Category: English

This Just In

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

  • Novell isn’t likely to see any of that money any time soon, if ever
  • The trial is suspended indefinitely, because under chapter 11 rules, a creditor isn’t allowed to sue a debtor.

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…

Ooh, skiffy!

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!”

One step forward, two steps back

I play a fair number of games. I go through about one PS2 game a month, on average, plus various PC games once in a while—mostly platformers and first or third person shooters on the PS2, and strategy / adventure on the PC, with some puzzle gmaes like Oasis thrown in.

The one thing that never ceases to surprise me with these games—especially console games—is how most of them share the same two elementary flaws, which you’d think they’d discovered and fixed years ago. Continue reading “One step forward, two steps back”

This is your brain on… what?

According to this Seattle PI article (which is unsurprisingly full of factual errors) music producers are up in arms over lossy audio compression. Listening to an MP3 (regardless of bit rate, apparently) is “like hearing through a screen door” and even CDs “contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording” (no mention is made of the fact that the half that is removed is below your stereo equipment’s noise threshold). But what really pisses me off is that these are the same producers who keep reducing the dynamic range of their recordings to make them sound louder. Some modern pop / rock recordings have a dynamic range as low as 4 dB!