Groklaw reports:
[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
In 2003, this would have been a huge story. By now, pretty much everyone seems to have concluded that SCO’s case was hopeless, so in some senses this seems like little more than a rubber stamp on the general consensus. It’s a legal rubber stamp, though, and it’s sort of nice to have that whole fiasco at or near a close.
For those not paying attention to Linux/SCO in 2003: in early 2003 SCO announced that they owned the Unix copyright, and that furthermore, Linux infringed on said copyright, so therefore Linux corporations owed them license fees. They made this big news by suing IBM, among others. At some point, Novell stepped in and said that they still owned the Unix copyrights, and this ruling is related to that case.
Legally speaking, I suppose there are a lot of loose ends to wind up, but as far as the end-user, home or corporate, this seems to me to be a pretty good ruling.
I think this has been available for awhile in beta, possibly rolled out to a few users at a time. At any rate, I was notified of it via email earlier today. I decided to check it out quickly — I didn’t have time to watch a movie, but was interested in how it worked.
Short version: It doesn’t. For me.
Long version: I’m sure it works fine, but it requires Windows, and IE 6 or higher, which means… I won’t be using it.
Way to go Netflix; congratulations! The first competitor to offer this feature in Firefox, on the Mac, and (preferably) on Linux, will, all things being equal, easily steal my business from you.
I know; full disclosure — yes, I work here.
But, I don’t sell anything. So, move on and read the news.
The nutshell? The Oracle 11g database will ship this month (okay, it will ship “probably in August”), and it will do so on Linux — “Oracle wouldn’t comment on when 11g would be available for the other operating systems the database will support including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows.”
As an unabashed Linux fanatic, that’s just sort of cool. Doesn’t mean too much in the long run, because Oracle will, of course, release a Windows version (I assume — I certainly wouldn’t know).
At any rate — yay, Linux. Let’s go have some breakfast.
Apple has a new iMac.
Sigh.
All fanaticism aside, Apple consistently demonstrates how it continues to deserve said fanaticism. Even if I didn’t like the Macintosh, I would sure be wishing I could buy a case that sexy to build my next PC into…
“Case”? What case? There’s practically nothing there. That’s a beautiful machine, right there. Of course, by the time I can actually justify buying another computer, Apple will no doubt have several new models, all of which will make this look like a rude, paleolithic-era computing implement.
Or, alternatively, someone else will. You would think that someone else would start trying to do what Apple is doing — marry a beautiful OS with an equally beautiful casing — but no one is. At least, they aren’t doing it well. Vaio? Yes, Sony, that is indeed a very skinny laptop. Too bad you put Windows on it. Dell? Why, yes, that is a wide selection of colors in which I could now order my plain, ordinary, Dell laptop. Sorry, Other Vendors… nice try, but so far, it’s Not Working Out Too Well.
_why, everyone’s favorite off-the-wall Ruby enthusiast, has created a “Tiny Toolkit for Making Web-like Desktop Apps,” and it is called Shoes.
If you are keeping score, this is also the creator of hoodwinkd, author of the Poignant Guide to Ruby, writer of various blogs, and creator of Hackety-Hack, a programming platform aimed at “Starter Coders”. That is to say, in the Great Battle Of Contributing Cool Things to the Web, he is ahead of most of us. Many kudos in his direction.
In the unlikely event that you want or need to search this weblog from the search bar in Firefox… I went ahead and created a Firefox search plugin for it. You can find it in the sidebar.
I should probably describe in meticulous detail how this was done, but all I would be doing is regurgitating this fine document and it’s related links, so I’ll just leave it alone.
We’re going to be moving to downtown Minneapolis in about a month & a half, which means that a huge cleaning and packing project is ongoing in the Crissman household. It’s a good opportunity to try and get organized, but it’s also very easy to get sidetracked.
Along the way, I’m finding a lot of old writings and artwork that I had nearly forgotten about. I think I’m going to have to create some pages online to upload some of these things; not sure yet whether I’ll do that on this site or some other.
We’re very excited to be moving; almost our entire lives have moved downtown over the last few years, so it will be a convenient place to set up shop. We’ll be in the Warehouse District, and yes… if you click on the map and go south-east about a mile or two, you’ll the 35W bridge which collapsed yesterday evening. As you might surmise, my wife and I were not on it, though we were both downtown. I think most of the people around here will be thinking about how close they could have been to being on that bridge, at that time, for some time.
Just thought I’d link to mrBen’s fine utility, Linkpot; just used this to shorten a url for Twitter. The site’s looking very nice indeed.
It’s like tinyurl, but uses dictionary words instead of random alphanumeric strings. Intuitively, this makes the url easier (possible) to remember. One also thinks that we could run out of dictionary words; mrBen? What’s the plan, there? ;-)
