Looks like Darl McBride, SCO’s “sue-happy cowboy” CEO, has seen his last roundup. In a new 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company reveals that, under the order of a bankruptcy court, it has eliminated the chief executive officer and president positions and consequently sacked McBride.
“There’s No Free Lunch–or Free Linux.” That was the title of SCO CEO Darl McBride’s keynote address at the Computer Digital Expo in Las Vegas back in 2003, and it signaled the start of a long legal siege. Earlier that day, SCO announced plans to file suit against a large-scale user of Linux as part of its campaign against the open-source operating system.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is finally having his say on Google’s wonderfully overblown Chrome OS announcement.
His take: It’s just another Linux distro.
After a bit of reflection, the Street is beginning to have its say about Google’s new Chrome operating system, and the consensus seems to be that while Chrome is obviously the company’s most direct assault on Windows to date, it’s not likely to be all that disruptive to the ubiquitous OS. “It’s not good news for Microsoft,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst David Hilal. “The real question right now is how bad can it be?”
“We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” Intel CFO Stacy Smith told Bloomberg earlier this year. “We’re lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.” Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia.
Red Hat is destined to be acquired, most likely by IBM–according to Jefferies analyst Katherine Egbert, anyway. Noting that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems is bad news for Red Hat, Egbert says the open-source outfit is going to need a partner sooner or later and that IBM may well volunteer for the position.
Time was, there was a Silicon Graphics workstation on every desk in computationally-intense industries like chemistry and film production. No longer. This morning, SGI, which recently endured a brace of layoffs, filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time and sold itself to Rackable Systems, which makes server and storage products for midsize and large data centers, for $25 million in cash.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini has confirmed what “people familiar with the matter” and industry observers have been saying for months now. Sun is eager to find a buyer and has offered itself for sale to IBM and pretty much anyone else who might have the cash to acquire it.
There’s a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat and at least one zero-day exploit for them in the wild already. Yet Adobe won’t have a fix in place until March 11, and then only for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9. Patches for earlier versions of the software will arrive sometime after that.
Two and half weeks or longer to wait for a critical patch.
An interesting metric for you: Of the products listed on Amazon’s Top 10 Bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware, five are Apple MacBooks. One is an ASUS Eee PC running Linux. One is a Samsung HDTV monitor. And the remaining three are netbook/mini laptops running Windows. Windows XP Home, that is. None run Vista.
Just because Microsoft acquired Danger doesn’t mean the company has its eye on Research in Motion, though some observers apparently feel otherwise. Noting the ugly decline in RIM’s share price in recent months and a financial crisis that’s already slowing the corporate IT spending that is its lifeblood, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek speculates that the Blackberry peddler is a good takeover target for Microsoft.
In Sept. 1991, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emailed CEO Bill Gates: “We must slow down Novell. As you said Bill, it has to be dramatic. We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger.” And in 2001 Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer likened Linux to “cancer.” Later that year, Gates derided open-source licensing models like the one used by Linux as “Pacman-like.”
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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