Say Weeeeeee!
Ahhhhhh!

Never Send To Know

Never send to know for whom the kitty mews, for I have no idea.

Though really it's more of a meep than a mew.

Twas brillig and the meeping cats
Did go out to a restaurant
All mimsy were the hypno fish
And the tarepanda outsplats.

The rhyming scheme is wrong, but that's the least of your worries:

On first sight, it is just a standard kitty. But Nyanko is good with "mimic" something (especially food) Remember it's not edible.

Remember, it's not edible! But then, neither were Bill's penguins.

(San-X via some random comment on Fark)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:52 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pull Back On The Stick!

Eeee!

Whew. I thought I was a goner for a minute there.

(See here for the previous installment.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Platter of Penguins

Over at Bloviating Inanities:

It's Penguin, it's Penguin
I shouldn't have made it but could
It's Penguin, it's Penguin
It's better than bad it's good

They're so cute!

Strawberry jello and spam: it's what's for breakfast!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Problem With Popplers Readers

The problem with having people actually reading your blog is that when you screw up, they notice.

Sorry Tiger, I forgot to close the quotes in a link. Plooie! All fixed now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Must Read

Tiger pointed me to the latest post at Collinization, which I must admit I hadn't read for a few days.

It's not his usual funny stuff, but it's even more worthy of your attention. Go. Go now, and read.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ars Technica

Geek site of the day is Ars Technica.

This isn't your average geek website. For one thing, the writers have some grasp of the English language: they can spell, they can use apostrophes without making me wince, and their grammar at least resembles what I remember learning at school. Though their use of the word who're as a contraction of who are raised eyebrows both with me and with dictionary.com. (Side note: a search for w$h%o!r'e finds... What you'd expect.)

For another, they can talk intelligently about the relative efficiency of the issue queues in the vector units of the PowerPC G4e and 970 processors. With pictures and everything.

I wandered into their web forum - and then backed out fast. There are over 5 million posts in the database, and more than 800 users online right now. I just don't have the time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Internet's Down!

Or maybe it's just my ISP again. For 15 minutes I couldn't establish a TCP connection of any sort, though existing connections still worked. Traceroute worked. Ping didn't. (!)

If they keep this up, I may decide to switch to another company. Oh, wait...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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SCO Must Die

I don't know how many of my readers have been following the recent kerfuffle over SCO (The Santa Cruz Organisation) suing IBM for more than $1 billion. SCO alleges that IBM took code that SCO owned and put it into Linux.

Yesterday SCO's share price rose on news that they had registered copyright on the Unix source - a completely meaningless step. Copyright registration merely says they you filed a copy of the work with the copyright office on a particular date. Unlike patent or trademark registration, it says nothing at all about whether you actually have any legal right to the work.

SCO's claim against IBM is nebulous - perhaps deliberately so. It is partly based on copyright, partly based on patents, partly based on trade secrets. So far SCO has not publically produced any evidence to support any part of their claim. Instead, they have moved directly to making not-at-all veiled threats towards Linux users: Pay us or we'll sue you too.

It's pretty clear why SCO has taken this route: The company is doomed. Back in the day, SCO had a good and competitive product. Take a high-end PC - say, a 386/33, or later a 486/50, add a Stallion board (a popular multi-port serial card) and a bunch of Wyse 60 terminals, install SCO, and you had a capable multi-user system for a lot less money than the proprietary Unix boxes of the day, and much less money than a traditional mini-computer.

A lot of small-to-medium businesses ran the company on SCO.

In recent years, though, SCO has been caught between Windows NT - a cow of an operating system, but reasonably stable and backed by Microsoft's marketing department - and Linux, which is not only a substantially better system than SCO, but is free.

There's no way out for SCO. There are no opportunities left. The only people still on SCO are legacy users - those who have always run on SCO, who have SCO-trained technical staff, and those who need an application that hasn't yet been ported to Linux.

So SCO went where the money is, and sued IBM. It's quite possible that they don't expect to win the lawsuit, but are looking instead to get bought out as part of a settlement. IBM don't appear to by playing according to SCO's script, however, and have told them to get knotted.

So now SCO have turned on Linux users, suggesting that they may be legally vulnerable if they continue to use Linux without paying SCO. This, without any case going to court, much less being proven. SCO have also issued warnings aimed at Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, saying that he too may be liable.

So in a short period of time, SCO have managed to make deadly enemies of every geek on the planet and IBM, which is not a good combination. On their side, they have Microsoft, who have listed Linux as their number two threat (after the sagging world economy). Microsoft recently - as in, after the lawsuit - paid SCO an undisclosed amount for a Unix license. Note that Microsoft do not sell Unix.

The remaining factor to this mess is that SCO is not a large company. Their market capitalisation is less than the likely tax they aim to extract from Linux users all over the world. In other words, to Linux users, it would be cheaper - and better in the long term - to buy SCO and close it down than to pay the tax.

It's just a pity that no-one thought to do this six months ago when their stock was in the toilet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Let It Be Known

That I was not at all drunk when I posted those posts last night.

Not even slightly, nooo...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Maze of Words

When else the purple hippos fly,
I often stop to wonder why:
Why antlers only wear one boot,
Why libraries do not take root,
How people walk their marzipan,
How mice are greater yet than man,
Where turnips grow when I stand up,
What cornflour should I feed a pup,
Which eiderdown I lost at sea,
When all things meaningless to me,
Are spinning gently, feeling ill,
Nurse says it's time to take my pill.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:04 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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