If I understand it correctly the Canopy group has sold about 3 million of their SCO shares (i.e. new dividend paying stock) between July 8th and last week. That translates into 30+ million in profit for the Canopy group if you compare with the lowest price last year.
Even if the stock continues to slump until the law suit the Canopy group might be able to net 100 million USD in (extra) profits by their pump and dump tactics.. It doesn't much matter if the SCO company goes bankrupt then - which might have been the plan all along.
Make a proper worldwide list of SCO resellers, and have people from each contry conntact each reseller. Just a few press releases saying "we are no longer a SCO reseller" would be worth it. (The SCO / Caldera site is not surprisingly broken for finding official resellers.)
Check if The Canopy group is dumping SCO stock. The used to own 65% or so, if they're dumping stock it should be worth a FP on slashdot, if not news.com.. I'm not sure how you do this, you probably have to have a bit higher market access than most people.
Check if Unixware contains any obvious code stolen from Linux. Later versions have ext2 support and such, and there is the linux compability layer. Is all that _really_ written from scratch? If someone can show that "SCO stole thousands of lines of code from Linux and here is the proof" it would take a LOT of the wind out of their sales. And then there is device drivers.. In 10 years I doubt that they haven't copied anything from Linux.
What more? Oh.. Perhaps the people at www.thesmokinggun.com could dig something up on a SCO exec? Like this mugshot (not safe for work or anywhere).
Oh, and I got the partner page to work on sco.com: For where I live the first listed is a privat person, then there is a huge dairy (i.e. milk and cheese producer).. I wonder if they know they sell SCO products;)
According to someone who used to work for SCO (or Caldera) it is a good possibility that this support is based on code stolen from Linux: linux kernel posting. IMHO the Linux community should be allowed to examine this code, and if it is found to disregard the copyright the remaining Unixware code should be examined closely.
As it apears that US copyright law is based around "give lawers as much income as possible" I imagine that there is plenty of precedence for suing a company over this, but certainly press released should be issued, and all SCO customers should be made aware of their (possible) rights under the GPL to Unixware source.
Oh, and the Canopy group should be mentioned as well: They owned 68% of SCO before the first press releases in March, but just a few days later stated in a SEC filling that they would start selling off stock. It shouldn't be too hard to show that it is possible that this is simply a ploy by the Canopy group to boost share price while selling out.
(With the stock at 13$ up from a.60$ low last year they might already have made more from selling at 13$ than they might have made from selling their entire holding at around 1$.)
Yes, a virus can overwrite the firmware of any device on a PC. This includes:
Motherboard bios
Firmware all modern IDE and SCSI disks and CD-R/W
Graphics cards (like the ones from nvidia)
Some network cards
Even processors (like Intel CPUs) have a form of firmware (microcode), but this is usually updated on boot by the bios or OS (think Linux) and not stored on the CPU itself.
As far as I'm aware there is no hardware which implements authentication of the firmware upgrade, the hardware would happily accept garbage. Reflashing a bios / firmware filled with garbage can also be a major task - not all motherboards have a jumper for reseting the bios, and I'm not sure how you would upgrade the bios of a pci card if it didn't show up as a valid card. Besides, just try to find the correct bios / firmware for your "made in mainland china with just a serial number on the circuit board" thingy if the board doesn't even boot.
If you're interested in a discussion of this google for "disk2brick", that should find the long and bitter flamewar on the linux-kernel list on the topic of "how to destroy eide disks using undocumented eide commands".
Oh, and imho - the reason virus makers aren't exploiting this (except for overwriting the bios of some intel motherboards) is that most of them are bored teenagers talking about "virii". If someone with a clue and resources enough to test various hardware put their mind(s) to it I'm sure something could be made that messed up much of the common hardware today - enough that fixing it might cost more than replacing the hardware itself.
Combine that with, say, the bugs in the MS network stacks that MS has admited to existing, and you have the potential of creating a lot of damage in a suprisingly short time.
But of course, that won't happen with the US govermnent becoming the Internet Police soon.. (Ok, so that last sentence was flamebait, sorry:) )
See http://killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=122 for a Palm emulator in full color and http://killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=236 for a more "retro" b/w version.
IMHO Linux on a palmtop makes perfect sense as the palmtop market isn't as strongly under the Microsoft thumb as the desktop PC market. On a level playing field, where vendors must compete on price and features, not "how fast does it run Microsoft Office" the co-operative nature and free licencing of Linux should be a big strength.
The backups on the download server will be uncompilable for the most part and source code only. We are being hit up for compensation on a number of damages that our software caused so it's probably better that the downloads don't compile.
In short it apears that the sourceforge code is still available, but that there are ongoing legal concerns. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the US legal system might offer their help, bcast2000 apears to be the most mature video editing suite available on Linux under the GPL right now, and it would be a shame to lose it.
It is pretty obvious who this "feature" is directed at, that is the business segment. I tend to fly with SAS every few months, and often the business class has more people than coach. As business class costs up to 3x the price of coach it is clear that keeping these high paying customers is very important for the airline.
The best customers are of course the ones with gold cards, one such I had a meeting with a few months ago just paid for a one week vacation in the carribean (from Europe) for himself, his wife and two children, including the hotel, using just his airmiles on one of his gold cards. Now, you can imagine how much money the airlines has made on that guy alone the last couple of years!
If wiring a single airplane for wireless internet attracts just one such customer it would be a goldmine for the airline..
I hope they don't, but it would be interesting if the "movie industry" went after the author of DeCSS for damages. Jon Johansen is 15 years old and lives in Norway, where such suits are almost unheard of. Since the newspapers in Norway are rather boring it should get front page exposure..
Ah well, one can always hope they aren't that stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct URL is of course:
t io n=m&board=1600684464&tid=cald&sid=1600684464&mid=3 0218
http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&ac
Hehe, I guess I should have used that preview button after all..
Saw this one on the SCOX yahoo forum:
1 06 &tid=185&tid=187&tid=88
article.pl?sid=03/08/20/145206&mode=thread&tid=
If I understand it correctly the Canopy group has sold about 3 million of their SCO shares (i.e. new dividend paying stock) between July 8th and last week. That translates into 30+ million in profit for the Canopy group if you compare with the lowest price last year.
Even if the stock continues to slump until the law suit the Canopy group might be able to net 100 million USD in (extra) profits by their pump and dump tactics.. It doesn't much matter if the SCO company goes bankrupt then - which might have been the plan all along.
- Make a proper worldwide list of SCO resellers, and have people from each contry conntact each reseller. Just a few press releases saying "we are no longer a SCO reseller" would be worth it. (The SCO / Caldera site is not surprisingly broken for finding official resellers.)
- Check if The Canopy group is dumping SCO stock. The used to own 65% or so, if they're dumping stock it should be worth a FP on slashdot, if not news.com.. I'm not sure how you do this, you probably have to have a bit higher market access than most people.
- Check if Unixware contains any obvious code stolen from Linux. Later versions have ext2 support and such, and there is the linux compability layer. Is all that _really_ written from scratch? If someone can show that "SCO stole thousands of lines of code from Linux and here is the proof" it would take a LOT of the wind out of their sales. And then there is device drivers.. In 10 years I doubt that they haven't copied anything from Linux.
- What more? Oh.. Perhaps the people at www.thesmokinggun.com could dig something up on a SCO exec? Like this mugshot (not safe for work or anywhere).
Oh, and I got the partner page to work on sco.com: For where I live the first listed is a privat person, then there is a huge dairy (i.e. milk and cheese producer).. I wonder if they know they sell SCO productsApparently it is possible to install ext2 support on SCO Unixware 7 and newer. (See http://www.sco.com/skunkware/COMPONENTS.html for version 7 information)
.60$ low last year they might already have made more from selling at 13$ than they might have made from selling their entire holding at around 1$.)
According to someone who used to work for SCO (or Caldera) it is a good possibility that this support is based on code stolen from Linux: linux kernel posting. IMHO the Linux community should be allowed to examine this code, and if it is found to disregard the copyright the remaining Unixware code should be examined closely.
As it apears that US copyright law is based around "give lawers as much income as possible" I imagine that there is plenty of precedence for suing a company over this, but certainly press released should be issued, and all SCO customers should be made aware of their (possible) rights under the GPL to Unixware source.
Oh, and the Canopy group should be mentioned as well: They owned 68% of SCO before the first press releases in March, but just a few days later stated in a SEC filling that they would start selling off stock. It shouldn't be too hard to show that it is possible that this is simply a ploy by the Canopy group to boost share price while selling out.
(With the stock at 13$ up from a
Even processors (like Intel CPUs) have a form of firmware (microcode), but this is usually updated on boot by the bios or OS (think Linux) and not stored on the CPU itself.
As far as I'm aware there is no hardware which implements authentication of the firmware upgrade, the hardware would happily accept garbage. Reflashing a bios / firmware filled with garbage can also be a major task - not all motherboards have a jumper for reseting the bios, and I'm not sure how you would upgrade the bios of a pci card if it didn't show up as a valid card. Besides, just try to find the correct bios / firmware for your "made in mainland china with just a serial number on the circuit board" thingy if the board doesn't even boot.
If you're interested in a discussion of this google for "disk2brick", that should find the long and bitter flamewar on the linux-kernel list on the topic of "how to destroy eide disks using undocumented eide commands".
Oh, and imho - the reason virus makers aren't exploiting this (except for overwriting the bios of some intel motherboards) is that most of them are bored teenagers talking about "virii". If someone with a clue and resources enough to test various hardware put their mind(s) to it I'm sure something could be made that messed up much of the common hardware today - enough that fixing it might cost more than replacing the hardware itself.
Combine that with, say, the bugs in the MS network stacks that MS has admited to existing, and you have the potential of creating a lot of damage in a suprisingly short time.
But of course, that won't happen with the US govermnent becoming the Internet Police soon.. (Ok, so that last sentence was flamebait, sorry
IMHO Linux on a palmtop makes perfect sense as the palmtop market isn't as strongly under the Microsoft thumb as the desktop PC market. On a level playing field, where vendors must compete on price and features, not "how fast does it run Microsoft Office" the co-operative nature and free licencing of Linux should be a big strength.
The backups on the download server will be uncompilable for the most part and source code only. We are being hit up for compensation on a number of damages that our software caused so it's probably better that the downloads don't compile.
In short it apears that the sourceforge code is still available, but that there are ongoing legal concerns. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the US legal system might offer their help, bcast2000 apears to be the most mature video editing suite available on Linux under the GPL right now, and it would be a shame to lose it.
It is pretty obvious who this "feature" is directed at, that is the business segment. I tend to fly with SAS every few months, and often the business class has more people than coach. As business class costs up to 3x the price of coach it is clear that keeping these high paying customers is very important for the airline.
The best customers are of course the ones with gold cards, one such I had a meeting with a few months ago just paid for a one week vacation in the carribean (from Europe) for himself, his wife and two children, including the hotel, using just his airmiles on one of his gold cards. Now, you can imagine how much money the airlines has made on that guy alone the last couple of years!
If wiring a single airplane for wireless internet attracts just one such customer it would be a goldmine for the airline..
Ah well, one can always hope they aren't that stupid.
And search a bit around.. You'll find among other things ftp://ftp.m17n.org/pub/super-h/ and a few other Linux ports to these chips.
Someone should proofread Slashdot for tech comments.. Or at least learn to use altavista.