SCO News Roundup

• One piece of SCO's anti-PJ filings (Exhibit #6 to IBM-1018) has given rise to speculation as to why it was filed, since it doesn't exactly support SCO's line of argument. Some people speculate that SCO's lawyers are feuding behind the scenes, and the big boys want Kevin to take the fall for SCO's incompetence in the courtroom. I prefer to go with the old saying and never attribute to malice what I can attribute to stupidity. I think they just don't realize this exhibit hurts their case.
  
  Still, it's fun to think about the internal feud scenario, even if I doubt it's true. I'm imagining something along the lines of Reservoir Dogs, except with a cast of tubby, balding -- and hopefully unarmed -- middle-aged PHBs in polo shirts. With dialogue that's classic Tarantino(ish), except that words like "proactive", "synergies", and "monetize" show up a lot.
  
  
• The latest twist in SCO v. PJ has made it to Digg now, but not /. yet, FWIW.
  
  
• I understand the story's already gotten the usual Lyons treatment. I find that I just sort of don't want to read his spin on PJ vs. SCO at the moment. But if you're interested, there's a link to his "Floating Point" blog in the sidebar. Enjoy, or not.
  
  
• Zen's been getting some interesting visitors lately, checking out the latest anti-PJ filings. That could mean anything, but to me it suggests that the few remaining rank-and-file SCO employees are getting the mushroom treatment, and they're really curious to see what's going on in the outside world.
  
  
• Here in blogospace, a couple of SCO v. PJ items at Open... and Twitter.com. Actually I'm not sure about the last one. I think it's about "our" SCO but I'm not 100% sure.
  
  
• On IV, the good Mr. Sizz offers a compendium of document-sealing incidents in SCO v. IBM. It's more common than you might think, and both parties have screwed up on occasion. But as you might expect, usually it's SCO that screws up.
  
  
• M$ is getting sued yet again, this time over its Vista branding strategy. As in, the alleged minimum system requirements are a bit, ahem, overly optimistic. Sure, the OS calls itself Vista, and the machine comes with a sticker that says it's Vista-compatible, but you don't actually get any of those exciting new features.
  
  This reminds me a lot of back when Windows 3.0 came out. Sure, it would technically run on a crufty old 4.77 MHz XT clone with a CGA video card. But you couldn't actually do anything useful with it. Windows 3.1 dropped support for anything less than a 286 (still impossibly slow) and an EGA adapter (still impossibly lo-res) -- although if you really had to, you could trick 3.1 into using 3.0's CGA driver with a bit of INI file trickery. Ahh, those were the days....
  
  
• There's already malware out there that exploits Vista's .ANI vulnerability. The bait? Britney Spears, of course.
  
  
• A Register piece speculating that OpenSolaris is the key to Sun's recent comeback. Which actually makes sense to me. In a recent project of mine, I hit a dead end a couple of times, and would've been totally stuck if I hadn't had kernel source to consult and figure out what the OS was thinking. Having the source really is a game-changer sometimes.
  
  IIRC one of Sun's execs said something to the effect that the "SCOSource" deal they did with SCO a while back ensured that SCO couldn't get in the way of opening the Solaris codebase. For that big of a shift, SCO really only got a (relative) pittance for it, and they've already spent all that cash on lawyers. They practically gave away the SVRx "crown jewels", to a direct competitor in the x86 Unix market no less, and they still won't mention any of this as a "risk" in their 10-Q or 10-K filings.
  
  
• Meanwhile, our cheerful chum "Paul Murphy" asserts that Sun is it's own worst enemy. Unfortunately, I'm afraid my eyes glazed over before I got to the part where he explains why (assuming he ever does).
  
  
• A few Apple items. First, there's the new 8-core MacPro. I've already asked my wife if I can have one, and, um, I can't comment on ongoing negotiations.
  
  If you'd like to read the obligatory Beowulf cluster comments, the Slashdot story is here.
  
  
• A bit more on-topic, two pieces about the Apple-EMI deal to sell tracks on iTunes without DRM. This really surprised me. Sure, Steve Jobs said he wanted to get rid of DRM, but I figured that was just a bit of reality distortion to confuse EU regulators, and probably the record companies. I didn't think they'd actually do it, but they did.
  
  So now, finally, you can buy tracks on iTunes and load them on your Zune. So, ok, if you "squirt" the songs to other Zune owners (assuming you know any), they still have to live with that 3 listens / 3 days evilness. But hey, that's the magic of DRM for you.
  
  
• More Euro-trouble for Apple: Seems that due to archaic and byzantine record company rules, iTunes can't sell the same tracks in all EU countries. Which is something the EU takes a very dim view of. Even the EU admits it's the record companies' fault, but the complaint names Apple too, since they're a party to the restrictive agreements. I suspect that left to its own devices, Apple would be more than happy to run a single EU-wide music store instead of twenty-odd small separate ones.
  
  I'm not totally convinced that a seamless single market in Euro-pop music will be a net benefit to humanity, if Eurovision is any indication. But it's really all about the principle of the thing, that's what I keep telling myself.
  
  
• Elsewhere in CPU land, rumor has it that AMD's got a single-socket, 8-core chip on the way. Which sounds like a Good Thing, until you realize that you'll need a $699 SCOSource license for each of those cores. Ouch!
  
  
• Also, the UltraSPARC IV+ just got a little faster too.
  
  
• Rumor also has it that IBM's having some trouble getting AIX 5.4 and the POWER6 architecture out the door.
  
  
• In case you missed it, OS/2 celebrated its 20th birthday a few days ago. If you're familiar with the cinematic ouevre of George Romero, you'll have a fairly good idea of what the party was like.
  
  
• OSNews takes a look at the shiny new RHEL 5.
  
  
• From Slashdot, stories of a "backlash" against Oracle Linux users. Jeez. Anyone who has a cow because somebody out there on the interwebs is using the "wrong" distro, from a company with the "wrong" support model, really neads to get a freakin' life already.
  
  
• A couple of days ago, I linked to a bit about Intel's new line of student laptops. A bit more info about that: In France, they'll be running Mandriva.
  
  
• SJVN on Dell & desktop Linux.
  
  
• A highly astute reader pointed me at the Inquirer's review of the Nokia N800, a gadget I seem to have mentioned before, once or twice. Drool! Drool!
  
  
• ...Although that's far from the only drool-inducing gadget out there. I was looking at Dynamism the other day -- Dynamism being your new best friend in the Japanese import business -- and I was checking out their usual range of tiny, ultra-sleek Japan-only notebooks. Seems that Sony's got this new Vaio that weighs in at just under 2lb. How did they manage that? Why, by making it out of the one material even more l33t than titanium: Carbon fiber. Carbon freakin' fiber.
  
  It's a real shame that it's a Sony, due to the recent rootkit thing. The price tag is also kind of a shame. But still. Carbon freakin' fiber.
  
  
• If you're looking for something a little more retro, and have money to burn, why not buy KITT from Knight Rider? Ok, so the in-car computers don't actually work or anything. Yet. But if you could make those blinkenlights work, even sort-of, well, that would be the ultimate case mod, wouldn't it? Then you could roll up to the next ComicCon in style.
  
  What most people don't realize is that SCO briefly marketed its own competing product (called "SCOTT"), way back in the day. See, they took an ordinary Yugo, and replaced the passenger seat with a huge, heavy-duty 286 Xenix box, with a special power suppy that ran directly off the car's fan belt (so you had to watch your fingers). Xenix didn't offer voice recognition -- are you kidding? -- so instead you controlled the whole mess with a VT-100 perched on top of the machine, and if you had the right multiuser licensing you could run serial lines back so both back seat passengers could have their own VT-100's as well. To control SCOTT's array of awesome 80's gadgetry, you got a nice shell prompt and some cryptic man pages, and really, what more could anyone ask for? Sadly, this was before the advent of mobile phones, so most people were really bad at multitasking while driving, yes, even worse than they are now. And airbags were still just a twinkle in some crazy safety engineer's eye. So the product quickly vanished from the market in a hail of litigation. But during its brief life, it inspired a few intrepid programmers to imagine a new and improved shell that could withstand and even thrive under demolition-derby-grade abuse. And thus "bash" was born. You heard it here first.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 9:41 AM