Thinking out loud about cars, computers and security
Catching up on my /. I came across an entry that I just couldn’t make sense of. Only on the third attempt did I realize that I had misread, and that the IFPI is indeed the International Federation of Phonographic, not Pornographic, Industries.
Merry Christmas to you all!
[edit 2013-02-13: this post originally had a lolcat based on this photo with the text “Fuwwy Pawwot sez happy bday daddy”; the shirt I am wearing was a birthday present and references the lolrus. That image is long lost, but luckily, I still had the original photograph. My “fuwwy pawwot” died of kidney failure on August 16, 2008. I still miss her.]
If you were in my movie
I’d have you as the doctor
Small black bag
And a big black coatI’d have you make a house call
To the woman
You could lay your
Diagnostic hand
Upon her belly and her throat
When someone has lived with a disorder for more than half his life and finally gets a diagnosis and starts a course of treatment, you would expect him to feel relief, anticipation, hope perhaps of a better life. That’s certainly what he expected, after years of living with the wrong diagnosis, being treated for the wrong disorder, and suspecting it all along. But when the day finally came—
Anticipation, yes, but fearful anticipation. Hesitation, every morning; a long time spent staring at his medication before finally swallowing it. Panic attacks in the evening, followed by uneasy sleep.
Do you understand? He doesn’t, at first. His wife suggests that he has lived with the disorder for so long that it has become a part of his identity, and he is now afraid of living without it, of becoming a man he does not know. He thinks she may be right, but it does not stop the panic attacks.
All he can do is wait, and hope.
The SCO Group, Inc. has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is interesting news, but not necessarily good news.
For one, it increases the likelihood that the lawsuits will be settled rather than tried, leaving a lot of questions unanswered. It would be far better for the Linux community (and the F/OSS community in general) to have these questions answered once and for all in court.
Then there is the matter of timing. SCO’s bankruptcy filing comes at a very opportune time: first, they were just handed a summary judgment (which, contrary to McBride’s claims, they haven’t yet appealed) saying that they don’t own the Unix copyrights and trademarks after all, which means they owe Novell a boatload of money (95% of their SCOSource revenues, if memory serves); second, the Novell case was just about to go to trial, and SCO failed to secure a jury trial, which was the only way they would have had a chance of winning. Filing for bankruptcy means that
Considering SCOs past behavior, I have to wonder—do you see it coming?—whether this is, in fact, just the latest in a long series of deliberate delaying moves…
Books I’ve been reading lately:
Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. An absolute delight; a masterpiece of satire and black humor.
Player Piano, also by Vonnegut; his first novel, in fact. Far less enjoyable; he had not yet found his form. Pretty much the only element it has in common with his later work is its pessimism.
Archform: Beauty, by L. E. Modesitt, was very interesting because it is the only Modesitt novel I’ve read (and I’ve read most of what he’s written up until around 2000) where the main protagonist’s actions results in neither the collapse of the antagonist’s civilization nor the total obliteration of their real estate. Instead, the male protagonists buys the female protagonist flowers and asks her out. Far out.
Lilith: A Snake in the Grass, the first book in Jack L. Chalker‘s Four Lords of the Diamond series. I know it’s not nice to speak poorly of the deceased, but Chalker, a fairly well-respected SF author, managed to get pretty much all of the science wrong in this one. Continue reading “Ooh, skiffy!”