International Talk Like A Pirate Day (here in the UK, in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care) is almost upon us (Friday the 19th in fact).  So it’s time to get your pirate name out, dig out those flags, blow up the inflatable parrot and get ready for 24 hours where every other word is “yarrr…”.

You’ll also need a pirate name. Mine is:

How prescient. After talking about Amoeba, Orca and other fluffy Vrije Universitat stuff, PC World just interviewed Andrew Tanenbaum. And MINIX was next on my left for OS of the week, too

Looks a lot like the Syrian one, doesn’t it:

Except that’s an image from Wikipedia of a Swiss reactor.

Most nuclear reactors look much the same, because there aren’t that many solutions to the same problem. As Public Enemy once said – Don’t Believe The Hype.

The Inquirer’s top ten trends of 2008, unshockingly, suggests that virtualisation won’t go mainstream next year.

Simon Collis, editor of esotechnica, expresses no surprise: “virtualisation is gaining slowly among those sort of people who like this kind of thing.  But for those who don’t, it’s no big deal.”

Peter Stringfellow, London nightclub owner and entrepreneur, wasn’t consulted for this post, and didn’t decline not to uncomment.

“Well,” said an unnamed spokesperson for a company that preferred not to be named at some yet-to-be-revealed point in the near-to-distant future, “this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already not know.”

Spokepeople for companies not mentioned in this article didn’t forget not to uncomment on this article.  Or not.  As the case may be.  Or may not be.

Apparently several people still remain unshocked by this non-unobvious prediction.  “I remember”, says Craig Deeplimaydup, “when they told me that this was true.  It sounded fairly right to me,” said the fictional member of staff of whatever it was.

Source: Brown.  Not HP.  It’s totally different.  Trust me.  Ask anyone who likes sauces.

Suddenly the world seems to have changed, one way or the other.

First, Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated by a suicide bomber: a disaster for Pakistani politics (if not world politics), as far as I can tell.

Then, there’s the fact that digital storage is much more costly and problematic than traditional film storage.  Or the fact that Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone.  Or that the Sistine Chapel is now copyrighted by the Vatican (public domain?  We’ve heard of it…).

Although perhaps the most technologically significant story of the day is the latest chapter of the SCO v its customers saga: they’ve been delisted from Nasdaq.  Seems a fitting punishment for what appears to be their corporate misbehaviour to me…