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If you haven't been following this, Glisan gave up Fastow, and Fastow gave up Skilling and Lay. We're waiting to see if Lay gives up Bush.

• Inmate Register Number: 20290-179
  Name: LEA W FASTOW
  Age: 42
  Race: WHITE
  Sex: FEMALE
  Projected Release Date: 7/10/2005
  Location: HOUSTON FDC
  1200 TEXAS AVENUE
  HOUSTON , TX 77002
  Phone Number: (713)221-5400

• Inmate Register Number: 20293-179
  Name : BEN F GLISAN
  Age: 38
  Race: WHITE
  Sex: MALE
  Projected Release Date: 1/17/2008
  Location: BASTROP FCI
  1341 HIGHWAY 95 NORTH
  BASTROP , TX 78602
  Phone Number: (512)321-3903

Bastrop is a low-security prison, with a plant making bulletproof vests. Houston FDC is an "administrative" facility, for short term prisoners, those in transit, and those with court proceedings nearby.

More recently, he's been in trouble with the SEC for selling $5.1 million in unregistered securities over the Internet. As the SEC's formal complaint puts it, "As of late 2002, MI's approximately 40 years' of development has resulted in a prototype Skycar capable of hovering about fifteen feet above the ground." That seems to say it all.

It used to be that American companies were focused on producing more and better products. Now, the focus is exclusively on how to crank out more expensive versions of the same crap. Also, the notorious shortsightedness of American companies has only gotten worse since the stock market has been inflated to a ridiculous, unsustainable level.

Case in point: Boeing. The Sonic Cruiser was something new and innovative - and was killed. The 7E7 is a more efficient, more polished version of the same thing they've been building for 20 or so years. After all, R&D costs money and you don't recoup those costs this quarter.

Wierdly, some of them are still trading. Ziplink (ZIPL) is quoted at $0.0001 on NASDAQ. Their web site is still up, although most of the pages are bad links. Their last news item is "ZipLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZIPL), a wholesale Internet connectivity provider, today announced that the company plans to suspend its operations effective today, November 17, 2000."

Despite this, the stock is still tradable, and a few people trade it each day.

Silicon Valley has many non-public companies that are quietly dying. Often it's not their fault; they were support companies for the semiconductor industry, which has moved elsewhere.

I've been reading "The End of Detroit", on how the US auto industry blew their market share. I see many parallels to Silicon Valley. Auto manufacturing hasn't been centered in Detroit for years now. Detroit, as a city, is a ghost town. The population is half of what it was at peak. See The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. That could happen here.

See Downside's Deathwatch. It really wasn't that hard, as you'll see if you read the explaination. The predictions haven't been updated since January 1, 2001. The charts still update automatically." Chart not available for this symbol" is not a bug; it means the company is gone.

We're still in very bad shape.

• Personal bankruptcies are up, way up. More people will go bankrupt this year than will graduate from college.
• The stock market is still far overpriced, by a factor of 2 to 3, based on historical price/earnings ratios. There isn't going to be a stock market recovery. Look at Japan. The bubble there peaked in 1989 and still hasn't recovered. It was at 39,000 then; it's around 10,000 now, fourteen years later.
• Manufacturing is only 12% of US employment. That number was 16% a decade ago, and around 35-40% half a century ago. Most of the high-paying jobs for low-skill people are in manufacturing. That's where the good working-class jobs went. Any job that involves large numbers of people doing the same thing repeatedly under direct supervision in a fixed location is a prime candidate for automation. Most of those jobs have already been automated. Technology continues to push manufacturing employment down.
• Median income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973. Yes. 1973. Best year ever for the working class. For thirty years, things have been getting worse. Slowly enough that there haven't been riots.
• 30 years ago, housing ate up about a quarter of income. Now, it eats up about half. And not because the housing is better.
• Schooling is far more expensive than it used to be. The decline in the public school system means that people go to great lengths to move to areas with better schools, or put their kids in private schools. This is part of the driver behind housing costs. Higher education is also far more expensive, and less subsidized.
• The "race for the bottom" effect dominates public policy. Jurisdictions compete to offer lower taxes, and even lower wages.
• From a pure economic perspective, workers should be paid just enough to keep them alive and working. That's where we were around 1850 or so, and that's where we're going today. Most of the world lives just above the survival level. The Western world avoided that for much of a century, but now it's coming back.
• Technology won't help. This is a fundamental result of unrestrained capitalism. Increased productivity does not inherently increase wages. In a free market, wages will decline as productivity improves, because the labor pool will become bigger as more people are unemployed. Total buying power doesn't increase unless wages do, so there isn't inherently a market for more stuff. An economy with a big pool of permanently unemployed or underemployed people dragging wages down is economically stable. Most of the third world is stuck in that mode. THe US is headed there.

It took about two hours a day for a week. Because my Downside.com has a good reputation, I was willing to go to some trouble to track them down.

• Today, I used Google to find some information on avalanche diodes. I found a new supplier, and a new part, I hadn't known about, and I called them. Before the Internet, I wouldn't have heard about them until the annual components directory, EEM, came out. This leads to a promising approach to a problem that's been unsolved for years.
• I looked up some patents, using the USPTO's search engine. I used to have to drive to Sunnyvale and look at microfiche for hours to do that.
• I put up a technical paper on our in-house web site, and sent an E-mail to my team to tell them to review it.
• I answered a request from a Stanford professor for job descriptions for summer students. That reply refers them to our web site for most of the information, so I don't have to make up or send out handouts.
• Early this morning, my financial analysis system, Downside, updated itself using the latest data from the Securities and Exchange Commission 10-K filings. The update took place automatically, and that system has worked for a year with minimal attention. You used to have to order that information by mail, and it took weeks.

All this works fine. Where's the problem?

The Internet isn't about shopping.

• Received: from cpe-203-51-210-143.qld.bigpond.net.au ([203.51.210.143] helo=downside.com)
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• Received: from host-148-244-79-22.block.alestra.net.mx (HELO downside.com) (148.244.79.22)
• Received: from elog-lab.ret.forthnet.gr (HELO downside.com) (193.92.145.218)

Those are all from a sequential block of spam bounces that we received. Look at the locations: Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, Maylasia, Turkey. That has to be some kind of distributed attack.

They're using our name. I operate Downside, a respected financial information site, and own "Downside" as a registered US trademark. I want to find out who's behind this. They're making us look bad. I get hate mail, because this spammer is advertising "extreme rape" sites.

Insights on how they're doing this would be appreciated. If this spammer can be clearly tied to felony computer intrusions, that would give me something solid to give my attorney.

It's entirely possible that the founders might take on debt and go private. Interest rates are so low right now that's a very real option.

As for "rejuvenating the market", Google just isn't very big. After all, it's almost fully automated.

Any story that quotes a "financial analyst" as an anonymous source is probably bogus. They're not insiders here; they can speak publicly. The ones who like being on Squawk Box are best ignored, of course.

We have years of depression ahead. Years. The market is still way overvalued. P/E ratios are still far too high. See the chart I put on Downside. for July 22, 2002. The bubble still hasn't fully deflated. Stocks have another 40% or so to fall to get back to normal P/E levels.

Look at Japan, where the stock market has been in the tank for a decade now. That's happening to the US. The peak was three years ago, after all.

Then again, they just reported a loss of $16 billion for the last 9 months. They may be overextended.

The editors of the Red Herring did correctly predict the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Their book, The Internet Bubble, which came out in late 1999, made it clear what was going to happen. I ran into the authors at Kepler's Books in 1999, and that's what convinced me to get out of the market, do Downside and pick losers.

The Industry Standard was also a good magazine. Upside, though, was pure hype.

Wired ought to have gone under by now, too. But they were bought by Lycos, which was bought by Terra Networks, which went down from 140 to 5 on the NASDAQ. Maybe they'll sell Wired off to Sharper Image as an additional catalog line.

Most of those "modern web techniques" cause more trouble than they're worth. They tend to work consistently only with Internet Explorer, which is their real reason for their existence and the reason Microsoft promotes them.

CSS is in a wierd niche - unneeded for simple pages, and too weak to do what Flash can do. Most of what CSS is usually used for can be done on the authoring side, with Dreamweaver templates or something similar. CSS also interacts badly with firewalls and proxy servers that edit out hostile content. If you really need exciting animated graphical effects (and you usually don't), Flash has far better capabilities.

Almost nobody uses XML as originally envisioned - as a way to send structured data from a web site to the user's client. I built Downside to do just that for SEC filings, but apart from one obscure client program nobody uses, nobody downloads data that way. We're not seeing XML-tagged price and part number info on sites to allow price-oriented search engines to find the best deal for consumers, now are we? When you buy something online, you don't get back an XML-tagged receipt that goes into your own database. XML is mostly used for in-house and business-to-business applications, typically in situations where no human looks at the content.

During the dot-com collapse, I regularly received hate mail, and threatening phone calls. Sometimes from angry CEOs. But not because I was wrong.

There is little joy in having been right about the dot-com collapse and the ensuing depression. Things are worse than I'd expected. I foresaw the collapse of the dot-coms in early 2000 (it wasn't hard if you can read a balance sheet), suspected the trouble at Enron, but had no idea so many old-economy companies would go under. I was expecting a flight to quality.

So I have a good reputation, but as a Cassandra.

What am I predicting now? We're years away from a stock market turnaround. Stock prices are still way too high by historical standards. We haven't reached the bottom yet. That's just from the numbers; the war situation may make things worse.

I tend to agree. I own Downside.com, whihc provides financial information. I get mail intended for Downside School and Downside, the grunge band.

For a while, the band was a problem, because they were offering an E-mail service for their fans through some affiliate service. ("Your own 'name@downside.net' e-mail address!") This generated much clueless mail. But they stopped promoting that sideline.

I own Downside, the trademark, which is the important thing to own.

The key to robust parsing is deferring the decision as to whether a tag has a closing tag until you've seen enough input to know. You have to read the whole document in, build a tree, then work on the tree, but for anything serious you want to do that anyway.

This parser is in Perl. If anyone would like to take it over and put it on CPAN, let me know.

There was a tendency, fueled by Wall Street and those idiots on "Squawk Box", to claim that growth without profits was an end in itself. After the dot-com debacle, and the collapses of Enron and WorldCom, that's over. Investors now want to see profits.

Remember, it's tired old Wired that published the article. They were cheerleaders of the dot-com boom and all its stupidities. And they're the people whose IPO failed. Twice. Wired isn't even a magazine with real content any more; it's more like a Sharper Image catalog, full of huge "articles" advertising consumer products.

Looking at user agents, the browser war is over. IE is #1, and Netscape often isn't even in the top 10; various indexer 'bots generate more traffic than Netscape.

I'm looking for pictures of homes of CEOs of failed companies, for Downside. I'd especially like pictures of the homes of executives of any of the companies listed on Downside's Deathwatch. Thanks.

I'm looking for pictures of homes of CEOs of failed companies, for Downside. I'd especially like pictures of the homes of executives of any of the companies listed on Downside's Deathwatch. Thanks.

• Parsing into a tree is the way to go. HTML is obviously a tree structure, but not many applications parse it into a tree and work on it that way.
• HTML::TreeBuilder is useful, but has problems with badly constructed HTML. I wrote my own parser (SGML::TreeBuilder), which is much more robust, and will parse HTML, SGML, and XML into a tree of HTML::Element reliably without knowing anything about the tags. The key concept is to defer deciding whether a tag needs a matching close tag until you see a close tag for either that tag or an enclosing tag. When you find the close tag, you assume that all the unclosed tags within it didn't need a matching close at all. This minimizes the impact of unclosed tags; for example, if someone fails to close an <I>, it's ignored, rather than putting the entire remaining document in italics. (I really should put that up on CPAN. E-mail me if you want a copy.)
• One of the things you learn from this is that Perl doesn't do "get next character" very well. Some parsers for HTML use a C subroutine(!) to do the low-level tokenizing. It's embarassing that Perl, a string language, does this so badly.
• The output of parsing is a tree of Perl objects. Perl does objects, but not very well. It takes a lot of memory to represent HTML this way.
• High-volume parsing is better done in Java or C++. Perl's regular expressions don't help much, and the weak object system is an obstacle. Doing the whole job in Perl can work, but there's a sizable performance penalty.

GreatDomains (a Verisign acquisition) is a joke. As I've mentioned previously, there's a huge difference between asking prices (often five figures) and actual sales prices (a few hundred dollars). Right now, you can probably buy almost any unused domain on the Internet for under $200.

Back when there was the big push for additional top-level domains, I pointed out that they were unnecessary. And, in retrospect, we didn't need ".biz", or ".info"; we had ".com" and ".net", and they did the job. Having more TLDs was just a moneymaker for registrars, not something useful.

It's all Esther Dyson's fault. She insisted, when she headed ICANN, that there had to be more TLDs, and that whether there should be more TLDs wasn't open to discussion. She was wrong.

The company is still issuing happy talk press releases, but most of the press releases that mention them mention lawsuits. "... Files Suit Against Merrill Lynch and Henry Blodget on Behalf of Investors of 24/7 Real Media, Inc."

They had good writing. As a modest literary magazine, along the lines of the Atlantic or the Nation, they had potential. But no way should they have ever become a major public company. That was sheer arrogance.

There was so much of that in the dot-com era.

But I didn't expect so much fraud. The numbers from the Internet companies were terrible, but honest; you could predict failure from the financial statements. I didn't anticipate phony numbers from hundreds of major, established companies.

We need to put a few dozen CEOs and CFOs in jail to restore confidence in the economy. Top management needs to be so afraid of going to jail that they don't dare cook the books.

The market, though, bailed out of Worldcom long ago. Look at their chart. Their stock peaked at $60 back in 1999. They dropped below $2 in May 2002. They're down to $0.79 right now. Most of the drop was long before this latest revelation.

The market, though, bailed out of Worldcom long ago. Look at their chart. Their stock peaked at $60 back in 1999. They dropped below $2 in May 2002. They're down to $0.79 right now. Most of the drop was long before this latest revelation.

First, warranties only are meaningful in the context of a commercial transaction. There's no reason to expect a warranty on a free good. So this is not a problem for free software.

Second, warranties aren't that expensive to manufacturers. Under 5% of the cost of a car is in the warranty. More to the point, in the gambling industry, where full financial responsibilty for errors and downtime is the norm, GTech, which runs lottery systems, pays out about 0.3% of revenue in penalties.

Compensatory damages and blame management are real issues. But this comes up in other areas, and the suppliers work it out between themselves, as in the Ford vs. Firestone tire failure issue. In computing, we should expect full warranties on the OS from manufacturers who preload an OS. Let Dell and Microsoft argue between themselves who's responsible.

Finally, manufacturers who don't offer a full warranty should have to put a giant "AS-IS" on the box, like those signs that appear on used cars.

Actually, I do follow that sort of thing. Also, here's the correct PBS link

The press release touts "Normalized EBIDTA" instead of net income, always a bad sign.

I have no idea what's really going on with this company. I doubt that anybody else on the outside does, either. There's too much "creative financing" involved.

Not yet, no. That will come.

It's tough dealing with the "creative" ways companies express data in 10-K and 10-Q filings. VA Software filed a nice, clean statement, but many others are far worse. Worst case: a money-losing company that filed a 10-Q with a line labelled "net loss", followed by a positive number, creating the illusion to the unwary that they're profitable.

The SEC used to require companies to file an SGML-encoded "financial data schedule" that was straightforward to parse. Now, that data has to be pulled out of the filings with AI programs. Three such programs now exist (ours, PriceWaterhouse Coopers', and one from the University of Kansas). S&P has an army of clerks doing it manually.

The programs have varying degrees of success. PWC's has been around for a while. It's in Prolog, of all things, with some C and an Oracle back-end. PWC hired a Prolog heavy, who wrote the thing, and then left. It doesn't really understand the newer HTML filings; it renders them into a monospace font, then treats them as text. Ours is in Perl (should have used Java; it doesn't really use regular expressions much, and it's very object-oriented and tree-structured.) backed by MySQL. The server is a Linux system. Ours prefers HTML filings, and hammers plain text into something that looks like an HTML table before processing. The Kansas one doesn't seem to be as far along. None of them do as good a job as Standard and Poor's army of clerks.

Dealing with the variations in format is a pain, but possible. The big problem is variations in line item names. That's where the "creative accounting" comes in. Many companies would prefer not to report things in the standard categories, because this makes direct comparisons with other companies easy.

There's some lobbying from the XBRL people for tightening up on this. They have a whole XML-based scheme for representing this stuff (and, in fact, the data from Downside's engine is automatically tagged in XML with their tags; do a View Source.) The idea is to get the SEC to mandate filing in a more rigid format. XBRL would be nice, but just insisting that the line items use names drawn from the XBRL representation of Generally Acccepted Accounting Practices for U.S. companies would be sufficient.

In the current regulatory climate (i.e. post-Enron) there's a good chance of getting some tightening up here.

The way Downside views this data, it's not when the company dies, it's when the stockholders die. And they're already dead; the stock is down 99% (yes, 99%) from its peak. There are ways a company out of cash can continue to operate, (dilute, take on debt, sell off assets) but they're all terrible for the stockholders.

Charging for Slashdot looks like a last-ditch effort to give that asset some value for resale.

The way Downside views this data, it's not when the company dies, it's when the stockholders die. And they're already dead; the stock is down 99% (yes, 99%) from its peak. There are ways a company out of cash can continue to operate, (dilute, take on debt, sell off assets) but they're all terrible for the stockholders.

Charging for Slashdot looks like a last-ditch effort to give that asset some value for resale.

People expect ads. This bugs me. But you can have fun with it.

There's someone who takes photographs of cities and removes all the ads in Photoshop, then prints them up as artworks. The effect is striking.

There's a set of anti-commercialism games at Global Arcade:

• Mergeroids!
• Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate your ship
• Use the shift key to propel the ship
• Use the control key to fire at the corporate asteroids
• When companies touch, they merge. It takes more firepower to break them up!

I have a financial web site that has a banner ad on it, just to make it look more "commercial". It just didn't look right without ads. It's a fake banner ad for Adbusters. Few people have ever noticed.

I also have a fake site for last years's "AI" game, full of fake ads. (About time to pull the plug on that one; the game sites themselves just went down, now that worldwide release of the movie is complete.) It looks more realistic that way.

As a sideline, I maintain an publicly available index of all Securities and Exchange filings, using a hosting account that costs me $14.95 per month and allows unlimited hits. That gives you a sense of how cheap it is to run a specialized search engine today.

A distributed peer-to-peer Google-type system is probably possible. Something like Gnutilla or Freenet, but with an architecture that distributes better and resists index spamming. As yet there's no need for it, but it's something to keep in mind.

It took legislation to make cars safe. The auto companies hated it. They fought every inch of the way. But it made the auto industry grow up and make their products really work, no matter what.

Every major industry goes through this transition, where society insists that the technology work safely. Railroads did. Steam boilers did. Autos did. Civil engineering did. Electric power did. It's time for computing to do it.

It's time for the software industry to grow up and stop hiding behind one-sided licensing agreements. Software is too important in modern life to be as crappy as it is.

I can't get that excited about fan sites having trademark problems. Most of them lack any significant original content. (There's fan fiction, but most of it sucks.)

Pressure applied to sites that criticize companies is more of a problem. But most of that is bluff. I run Downside, which was very negative on doomed dot-coms back when they were riding high. I've received threats from companies I mentioned, but nobody ever actually did much. Read the Associated Press libel manual for guidance, then go ahead and criticize.

The biggest disappointment to me in the last decade of the Internet has been the lack of good online journalism. I'd hoped that disintermediation between journalists and readers would lead to reader-supported investigative reporting. Nothing like that has happened. We have online columnists, yes, but not hard-news reporters.

Until domain names came along, few people bothered with supplemental registry trademarks, but because ICANN's rules respect even supplemental registry trademarks, it's worth doing.

I hold Downside(tm), downside.com, Animats(tm), and animats.com. Downside was accepted with no problems and is on the principal register, but Animats was initially rejected as a generic term for artificial animals, and I accepted a supplemental registration on that one.

A company can request a change of stock symbol, but it's rarely done. More common is what happens in bankruptcy. When a NASDAQ-listed company goes into bankruptcy, its symbol gets a "Q" on the end, as you can see here when At Home Corp. was changed from ATHM to ATHMQ on October 10, 2001.

A company can request a change of stock symbol, but it's rarely done. More common is what happens in bankruptcy. When a NASDAQ-listed company goes into bankruptcy, its symbol gets a "Q" on the end, as you can see here when At Home Corp. was changed from ATHM to ATHMQ on October 10, 2001.

Worse, VA will probably go out of business soon. I've been worried about this for some time. I run downside.com, and have a good record in predicting which dot-coms are going to tank. For some time, I've predicted that VA will tank. From an investor's perspective, that already happened, the stock is down over 99%. VA is still losing money and almost out of cash. Something very bad has to happen.

If there's no good backup, the failure of VA could take down much of the open source movement with it.

There's no guarantee that someone will want to buy VA at any price. Many, perhaps most, of the money-losing dot-coms that have gone under haven't been bought out; they've been liquidated outright. If the business model is a failure, buying into it at any price is a lose.

Worse, VA will probably go out of business soon. I've been worried about this for some time. I run downside.com, and have a good record in predicting which dot-coms are going to tank. For some time, I've predicted that VA will tank. From an investor's perspective, that already happened, the stock is down over 99%. VA is still losing money and almost out of cash. Something very bad has to happen.

If there's no good backup, the failure of VA could take down much of the open source movement with it.

There's no guarantee that someone will want to buy VA at any price. Many, perhaps most, of the money-losing dot-coms that have gone under haven't been bought out; they've been liquidated outright. If the business model is a failure, buying into it at any price is a lose.

I have no idea what I did to get placement like that. And I'm not even selling anything.

It's not, in general. There's the Investment Advisor Act, but that regulates people who charge fees and have clients. There are laws against insider trading, but you have to be an insider and you have to trade in the stock of the company of which you are an insider to violate them. There are laws against stock manipulation, but you have to have a financial interest in the outcome. And truth is an absolute defense to libel in the US.

I run Downside, and I get occasional threats from companies. But they've never actually done anything. I'm not anonymous, I'm not an employee of any of the companies mentioned, and I don't trade in those companies. (I'm into "value investing", companies with, like, profits.) Companies hate it when you point out that their business model is totally bogus, or that their CEO put in a golden parachute scheme just when the company was tanking. But somebody has to do it.

The German term "Schadenfreude" has seen a lot of play in recent months. It means, "Taking joy in the suffering of others", and it perfectly encapsulates the spirit of not only the "eCompanyNow" article but of many of the new websites that have popped up to celebrate the downfall of the dotcom economy.

The eCompanyNow article was something of a cute encyclopedia of some of the greatest excesses witnessed in the midst of the tech bubble. I enjoyed reading it, and laughed out loud at seeing so many portraits of hubris and foolishness in so compact a setting. But it makes for ironic reading, considering the origins of the magazine itself.

eCompanyNow was a rag brought into existence by Time, Inc. for the express purpose of soaking up a fair share of the funnymoney dotcom advertising dollars being generated by the mania itself. But the timing was less than opportune, since they came to market in May of 2000, as the bubble had already begun its rapid deflation. The dotcom advertising budgets that had led magazines like "FastCompany" and "Business 2.0" to swell to the size of phone books were suddenly gone, and as a result, the new economy magazines have all found themselves in a perpetual state of whithering, many looking anoxeric compared to their 1999 selves.

Not all new media rags were guilty of contributing to the bubble. Some were actually attempting to do a public service by reporting on the bubble as a genuine problem that was undermining both the common sense of the investing public, and the morality as well.

"Red Herring" was somewhat lonely as tech rags go, as they constantly decried the ever-inflating bubble in 1999, even at the risk of alienating the dotcoms that were advertising in their magazine.

Consider this prescient story from October of 1999, called "Internet bubble popping American business ethics?". I admired Redherring enormously for continually bringing the bubble to the attention of their readership in the midst of the madness, when so many other tech/stock rags didn't have the stomach or brains to do the same. It takes guts to tell your readers that they are delusional and your advertisers that they are doomed, but Redherring did as much when the mania really got overwhelming.

Now, "f-ckedcompany","downside.com" ,"NetSlaves" and "failure magazine" have all become the order of the day, each basically engaging in the time-honored tradition of "kicking them while their down". It is to be expected.

But one has to wonder, how long can the gleeful celebration of the death of stupid dotcoms last? Like vultures surviving off of the carcasses of dead and dying animals in the midst of a sudden drought, after a while, you've picked the bones clean, and there is nothing left to eat.

Kicking the recently humbled dotcom stars I guess is to be expected, but it will itself become tiresome. And then what will fuel the existence of those sites that were created solely for the Schadenfreude? Will they fail and be mocked by a 2nd generation version of themselves? Or simply forgotten? (I suspect they'll be the last to die before a new phase begins.)

And what will become of "eCompanyNow"? Soon they have have no more companies to mock, and no more advertisers to subsidize the mockery. Consolidation is already whittling the new media magazines down to a precious few, and I believe I've heard rumors that "eCompanyNow" will be merged with "Business2.0" and renamed "Business2.0". I hardly care what happens to either, given the fact that both are predicated in their very names on the myth we now have watched vanished before our eyes. There is no "Business2.0" model- that was the lie that we were being sold in the midst of the mania. There is no "eCompanyNow" model to embrace. We're back where we started, looking to the "Fortune" and "Forbes" magazines that preexisted the latest bubble and the "RedHerrings" that decried it for wisdom about what is coming.

FIN.

Here's what I wrote one year ago, the day Downside went online:

4.14.2000 - Today begins the Second Great Depression

• All bubbles burst. This one just did. The great Internet bubble is over. First we had Internet companies with no profits. Then we had Internet companies with no revenue. Towards the end, we saw attempts to take public Internet companies with no operations. It had to end, and it just did. This is healthy. It's not the end of the Internet, just the end of the stupidity. Now we have to get through a return to reality. "Reality", in this context, is a return to historical P/E ratios, in the 6 to 20 range. What about the companies with no earnings? Uh oh. Losing money on every sale and making it up on volume is a joke, not a business plan.

Any questions?

They have no choice; acording to The Downside Deathwatch, financially their backs are up against the wall.

TLD confusion is very real. I own Downside.com, which has financial information. I get misaddressed mail intended for:

• downside.net, a grunge band on Long Island (they don't generate much mail),
• downside.ws, which despite being in the Western Samoa TLD, is actually a band in California (who signed up with one of those branded E-mail services, offering their fans free E-mail ("name@downside.ws"), so they generate a fair amount of mail),
• downside.org, which redirects to downside.ws,
• downside.co.uk, Downside School and Abbey, a monastery in England (where all the students have individual E-mail addresses).

At first, I just ignored the misaddressed stuff, but I was getting misaddressed mail like "Why don't you answer my E-mail? Don't you love me any more?", and similar outpourings of teen angst.

So I routed incoming mail through SpamCop to bounce the drivel. The worst problem was students at Downside School signing up for mailing lists using "downside.com". All that stuff just bounces now.

So that's what it's like when you have a good name shared by different sites in different TLDs. (I've trademarked "DOWNSIDE", so I don't have to worry about that problem.) It's confusing.

I think it's time to lobby for full warranties for software. Now that Microsoft is talking about 99.99% uptime, it's a competitive issue. Companies should be competing on length of warranty, like car manufacturers started doing once Japanese competition got serious.