From: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, December 6, 2004 12:28 AM
To: eWEEK readers
Subject: Object of SCOrn; Dell of an offer; Berners-Lee buzz
“We own all your code. Pay us all your money,” Spence read aloud as he viewed the hacked banner graphic on SCOs home page. “Mmm, are ya sure its a hack, or have they just begun a new dead-on marketing campaign?” the Kitty queried a nearby crony. The faux graphic that mocked SCOs intellectual property arguments was a replica of the existing graphic on the home page, which reads, “SCO partner Webinars. Click here to learn more.” The hackers also used the same stock photo of a woman writing on a white board that appears in the real SCO graphic, but they scrawled the words “hacked by realloc(” across the board.
A second hack to the site was the faux announcement “SCO vs World” and the subsequent proclamation that SCO had recently found parts of its source code in all of Microsofts products, from MS-DOS 2.1 to “Longhorn,” and that SCOs legal department would be taking action. “Are ya really sure its a hack?” laughed the Lynx once again.
Turning back to business, El Gato got a call from a pal enthralled by the slugfest among counties in North Carolina as they try to induce Dell to build an assembly plant within their borders. The city of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County reportedly plan to offer Dell nearly $28 million in incentives. The offer, which the Winston-Salem Journal reports would be $14.76 million from Forsyth County and an expected $13 million from Winston-Salem, would more than double offers from Guilford County and Greensboro. Dell is expected to decide by years end. “People usually offer me incentives to go away,” groused the Grimalkin.
Hopping into a Zipcar, the Tawny Titan weaved through Boston traffic to the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel to attend the World Wide Web Consortiums 10th anniversary bash. In a world where countries cant even agree on the metric system, as e-Travel Development Director Denis Lacroix noted at the event, the W3C has worked to define international standards for Web interoperability.
The event offered Spence insight into the inspiration for Tim Berners-Lees creation of HTTP as he noted that the hyperactive genius, MacArthur Fellow and current W3C director speaks in a dialect closely related to hypertext, jumping from one idea to the next before completing a sentence. “I should be taking notes in HTML—Hyper Tim Markup Language,” mused the Mouser.
An earful of Berners-Lees discourse left Spence ready for a trip to the hotel bar. There, he met a compadre who was chuckling about Staples online charity auction called Staplers of the Stars. The auction touts more than 140 office staplers autographed by celebrities ranging from Paris Hilton to Bill Gates.
Staples promises 100 percent of the proceeds from each autographed stapler will go directly to each celebritys favorite charity. “But why would I want an autographed stapler?” pondered the Puss, sipping a merlot. “Gimme a blank check autographed by Bill Gates or a date with Paris Hilton—now, that would be worth bidding on!”