Can SCO survive long enough to make it to trial ?

Posted on March 19, 2007 by Chris Samuel

Well we know SCO’s stock has been performing sub-optimally (mirroring the company itself, suing your own customers like Autozone & Daimler is not a smart move to get repeat business) but now Groklaw raises the spectre of SCO going under before they can get to trial with IBM!

For instance, SCO’s latest 10Q filed with the SEC says they they:

believe that we have sufficient liquidity resources to fund our operations through October 31, 2007.

Now that may not be a problem for a company making money (they won’t touch their resources), but SCO isn’t. PJ goes on to say:

So do they actually have enough funds to make it to trial? After all, the Novell litigation goes first and is currently set to begin on September 17, 2007. There is currently no date set for the IBM litigation to even go to trial, but we do know it is expected to last for about 5 weeks. If Novell starts on September 17 and runs for even half that long, oops. Insufficient liquidity resources, I’m thinking, to make it to trial with IBM after that. No wonder SCO asked the court to have IBM go first. That’s if either case ever does go to trial. SCO again admits neither may ever make it to a jury.

Strangely enough this is not good news. Even though SCO’s “mountain of evidence” turned out to be a measly 326 lines of “code” (IBM identify 121 as #define, 12 as function prototypes, 164 as structure definitions and a quantity of comments) in 12 files, 11 of which are header files, it would be very useful to get this all out in open court to finally prove how brazen a shakedown attempt this was.

Wales 27 – England 18

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Chris Samuel

Well there was me thinking we were going to get the wooden spoon after Wales lost their first 4 matches in the Six Nations, but they’ve managed to avoid that by beating the old enemy, England, 27-18! Our fly half (James Hook) managed to score 22 of those 27 points.

Would have been nicer to have won a few more matches along the way, but at least it’s not a whitewash (especially given that 74,500 people were watching in the ground). 🙂

Another Problem for SCO

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Chris Samuel

SCO have had enough to worry about recently, but just to add to their troubles their stock is now trading at less than the $1 minimum bid price that the NASDAQ regulations require ($0.94 as I write).

If that happens for 30 consecutive days then they are deemed to be non-compliant and the NASDAQ can begin moves to delist them, unless they manage to trade at more than $1 for another 10 consecutive days.

Up On The Roof – and stuck there!

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Chris Samuel

Another “oops” moment..

A 91 year old man in Magdeburg, Germany, was trying to fix his roof with bitumen when passers by started to get the wrong idea and thought he was going to jump. Unfortunately whilst they called the police he fell backwards onto the roof. The police said:

When we got there, he was like a beetle on its back, with his arms and legs sprawled out and completely glued to the roof.

Fortunately the local fire service rescued him and he was unhurt but in need of a laundry service..

Mind you, I’m seriously impressed that someone of that age would be out doing DIY on their own roof! Good on ya!

Novel Diplomatic Gag

Posted on March 13, 2007 by Chris Samuel

Err.. from a BBC News story..

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear. Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

The Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson had a very, umm, diplomatic reaction..

We’re talking about behaviour that is unbecoming of a diplomat

Mind you, it could have been much more serious for him..

Thanks to Rich for the link..

ZFS on Linux with FUSE reaches first beta release

Posted on March 12, 2007 by Chris Samuel

I’m a bit behind at the moment, but this is something worth a mention.

Ricardo Correia’s port of Sun’s ZFS (which I’ve been playing with for a while) has finally reached its first beta release!

He’s made some useful performance improvements recently as well as tidying up some of the memory handling and fixing various bugs, including that bug from the upstream that yours truly got bitten by.

Here’s an updated Bonnie++ run for comparison.

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
inside           2G           18838   5  6995   2           18277   2 144.4   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  2795   5  9658   9  3462   5  2739   5 13736  11  4015   6
inside,2G,,,18838,5,6995,2,,,18277,2,144.4,0,16,2795,5,9658,9,3462,5,2739,5,13736,11,4015,6

real    10m12.258s
user    0m0.840s
sys     0m18.605s

Compared to previous results the write speed has improved, but the read speed seems to have dropped off a bit. Still, it’s early days yet.

Cray 1 Review

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Chris Samuel

For those into retro computing here is a great bit of nostalgia, a 1979 Popular Science review of Seymour Cray‘s Cray-1 SuperComputer.

Incredible Cray-1 cruises at 80 million operations a second

At US $8,000,000 that was $100K per MIP, or 17 MegaFlops per US$1M (( it was rated around 250 MFlops, but that was with very tuned code, usually it could do about 136 Mflops according to the Wikipedia article )). 🙂

As the introduction to the blog post says, “a Pentium 4 2.8ghz can hit about 2.5 GFLOP/s“, or just under 20 times the speed. For some reason I’m reminded of Ozymandias.

Lichtenstein Accidentally Invaded by Switzerland

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Chris Samuel

A training exercise for Swiss infantry turned into an accidental invasion of Lichtenstein, according to this BBC article:

A 171-strong Swiss company got two kilometres into its neighbour before realising the mistake and heading back. […] The company commander led his men in the wrong direction in bad weather but gave the immediate order to return when realising the error.

Oops.. 🙂