Monday's Meat Wagon

Joy to the news, Saddam is captured. The US Bill of Rights was ratified on this day in 1791. Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877.

1. The controversy continues over SCO's claims of being clobbered by DDoS attacks last week. (We reported SCO's version of the facts on Thursday.) As we mentioned then, the Groklaw blog was quick to cast doubt on SCO's claims, saying their story didn't make sense. But the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) issued a report on Thursday that seemed to confirm the attack. Groklaw recanted on Friday. At this point it seems that something did indeed happen to SCO's servers, but that SCO was mistaken in characterizing it as a SYN flood.
2. Meanwhile SCO investor, The Royal Bank of Canada, has changed the terms of its investment giving the bank veto power over the high contingency fees SCO is paying its lawyers.
3. According to the New York Times in an article titled "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb" [free registration required], the Columbia disaster was partly caused by NASA's reliance on PowerPoint. NASA engineers presented their findings on the wing damage in a slide "so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle."
4. Microsoft is removing a font that contains swastikas from Office 2003. New versions of Office will have a modified Bookshelf Symbol 7 font, current owners can remove the font with a patch from Microsoft. Historians will note that the swastika is an ancient symbol used long before Hitler co-opted it as the symbol of his National Socialist Party, but considering its modern connotations, it's probably prudent to remove it.
5. Now that Windows 98 is officially Not For Sale, Microsoft is planning to drop support for the operating system next month. However, in a recent survey, AssetMetrix reports that 80% of companies are still running some copies of 98 and 95 and that lack of support could mean security problems ahead.
6. Are you ready for a billboard that changes its message depending on what radio station you're listening to? It's not a scene out of Blade Runner, according to the New York Times, it's here now, in use on five billboards in California, and soon to come to a billboard near you.
7. According to SlashDot, Patrick Pelissier has released the first open source operating system for Texas Instrument calculators. PedroM is UNIX-shell like, features task switching, and runs in 192k.