SCO News Roundup

• SCO's stock tanked into the 70 cent range yesterday, hence the title. I mostly pay attention to that for schadenfreude purposes, as a sign that the company continues to wither away. So it's good when the stock goes down, unless it goes too low, and one of their mysterious backers decides to shovel more cash into the company to keep the sham going. I'm not saying that's guaranteed to happen again, just that it's happened before, so there's a precedent for it, and investors on board who might be tempted to throw bad money after bad, so to speak.
  
  
• PJ's got a new article about the delisting letter. She explains why she doesn't follow the stock angle too closely, but offers a few fun Darl quotes from back when the stock was still in full-on speculative bubble mode.
  
  
• Slashdot covered the gag order story yesterday. I was going to say "finally", but I'd meant to do this post yesterday and didn't quite find the time, what with the NHL playoffs, and sleeping, and such.
  
  The gag order business highlights another reason I do this SNR stuff. Groklaw is a great resource, of course, but I think the SCO situation and others like it require a more distributed model. Centralizing everything at one location presents a tempting target, a single point of litigation for SCO and every other IP troll that shambles out of the mire.
  
  
• A gag-order thread on Tuxmachines, pointing to the Ars piece I linked to the other day. Incidentally, the Ars link was broken until an astute reader pointed it out. It's like an old CEO of mine said years back: Customers (readers, in this case) make the best QA, and you don't even have to pay 'em, the suckers. But seriously, if you see something broken, lemme know, or just post a correction, or whatever. Thx. Mgmt.
  
  
• SJVN on the delisting letter.
  
  
• SCO gets a quick mention in this entertaining ITJungle piece about RMS and GPL3. And Greek philosophy, too. And ventriloquism. No, really.
  
  
• A different perspective on delisting. The poster says he knows people who own SCO stock, therefore he hopes it doesn't get delisted, because his friends would lose money. To which I can only respond: You call yourself a friend, and yet you let your friends buy SCO stock?
  
  
• Coming soon to a TV near you, just what we needed: an HBO original movie about the 2000 election in Florida. I wonder who would play Boies?
  
  
• While we're on that topic, seems Boies is back in the election biz, this time working for that Sanjaya punk. Ok, no, not really. But admit it: It's not actually inconceivable.
  
  
• The very latest on Boies's gardening debacle. Nical (i.e. his side) was recently sold to another firm, although some suggest the new company is a front for the old company, to try to weasel out of the existing settlement agreement.
  
  
• And the very latest on Sun, Solaris, and the GPL. The executive summary version: No GPL'd Solaris yet, but they're still thinking about it. And thinking. And thinking.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Dell will now sell you a desktop box with Ubuntu preloaded. You probably heard about that already, and it wasn't a huge surprise after the recent PR with Michael Dell allegedly running Ubuntu at home, etc. But still, it's nice to see that they listened. If you took the trouble to go sign the petition, you are going to buy a box now, right?
  
  I don't see anything on Dell's site where you can click a checkbox to buy a SCOSource license for a mere $699 extra. Funny, that.
  
  
• An MMORPG patent troll that didn't get the Supreme Court's memo. In the longer term I think they're a dying breed now, but not just yet.
  
  
• Study: Tech is as polluting as aviation.
  
  
• From the math software world, Maple 11 is out now, and it runs on OSX, Solaris, Linux (even Itanium), Windows thru 2k3. But Vista? Not so much.
  
  
• A BBC piece on Hollywood's heavyhanded, and failed, attempt to censor Digg re: the HD-DVD crack discovered a while ago. One curious thing is that they've already done the key revocation trick with new HD-DVD releases, so they've already "solved" this problem -- unless they have less than full confidence in the key revocation trick, that is. Hmm.
  
  Slashdot has the story too, now.
  
  
• I can't really call something "Groovy 70's Edition" without at least one groovy retrotech item. Dumb terminals are way retro. They're still cutting-edge in the SCO universe, as SCO's antiquated per-user licensing model shows, but elsewhere they're nearly extinct. I don't even know where you'd go to buy a new ASCII dumb terminal if you needed one.
  
  Fortunately the world's awash in old terminals from back in the day, and some of them look pretty cool in a retro sort of way. And unless they use some sort of weird proprietary interface, you might be able to cable it up to your shiny new quad Xeon box and run Emacs on it, and if you've got Emacs, what else do you need? Ok, vi users aren't out of luck either, and I expect Lynx would work too. So really, you'd be all set.
  
  And if you're going to do that, you might as well get the absolute coolest terminal ever made, the Olivetti TCV-250. (Mouse over the photo and then click 'more' for more photos). The Museum of Modern Art in New York has one on display, so its infinite coolness has been officially recognized by the design gods. The great thing is that since it doubles as a desk, you could probably hide a small *Nix box (say, a Mac mini) in or around it, and the TCV-250 would be all that you'd see.
  
  (Ok, fine, the terminal's actually from the 60's, not the 70's, if you want to be pedantic about it. But now that SCO stock's hit the 70 cent range I'm looking forward to it dropping back to the 60's, so that makes it ok, and besides, this is my blog, and you didn't pay a cent to read it, so why are you complaining?)
  
  Unfortunately all the stuff I can find about the TCV-250 on the net is just other people oohing and aaahing over it. And you can't blame them, I mean, check out that round monitor. Utter awesomeness. But there aren't any tech specs that I can find, and not even any mention of what it was originally supposed to connect to. And I also don't know where you'd get one, other than robbing the museum, which is inadvisable. I don't see a termcap or terminfo entry for it, and those never get thrown away once written, so it probably wasn't used as a Unix terminal way back when. So if someone was to give me one for Christmas or whatever, hint hint, I'd be willing to have a go at it. You know, to contribute to the greater good of humanity and all that.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 4:20 PM