The dollar is falling. Wonder how much they'll let it slide. At some point, it will be enough to seriously tick off Germany and Japan. But in the meantime, it's the beginning of the long overdue correction in the cost of American labor. Most all our stuff is radically overpriced in relation to the rest of the world. Foreign goods will now cost more. That's bad for me, since most all my goods are foreign. It will encourage buying US products because they will seem cheaper again. That's also bad for me, since the stinkin' US manufacturers only sell to the big guys. Sigh...

It also points out how far we are into voodoo economics. Propping bonds and keeping the prime rate down while letting the currency freefall. Hope these guys know what they're doing. Wouldn't take much to screw things up big time at this point. We're going to counter the threat of spiraling deflation by introducing spiraling inflation to counteract it. Recall that foreign-made goods will now cost more. This way you'll buy American goods. But America doesn't make any goods in appreciable quantities anymore. The end result is that you'll pay more for everything. Now that could be good for the economy. If you want something, you better buy it now. Even go into hock with one of those cheap loans in order to get it. Why? It'll cost you even more tomorrow.

My, my... What a strange twist. SCO announced that it has signed an agreement to license it's Unix variant to Microsoft. Now let's see if I can keep all the facts straight. SCO owns AT&T Unix. They were bought out by Caldera systems which bought up the rights to a whole bunch of second-tier operating systems, including DR-DOS and I think CP/M. I seem to recall there was some connection to Novell along the way. AT&T Unix (which originally powered Sun and IBM, etc.; has been supplanted in the marketplace by Linux. Now here's the twist I promised. SCO Group is the former Santa Cruz Operation (now situated in Novell's base of Provo, Utah - but I digress...). They've been around for fifteen or twenty years. They got their business off the ground after Microsoft sold them it's own version of AT&T Unix, a failed product then called Xenix; which provided the foundation for SCO Unix before they owned the AT&T rights. Microsoft didn't want it because it competed with their own OS; which is why it remained a pathetic and limited Unix variant. It still is. Now they're buying it back? If you can keep all this straight, you're doing better than I.

Perhaps the more important question is why? What possible reason does Microsoft have for licensing Unix? AT&T Unix (the loser) no less. Somehow I think it must have something to do with their stated objective of neutralizing Linux. I fail to see how though. They'd have to release yet another operating system and make sure it took market share from Linux, and then kill it so it doesn't take market share from Windows. Maybe sell it back to SCO. Sounds like Xenix all over again.