Once I worked in company, Microsoft partner, and we've got a contract from Microsoft to parse their RSS channels into database (it's true! b/c they wanted their clients to do it without accessing to the primary channel DB).
I've written it in Perl, and an orifinal demo-prototype has been deployed to BSD server.
Also, on Microsoft training classes they have told us (unofficially!) that Microsoft uses many Unix, BSD and Linux servers inside, some of them for development, some for networking and data management, but that is a kind of covered, for marketing purposes.
I haven't been surprised when I've seen this news today. I think it's not far way from the day Microsoft Linux distro will be announced. With ongrowing Linux success, Microfoft won't have any other choice.
In our company developers (~20) are on the middle of their way to use Cygwin for build automation (cvs, ssh, make, gcc, python, etc). The only problem was so far when we've been using unfamous cygwin's setup - very buggy, very unstable program, a bright illustration why GUI is worse than CLI for advanced users. This problem is recently gone - now we use Cygwin port of Portage (from Gentoo) for Cygwin installation.
Some of developers also use Xfree under Cygwin to run remotely GUI applications from few Linux servers.
Many our developers use Linux as a desktop at home, does it count?
Cutting the nerve is a very-very bad idea. The real solution is to implant the switch:
Gotta work? Switch off your sweating. Gotta go? Don't forget to switch it on (or you will regret soon when experience the compensatory sweating).
Well, combining the switch with the timer will work even better: gotta work, switch off your sweating nerve, that activates the timer, in 30 minutes it will switch it on again as a reminder that you have to breake for coffee, washroom or better to some stretch excercise, 10 minutes after that you can switch it off again and get back to your work.
Sigh... Better implant a blootooth gateway I can connect my brain directly to my home/office network so I don't need any freaking keyboard or mouse or screen anymore. Just think about it. I mean - literally.
Booming loud music in headphones. What's that ringing sound I'm always hearing?
It's not clear, are you saying you listen a loud music to ignore the distruction of the ring when the boss is calling you by phone? If so, have you ever tried to disconnect your desk phone to avoid its distructions?
IMHO a loud booming music is a much more distructing factor, it make me even stupid. I listen very low-volume classic music when I am coding, jazz when I do sysadmin and integration work, nothing when I am documenting and psycodelic rock when I am reading news on/.
By the way, stopt reading news on/. if you need your job done:) Seriosly, I read news only when I really have a free time and nothing else todo.
At the beginning there was LISP, the language with the biggest language report. You don't like various Perl assignments? How about various Lisp quotes?
Then they decided to idealize it and created Scheme - the language with the smallest language report. Both languages are good, but both language have lost their popularity to first imperative and then OOP ones.
I think the length of the language report won't help Perl either. People are already re-writing Perl code to Python. Why? Perhaps because they don't like to hack, they rather wanna design their programs. Perl coding style is hacking.
Well, Java is not less experimental than Python. It might have a lot of hot air around it, but it is still breaking compatibility on every minor releases, it's still memory leaking like a...
C and C++ are much more stable in both language reports and compilers, but Perl must be in the same so-called "experimental" group as Python and Java.
On the other hand, all of them must be in the experimental group, comparing to LISP (Scheme included), the language that survived since 1957 (amazingly - even still actively used, despite newfollowers like ML and Haskell), and FORTRAN, the language that existed for awhile since 1957 (well, perhaps too long for "awhile", but thanksfully it's dead anyway). And all of them are very real, comparing to really exotic languages. And they are practical, comparing to languages from our future.
Perhaps your school should give four groups of choice:
dead languages from musiums: FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/1, COBOL, ADA, Smalltalk;
practical languages for daily programming: Lisp, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Tcl, VB, Prolog, SQL;
real experiments, never came to real business, and barely will come: Icon, Snobol, Dylan, Curry, APL, Mercury;
However, I wonder, what's the academical point to separate artificially languages instead of requiring that students will take two language with at least two different parigms, like OOP vs FP?
You know, technically, the Federal government is for the people, by the people.
Not in USA. American goverment is for the corporations, by the corporations.
Speaking about constitutional rights, would it be constitutional to somehow get rid off real-life marketers, those guys who knock your door and try to sell TV channels that you have already subscribed for, or a cell phone that you have already got? It's really annoying and disturbing to answer them "no" EVERY WEEKEND!
Constitution, shmastitution... Can I just kill them one by one?
But now it's possible. Is it wrong? Can I create my own music, write it in MP3/OGG and share with the rest of the world through P2P? No? Who said that?
The freedom is a very essential part of any civilized Constitution. Because it's to protect everyone's rights. The patent/copyright law is to protect only a small group of people. Regrarding P2P, RAAA uses the law in a very wrong way - to punish a whole freedom of exchanging the information just only for a misareable chance to kick someone who is using P2P to violate IP laws.
I am very happy that the German court doesn't kiss Bush's ass and decided to look at the problem independently from any US pressure. Go Germany! I hope other European countries will follow the same way.
Education system: The US has a better starting position, but China is rapidly gaining. Chinese have thrown away all Mao anti-illectual rubbish and know to value knowledge these days.
I am working in several projects with Chinees programmers educated back in China. Also I am working with Indian, Russian, West-Europian and North American programmers. I would say that Chinees and Russian are the best. Well, Russians are smarter a bit and their eduction is often evn overkilling, but they are slow and they do not have any sense of a discipline (like artists, they write the code they haven't been asked and they forget to write the code they've been asked). Indian programmers are very fast and have extreme sense of discipline, but that hurts their creativity a lot, besides Indian education is not really good. North American programmers are slow, with no creativity and a very poor education (most of American programmers I know barely know elementary math calculus). Chinese and West-Europian programmers are fast, disciplined and well (optimally) educated.
Having said that I should add that Russian education is going down in its quality very rapidly. Europian ediaction keeps the same. North American education has no hope in any near time. Chinese and Indian education is growing. Thus, counting other logic (especially IP and patents) I think that China has a lot of future. All they need is to maintain a political stability by slowly giving up to their people more and more freedom, but doing it very slow (Soviet Union is collapsed b/c people receive too much of freedom rapidly at on time - too fast to egt using it properly).
Hmm... I've just realized. For last year, I am not just a Linux guy - I am Gentoo guy. So, it's even more easy for me to switch from Gentoo/Linux to Gentoo/BSD as they both Gentoo and my gentoo skills are in Portage, not in the kernel. Besides, my boss is comfortable to use Gentoo/Linux as he already knows from me and from articles that we can switch from Gentoo/Linux to Gentoo/BSD easier than between two different Linux distros or between two BSD distros. And that our used Linux applications are in fact kernel agnostic as they are either already ported to both or they are interpreter-based or just web-based. Very convinient:)
Yep! You just run the player in Mac OS (9 or X) inside MOL (Mac-On-Linux) inside X11 window on you Linux/PPC box. Then you can interspt everything. But that won't make it any more legal.
That's exactly what they (SCOX, MSFT, SUNW) wabt you to do. If enough people will switch to BSD, then (1) overall Linux "temperature" will go down, (2) some will notice that BSD is not as good as Linux and will go over it to Windows or Solaris or Unixware. Later they (SCOX, MSFT, SUNW) can easily do something similar to kill the rest what's left of BSD and finally they will attack IBM.
If you really want to help Linux - don't switch to BSD! Keep your Linux plans as they were before all this SCO propaganda. And under any circumstances - never trust Gartner! They were always sold to Microsoft and we already know that MSFT is behind this SCO lawsuit (along with Sun).
Personally, I trust IBM in this deal. They have invested billions to Linux and they know what they are doing. SCO is trying to make last possible deals before the final death (merge or acquisition). Sun sees a threat from Linux (and that's IMHO stupid - Linux works fine on Sparc!). Microsoft is trying to change something before The Next Big Thing - before the MSFT stock buble will blow up in a same way as dot-com did.
if robots take over 50% of the jobs, the robot industry will grow along with its suppliers and that will create jobs enough to aquire all people unemployed by robots.
There will be always a job that people will do cheaper and/or better than robots. Even if the industry will create sex-robots, many people with money will demand natural hookers (like organix food todoay), while poor people will by "fast-sex" in McPennis (or McVagina or McAss) kiosks.
Seriously, there is intuition and we, humans are much better in it. Besides, we are perfect dictators (sorry - managers). And
n other words, it's a high level language, as opposed to being one or two steps above asm.
In other words it's still way too low level language, just two (only two!!!) steps above asm, while most of programming languages I know and use are thee or more steps above asm.
First of all you admit about Perl's bad syntax by yourself. From this prospective, Python is one step above Perl (means 3 steps above asm), as its syntax lets a Python programmer to complete the target program much faster then Perl to Perl programmer. No need to mention that most of Perl code is done as "do it, run it, wast it" - the poor syntax of perl doesn't let to maintain the code of other programmers (or own old code). I used Perl a lot and I know what I am talking about.
Next, both Perl and Python (and Java) are imperative languages. Destructive assignment is the same bad thing for program verification as unfamous GOTO operator or memory-leaking pointers that you hate so much. That's why functional and logical programming languages make at least one step above Python (that makes them at least 4 steps above asm!).
I am not sure if I should continue "steps above asm" with type inference and generic programming. You cannot understand it anyway, as you are still at "Perl level".
The pyramid of programming languages is like a real mountain. When you go to summit it you see maximum one level above you (often you don't see even it all, or you don't recognize it as a higher level) and all (or most of) levels bellow you. Therefore, you can never appriciate higher levels until you hike up to them. That's why your favorite programming language is always (if it is not asm) a high level language.
By that time China, with their traditionally relaxed IP/patent/copyright laws, will be a technological world leader, while US will be the same outsider as UK - just a part of the "Old World". Every English word will copyrighted, every math concept and phisical law will be patented. Genes will be patented as well and Americans will pay money to one or another of few American corporations, which major business is to collect money from people for using genes patented by corporations.
FYI, American programmers are making USD25K per MONTH(!!!) in Saudi Arabia. Well, the social life there... actually there is no much of such thing there. But that is a good thing also: nothing to spend money for. After 2-3 years contract you can return back and invest money into you software company, and give the job to American programmers. Or to H1B, who knows how you will be changed after all:)
You need a bit more of education to be more competitive on the job market.
I did not ask for BMW's and polo shirts. I just want to program for livable wages.
You live in the country where very simple things are much more expensive than in next countries. You gotta work harder and harder every day just to keep your *economical* right to live there. Otherwise you have to go to India or Dubai (or Saudi!) where you (with your English - finally you've got at least something competitive) may make more than others around you and thus live better than others around you. By the way, I guarantee you'll have a much better car there than you can earn here.
Just give me my fucking job back. Those H1B visa people took it away.
H1B did not take your job. You've lost it. Face it and get over it.
It's happened primarily not b/c they asked less (although it was often a case). They are much more educated in average than most of Visual Basic programming Americans. When I came to US I and my friends were making 20-50% more salary than resident programmers. Well, we also knew how to write with CORBA and what is XML about and how to apply math to optimize a super-complicated SQL statement, while resident programmers were professional Visual Studio mouse-clickers.
The US does not owe jobs to the whole damned world.
Should I, non-American, remind you, American, that American economy is based on capitalism, not socialism? It's a free country. Including free for corporations to make their free choices about how to improve their quality and reduce the cost at the same time - to stay afloat in this free competition. Attempts to politically regulate things can create very unexpected result.
The goverment lets (politically!) to bring more H1B and that increases the overall quality of the job market in USA as everyone must work harder *AND* American must get better education to stay competitive. Some fresh blood is never wrong for an organism.
Then the goverment tells (again politically!) INS to stop H1B and American corporations move their business off-shore. You see? Wrong political decision and you are screwed up even more (more than without such a wrong decision).
And, by the way, don't forget to blame American investors for growing up the Internet buble. And greedy American chief officers for blowing it up. We, H1B, have nothing to do with these last two things.
We need to take care of our own FIRST. Don't worry about your neighbor's family until you feed your OWN.
Exactly. Well, after Afganistan and Iraq we all know that.
Just don't forget, in a free world a political ego creates more problems than it solves.
Hold on. A derivated work from GPLized software is under GPL. Is a derivated work from SysV software still under Unix copyrights? In other words, is Unix license "viral" in a same way as GPL is?
1. What if SCO is well-belayed to manage to stay on the cliff without failing down? As for now, I don't see any reason why they should fail from the cliff.
2. The more we wait SCO failure the more Linux reputation in a business world drops. As for "sympathy", I guess you mean a sympathy of geeks, which cannot be count in any business plans. Geeks don't buy, businesses do.
3. I think it's in SCO best interests to keep FUD as long as possible. They are trying to make money on FUD.
4. I don't suggest to woo mates. Instead, I suggest Linux community to coordinate efforts with IBM. We need lawyers. Without lawyers we are blindly thinking many things wrong, basing our understanding on our feelings and emotions, while the enimy is building the case with facts, which might be laughable if we would know them, but we don't know them, while the judges don't know that they are laughable. In the court you cannot jump last minute to the case and win it, whatever case is.
P.S. Did you read Sun Tsu's "Art of the War"? Then you should remember: "if you underestimate your enimy then you have already lost the battle."
*New* SCO didn't buy any Unix copyright either, it was *old* SCO who bought it. But anyway, all merge and aquisition actions inherit all belongs of old entities unless it's says differently.
Slashdot Mirror
I've written it in Perl, and an orifinal demo-prototype has been deployed to BSD server.
Also, on Microsoft training classes they have told us (unofficially!) that Microsoft uses many Unix, BSD and Linux servers inside, some of them for development, some for networking and data management, but that is a kind of covered, for marketing purposes.
I haven't been surprised when I've seen this news today. I think it's not far way from the day Microsoft Linux distro will be announced. With ongrowing Linux success, Microfoft won't have any other choice.
Some of developers also use Xfree under Cygwin to run remotely GUI applications from few Linux servers.
Many our developers use Linux as a desktop at home, does it count?
Gotta work? Switch off your sweating. Gotta go? Don't forget to switch it on (or you will regret soon when experience the compensatory sweating).
Well, combining the switch with the timer will work even better: gotta work, switch off your sweating nerve, that activates the timer, in 30 minutes it will switch it on again as a reminder that you have to breake for coffee, washroom or better to some stretch excercise, 10 minutes after that you can switch it off again and get back to your work.
Sigh... Better implant a blootooth gateway I can connect my brain directly to my home/office network so I don't need any freaking keyboard or mouse or screen anymore. Just think about it. I mean - literally.
It's not clear, are you saying you listen a loud music to ignore the distruction of the ring when the boss is calling you by phone? If so, have you ever tried to disconnect your desk phone to avoid its distructions?
IMHO a loud booming music is a much more distructing factor, it make me even stupid. I listen very low-volume classic music when I am coding, jazz when I do sysadmin and integration work, nothing when I am documenting and psycodelic rock when I am reading news on /.
By the way, stopt reading news on /. if you need your job done :) Seriosly, I read news only when I really have a free time and nothing else todo.
Then they decided to idealize it and created Scheme - the language with the smallest language report. Both languages are good, but both language have lost their popularity to first imperative and then OOP ones.
I think the length of the language report won't help Perl either. People are already re-writing Perl code to Python. Why? Perhaps because they don't like to hack, they rather wanna design their programs. Perl coding style is hacking.
There is nothing wrong with NCR. It's USPO that must be vanished. I hope next 9/11 plane won't miss their office.
Mozart and Curry.
USE="brains" emerge joke
C and C++ are much more stable in both language reports and compilers, but Perl must be in the same so-called "experimental" group as Python and Java.
On the other hand, all of them must be in the experimental group, comparing to LISP (Scheme included), the language that survived since 1957 (amazingly - even still actively used, despite newfollowers like ML and Haskell), and FORTRAN, the language that existed for awhile since 1957 (well, perhaps too long for "awhile", but thanksfully it's dead anyway). And all of them are very real, comparing to really exotic languages. And they are practical, comparing to languages from our future.
Perhaps your school should give four groups of choice:
- dead languages from musiums: FORTRAN, Pascal, PL/1, COBOL, ADA, Smalltalk;
- practical languages for daily programming: Lisp, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Tcl, VB, Prolog, SQL;
- newcoming standards: ML, Haskell, C#, Mozart, Erlang, XML;
- real experiments, never came to real business, and barely will come: Icon, Snobol, Dylan, Curry, APL, Mercury;
However, I wonder, what's the academical point to separate artificially languages instead of requiring that students will take two language with at least two different parigms, like OOP vs FP?Not in USA. American goverment is for the corporations, by the corporations.
Speaking about constitutional rights, would it be constitutional to somehow get rid off real-life marketers, those guys who knock your door and try to sell TV channels that you have already subscribed for, or a cell phone that you have already got? It's really annoying and disturbing to answer them "no" EVERY WEEKEND!
Constitution, shmastitution... Can I just kill them one by one?
The freedom is a very essential part of any civilized Constitution. Because it's to protect everyone's rights. The patent/copyright law is to protect only a small group of people. Regrarding P2P, RAAA uses the law in a very wrong way - to punish a whole freedom of exchanging the information just only for a misareable chance to kick someone who is using P2P to violate IP laws.
I am very happy that the German court doesn't kiss Bush's ass and decided to look at the problem independently from any US pressure. Go Germany! I hope other European countries will follow the same way.
I am working in several projects with Chinees programmers educated back in China. Also I am working with Indian, Russian, West-Europian and North American programmers. I would say that Chinees and Russian are the best. Well, Russians are smarter a bit and their eduction is often evn overkilling, but they are slow and they do not have any sense of a discipline (like artists, they write the code they haven't been asked and they forget to write the code they've been asked). Indian programmers are very fast and have extreme sense of discipline, but that hurts their creativity a lot, besides Indian education is not really good. North American programmers are slow, with no creativity and a very poor education (most of American programmers I know barely know elementary math calculus). Chinese and West-Europian programmers are fast, disciplined and well (optimally) educated.
Having said that I should add that Russian education is going down in its quality very rapidly. Europian ediaction keeps the same. North American education has no hope in any near time. Chinese and Indian education is growing. Thus, counting other logic (especially IP and patents) I think that China has a lot of future. All they need is to maintain a political stability by slowly giving up to their people more and more freedom, but doing it very slow (Soviet Union is collapsed b/c people receive too much of freedom rapidly at on time - too fast to egt using it properly).
Does Flash mob has Flash moderators? And how about meta-moderators? How do they get karma? Is there any weekly Flashback review?
Hmm... I've just realized. For last year, I am not just a Linux guy - I am Gentoo guy. So, it's even more easy for me to switch from Gentoo/Linux to Gentoo/BSD as they both Gentoo and my gentoo skills are in Portage, not in the kernel. Besides, my boss is comfortable to use Gentoo/Linux as he already knows from me and from articles that we can switch from Gentoo/Linux to Gentoo/BSD easier than between two different Linux distros or between two BSD distros. And that our used Linux applications are in fact kernel agnostic as they are either already ported to both or they are interpreter-based or just web-based. Very convinient :)
Yep! You just run the player in Mac OS (9 or X) inside MOL (Mac-On-Linux) inside X11 window on you Linux/PPC box. Then you can interspt everything. But that won't make it any more legal.
That's exactly what they (SCOX, MSFT, SUNW) wabt you to do. If enough people will switch to BSD, then (1) overall Linux "temperature" will go down, (2) some will notice that BSD is not as good as Linux and will go over it to Windows or Solaris or Unixware. Later they (SCOX, MSFT, SUNW) can easily do something similar to kill the rest what's left of BSD and finally they will attack IBM.
If you really want to help Linux - don't switch to BSD! Keep your Linux plans as they were before all this SCO propaganda. And under any circumstances - never trust Gartner! They were always sold to Microsoft and we already know that MSFT is behind this SCO lawsuit (along with Sun).
Personally, I trust IBM in this deal. They have invested billions to Linux and they know what they are doing. SCO is trying to make last possible deals before the final death (merge or acquisition). Sun sees a threat from Linux (and that's IMHO stupid - Linux works fine on Sparc!). Microsoft is trying to change something before The Next Big Thing - before the MSFT stock buble will blow up in a same way as dot-com did.
There will be always a job that people will do cheaper and/or better than robots. Even if the industry will create sex-robots, many people with money will demand natural hookers (like organix food todoay), while poor people will by "fast-sex" in McPennis (or McVagina or McAss) kiosks.
Seriously, there is intuition and we, humans are much better in it. Besides, we are perfect dictators (sorry - managers). And
In other words it's still way too low level language, just two (only two!!!) steps above asm, while most of programming languages I know and use are thee or more steps above asm.
First of all you admit about Perl's bad syntax by yourself. From this prospective, Python is one step above Perl (means 3 steps above asm), as its syntax lets a Python programmer to complete the target program much faster then Perl to Perl programmer. No need to mention that most of Perl code is done as "do it, run it, wast it" - the poor syntax of perl doesn't let to maintain the code of other programmers (or own old code). I used Perl a lot and I know what I am talking about.
Next, both Perl and Python (and Java) are imperative languages. Destructive assignment is the same bad thing for program verification as unfamous GOTO operator or memory-leaking pointers that you hate so much. That's why functional and logical programming languages make at least one step above Python (that makes them at least 4 steps above asm!).
I am not sure if I should continue "steps above asm" with type inference and generic programming. You cannot understand it anyway, as you are still at "Perl level".
The pyramid of programming languages is like a real mountain. When you go to summit it you see maximum one level above you (often you don't see even it all, or you don't recognize it as a higher level) and all (or most of) levels bellow you. Therefore, you can never appriciate higher levels until you hike up to them. That's why your favorite programming language is always (if it is not asm) a high level language.
My advise: keep hiking.
By that time China, with their traditionally relaxed IP/patent/copyright laws, will be a technological world leader, while US will be the same outsider as UK - just a part of the "Old World". Every English word will copyrighted, every math concept and phisical law will be patented. Genes will be patented as well and Americans will pay money to one or another of few American corporations, which major business is to collect money from people for using genes patented by corporations.
FYI, American programmers are making USD25K per MONTH(!!!) in Saudi Arabia. Well, the social life there... actually there is no much of such thing there. But that is a good thing also: nothing to spend money for. After 2-3 years contract you can return back and invest money into you software company, and give the job to American programmers. Or to H1B, who knows how you will be changed after all :)
You need a bit more of education to be more competitive on the job market.
I did not ask for BMW's and polo shirts. I just want to program for livable wages.
You live in the country where very simple things are much more expensive than in next countries. You gotta work harder and harder every day just to keep your *economical* right to live there. Otherwise you have to go to India or Dubai (or Saudi!) where you (with your English - finally you've got at least something competitive) may make more than others around you and thus live better than others around you. By the way, I guarantee you'll have a much better car there than you can earn here.
Just give me my fucking job back. Those H1B visa people took it away.
H1B did not take your job. You've lost it. Face it and get over it.
It's happened primarily not b/c they asked less (although it was often a case). They are much more educated in average than most of Visual Basic programming Americans. When I came to US I and my friends were making 20-50% more salary than resident programmers. Well, we also knew how to write with CORBA and what is XML about and how to apply math to optimize a super-complicated SQL statement, while resident programmers were professional Visual Studio mouse-clickers.
The US does not owe jobs to the whole damned world.
Should I, non-American, remind you, American, that American economy is based on capitalism, not socialism? It's a free country. Including free for corporations to make their free choices about how to improve their quality and reduce the cost at the same time - to stay afloat in this free competition. Attempts to politically regulate things can create very unexpected result.
The goverment lets (politically!) to bring more H1B and that increases the overall quality of the job market in USA as everyone must work harder *AND* American must get better education to stay competitive. Some fresh blood is never wrong for an organism.
Then the goverment tells (again politically!) INS to stop H1B and American corporations move their business off-shore. You see? Wrong political decision and you are screwed up even more (more than without such a wrong decision).
And, by the way, don't forget to blame American investors for growing up the Internet buble. And greedy American chief officers for blowing it up. We, H1B, have nothing to do with these last two things.
We need to take care of our own FIRST. Don't worry about your neighbor's family until you feed your OWN.
Exactly. Well, after Afganistan and Iraq we all know that.
Just don't forget, in a free world a political ego creates more problems than it solves.
Hold on. A derivated work from GPLized software is under GPL. Is a derivated work from SysV software still under Unix copyrights? In other words, is Unix license "viral" in a same way as GPL is?
2. The more we wait SCO failure the more Linux reputation in a business world drops. As for "sympathy", I guess you mean a sympathy of geeks, which cannot be count in any business plans. Geeks don't buy, businesses do.
3. I think it's in SCO best interests to keep FUD as long as possible. They are trying to make money on FUD.
4. I don't suggest to woo mates. Instead, I suggest Linux community to coordinate efforts with IBM. We need lawyers. Without lawyers we are blindly thinking many things wrong, basing our understanding on our feelings and emotions, while the enimy is building the case with facts, which might be laughable if we would know them, but we don't know them, while the judges don't know that they are laughable. In the court you cannot jump last minute to the case and win it, whatever case is.
P.S. Did you read Sun Tsu's "Art of the War"? Then you should remember: "if you underestimate your enimy then you have already lost the battle."
*New* SCO didn't buy any Unix copyright either, it was *old* SCO who bought it. But anyway, all merge and aquisition actions inherit all belongs of old entities unless it's says differently.