SCO News Roundup

• Another round of hearings in the Novell case today, with leftovers heard on June 4th. No news yet, obviously, but I'll link to it when I hear anything.
  
  
• Right on the heels of that second hearing, SCO's Q2 earnings call will be held after the markets close on June 5th.
  
  
• Yesterday was the 3rd consecutive close over a dollar for SCO's stock. Another seven days of that and they'll be off delisting watch, for all the good it'll do 'em.
  
  
• You might've seen the oohing and aahing over M$'s new "Surface" coffee-table computer. I'm dubious, myself, and not just because it's a Microsoft product. What happens the first time you spill a brewski on the surface, it interprets the spill as a "gesture", and deletes all your files? Great. Just great. Oh, and coffee tables tend to sit right in the middle of a room, and now you'll need to run a power cord and maybe a network drop to it, giving you a couple more things to trip over on your way to the fridge for a replacement brewski.
  
  Besides, it isn't even new. Think of Dillinger's cool desk in Tron, for one thing. You may recall that Dillinger was the bad guy, and made his fortune swiping other programmers' innovations. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?
  
  As you might expect, the Mac community is skeptical. I imagine it's more than the eternal Mac vs. Windows thing this time, too. If the stereotype holds any water at all, a substantial number of Mac folks are affluent design-geek types, and it's unlikely they'll want to redecorate their living rooms around an ugly coffee table from Redmond, even if they do redecorate often enough to keep up with the usual PC obsolescence cycle.
  
  Rumor has it that SCO's already hard at work on a competing product, the OpenServer bidet. The target market remains unclear right now, but at least it fits in with the company's core competencies.
  
  
• CRN says Vista isn't more secure than WinXP. Film at 11.
  
  
• The M$ patent FUD is still generating copy. Here's an unintentionally hilarious screed from an M$ fanboi. M$ Word already flags grammar issues with a green underline. Wouldn't it be nice if it could do that for illogical, poor-quality writing, too?
  
  
• PC World on the brave new world of Web 2.0 security, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Yikes.
  
  
• On the same day the Surface surfaced, Palm unveiled a decidedly non-palm-sized device, the new Palm Foleo. It's sort of a Linux subnotebook device with flash instead of an hd. I think it looks kind of cool, although mine seems to be a minority opinion. The cool kids at Engadget aren't impressed, for one thing.
  
  This isn't the only gadget of its kind. Most coverage of the Foleo mentions Nokia's N800, and I seem to recall that Sharp had/has a similar Linux-based Zaurus gadget, which they only sold in Japan. And let's not forget the late, lamented Psion gadgetry of years past. Oh, and word on the street is that we may see a flash-based subnotebook from Apple sometime later this year. Call me a cynic, but something tells me that the same people who say they just don't get it coming from Palm will dance in the streets when the Apple version ships. That's just how the industry works, I'm afraid.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 12:28 PM