Monday, July 16, 2007
7/17 SNR
- We'll get to the photo in a moment, but first we have some actual court-related news for once. Three new docs in the IBM case to be precise. IBM-1072 is IBM asking for a 30-ish day extension of of those alleged "pretrial deadlines" they agreed on back in May. IBM-1073 is SCO opposing the motion, and IBM-1074 is Kimball quickly granting IBM's motion.
The funny part about this episode, besides the fact that it's another minor defeat for SCO, is that IBM's proposed schedule conflicts with the Novell trial. They say they'll be happy to stipulate a further extension if needed, it's just that SCO hasn't told them when they expect the Novell trial might be over. SCO naturally couldn't take IBM's "yes" for an answer, and objected to the motion, while insisting they too would be delighted to stipulate to a further extension. They didn't make a concrete counterproposal about the dates though. So Kimball went ahead and granted IBM's motion, and unless there's a further stipulation SCO will soon be fighting on two fronts at once. - It looks like Biff finally got himself banned from the Y! SCOX board. The offending post has been deleted, but it's been saved for posterity here in all its vileness and malice. The guy had no redeeming qualities at all. Good riddance.
...or is he really gone? This post by a brand-new nym has a certain bifflike style to it. Although it also might be a second-rate Biff impostor, and if so, how would we be able to tell? - Oh, and about the photo: It's a page from a peculiar little book called "A Day With Biff". It looks like a children's book about the adventures of a small black dog named Biff, but in fact it's meant as a showcase for clip art by a pair of Bay Area graphic designers. There's a Mac-formatted floppy in the back full of EPS versions of various illustrations in the book, along with a restrictive EULA, appropriately enough. So if you want to see any of the illustrations for yourself, you'll need to check your local library / used book shop, or Amazon if neither of them have it. In case you're really that interested, I mean.
- Panglozz on an OOXML standards "committee" being packed with M$ pawns.
- A new interview with PJ, in which she insists she isn't a superhero. Which, of course, is exactly what they all say when asked about it directly. C'mon, everybody knows that.
- I forgot to post this last time, and GL's already covered it now, but here's that clueless anti-GPL fud piece by that David DeJean guy. If you read it when it first came out, you might want to take another look. He's given the pig's lipstick a touch up, backpedalling about what he said about SCO earlier, while leaving his GPL 2 vs. 3 drivel intact. The comments section is rather... entertaining, as you might expect.
I swear, I think the less scrupulous parts of the trade press (i.e. all of them) have figured out that nothing drives page views like an ignorant doofus columnist spouting off about issues he doesn't have a clue about. Dvorak perfected that way back in the dead-tree days, and it works even better on the interwebs. Sure, what DeJean generated was a tidal wave of geeks showing up to taunt the guy, but that still meant a big pile of banner ad revenue.
Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech