"Old words are good, short words are good, and old words when short are best." -- Winston Churchill on writing
Maybe most people don't realize this but "fuck" is one of the oldest words in the English language. As you get older, and more sexually experienced, "fuck" becomes less and less of an "obscenity" and more a part of making love. Love can be expressed in many ways, from a gaze, a kiss, a shrug, holding hands, to the more intimate gestures of pinching nipples, sucking genitals, sniffing and tasting the sweats of arousal, and, yes, fucking.
You can go ahead and continue to think of the word "fuck" as an obscenity, even when used in the proper context, you can continue to say "effing" instead of "fuck", but the everyone will think you are linguistically silly except for a small coterie of old prudes who have never fucked.
Sorry if this seems a little harsh, but generally I try to write well, and I have very little patience when people use an improper word (like "effing") when a perfectly good proper word exists ("fuck").
"So BIND blocks this won't Verisign just make another "patch" and fix the glitch?"
I don't think so. The easiest way to fix BIND to ignore wildcard records is to simply make wildcards unrecognizable. Frankly, I can't think of a reason why DNS supported it in the first place.
Take away that capability, and there's no "glitch" to "fix".
Any BIND developers out there who can flesh out the technical details for us?
"32V is public domain, so their copyright bag isn't totally empty, but it's pretty damn bare."
I was going to argue this, but then I realized what an excellent example it makes for "how public domain happens".
For instance, my first thought was, 32V isn't public domain, yet. It's still under copyright until a judge or the copyright holder declares it public domain, or until it's something like over 50 years old or the author dies.
But then I thought, Wait, I don't *know* that ATT never put 32V under public domain. Or Novell. Hell, it's possible.
This code has been viewed by so many people and licensed under so many conditions, that the provenance of any particular code portion is a tangled mess, and the ability to defend the copyright is severely compromised by the inability to show where any portion actually originated.
When a judge hears a plaintiff and a defendant argue over a piece of code, this is what he hears (apologies in advance to Gary Larson):
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, but we wrote it first, blah blah blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, no, you copied the implementation from here, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, and that was based on something else we did first, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, we did it first here, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, no, we did, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, did not, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, did so, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, did not, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, did so, blah, blah, blah
At which point the judge decides, ok, this point is moot, I'll decide the issues on the other merits.
But, then, if the judge has to hear this argument 10, 20, 100, 1000, 3000, times -- as SCO is threatening to put upon Judge Kimball with their "million lines of infinging code" argument -- then the judge throws up his hands and says, "That's it. Public Domain. No more of this. It's driving me up a fucking wall, and, you, Plaintiff, have clearly not been properly enforcing your copyrights or doing the due diligence to track them in a manner to prove your ownership before the court."
There are other routes to Public Domain, of course. But this is the one SCO is preparing to trod. Idiots.
While there are certainly problems with the US legal system, this isn't a clear-cut example of those issues. I mean, Australia, Austria, and Poland have not succeeded in shutting down SCO's FUD any more, yet, than Red Hat in the US. If Australia, Austria, and Poland get their gag orders before RH, then your point would be valid.
As it is now, the only thing you could possibly prove with this example is that Germany can shut down corporate misinformation faster than the other countries.
Don't count on it. Darl needs revenue from SCOSource for each of the next two quarters if he wants to get the big bonus. He'll find someone to keep them afloat, might be MS, might be someone else with an axe to grind wrt Linux.
"Anyone done analysis of their press release patterns to see if the trends of Big Sales announcements has changed in the past 6 months or so?"
I know of five sales that they announced in the past 6 months:
A) MS license
B) Sun license
C) Some sort of software upgrade for McDonalds. (And how pathetic is your business when you gotta brag about selling an *upgrade* to Mickey D's?)
D) Two unidentified licensees who either bought licenses for UnixWare, or SCO's IP in Linux. Reports were maddeningly vague on this issue, but then again, so was SCO.
I don't have dates though, so if you're looking to correlate the dates to stock prices or other SCO manipulations, well, sorry, don't know.
Might not be a good idea to short the stock price right now. Disregarding the obvious and rampant manipulation going on with their stock, Darl's got huge bonuses, in the form of stock options, that will be awarded to him once he gets 4 profitable quarters in a row.
He's halfway there now. I expect he'll do *anything* to show profits this quarter and next, even cook the books, just to collect his bonus and cash out before the stock goes under. So that means another 4.5 months, at least, that Darl's got to take actions that will also keep the stock up.
"Notice that the licenses sold to Sun and Microsoft account for 100% of their SCOsource revenue, and neither appear to be Linux related, meaning that they've fooled noone into buying their $699 licenses, not even a single idiot."
Up until July 31. Of course, SCO made a claim that they sold a license back in the beginning of August, but it conveniently can't be verified until the next 10-Q is due on Dec. 15.
Not that this disproves your point. It just means that SCO is disputing it, and that we can't prove them wrong till the next 10-Q, unless something comes out in discovery in the RH or IBM case and gets circulated.
I posted this in a previous SCO thread, but I'm reposting it here, because it's the best answer I can think of to explain SCO's "business model"
What Does Darl Get Out Of It?
Darl gets a big fat payoff if he can deliver four straight profitable quarters. Most of it is in stock, which means he'll have to keep up the fiasco for extra quarter or two to cash out.
At that point, I think we can expect him to leave SCO -- if there is any SCO left to leave. Maybe the final legal showdown will be Darl v. Ralph, to be filed in late 2004 or early 2005. We all know how much Darl loves to sue his employers.
Anyway, this means the SCO v. IBM case is not likely to ever make it to court because there's *no* motivation for Darl to go that far.
In the meantime, he'll do whatever it takes to show profit on the next two or three 10-Q's. He'll slash personnel, support, anything, doesn't matter how it affects SCO's long term prospects, as long as he shows profits each quarter.
He'll try to get people to pay for SCO IP in Linux licenses NOW, not after the case is resolved in court, because he doesn't care what happens that far down the line.
He needs the money on the books and in the 10-Q next quarter and the following quarter. He's got two profitable quarters in a row now, though he probably wouldn't have made it this quarter without cutting personnel and associated costs. Two more to go, and he's golden.
If he hasn't done it already, we can expect some *extremely* creative accounting over the next two quarters. Personally, I think that asset listed as "Goodwill" is just the start of SCO's attempts at creative accounting. Or maybe more money from MS. MS, according to the latest 10-Q (available at SEC), has apparently purchased those "expanded licensing options" that were mentioned in the April 30 10-Q.
Darl's biggest fear is that something will shut down SCO and/or it's FUD machine within the next two-three quarters. If he sounds irrational and afraid, well, that's because he is. He can't pull any more profits out of Germany. Australia, Austria, and Poland are lining up to gag him in their countries. Red Hat's trying to do the same in the U.S. Of course, none of this matters much as long as no court decisions are reached within the next 3 quarters. Which means delay, delay, and delay will be SCO's legal strategy going forward.
(BTW, I hope you don't mind that I just call you "bwc". When I was hanging out with Boutros-Boutros Ghali, I always used to call him just "Boutros" and he never had a problem with it.)
Given that Canopy owns about 40% of the stock, and that there's probably another 30% tied up in other Canopy companies, Canopy board members, and maybe options (not sure about the options, SCO may be issuing them from the pool of 45 million shares they caan print up at will), there are probably only about 4 million shares in the real float.
"Does anyone have any numbers of how far they'd be in the red if it wasnt for [the SCOSource] initiative?"
I think their payout per share was something like 18 cents. At roughly 13,825,000 shares, that would make the net profit approx. 2.5 million.
The SCOSource revenue for the most recent quarter was about 7.25 million. So without the SCOSource revenue, they would have lost about 4.75 million.
(Sorry for the rough estimates here, I'm pulling these up from memory cause, let's face it, 10-Q's are boring as all fucking hell and I don't feel like reading through it again. You can look it up yourself at SEC's website, if you want to verify my numbers.)
True. But not necessarily relevant to all Sun's customers.
Those customers who aren't particularly in need of high volume I/O can get a discount, just so the Sun rep. can make the sale. Better than having those boxes pile up in a warehouse.
Whoops. I'm wrong. Dammit, I wish we could delete posts from here.
SCO's 10-Q was for the quarter ending 7/31/03. The August license sale won't show up until the next 10-Q, due about December 15, for the quarter ending October 31.
Nope, it was Sun. Reportedly they were purchasing a license for drivers that weren't included in the original System V source. In fact, their purchase price was probably close to nil once you factor in the options SCO threw in to sweeten the deal.
For instance, on the 10-Q, SCO places the value of Sun's 210,000 options at $500,000, using something called the Black-Scholes valuation method -- and I won't even pretend to understand what that means. But SCO's stock closed at 19.55 today. Sun's options are 1.83. Were Sun to cash out today at closing, their take would have been $3,721,200.
I'll bet that comes pretty close to covering Sun's license purchase. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sun actually makes money off the deal -- provided they cash out before the stock crashes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Old words are good, short words are good, and old words when short are best." -- Winston Churchill on writing
Maybe most people don't realize this but "fuck" is one of the oldest words in the English language. As you get older, and more sexually experienced, "fuck" becomes less and less of an "obscenity" and more a part of making love. Love can be expressed in many ways, from a gaze, a kiss, a shrug, holding hands, to the more intimate gestures of pinching nipples, sucking genitals, sniffing and tasting the sweats of arousal, and, yes, fucking.
You can go ahead and continue to think of the word "fuck" as an obscenity, even when used in the proper context, you can continue to say "effing" instead of "fuck", but the everyone will think you are linguistically silly except for a small coterie of old prudes who have never fucked.
Sorry if this seems a little harsh, but generally I try to write well, and I have very little patience when people use an improper word (like "effing") when a perfectly good proper word exists ("fuck").
Correlation is not causation.
Research suggests that it may be the studies causing cancer in rats.
And Slashdot gets Slashdotted every day without crashing.
"SPAM", with all caps, is the Hormel trademarked name. Look at a can of SPAM next time you're in the supermarket. Note the caps?
That's why some people use all caps; they are merely respecting the terms historical origins in a trademarked product.
"So BIND blocks this won't Verisign just make another "patch" and fix the glitch?"
I don't think so. The easiest way to fix BIND to ignore wildcard records is to simply make wildcards unrecognizable. Frankly, I can't think of a reason why DNS supported it in the first place.
Take away that capability, and there's no "glitch" to "fix".
Any BIND developers out there who can flesh out the technical details for us?
"32V is public domain, so their copyright bag isn't totally empty, but it's pretty damn bare."
I was going to argue this, but then I realized what an excellent example it makes for "how public domain happens".
For instance, my first thought was, 32V isn't public domain, yet. It's still under copyright until a judge or the copyright holder declares it public domain, or until it's something like over 50 years old or the author dies.
But then I thought, Wait, I don't *know* that ATT never put 32V under public domain. Or Novell. Hell, it's possible.
This code has been viewed by so many people and licensed under so many conditions, that the provenance of any particular code portion is a tangled mess, and the ability to defend the copyright is severely compromised by the inability to show where any portion actually originated.
When a judge hears a plaintiff and a defendant argue over a piece of code, this is what he hears (apologies in advance to Gary Larson):
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, but we wrote it first, blah blah blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, no, you copied the implementation from here, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, and that was based on something else we did first, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, we did it first here, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, no, we did, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, did not, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, did so, blah, blah, blah
Defendant: blah, blah, blah, did not, blah, blah, blah
Plaintiff: blah, blah, blah, did so, blah, blah, blah
At which point the judge decides, ok, this point is moot, I'll decide the issues on the other merits.
But, then, if the judge has to hear this argument 10, 20, 100, 1000, 3000, times -- as SCO is threatening to put upon Judge Kimball with their "million lines of infinging code" argument -- then the judge throws up his hands and says, "That's it. Public Domain. No more of this. It's driving me up a fucking wall, and, you, Plaintiff, have clearly not been properly enforcing your copyrights or doing the due diligence to track them in a manner to prove your ownership before the court."
There are other routes to Public Domain, of course. But this is the one SCO is preparing to trod. Idiots.
While there are certainly problems with the US legal system, this isn't a clear-cut example of those issues. I mean, Australia, Austria, and Poland have not succeeded in shutting down SCO's FUD any more, yet, than Red Hat in the US. If Australia, Austria, and Poland get their gag orders before RH, then your point would be valid.
As it is now, the only thing you could possibly prove with this example is that Germany can shut down corporate misinformation faster than the other countries.
Don't count on it. Darl needs revenue from SCOSource for each of the next two quarters if he wants to get the big bonus. He'll find someone to keep them afloat, might be MS, might be someone else with an axe to grind wrt Linux.
But after Darl gets that bonus? Yeah, zero.
"Anyone done analysis of their press release patterns to see if the trends of Big Sales announcements has changed in the past 6 months or so?"
I know of five sales that they announced in the past 6 months:
A) MS license
B) Sun license
C) Some sort of software upgrade for McDonalds. (And how pathetic is your business when you gotta brag about selling an *upgrade* to Mickey D's?)
D) Two unidentified licensees who either bought licenses for UnixWare, or SCO's IP in Linux. Reports were maddeningly vague on this issue, but then again, so was SCO.
I don't have dates though, so if you're looking to correlate the dates to stock prices or other SCO manipulations, well, sorry, don't know.
Might not be a good idea to short the stock price right now. Disregarding the obvious and rampant manipulation going on with their stock, Darl's got huge bonuses, in the form of stock options, that will be awarded to him once he gets 4 profitable quarters in a row.
He's halfway there now. I expect he'll do *anything* to show profits this quarter and next, even cook the books, just to collect his bonus and cash out before the stock goes under. So that means another 4.5 months, at least, that Darl's got to take actions that will also keep the stock up.
"Notice that the licenses sold to Sun and Microsoft account for 100% of their SCOsource revenue, and neither appear to be Linux related, meaning that they've fooled noone into buying their $699 licenses, not even a single idiot."
Up until July 31. Of course, SCO made a claim that they sold a license back in the beginning of August, but it conveniently can't be verified until the next 10-Q is due on Dec. 15.
Not that this disproves your point. It just means that SCO is disputing it, and that we can't prove them wrong till the next 10-Q, unless something comes out in discovery in the RH or IBM case and gets circulated.
#man drugs
Posts non-sequitur comments to slashdot and other forums.
Interesting.
I posted this in a previous SCO thread, but I'm reposting it here, because it's the best answer I can think of to explain SCO's "business model"
What Does Darl Get Out Of It?
Darl gets a big fat payoff if he can deliver four straight profitable quarters. Most of it is in stock, which means he'll have to keep up the fiasco for extra quarter or two to cash out.
At that point, I think we can expect him to leave SCO -- if there is any SCO left to leave. Maybe the final legal showdown will be Darl v. Ralph, to be filed in late 2004 or early 2005. We all know how much Darl loves to sue his employers.
Anyway, this means the SCO v. IBM case is not likely to ever make it to court because there's *no* motivation for Darl to go that far.
In the meantime, he'll do whatever it takes to show profit on the next two or three 10-Q's. He'll slash personnel, support, anything, doesn't matter how it affects SCO's long term prospects, as long as he shows profits each quarter.
He'll try to get people to pay for SCO IP in Linux licenses NOW, not after the case is resolved in court, because he doesn't care what happens that far down the line.
He needs the money on the books and in the 10-Q next quarter and the following quarter. He's got two profitable quarters in a row now, though he probably wouldn't have made it this quarter without cutting personnel and associated costs. Two more to go, and he's golden.
If he hasn't done it already, we can expect some *extremely* creative accounting over the next two quarters. Personally, I think that asset listed as "Goodwill" is just the start of SCO's attempts at creative accounting. Or maybe more money from MS. MS, according to the latest 10-Q (available at SEC), has apparently purchased those "expanded licensing options" that were mentioned in the April 30 10-Q.
Darl's biggest fear is that something will shut down SCO and/or it's FUD machine within the next two-three quarters. If he sounds irrational and afraid, well, that's because he is. He can't pull any more profits out of Germany. Australia, Austria, and Poland are lining up to gag him in their countries. Red Hat's trying to do the same in the U.S. Of course, none of this matters much as long as no court decisions are reached within the next 3 quarters. Which means delay, delay, and delay will be SCO's legal strategy going forward.
Thanks, bwc!
(BTW, I hope you don't mind that I just call you "bwc". When I was hanging out with Boutros-Boutros Ghali, I always used to call him just "Boutros" and he never had a problem with it.)
Given that Canopy owns about 40% of the stock, and that there's probably another 30% tied up in other Canopy companies, Canopy board members, and maybe options (not sure about the options, SCO may be issuing them from the pool of 45 million shares they caan print up at will), there are probably only about 4 million shares in the real float.
That would make it *very* easy to manipulate.
Dear Darl,
You're a fuckwit.
Please take it personal.
John Gabriel
Oh, man...
Such a waste of a good domain name.
"Does anyone have any numbers of how far they'd be in the red if it wasnt for [the SCOSource] initiative?"
I think their payout per share was something like 18 cents. At roughly 13,825,000 shares, that would make the net profit approx. 2.5 million.
The SCOSource revenue for the most recent quarter was about 7.25 million. So without the SCOSource revenue, they would have lost about 4.75 million.
(Sorry for the rough estimates here, I'm pulling these up from memory cause, let's face it, 10-Q's are boring as all fucking hell and I don't feel like reading through it again. You can look it up yourself at SEC's website, if you want to verify my numbers.)
True. But not necessarily relevant to all Sun's customers.
Those customers who aren't particularly in need of high volume I/O can get a discount, just so the Sun rep. can make the sale. Better than having those boxes pile up in a warehouse.
Mixed metaphor. SCO can't stand in the middle of the road *and* play both sides of the fence at the same time.
This could have easily been avoided.
For instance, the "middle of the road" cliche could have been replaced with something slightly more creative like:
"You know, when you play both sides of the fence you usually end up skewered through your torso by that picket pole sticking up your ass."
Here's an interesting line from the 10-Q:
"In April 2003, a former Indian distributor of the Company filed a claim in India..."
Looks like that Norwegian VAR is not the only VAR getting screwed by SCO.
Makes you wonder, where's the write down for "Rage"?
Whoops. I'm wrong. Dammit, I wish we could delete posts from here.
SCO's 10-Q was for the quarter ending 7/31/03. The August license sale won't show up until the next 10-Q, due about December 15, for the quarter ending October 31.
I guess their fiscal year starts in February.
True, that money should have shown up in the line entry for SCOSource Revenue.
It didn't.
SCO lies again.
Nope, it was Sun. Reportedly they were purchasing a license for drivers that weren't included in the original System V source. In fact, their purchase price was probably close to nil once you factor in the options SCO threw in to sweeten the deal.
For instance, on the 10-Q, SCO places the value of Sun's 210,000 options at $500,000, using something called the Black-Scholes valuation method -- and I won't even pretend to understand what that means. But SCO's stock closed at 19.55 today. Sun's options are 1.83. Were Sun to cash out today at closing, their take would have been $3,721,200.
I'll bet that comes pretty close to covering Sun's license purchase. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sun actually makes money off the deal -- provided they cash out before the stock crashes.