>>Nothing quite like two national governments recommending against using your product to raise the priority of fixing the problem
Nothing like people actually switching browsers in droves because of the warnings to raise the priority of fixing it. Now that they've switched, what are the chances of those lost users switching back?
Zero value was reached years ago, some idiots are still purchasing (very few) shares at about $0.15 though, so the stock isn't reflecting the true value, even though their new plan proposes paying stockholders perhaps $0.02/share if things go well.
Using the same failure rate figures as the article, you WILL get an unrecoverable read error each and every time you back up your 12 TB of data. You will be able to recover from the single block failure because of the RAID 5 setup.
With that kind of error rate, drive manufacturers will be forced to design to higher standards, they won't be able to sell drives that fail at that rate.
>>Something I've never understood is why so many people I know try to get out of jury duty.
I got called for a jury pool for a gang-related murder trial. They expected it to last for months (it did). I was working for a start-up that couldn't afford to lose my contribution for that long a time, and they didn't cover jury pay.
As long as the jury pool is limited to those who can manage on $5/day jury pay, there will be bright educated people who can't afford to participate (in my case, I would not have been able to pay my mortgage).
The games they've been playing, even out in clear view od the SEC and bankruptcy courts, with other people's money (millions of which went to corp execs) are probably nothing compared to what they're going to do if they take the company private. No need to report to anyone. Just declare bankruptcy when Novell wins, and pay bonuses to the execs for FUD well done, and exit with no cash to pay the creditors.
On the plus side, the old saying is "there's no such thing as bad advertising", right?
In this case, the connections to Redmond are there for anyone to see. The advertising comes from the desperation efforts of MS continuing from all angles, regardless of how it reflects on them. We have the SCO funding, the "Get the FUD" campaign, the efforts to subvert the standards organizations, the patent suits from Acacia, licensing "deals" with Linux vendors, and now the patent suit in Nigeria against OLPC.
Those are the things that scream loudly that MS believes in FOSS enough that everybody ought to take a look at it.
>>Perhaps the ISP shouldn't oversell their bandwidth? It would result in higher prices, but it would be more honest.
Or perhaps they should sell their bandwidth differently. Some people want a really high-speed connection for instant response time and occasional large transfers, others want to use all the bandwidth they can get 24/7. The two could be charged differently for their usage. Sell different plans with the same connection speed but different limits on maximum monthly usage. When someone goes over the limit, either throttle their connection to a much lower speed or bill the extra usage at a premium rate. The ISPs could actually offer higher speeds at much cheaper rates to the 'normal' users, and make extra bucks off the high volume users. Users would pay for what they use, and as people moved to high volume use, the ISP could add the bandwidth without having to gripe about it. They could even shape their traffic if they wanted to, offering lower rates during off hours for high volume use.
A side benefit would be that they wouldn't have to oversell bandwidth by anywhere near as much since they would know how much real bandwidth they need by the type of account.
Is there any way to know how a particular phone/provider combination is going to work? Calling 911 to test it doesn't sound like a good idea, but knowing whether or not my phone is going to alert the burglar in my house that I'm there might be good information to have.
This problem has been around since the dawn of data centers. One bank in Chicago with IBM mainframes in the 60's had battery UPS + generators to back up the mainframes, an identical setup to back up the cooling system, plus one more identical backup system to cover failure in either of the other two.
When they tried to sue Daimler-Chrysler for being a Unix customer and using Linux, they didn't realize that their code hadn't been used for over a decade, and they sent their demands to "President, Chrysler Corp." at an address of a building that had been torn down for years. I seriously doubt that their "customer list" is all that valuable, they can't even find their own customers on it. In any case, the customers and VAR network were what SCO (then known as Caldera, the Linux vendor) tried to use to build their Linux base before they went sue-crazy. That plan has been tried and didn't work. The VARs have long since moved on to Linux or Microsoft. The "millions of customers" they "help build their business every day" they refer to in their SEC reports can only be the ones that get lunch at McDonalds (where they at least used to provide software to run the cash registers), and the customers of some Japanese phone companies who use SCO software for billing. [With $15M revenue for a product that sells for $500 or more, that's a max of 30,000 sales/year, mostly to a few large customers]
I just can't see any asset they might have to be worth over about $0. The customer base is so small, and the code is so far out of date that it would take a massive R&D and marketing effort to ever make a dime out of it. Their "buyer" has expressed no such plans, and if someone else wanted it, they could cut out the middle man and buy it themselves directly. Nobody's interested. SCO's worldwide sales are about the same as one Target store.
OTOH, I can see someone willing to pay a bunch to take the corporate records and files out of where they might be vulnerable to a group of creditors having access to them. That just might be worth millions to the right bidder.
Support revenue has been about $5M/year, dropping by about 20%/year, with costs of about half of that (before administration, marketing and overhead). Even at the current rate of decline, that's a $2M/yr revenue stream in five years, and it's going to drop faster than that now. If costs of providing it go up (it will be really unique knowledge), and overhead stays the same, it only loses $3-4M/year. They don't make money on it now. Would you pay $36M for a business that can expect gross revenues under $20M over the next five years, with costs probably double that amount?
There is nothing left worth selling. SCO has bludgeoned UnixWare and Open Server to death. They have lost a total of $250 million running the company for the last seven years (of course $100M or so was thrown away on fantasies of lawsuits), and the product hasn't been maintained for years. The only customers are those stuck with legacy systems with proprietary hardware/software that can't be replaced easily. The only way to ever get any new customers would be for a trusted company to put massive amounts of development effort into building a new product out of it. Even then, the product is horribly overpriced, and even at those prices it hasn't shown any profits. Now it's competing against Linux and Microsoft solutions in their core business areas. Nobody is going to resurrect the SCO Unix line.
There is nothing there to break up into profitable pieces. The SCO Unix line is dead, and they have been pushing their "mobile" business as the hope for the future for years. Unfortunately, they have never shown a dime of income (let alone profits) on their balance sheets for any of it. They've never shown a dime of R&D expenses for it either. Nevertheless, Darl has fantasized about "if we only took 20% of the mobile market", we could make billions. If I only had 20% of the gold in Fort Knox, I'd be rich too, but my plan is missing the same piece that Darl's is missing.
Someone wants to pay $36M to take over the books and records of what's left of SCO, and perhaps to fund the legal FUD campaign for a while longer. I predict that any records of illegal activity will be "lost" soon after the transfer, perhaps in an unfortunate warehouse fire or miscommunication with a document destruction company, and the "software business" will never receive funding of any sort. Current customers are out of luck as the support line will be staffed by a kid who asks if you want fries with that.
Well, I'm a composer, and I recognise that I probably won't be making much money off my music during my lifetime. My kids though, may well have the distinction of saying "yeah, that unfunk fellow was my dad" and thus, I'm all for them getting money from my work.
Too bad that, unless you're in the top.1% of composers, your work will all be lost by then. If it doesn't make money now, nobody is going to publish it commercially and since copyright laws prohibit others from attempting to preserve it, it's gone. Rather than living off the wealth of your creativity, your grandchildren won't even know about anything you wrote.
IMHO, fixing that would go a long way towards fixing the patent situation. If the patent holder had to pay back all licensing and attorney fees for a patent ruled invalid, the patent holders themselves would be far more careful in asserting rights for "inventions" that are not likely to stand up to scrutiny.
The patents here appear to be for the tools used to build the drives. IANAL, but I thought that patents covered only the end product. In this case, the patented tool can be claimed, but not everything ever built with the patented tool. This claim would need to be filed in the country where the tool was used, assuming that country has issued a patent on the invention.
They have already been able to delay until, magically, Vista got released. Now that Vista is having a bit of a problem with traction in the marketplace, perhaps it's time for some more "emergency" delay. Not that anyone is really concerned any more that there is anything wrong with Linux, but that seems to have been the original idea, and perhaps some of the principles still think they can generate some more FUD out of it.
So far, SCO has shown 326 lines of code after over three years of discovery, and those are questionable at best (coming from standards that SCO participated in writing like ELF, or coming from IBM home-grown code like JFS). In June, the judge gave one of my favorite quotes from the case.
SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know. SCO received substantial code from IBM pursuant to the court's orders as mentioned supra. Further, SCO brought this action against IBM and under the Federal Rules, and the court's orders, SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table.Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that "you know what you stole I'm not telling." Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say "its in there somewhere, you figure it out."
Now, after discovery is over, when they were told that ALL of their claims had to be stated by the end of discovery, SCO claims in their expert reports that virtually the whole of Linux is at issue. Since discovery is over, that would mean that IBM could not gather any new evidence to refute the claims. This is NOT how the system works. Normally, you state your claims, both sides have a chance through discovery to determine the evidence, that evidence is presented, experts review the evidence and report on it, then you go to trial.
In this case, SCO claimed they didn't KNOW what their claims were and they wouldn't know until after discovery. That in itself seems to put IBM at a disadvantage. At the end of discovery, they had 326 lines and some nebulous claims with no evidence (which were thrown out in the ruling in June). Now, in the "expert reports" which are supposed to examine the evidence on the table, SCO adds a raft of claims for which they still present no evidence.
Given that over three years ago, they claimed to have a suitcase stuffed with "millions of lines" of "stolen" code, it's rather surprising that they didn't present it as part of their case, even after repeated admonishments from the judges to show some evidence. You'd almost think they didn't actually have a case.
Actually, I think the sellers are under the impression that it's "their" store, and they're driving away the buyers by trying to make the rules in their favor. eBay listens to the sellers too much, and actions like this will only make it worse. You have sellers trying every trick in the book to pull one over on the buyers ($0.99 items with $87.50 shipping, allowing feedback to be hidden, things buyers want like "eBay Negs" not being adopted because they upset the sellers, etc.). The sellers want to make an easy buck and it shows. It used to be that the playing field was far more level. Now the sellers are wondering why the buyers are fading away, and they want to take ~more~ control over the environment to "fix it"?
Part of the problem is market saturation, part of it is that some of the novelty has worn off, another part is other sellers (Amazon, Newegg, Tiger Direct to name a few that I know of) getting better at what they do and adapting to the market as it is.
I know as a buyer, my buying has changed. I used to spend lots of time searching for bargains, and would usually find them. Now, the sellers are way more sophisticated at keeping their prices up (and more willing to list an item a few more times before it sells), looking at masses of data collected to try to "maximize" their profits. Now, my buying generally comes down to a decision of how soon do I want the item, and do I want to spend the time to go to a brick and mortar store searching, or just order from my desk, If it;s not all that important, I'll buy frim a seller who looks good, and might pay a few bucks fir the convenience of not having to waste gas and deal with stores, but I;m sure not going to expect to find a "great" deal any more. (In the oast, I found lots of things mis-listed where others missed them, and I could get a deal, that doesn;t happen any more as the sellers are getting more sophisteced with their software and "marketing programs". When I find the item I want, it's $3.00 less than Amazon, and it;s a no-rainer spending the $3.00 on a known solid company. It's no surprize to me that, as sellers hae become more scientufic about extracting the last dime out of buyersk it's beggomg harder to find buyers.
Having the sellers:take over teh store" will just make it worse for teh buyers, and the sellers will wonder even more:what happened to the "good old days", while the buyers wikk wander in other directions,
Worse than that, if the "talking head" goes too far, Lanham Act claims will appear (and the "Get the Facts" campaign is already pretty close to the line).
especially when it only 'shows' infringment in 3 out 201 issues
No, we haven't gotten that far yet. So far only 3 of 201 issues actually "suggest" infringement. Those are the issues where SCO may have actually shown a line of their code and a line of someone else's code, and identified what files/lines they came from.
Since SCO has, in the past, shown "errno.h" which it appears they got from elswhere as part of the alleged "infringement", and has claimed IBM and Sequent patented ideas which they copied into their code as other "infringing" items, it's a bit of a leap to assume that the three remaining items (after throwing out the part they didn't identify at all) actually "show" anything.
What remains is where SCO identified at least a file and some lines from the code. This is a long way from making an assumption that those 3 pieces are actually somehow infringing on something that SCO owns. Remember that SCO still claims to "own UNIX" in their SEC filings and press releases, and still claims that IBM and Sequent patented algorithms are "theirs" because they were taken from AIX and Dynix and put into their code.
All we're asking to have thrown out now are places where SCO has said basically "something in your code infringes on something in our code and we're not telling you where or what it is". IBM is asking for those claims to be thrown out as they aren't specific, don't constitute a vaild legal claim, and therefore can't possibly be defended against. In other words, they aren't even claims of any wrongdoing. I't like going to the cops and saying "Joe stole something from me, I'm not telling you what or when, go put him in jail for it"... it won't get prosecuted and Joe would have no way to defend himself from such a claim. That claim would just be thrown out.
The remaining claims apperently specify at least enough to identify what is claimed to be stolen. With those, Joe can at least show a receipt for his purchase, show that he picked it up at Sam's garage sale, or whatever. I would guess that whatever is left after throwing out the "unidenified claims" will be fairly trivial for IBM to defend against.
Most certainly a new CISC design wouldn't resemble the x86 architecture. That architecture was designed around an entirely different set of constraints on how the hardware could be built (and on a bunch of compatability constraints with older [4004, 8008, 8080,...] architectures) that are no longer an issue today. The IBM/360...z/900 architecture is also dated by requirements for compatibility with some really OLD hardware and software designs. Conceptually, a new CISC design could vastly improve on these old designs, and personally anyway, I think the M68000 series CISC instruction set for example, was significantly "better" designed, but the older CISC designs have a huge amount of legacy code running on them, so a new design will always start off in a deep hole trying to gather market share.
In addition, building compilers to effectively use novel CISC architectures is much more complex than converting compilers to generate efficient code on competing RISC systems. In RISC systems, generally there are a LOT of similarities between different system's instruction sets, and a few (albeit important) differences between them. In different CISC architectures, pretty much everything changes. You have similar problems rebuilding assembler level code routines from one CISC architecture to another.
I doubt that the advantages of a new CISC architecture would be able to overcome the difficulties of converting to it, at least not until there is a major change in the playing field (such as quantum computing systems, or something equally revolutionary in the future), where rebuilding pretty much everything from scratch is necessary in order to effectively use it. Other architectures that are neither RISC or CISC, but something different altogether may also evolve (for example, the Itanium architecture, at least to me with my limited knowledge of it, seems to be a branch into a somewhat different realm).
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>>Nothing quite like two national governments recommending against using your product to raise the priority of fixing the problem
Nothing like people actually switching browsers in droves because of the warnings to raise the priority of fixing it. Now that they've switched, what are the chances of those lost users switching back?
>>Have SCO stocks reached zero value yet?
Zero value was reached years ago, some idiots are still purchasing (very few) shares at about $0.15 though, so the stock isn't reflecting the true value, even though their new plan proposes paying stockholders perhaps $0.02/share if things go well.
Using the same failure rate figures as the article, you WILL get an unrecoverable read error each and every time you back up your 12 TB of data. You will be able to recover from the single block failure because of the RAID 5 setup.
With that kind of error rate, drive manufacturers will be forced to design to higher standards, they won't be able to sell drives that fail at that rate.
I thought the XP version that was allowed on low cost PCs had restrictions that prohibited using touch screens. Did Microsoft change those rules?
>>Something I've never understood is why so many people I know try to get out of jury duty.
I got called for a jury pool for a gang-related murder trial. They expected it to last for months (it did). I was working for a start-up that couldn't afford to lose my contribution for that long a time, and they didn't cover jury pay.
As long as the jury pool is limited to those who can manage on $5/day jury pay, there will be bright educated people who can't afford to participate (in my case, I would not have been able to pay my mortgage).
The games they've been playing, even out in clear view od the SEC and bankruptcy courts, with other people's money (millions of which went to corp execs) are probably nothing compared to what they're going to do if they take the company private. No need to report to anyone. Just declare bankruptcy when Novell wins, and pay bonuses to the execs for FUD well done, and exit with no cash to pay the creditors.
On the plus side, the old saying is "there's no such thing as bad advertising", right?
In this case, the connections to Redmond are there for anyone to see. The advertising comes from the desperation efforts of MS continuing from all angles, regardless of how it reflects on them. We have the SCO funding, the "Get the FUD" campaign, the efforts to subvert the standards organizations, the patent suits from Acacia, licensing "deals" with Linux vendors, and now the patent suit in Nigeria against OLPC.
Those are the things that scream loudly that MS believes in FOSS enough that everybody ought to take a look at it.
>>Perhaps the ISP shouldn't oversell their bandwidth? It would result in higher prices, but it would be more honest.
Or perhaps they should sell their bandwidth differently. Some people want a really high-speed connection for instant response time and occasional large transfers, others want to use all the bandwidth they can get 24/7. The two could be charged differently for their usage. Sell different plans with the same connection speed but different limits on maximum monthly usage. When someone goes over the limit, either throttle their connection to a much lower speed or bill the extra usage at a premium rate. The ISPs could actually offer higher speeds at much cheaper rates to the 'normal' users, and make extra bucks off the high volume users. Users would pay for what they use, and as people moved to high volume use, the ISP could add the bandwidth without having to gripe about it. They could even shape their traffic if they wanted to, offering lower rates during off hours for high volume use.
A side benefit would be that they wouldn't have to oversell bandwidth by anywhere near as much since they would know how much real bandwidth they need by the type of account.
I looked ... it doesn't mention it.
Does that mean I can sue them if it sounds an alarm and the burglar kills me?
Is there any way to know how a particular phone/provider combination is going to work? Calling 911 to test it doesn't sound like a good idea, but knowing whether or not my phone is going to alert the burglar in my house that I'm there might be good information to have.
This problem has been around since the dawn of data centers. One bank in Chicago with IBM mainframes in the 60's had battery UPS + generators to back up the mainframes, an identical setup to back up the cooling system, plus one more identical backup system to cover failure in either of the other two.
Aside from obviousness, the idea has been around forever. nCube built a business around it in the early 80's.
When they tried to sue Daimler-Chrysler for being a Unix customer and using Linux, they didn't realize that their code hadn't been used for over a decade, and they sent their demands to "President, Chrysler Corp." at an address of a building that had been torn down for years. I seriously doubt that their "customer list" is all that valuable, they can't even find their own customers on it. In any case, the customers and VAR network were what SCO (then known as Caldera, the Linux vendor) tried to use to build their Linux base before they went sue-crazy. That plan has been tried and didn't work. The VARs have long since moved on to Linux or Microsoft. The "millions of customers" they "help build their business every day" they refer to in their SEC reports can only be the ones that get lunch at McDonalds (where they at least used to provide software to run the cash registers), and the customers of some Japanese phone companies who use SCO software for billing. [With $15M revenue for a product that sells for $500 or more, that's a max of 30,000 sales/year, mostly to a few large customers]
I just can't see any asset they might have to be worth over about $0. The customer base is so small, and the code is so far out of date that it would take a massive R&D and marketing effort to ever make a dime out of it. Their "buyer" has expressed no such plans, and if someone else wanted it, they could cut out the middle man and buy it themselves directly. Nobody's interested. SCO's worldwide sales are about the same as one Target store.
OTOH, I can see someone willing to pay a bunch to take the corporate records and files out of where they might be vulnerable to a group of creditors having access to them. That just might be worth millions to the right bidder.
Support revenue has been about $5M/year, dropping by about 20%/year, with costs of about half of that (before administration, marketing and overhead). Even at the current rate of decline, that's a $2M/yr revenue stream in five years, and it's going to drop faster than that now. If costs of providing it go up (it will be really unique knowledge), and overhead stays the same, it only loses $3-4M/year. They don't make money on it now. Would you pay $36M for a business that can expect gross revenues under $20M over the next five years, with costs probably double that amount?
There is nothing left worth selling. SCO has bludgeoned UnixWare and Open Server to death. They have lost a total of $250 million running the company for the last seven years (of course $100M or so was thrown away on fantasies of lawsuits), and the product hasn't been maintained for years. The only customers are those stuck with legacy systems with proprietary hardware/software that can't be replaced easily. The only way to ever get any new customers would be for a trusted company to put massive amounts of development effort into building a new product out of it. Even then, the product is horribly overpriced, and even at those prices it hasn't shown any profits. Now it's competing against Linux and Microsoft solutions in their core business areas. Nobody is going to resurrect the SCO Unix line.
There is nothing there to break up into profitable pieces. The SCO Unix line is dead, and they have been pushing their "mobile" business as the hope for the future for years. Unfortunately, they have never shown a dime of income (let alone profits) on their balance sheets for any of it. They've never shown a dime of R&D expenses for it either. Nevertheless, Darl has fantasized about "if we only took 20% of the mobile market", we could make billions. If I only had 20% of the gold in Fort Knox, I'd be rich too, but my plan is missing the same piece that Darl's is missing.
Someone wants to pay $36M to take over the books and records of what's left of SCO, and perhaps to fund the legal FUD campaign for a while longer. I predict that any records of illegal activity will be "lost" soon after the transfer, perhaps in an unfortunate warehouse fire or miscommunication with a document destruction company, and the "software business" will never receive funding of any sort. Current customers are out of luck as the support line will be staffed by a kid who asks if you want fries with that.
Too bad that, unless you're in the top
IMHO, fixing that would go a long way towards fixing the patent situation. If the patent holder had to pay back all licensing and attorney fees for a patent ruled invalid, the patent holders themselves would be far more careful in asserting rights for "inventions" that are not likely to stand up to scrutiny.
The patents here appear to be for the tools used to build the drives. IANAL, but I thought that patents covered only the end product. In this case, the patented tool can be claimed, but not everything ever built with the patented tool. This claim would need to be filed in the country where the tool was used, assuming that country has issued a patent on the invention.
They have already been able to delay until, magically, Vista got released. Now that Vista is having a bit of a problem with traction in the marketplace, perhaps it's time for some more "emergency" delay. Not that anyone is really concerned any more that there is anything wrong with Linux, but that seems to have been the original idea, and perhaps some of the principles still think they can generate some more FUD out of it.
So far, SCO has shown 326 lines of code after over three years of discovery, and those are questionable at best (coming from standards that SCO participated in writing like ELF, or coming from IBM home-grown code like JFS). In June, the judge gave one of my favorite quotes from the case.
Now, after discovery is over, when they were told that ALL of their claims had to be stated by the end of discovery, SCO claims in their expert reports that virtually the whole of Linux is at issue. Since discovery is over, that would mean that IBM could not gather any new evidence to refute the claims. This is NOT how the system works. Normally, you state your claims, both sides have a chance through discovery to determine the evidence, that evidence is presented, experts review the evidence and report on it, then you go to trial.
In this case, SCO claimed they didn't KNOW what their claims were and they wouldn't know until after discovery. That in itself seems to put IBM at a disadvantage. At the end of discovery, they had 326 lines and some nebulous claims with no evidence (which were thrown out in the ruling in June). Now, in the "expert reports" which are supposed to examine the evidence on the table, SCO adds a raft of claims for which they still present no evidence.
Given that over three years ago, they claimed to have a suitcase stuffed with "millions of lines" of "stolen" code, it's rather surprising that they didn't present it as part of their case, even after repeated admonishments from the judges to show some evidence. You'd almost think they didn't actually have a case.
Actually, I think the sellers are under the impression that it's "their" store, and they're driving away the buyers by trying to make the rules in their favor. eBay listens to the sellers too much, and actions like this will only make it worse. You have sellers trying every trick in the book to pull one over on the buyers ($0.99 items with $87.50 shipping, allowing feedback to be hidden, things buyers want like "eBay Negs" not being adopted because they upset the sellers, etc.). The sellers want to make an easy buck and it shows. It used to be that the playing field was far more level. Now the sellers are wondering why the buyers are fading away, and they want to take ~more~ control over the environment to "fix it"?
:take over teh store" will just make it worse for teh buyers, and the sellers will wonder even more :what happened to the "good old days", while the buyers wikk wander in other directions,
Part of the problem is market saturation, part of it is that some of the novelty has worn off, another part is other sellers (Amazon, Newegg, Tiger Direct to name a few that I know of) getting better at what they do and adapting to the market as it is.
I know as a buyer, my buying has changed. I used to spend lots of time searching for bargains, and would usually find them. Now, the sellers are way more sophisticated at keeping their prices up (and more willing to list an item a few more times before it sells), looking at masses of data collected to try to "maximize" their profits. Now, my buying generally comes down to a decision of how soon do I want the item, and do I want to spend the time to go to a brick and mortar store searching, or just order from my desk, If it;s not all that important, I'll buy frim a seller who looks good, and might pay a few bucks fir the convenience of not having to waste gas and deal with stores, but I;m sure not going to expect to find a "great" deal any more. (In the oast, I found lots of things mis-listed where others missed them, and I could get a deal, that doesn;t happen any more as the sellers are getting more sophisteced with their software and "marketing programs". When I find the item I want, it's $3.00 less than Amazon, and it;s a no-rainer spending the $3.00 on a known solid company. It's no surprize to me that, as sellers hae become more scientufic about extracting the last dime out of buyersk it's beggomg harder to find buyers.
Having the sellers
Worse than that, if the "talking head" goes too far, Lanham Act claims will appear (and the "Get the Facts" campaign is already pretty close to the line).
It's Sun and Microsoft that bought tens of millions of dollars worth of "SCO products".
No, we haven't gotten that far yet. So far only 3 of 201 issues actually "suggest" infringement. Those are the issues where SCO may have actually shown a line of their code and a line of someone else's code, and identified what files/lines they came from.
Since SCO has, in the past, shown "errno.h" which it appears they got from elswhere as part of the alleged "infringement", and has claimed IBM and Sequent patented ideas which they copied into their code as other "infringing" items, it's a bit of a leap to assume that the three remaining items (after throwing out the part they didn't identify at all) actually "show" anything.
What remains is where SCO identified at least a file and some lines from the code. This is a long way from making an assumption that those 3 pieces are actually somehow infringing on something that SCO owns. Remember that SCO still claims to "own UNIX" in their SEC filings and press releases, and still claims that IBM and Sequent patented algorithms are "theirs" because they were taken from AIX and Dynix and put into their code.
All we're asking to have thrown out now are places where SCO has said basically "something in your code infringes on something in our code and we're not telling you where or what it is". IBM is asking for those claims to be thrown out as they aren't specific, don't constitute a vaild legal claim, and therefore can't possibly be defended against. In other words, they aren't even claims of any wrongdoing. I't like going to the cops and saying "Joe stole something from me, I'm not telling you what or when, go put him in jail for it" ... it won't get prosecuted and Joe would have no way to defend himself from such a claim. That claim would just be thrown out.
The remaining claims apperently specify at least enough to identify what is claimed to be stolen. With those, Joe can at least show a receipt for his purchase, show that he picked it up at Sam's garage sale, or whatever. I would guess that whatever is left after throwing out the "unidenified claims" will be fairly trivial for IBM to defend against.
Most certainly a new CISC design wouldn't resemble the x86 architecture. That architecture was designed around an entirely different set of constraints on how the hardware could be built (and on a bunch of compatability constraints with older [4004, 8008, 8080, ...] architectures) that are no longer an issue today. The IBM/360...z/900 architecture is also dated by requirements for compatibility with some really OLD hardware and software designs. Conceptually, a new CISC design could vastly improve on these old designs, and personally anyway, I think the M68000 series CISC instruction set for example, was significantly "better" designed, but the older CISC designs have a huge amount of legacy code running on them, so a new design will always start off in a deep hole trying to gather market share.
In addition, building compilers to effectively use novel CISC architectures is much more complex than converting compilers to generate efficient code on competing RISC systems. In RISC systems, generally there are a LOT of similarities between different system's instruction sets, and a few (albeit important) differences between them. In different CISC architectures, pretty much everything changes. You have similar problems rebuilding assembler level code routines from one CISC architecture to another.
I doubt that the advantages of a new CISC architecture would be able to overcome the difficulties of converting to it, at least not until there is a major change in the playing field (such as quantum computing systems, or something equally revolutionary in the future), where rebuilding pretty much everything from scratch is necessary in order to effectively use it. Other architectures that are neither RISC or CISC, but something different altogether may also evolve (for example, the Itanium architecture, at least to me with my limited knowledge of it, seems to be a branch into a somewhat different realm).