Technology

By DRAKE BACON

M2 columnist

As usual, the article is late to the editors desk again, because I've been cleaning up my "office" and finding many things to talk about.

One item is that I found a long lost cable.  I had bought an external battery for my Dell Inspiron E1505, named sandra for a few reasons I won't get into.  It makes the system last all day and I'm generally happy about it for when I'm at a long convention like Anthrocon.  Except when the connecting cable from the battery to the laptop went AWOL.

Found it yesterday, as I was sorting documents from a laundry basket into filing containers I had bought from a closing Office Depot near my day-job.  Tis a shame, but they didn't get enough business to sustain them.

Anyway, the external battery is from Hi Capacity Power Products, and I bought it from ebatts.com, a decent place.

I should check, though, if the battery would work with an XPS M1530... and Dell just killed the one I was looking for by killing the 15.4" over 1680x1050 resolution screen.  ARGH! Time to look again.

Alienware's M15x?  $1600 US... but that's for a gaming rig of a laptop.  Um, no, want a middle-of-the-road laptop I can downgrade to XP and dual-boot to Linux on.  Dell?  Ugh.  They killed any LCD resolution from 1680x1050 on up. HP?  Forget it.  Pulling anything out from them is like doing dental work on a hungry polar bear.  Asus? Slow to pull up, even on my iMac (although a likely candidate from them is the N50Vn-C2S according to NewEgg, for $1300 US).

Switching gears, we survived Conficker... not that it did much.  All it was going to do was expand it's range of sites it checks for updates from 500 to 50,000.  Some common sites like CNet UK and Yahoo would be pinged on random days, but several public DNS systems like OpenDNS and registrars like Canada's central registrar are tracking them, and in some cases blocking them.

Good news from Delaware, where SCO's Bankruptcy is being handled.  The judge has cut SCO off from having to file a workable business plan for staying in business.  This means any party that SCO owes money to can file the reorganization plan, petition the court to place SCO in control of a trustee, or to send in an examiner to investigate problems.

Groklaw's PJ (who I thank about keeping it up to date and fixing the RSS feed) posted an article about the deadline hitting hard.  From quoting the judicial texts and the filed objections from IBM and Novell, there's only a few limited paths that SCO can follow now.

First, SCO can get it's act together and file an appropriable plan... which given history is highly unlikely.

Second, IBM and/or Novell will file their plans... but it's hard to do unless you know the business model they have in SCO.  I would not be surprised if they petition for a examiner first before filing plans.

Third, they can petition for the trustee.  This is different than the U.S. Trustee in the case that the appointed (or elected) trustee runs SCO.  They can call for the appointment on grounds of "fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, or gross mismanagement."  Given SCO, this has a high chance of being done.

Or fourth, cut SCO completely off by petitioning the court for converting the case to a full Chapter 7 (liquidation)... which given how much SCO owes and how much it's losing over time, may be the "punt" option.

The first three would extend the drama (even though SCO's been ordered to go ahead with their case against AutoZone, an automotive parts company).  The last one would kill it... which I think would make me write more Second Life related stuff, now would it?