. In place of the the cute hound dog in the search dialog, WinNP would feature a friendly travelling salesman. And the tired old hourglass cursor would be replaced by an animated galaxy, slowly rotating as WinNP mulled over your latest request at its leisure.
  
  Well, I thought it was funny at the time, anyway.
  
  
• A Cosmic Variance piece on gravitational lensing. You know, the fun effect that happens when a foreground object (say, a gigantic black hole) is so dense and massive that it distorts light coming from a background object (say, a distant galaxy). This is somewhat on topic because the story links to a fun lensing simulator that lets you apply a lensing effect to an image file of your choice. Such as this photo of a Vista Ultimate box, to pick a random example. Or more precisely, this is the effect you get when you have shelves of unsold copies of Vista -- a common occurrence, I'm told -- and the first box on the shelf lenses the ones behind it.
  
  
• An alarming new Xerox patent on figuring out your demographics from your surfing habits. Yikes!
  
  
• A new toy for hardcore overclockers: chilled oil.
  
  
• A PR bit about something called Cedega, which is supposed to let you run a lot of PC games under Linux. Sounds intriguing, although I try not to ever make up my mind about anything based on a press release. Plus, as I've said before, I'm perhaps the world's most incompetent and unmotivated gamer. I started playing the old Colossal Cave Adventure game back in the late 70's or early 80's on an old Data General minicomputer, and I still haven't finished the damn thing. So this Cedega thing is probably not for me.
  
  
• Palm's latest numbers, along with more of the never-ending speculation about the company's future. A new Blankenhorn column asks Can Linux save Palm?
  
  
• A court rules that the First Amendment does apply on MySpace.
  
  
• K5 on the Kathy Sierra situation. Although it wanders off topic and discusses ESR at length, thus reminding me why I usually don't bother reading K5 anymore.
  
  It probably won't ever come up, since I generally don't get a lot of user comments here, but I have a firm policy on threatening or intimidating comments: They will be cheerfully and unapologetically deleted. Period. And I mean threatening or intimidating directed at anyone. Me, other users, random celebrities, even those scumbags at SCO. That kind of talk isn't welcome here. But like I said, it probably won't ever come up.
  
  
• Computerworld's Top 10 Firefox extensions to avoid.
  
  
• Photo of the day: Bill Gates with the Hooters Girls. Safe for work (depending on where you work), but for the love of God, don't let Melinda see it.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 2:12 PM