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The latest SCO acquisition is Vultus, which even sounds evil. The SCO stockholders are the eventual losers, but I find it difficult to develop sympathy for someone who buys into a shakedown racket.

Bruce

"It's like a house that hasn't been maintained in a few years," McBride said. "We're going to come back and spruce the place up."

SCO's MIT mathematicians go AWOL

SCO said, they had three teams, including a team from MIT math department, examine their "proof" of UNIX code improperly in Linux

1. No such team could be found at MIT. And SCO are back tracking on this claim.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N33/33sco.33n.html

2. Here is an example quote that SCO made about MIT math involvement:

http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/gove rnment/legalissues/story/0,10801,81973,00.html

SCO was able to uncover the alleged violations by hiring three teams of experts, including a group from the MIT math department, to analyze the Linux and Unix source code for similarities. "All three found several instances where our Unix source code had been found in Linux," said a SCO spokesman.

• Broken patches
• Doesn't work + make a new hole
• Innadequate

People with production systems are reluctant to alpha test microsoft's patches on their production machines. That's not happenstance, that's policy. Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie recently suggested that in the name of security, it may be appropriate to force you to install Microsoft patches or updates, and if that breaks your existing applications, well, it's for your own good.

If you think about it, if MS-Support keeps breaking third party apps and/or keeps recommending wiping the hard drive and doing a clean install, they get rid of all third party apps through attritition. It's by wearing down the flunky doing the install or using up all the flunky's time or the end user being unable to use the app until the flunky can fix it. Rather clever, I think, even when considering that Microsoft is more of a marketing company or pyramid scheme than a tech company.

eWEEK asked:

SCO and its lawyers also say that even if that were a workable solution, they would still want damages for the illegal use of their code in Linux until the "fix" was implemented. They say Unix code has been in Linux since 2001 and that vendors and end users have been profiting from this since then, and they want to be compensated for that. Who, they ask, would compensate them under this scenario.

Better yet: How about a class action suit against Canopy Group? They have made millions during the course of this scam while threatening busnesses and everyone's freedom. People of the World v. Canopy Group sounds nice. They should pay for our anguish with a multiple of the profit they made by these actions.

Train wreck? What a total crock from Keynote. here is a well researched article that's easy to read for you [sciam.com].

I'm sorry but I cant find anything in there that says the train wreck didnt happen?

Are you saying that there was not a crash and that there were no cables affected by the crash?

These stories disagree with you:

http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/energy /story/0,10801,62375,00.html

http://www.isp-planet.com/technology/2001/baltimor e_bol.html

http://www.firefighting.com/articles/namFullView.a sp?namID=3365

...snip grumble...

You can contrast that to free software distribution systems where it's easy to set up a local mirror and theyby reduce the amount of traffic needed by orders of magnitude.

No shit! You know thats really interesting. If only MS had a system like tha... heyyy they DO! In fact you know - I have one. On my network.

Incidentally in your mirroring system how do you keep all your software up to date and are 100% certain that it hasn't been tampered with?

I was wondering about whether or not their sales talks at their little get together are real or are they just hot air.

They seem to have convinced their faithful that they really do have some new products coming out.

From Users and resellers say SCO's news is good news:

"I came away willing to invest in Unix" again, he said. "I was very pleased that SCO appears to be very committed to Unix, that there is a road map. It appears that it's a company that wants to partner, and therefore we should explore a lot of technical opportunities with them."

S. Arshad Raza, CEO of Premier Systems Ltd., a SCO reseller and systems integrator in Karachi, Pakistan, said he has worried for several years about the apparent end of SCO Unix, but he now has a renewed belief in the company's outlook. "When [customers] lost confidence in SCO," he said, they stopped paying him for licenses and bought and installed pirated copies of the operating system because they didn't feel they needed to pay money to a declining business. But that's now changing, he said, since SCO has filed an intellectual-property lawsuit against IBM, and customers are gaining new optimism.

Considering the ethics of the current SCO, would you trust them to deliver products they promise?

ha hAaa!

And keep this description of SCO, and their holding-company's, Shell-Game in mind whilst doing-so.
( REALLY dig that link before complaining to SEC: it's gooood, if one isn't SCO, to see that concise and clear description of their doings posted openly )

SCO's 'Shell' Game, boosting their stocks for their siblings in the holding-company, for their temporary benefit, and for the holding-company, of course....

( yes I know that spouting falsity for sake of stock-value-manipulation is a right, in capitalism, but having the market's PEOPLE clued-in to information is also a right, some believe... )

The SCO execs are not only sniking the future of their company, but potentially the future of other companies.

the latter may be true, but the former isn't necessarily true.

The insider trading issue is actually bigger than suspected.

This article demonstrates how SCOs owners have cashed in on the inflated share prices without having to show up on the insider trading lists.

All that talk about buying SCO/Linux licences as an "insurance" sounds more and more like the Godfather. When did racketeering become legal in the USA?

and if your boss claims that the budget won't support it, then refer said boss to

http://www.computerworld.com/departments/opinions/ sharktank/0,4885,83304,00.html

That's a low-end server. Perfect for a small department server or maybe for hosting a small website.

Also perfect for high-end applications by the United States Navy, ala nuclear attack submarines.

http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/defens e/story/0,10801,83783,00.html

I must know what SCO really is up to!

i know most GPL-heads, linux lovers and misc. nerds on here will be outraged or dumbfounded by the escalating surrealism of this whole fiasco, but the suits behind this are not idiots. there are probably good reasons for all the lawsuits, and this must be one of them:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/32346.html

(be sure to check out the computerworld link in the last paragraph.)

There are two problems I see with the theory. First, I don't see SCO taking over any small companies right now. ;)

Actually, they are. Computer World published and article on it called SCO's Shell Game. Also found other tidbits while Googling(tm) around. They make a claim, their stock goes up, they issue new shares and buy stuff by trading the new shares.

Now, I don't say the parent is absolutely correct, but there is some real validity to his claims. Not necessarily probable, but very possible. The parent is not that far off my line of reasoning.

I posted this in a thread yesterday, but it got sort of buried and I think /.ers ought to keep it in mind:

SCO's Shell Game

Some quotes:

None of the threats make legal sense. If they did, SCO would be able to get an injunction to shut down Linux users. In practice, SCO hasn't even been able to get an injunction against IBM and won't get a court hearing on its request to do that until 2005.

Meanwhile, a German court told SCO in June that it must stop threatening Linux users. And an Australian government agency is looking into charges that SCO is essentially running a shakedown racket by claiming that Linux users must buy a license they don't actually need.

And SCO's tactics don't make business sense, either. SCO is a software company that has slashed its R&D budget, alienated its customers and demolished the value of its brand. That's not the way you build a business.

So, what do you do when you have no real business but your stock price keeps going up? We all learned that lesson during the dot-com bubble: You use that stock as currency.

. . .

Got all that? If it sounds like a shell game, well, that's the way Canopy likes to move its companies around. But in effect, Canopy used SCO's stock price, boosted by SCO's Linux threats, to rake in a couple of million dollars in cash behind the scenes.

And apparently it worked. Which means we can expect that as long as Canopy can find ways of cashing in on SCO's threats against Linux users, those threats will keep coming -- no matter how little sense they make.

Case in point - an interesting article over at ComputerWorld about how IBM is pitching Linux to the banking industry, as a migration path away from OS/2.

Those nefarious nogoodniks - trying to ensnare innocent customers in their illegal activities!!!

see how to turn brown stuff green

From the SL Trib:

...Computerworld recently ran an article detailing how SCO's backers are cashing in its stock in a complex transaction involving purchase of a company owned by the Canopy Group, a Utah investment concern that also owns a big chunk of SCO.
An SCO spokesman said the report's allegations of a "shell game" weren't true, and added that SCO has no control over its stock price.


Here's (I'm pretty sure) the article mentioned:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/mana gement/story/0,10801,83452,00.html

It's not just that, there's been some shady dealings from SCO's major owner, the Canopy Group: article here. Something about a stock swap using inflated SCO shares to acquire Vultus which is a web services firm also owned by the Canopy Group. What's surprising is how the hype and disruption and the $3billion lawsuit claim are so out of proportion to the money they're actually making from this fraud. Execs sell $1.2M of stock. Vultus deal was $3M. Microsoft pays $25M. Almost like a mugger killing a guy to steal 20 bucks.

That's possible. I was thinking about it in terms of management, who I'm sure sometimes listen to their techies (of whatever stripe). However, judging by what I've read various places, particularly the Computerworld SharkTank, they also often don't listen to their techies, instead listening only to the most persuasive marketing.

Dan Aris

Speaking of their stock...
Dig This

She says less than ten percent of the files on a single server were affected. She says Acxiom has thousands of computer servers -- and the amount of material taken is small compared with all the information the company handles...Acxiom's Web site says the company serves 14 of the top 15 credit card companies, seven of the top ten auto manufacturers, and five of the top six retail banks.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) has approved a new and final draft standard for 802.11g wireless LANs that will have a true throughput for Internet-type connections of between 10M and 20Mbit/sec., far lower than 54Mbit/sec. raw data rate initially billed for the standard.

I'd be willing to bet that this whole charade by SCO is just a shell game to pump and dump stock

a shell game? You can say that again!

The Smart Dust Project at UC Berkeley, which seeks to create a wireless network of sensors each of which is one cunic milimeter in size. These "micro motes" create an ad-hock network to communicate between each other and relay information back to a central computer. The motes are cheap and self powered so they can be placed a variety of places.

Here's a good article on the motes and what they are all about.

Along with "Smart Buildings", the "Smart Kindergarten" would seem like the perfect non-military application for this emerging technology.

McNealy might be suffering from mercury toxicity.

That would explain alot.

They will probably put Red Hat 6.0 with "everything" installed. Hey, even an M$ tech can figure that one out, right?

All kidding asside, this lab is getting set up because they were tired of how lame their lies were. It was so obvious their FUDsters have no clue. They can't even hire a PR firm to lie for them as is.

Check out the quality of the FUD from just a few articles back in Computerworld The poor meat head tell about chasing down M$ worms and finding "rogue" computers running Linux. Though he's forced to run all over the place by Windoze poor remote administration tools, he worries about the security of boxes he did not know about because they never had a problem. He worries about the security of "third-party" applications like " file transfer protocol, sendmail and Apache. And other open-source software ..." Total cluelessness. They don't know what they are talking about, so they can't lie about it. It's as simple as that.

Their biggest problem is going to be finding people with both the comptence to run their lab and the the ability to lie enough to please meat heads like Steve Balmer. The truth, "dude, this is kicking our ass." is something they already know and don't want to hear. I can just hear Mr. Baller, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, tell me something bad about it, bitch or you are out of here!" Yeah, everything I read about life at M$ is like that, they call such abuse "elite". It must take a really wierd combination of high intelegence, low self esteem, big ego, bad morals, and greed to put up with that.

Last week SCO announced acquiring the assets and technology of Vultus, a web services company, who offer web development tools called WebFace ("Runs on Internet Explorer 5 and up").

While SCO predicted that they would obtain 15%-20% of a $3.7bn Web Services market, I have to admit to being perplexed how this is supposed to happen, and also wondering how well an Internet Explorer-based product could fit into SCO's UNIX offerings.

ComputerWorld has an alternative explanation of the Vultus acquisition, they call it: "SCO's Shell Game".

One thing is for sure - it sure is lucky that Vultus was in the same (Canopy-owned) building as SCO (check the picture), even before the acquisition!

Update: More on this story at GROKLAW

Repost: Form-4 filings with the SEC reveal Executives profiting from SCO stock sales: they made $398,833.90 in June, and $781,964.70 in July (so far)!

Already done

And what choice do they have? It's either take the job or be unemployed and have no money food etc, and hope that your familiy can support you. (Welfare? doesn't exist of course)

What choice do they have? Lets see, they could work for Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Yahoo, Adobe, Hughes, EDS or Oracle, to name a few employers in India.

What makes you think that IBM are even looking for the best talent?

How much bargaining power in the job market do you think these Indian workers have?

you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors. Check out Monster India, Naukri or Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.

Krishna

I just read this interview with the CEO of Cognizant, a company you outsource to, where he talks about outsourcing and BPO.

"I don't see it as something that should incite an enterprise Linux customer to do any more than they did last week," he said. "The threat level increases a bit, but mainly because the perception that SCO is a psycho killer, not that the case has changed."

Jonathan Eunice, Illuminata Inc., Nashua, N.H. in ComputerWorld
(Emphasis mine)

As some of you may know, Computerworld sends out a free email newsletter. Here are two consecutive headlines from the July 16, 2003 Afternoon Update:

Microsoft Warns Of Widespread Windows Vulnerability

Homeland Security Department To Buy Microsoft Software

Sleep snug, guys.

This article on Computerworld talks about tracking down unauthorized access points.

DARPA is also funding a research project that eventually hopes to create software that is self-aware. I believe this was posted previously on /. article here This might also tie into the Genoa II and Sensit projects. There are many projects with similar aims funded by darpa.

The code in contention is Unix System V.

Is that a fact?.

I suppose someone ought to tell the guys at SCO that, because they seem blissfully unaware.

http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/netw orking/story/0,10801,75539,00.html

Scale free networks. A network that fits this characteristic can be significantly degraded by removing well-connected nodes.

Secretary tells help desk, "I just spilled coffee on my boss's keyboard. What should I do?" Help desk pilot fish decides, "What the heck, it's just a $35 keyboard. Have her disconnect it and wash it out in the sink. If that doesn't work, we'll replace it." Next call is from her enraged boss: "Who the hell told my secretary to put my new $4,000 laptop in the sink and run water all over it?"

(source)

Third of all, how many space shuttle flights have there been in the last 10 years? And how many commercial airplane flights have there been in the last 10 years? How many people are monitoring the Space Shuttle flying? How many people are monitoring the average commercial airplane flying? Don't compare apples and oranges.

Oh and I almost forgot: you mention that the autopilot in Columbia _can_ be disabled. The autopilot mentioned here _cannot_ be disabled. Slight difference. Nothing worth mentioning. Until you need to disable it.

Doesn't anyone remember a while back when you could search for "go to hell" and it would send you to microsoft.com?

The top of this article about it says:

Could Bill Gates really be the devil?

maybe the NYT is on to something here.. :)

-metric

No sense in letting a rejected post go to waste. :)

Here's more background on the ideas and issues at stake, especially (surprisingly) the technology press links.

At the recent Wireless Internet Opportunity for Developing Nations conference, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that 802.11b (AKA Wi-Fi) has "a key role to play everywhere, but especially in developing countries and countries with economies in transition," where there is little to no telecommunications infrastructure in place. Keynote speaker Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger was understandably thrilled saying, "We see millions of people with the potential to become Wi-Fi users," and that wireless Internet was particularly appropriate for developing nations because it was neither government-regulated nor licensed. With 40-50 million PCs in use already, developing nations (including China and India) now make up the fastest growing market segment. Intel's new Centrino 802.11b laptop chipset and 30-mile-range MANs now under development that are based on 802.16 make Gelsinger hope for a sales bonanza that will put Intel in the lead for wireless notebooks. Critics say that a technology focus is not the panacaea for the poor, but instead solutions should be matched to the needs of a population.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software at Sun Microsystems Inc., spoke with Computerworld during the recent JavaOne conference here about the possibility of Java becoming open-source, the potential market for Java in mobile devices and Java's relationship with IBM. Excerpts from that interview follow.

Should Java be made fully open-source? The problem with open-source is that [victory] goes to volume, and that's evident in the Linux community today where ISVs [independent software vendors] are qualifying to Red Hat and abandoning everyone else. Why? Because Red Hat has volume. If Java were open-source, Microsoft could take it, deliver it as they saw fit and drive a definition of Java that was divergent from the one that the community wanted to be compatible. And to the victor would go the spoils of that nefarious action. To the extraordinary credit of the Java Community Process [JCP], we have a uniform compatible standard that now spans hundreds of millions of devices, hundreds of millions of smart cards, hundreds of millions of desktops and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of servers. So you have to really be careful in understanding the distinction between open-source and open standards.

More at http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/dev elopment/story/0,10801,82286,00.html

Darl accidentally played his hand (or on purpose, who can tell with him) in an interview where he admitted that a buyout from IBM is "an option."

The article you're thinking of is here. Very interesting reading.

DO THEY HAVE ANY PROOF THAT TERRORISTS USE LINUX?

Yes, here's proof that terrorists use linux:
Defense Department OK's open-source software.

War *is* terrorism.

This is part of an interesting pattern of MS killing off competing products, esp. on competing platforms.

I submitted a story (which was rejected) about this little gem:
Microsoft has purchased the RAV antivirus program, and will discontinue the Linux version.

Now this is interesting: they kill IE for Mac. They kill a product that allows a Linux/Sendmail based system to scan for viruses before they are delivered to the end user.

Question: has MS lost all fear of anti-trust action, and begun the final offensive against all competition?

Do bears excrete in the forest?
Do trolls post on Slashdot?

looks like the aussie computerworld article got slashdotted, but here's a similar one: http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/gove rnment/legalissues/story/0,10801,82070,00.html

You are getting confused by the theoretical bit rate 54 Mb/s and the actual data throughput of 10-20 MB/s.

The poorly written artical you're thinking of is a muddled piece of work, as many of the the comments in the slashdot discussion explained.

sigh

http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/s tory/0,10801,75830,00.html