Status-Q

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I've just discovered the Mac version of this rather fun Linux game. I realise I'm a bit slow - it's been around for some time and has won lots of awards. My excuse is that I'm not really a games-player, but I do appreciate it when a simple idea can provide so much entertainment.

Finding the rules is not too easy. Basically, you use the cursor keys to shoot a coloured bubble at groups of two or more bubbles of the same colour, which will then fall down. Oh, and you can bounce off the side walls. Easy...

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Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO, recently managed to turn his company into one of the most disliked in the high-tech world by saying to Linux users, in essence, "You've infringed our copyright. We're not going to show you how, but you have to pay us anyway".

This would be completely idiotic if it weren't the last struggles of a dying company sufficiently desperate to try anything. And the really tragic thing is what has happened to the SCO share price as a result of this tactic:

Perhaps realising that public relations disasters can still be be profitable, and that corporate image and customer satisfaction are much harder work than having a dodgy patent infringement claim, he has gone on in this open letter to spread evil rumours about how free software is anti-American:

"The 1976 Act grew out of Congressional recognition that the United States was rapidly lagging behind Japan and other countries in technology innovation....
Congress adopted the DMCA in recognition of the risk to the American economy that digital technology could easily be pirated and that without protection, American companies would unfairly lose technology advantages to companies in other countries through piracy, as had happened in the 1970's...
However, there are a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress. In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the open source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the U.S. and European systems of copyrights and patents....
...do you support copyrights and ownership of intellectual property as envisioned by our elected officials in Congress and the European Union, or do you support "free" ... intellectual property envisioned by the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and others? There really is no middle ground. It is no understatement to say that the future of the global economy is in the balance.

Well, Mr McBride - there is a middle ground. We're not going to show you how, but you'll have to believe it anyway.

Update: Larry Lessig responds

[Original Link] One day SCO is going to annoy too many people. Well, they've already annoyed a very large number, but they made the mistake of accusing SGI, who started to do some serious analysis of their claims. Moral: if you don't have much of a leg to stand on, be careful whom you kick.

[Original Link] "OpenOffice.org Writer isn't a replacement for anything; it's simply a better piece of software." I agree with Bruce Byfield on this - many of the OpenOffice components are superior to their Microsoft counterparts. The only real thing they lack is familiarity. Looking forward to when it runs natively on my Mac (ie. without needing X-windows).

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Robert Cringely asks why Macs aren't more popular in business, and in particular why people adopt Linux machines in place of Apple's lovely XServe boxes. He thinks it's a conspiracy - that sysadmins are concerned that Macs are so easy to use that they'll be out of a job. I doubt it. I don't think people deliberately make their lives harder to keep themselves employed; not often, anyway.

I suspect it's just that Macs, for most, are an unknown quantity. You can try out Linux almost for free while to try out a Mac server costs a bit more. Apple should offer some 'sale or return' scheme.

And secondly, I think the traditional divide between Mac and Windows has been big enough that people don't think of buying a Mac as a file/web/mail server for PCs, a task it ought to be able to perform just as well as a Linux box. I'm thinking of trying this soon...

This will be of little interest to most people, but somebody may find it on Google and be grateful! I have seen a few queries about this out there, and I've hit the problem twice recently, so I thought it worth posting.

always-broadcast on;

at the appropriate point in /etc/dhcpd.conf. See the dhcpd.conf man page for more info.

Realised today that it is well over a year since I used Windows. The Mac has done everything I need, and I use Linux for a few servers, experiments etc that I run. I've hardly touched a Windows machine in the last 18 months and I haven't missed it one bit.

[Original Link] A nice story by Jonathan Gennick.

[Original Link] Got a Linux box and an OS X box? Michael Dales' handy utility may save you desk space.

Having recently created quite a large document in OpenOffice, I must say I'm quite a fan. There are several features which I much prefer to their Microsoft equivalents. And if, occasionally, things seem not to be quite as intuitive as they might, I have to keep reminding myself that I've used Microsoft Word, on and off, for about 14 years, and that's quite a legacy/mental rut to get out of.

If, by the way, you've tried it under Mac OS X and have been disappointed by the ugly fonts currently supported by the X server, you might want to try this. Slow, on my elderly Mac, but much prettier. Make sure you turn off 'Preview in font lists' in the View options if selecting fonts is too time-consuming!