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glad I could help

Check the footnotes in the 10-K for the pro forma reconciliation of the result of the firm's generous options plan. For 2003, the $0.19 profit turns into a $0.27 loss. For 2004, the $0.71 profit shrinks down to $0.45.

Check the footnotes in the 10-K for the pro forma reconciliation of the result of the firm's generous options plan. For 2003, the $0.19 profit turns into a $0.27 loss. For 2004, the $0.71 profit shrinks down to $0.45.

http://www.fool.com/news/foolplate/2000/foolplate0 00412.htm

Here is an analyis of major airlines' pilot pay from herehttp://www.fool.com/community/pod/2000/000522. htm:

Note those are hourly rates. Now I am not saying that pilots' pay should be reduced to something like that of the average programmer because pilots are holding peoples' lives in their hands; but their union-negotiated rates of pay are high because their contracts were signed at the height of the dot com boom when everyone was willing to pay top dollar to fly to Redmond or Austin on a moment's notice. I am saying that at this point, when businesses are watching their travel budgets much more closely, every stakeholder in a business needs to make concessions to keep that business stable for the long term.

Motley Fool has a write up about YDS.

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05011117.htm

Outsourcing [sic] is all about economic rationalism. What has patriotism to do with it?

Because if you offshore tech jobs, your country will inevitably have less home-grown technology.

The thought of an aggressive, communist country like China becoming more technologically advanced than America (with all its faults) scares me. It also scares people like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's second in command.

And, by the way, I'm not an American.

If The US is ''exporting jobs'' at an alarming rate, how come than the US has actually a far lower unemployment rate than that of the ''more patriotic'' countries, like Italy and France [...] ?

Because America will always need burger-flippers ;-) You are ignoring the quality of the jobs in these countries.

A report commissioned by the OECD back in 2000 showed that although the Eurozone created less jobs than America, the quality of the jobs it created was much higher. (I forget the reference for this report but Will Hutton covers it a lot in his excellent book The World We're In).

What happens to the U.S. when we are dependent on other countries ... I will tell you what will happen: absolutely nothing.

... except an ever-shrinking dollar. I don't know of any country that has ever devalued its way to prosperity.

The US is already dependent on oil from not-so-friendly countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela.

And this is a good thing? The US supports an oppressive regime in Saudi and tried to topple the democratically elected president of Venezuala in 2002 because the Bush administration didn't like his oil policies.

white-collar jobs are going the way of manufacturing jobs, it's inevitable, and the US won't descend into misery because of that -- Americans have always found a way to adapt.

Are you forgetting history? Think about the Great Depression (widespread poverty, civil unrest, a plot to topple the President etc etc). Sure, if by "adapt" you mean "well, not everybody starved to death", I'll grant you, Americans "adapted". But I'd rather avoid that situation than "adapt".

Microsoft wasn't paying taxes (as I understand it) for some time in the 90's due to the way they were accounting for their employee stock options.

• The other lesson for investors is that Microsoft, contrary to the overwhelming chatter, isn't the only source of computer vulnerabilities. Some reports claim that Linux, the open-source operating system peddled by dozens of outfits, including Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), and IBM (NYSE: IBM), is already the world's most oft-breached OS, comprising 65% of security compromises compared to Windows' 25%.

There is the concept of a 'soft' and 'hard' credit checks. Checks you perform on yourself are considered 'soft' and thus don't count against you.

Here is some more info

forgot http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2004/commentar y04092402.htm

Maybe they're going to switch to selling macs instead?

I don't see it happening but it's an interesting coincidence to see these speculations published on the same day.

Quote

However, in order to be found guilty of a securities law violation, a defendant must have acted with scienter. Scienter has been defined by the Supreme Court as a "mental state embracing intent to deceive, manipulate or defraud."

Quote:

Ignorance of the law (not based on the advice of a tax expert). But, you should also be aware that, in some cases, where the taxpayer's mistaken belief (that filing was not required, for example) was deemed "reasonable" or due to extraordinarily complex tax concepts, reasonable cause was found.

Aren't you sick of always being wrong?

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04120213.htm

Read this article from motley fool. Everybody is wondering how sun is going to make money. Before you say "service" keep in mind the most expensive support plan from SUN is less then the least expensive support plan from RedHat. They can't possibly make up the difference from support if they are practically giving that away too.

So what's left to sell? Intel boxes? AMD64 Boxes? Sparc workstations?

Do you really see Sun sustaining itself with those products? I don't.

There is only one thing that sun has that could make it money and that's patents.

Good reply. I couldn't have explained it better.

As far as #2 goes, Actually, I'm kind of surprised that someone hasn't tried #2 yet

the share price of SCOX is still higher than it was pre-litigation. So Darl has actually increased shareholder value since the days before litigation. Anyone who bought after the start of litigation was buying into "litigation as business model", and has no leg to stand on, regardless of whether they got in early and cheap or too late and when the stock was at it's peak.

What needs to happen, and probably won't (due to an underfunded SEC and a look-the-other-way Justice Dept.), is an investigation of stock manipulation by Canopy Group as well as an investigation of the Microsoft connection.

SCOG was already a soon-to-be dead company, before they took on IBM. If anything, Darl has managed to keep SCOG alive, and for a while, with an impressive stock price. I'm sure he has made Ralph Yarro very happy, and that's the only shareholder he need ever answer to.

I wonder if Time-Warner is starting to regret it.

Damn that internet! ;^)

I think you mean "Damn the internets! ;^)"

On the CPU front, Apple sold 836,000 computers, a 6 percent increase over the year-ago quarter but down 5 percent from the third quarter of 2004. Revenue for the entire category was $1.231 billion, up 3 percent year-over-year but down 3 percent sequentially. The company blamed the sluggish numbers on limited G5 processor availability, which delayed the introduction of the G5 iMac and affected the Power Mac G5 pipeline.

The iMac line suffered the expected double-hit from the late introduction as well as supply constraints of the G5 chip. At 229k, this is the 2nd lowest unit sales in iMac sales in the last 5 years. At $216M, it's also the 2nd lowest revenue for the iMac in the last 5 years. Apple continues to see major supply constraints despite holding back the introduction in order to build up inventory. Transitioning the iMac to the G5 at a time when IBM was not prepared to meet volume demands has contributed to further weakening of the consumer desktop line.

Intel released their Q3 results late Tuesday. In their conference call they were evasive about a suprising drop in their tax rate and also about the amount of their inventory writeoff. Intel claimed their inventory was down $43 million to $3.2 billion with an unspecified writeoff amount. Investors were happy to see inventory did not go up again and the stock went up Wednesday. In several different articles people are working out the mystery of the writeoff amount. Normally Intel's "cost of sales" is a steady number. Any writeoff will add to this number. So you can estimate the writeoff just by seeing how much this increased. With this calculation, it seems Intel had a writeoff of $472 million.

Meanwhile management will be on patrol with whips, screaming such motivational phrases as "Don't you be letting my stock price drop", "We kick AMD's a** or I'll come back and kick your a**" and always a favorite "Yamhill! I mean, Yah Mule, get along there, keep working, that's the stuff *crack*"

What the article doesn't tell you is about Intel's pile of unsold processors. Hey, do what automakers did, sell out your future today, slash prices, provide %0 financing and move them little doggies out.

Now this is the equivalent to MotleyFool.

This may be a good thing for Sirius, but it seems to have made the stock market go stupid. The price of Sirius stock -- already overpriced IMHO -- jumped a billion dollars on the news. Later it dropped to half a billion. but that's still nuts. The Motley Fool did an article on it. I don't care for Howard Stern, but even if you think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread, what could he possibly say on the radio that would increase the value of the company by that much?

They are essentially recreating the X-15 experiments made in the early sixties.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x15/cove r.html

Those missions a rocket plane would detach from a B-52 and fly to suborbit and then glide back to earth and land like a plane.

What is really important is that resently there was an article about there being more billionaire's in the United States then there ever was in the history of the United States.

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2004/mft04092701.htm

And now Paul Allen and Burt Rutan are about to prove (I hope!) that these rich kids can have their very own space program for a mere $20 million. Which hopefully will lead to an increase in aerospace start-ups and maybe a boom in aerospace technology similar to the .com boom.

I hope this happens because not only will we finaly start seeing the promises made during the space race come to fruitation, but we can also learn from our past mistakes made during the dot com era and make a shit load of money by bailling out when the getin's good.

It's going to take a few years for this to start, Virgin is (assuming it's true and not a publicity stunt it's libel to be) not planning launches for another three years. That's time enough for everyone to change their major's and hit the books for the next big thing.

Of course if spaceshipone crashes and burns you can just forget about what I just said.

No slave ever got freedom by happily pleasing his masters.

Again, bad logic. You've provided a false dichotomy. Choose the second option all you want, it doesn't mean it's based in reality. NAFTA did send a lot of jobs outside the US, go ask anyone who lost a manufacturing job to Mexico. Outsourcing is a bad deal. It's sending middle class jobs and a strong tax base overseas for what? What has come back? Where are the new industries building on top of this and creating jobs? Why would you even start that industry in this country instead of India?

Your response to someone telling you that you got screwed in a business deal is "don't be a girlie-man economist"? I call it being stupid, but don't take it from me: I Am an Economic Girlie-Man [Motley Fool Take] September 1, 2004

Free Trade only works among equals. We are not equal to any other country or economy in the world. Free Trade is a one way street for this country where we lose. Fair Trade is the only way we can grow and ensure that the promises of globalization are realized.

The current situation is being buoyed by the floating of our currency by China and other developing countries so that they can artifically lower their currency and keep the growth coming at our expense, literally.

You're solution is to smile while we trade good middle class jobs and quality American products for cheap Chinese crap at Wal-Mart and non-service from India. Excuse me if I hold higher asperations for my country.

Anybody who goes the Dutch auction route earns Wall Street's wrath. Overstock.com did this two years ago - their CEO claims nobody wanted their business, and that they still get bad-mouthed because of it (see here and here for the Motley Fool's take on that).

Granted, Overstock.com is a classic dot-com, which could explain a lot of the bad press...

Anybody who goes the Dutch auction route earns Wall Street's wrath. Overstock.com did this two years ago - their CEO claims nobody wanted their business, and that they still get bad-mouthed because of it (see here and here for the Motley Fool's take on that).

Granted, Overstock.com is a classic dot-com, which could explain a lot of the bad press...

That's why I don't think you can trust anything Wall Street says about the Google IPO: The investment banking establishment has too much at stake and too many institutional conflicts of interest to make them credible on this offering.

I've been saying this since day one. The great thing about the Google IPO is that it puts the market back into balance - remember, shares are *supposed* to be valued based on direct investor demand, not insider deals and analyst payoffs. The Street will do what is in *it's* best interest, which means controlling the market (ahem, not a free market then eh?)

Not only is Google doing the auction to avoid insider deals (and keep that cash in the family), but it's spreading the offering among many, many different brokers, even progressive discount brokers [/shamelessplug]!

Definitely *not* evil ;)

Here's the sad truth: SCO is working hard to erase whatever viability it had as a software provider. It is now little more than a shell -- a lawsuit with a fancy name. We saw this coming awhile back when the company's sugar daddy, hedge fund BayStar Capital, muscled the firm away from its languishing enterprise business and demanded it concentrate on the litigation. A legal victory looks highly unlikely, and even if a decision went SCO's way, the probable remedy would not be money for SCO, but a rewrite for Linux, something the open-source community would accomplish in the blink of an eye.

At 5 bucks a share, with almost nothing available to short, SCO isn't worth much of your investing effort. But it's definitely worth watching, if only as an example of the way a company can be run into the ground, taking investors along. -- SCO Keeps Sinking

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

Even among index funds you should have some diversity such as 50% SmallCap and 50% S&P 500. You can see the average returns for youself in this handy table. Make sure you pick a fund with a low expense ratio. Definitely diversify though. And don't plan on striking it rich. Plan on investing for the long-term. After your feet are thoroughly wet you might find an opportunity for a small purchase of Company X that you feel will do well. Beyond that though invest safely.

This is no longer true--with the Bush's Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 capital gains rates dropped to 15% or 5% depending on income level and dividend rates are now 15% or 5% again depending on income level. But of course Bush's tax cut was all about taking care of the rich & screwing the poor.

$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.

IANACPA, but I'd expect that a corporation would count R&D as an expense, and therefore someething that's deducted from revenue along with all the other expenses like payroll, raw materials, rent, equipment, taxes, beer bashes, corporate jet, marketing, legal expenses, warehouses, etc. Profit is what's left over after you subtract all those things from revenue.

According to it's annual report, Apple spent $471 million on R&D in 2003. I couldn't find any statement of R&D expenses in Dell's 2003 annual report, but I did learn that Dell had about $35 billion in revenue for that year. Fool.com tells us that Dell spends about 2% of sales on R&D, and if we agree that most of Dell's revenue comes from sales, we can guess that Dell probably spends around $700 million a year on R&D.

So yes, Apple's $61 million profit for the quarter wouldn't put much of a dent in Dell's R&D budget, but neither would it come even close to covering Apple's R&D.

Any thoughts on how long apple can keep up results this mediocre?

If they want to run the company like a Dell, not very long at all. But given that Apple is not Dell, and that people have been unsuccessfully predicting its demise since the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, I think they can keep it up for quite a while. And I hope they do, as Apple has been the most important innovator in the personal computer market for the last 28 years.

Well, we have a capital gains tax, but I don't think it is nearly 91%. It as apparently reduced in 2k3 to 15% or 5%.

Starbucks shares hit new high on strong sales

5 feel good stocks

Their stock is trading at a whopping $.39 per share. And the best part? It's OTC! "Over the counter" stocks are unregulated, and so ridiculously abused for scams that I've never heard a single investment guide of any repute (including, and especially, The Motley Fool) say anything except to run like hell away from them. I'm curious to see if this company really can do what it claims, given this shady bit of data...

And for a whole community of those with a similar philosophy, try the Motley Fool.

The increase to 100MB was reported in Motley Fool on May 17.

If making goods abroad cuts costs, why does a pair of sneakers that cost 50c to make still cost me about $50?

Why is it that the most expensive people in my organisation and the easiest to offshore (middle-management) get paid more than me?

I think yours is a very simplistic view of the World.

Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's second in command) argues against over-simplifying economics (follow the links to his transcript at the Motley Fool) and the dangers that it brings.

Sure, the first order effects of offshoring look good, but second, third and fourth order effects could be devastating (including your friendly offshore nation builds a better atomic bomb than you because you have been paying him to increase his intellectual capital).

Live below your means. Put off that new car or computer for another year or two. Eat out 1 fewer times per week. Don't pay so much for your porn! Simple things like that can easily add up to one hundred bucks per month with very little pain.

Time is on your side. Start saving now. Be patient. It will grow very slowly at first. But the earlier you start, the earlier your savings will start growing rapidly.

Peter

BS, I used to think the exact same way. I've told myself "I'll save whatever's left over from my paycheck for an emergency fund". Sure enough, I always ended up not saving because there never were any money leftover.

I finally got sick and tired of living paycheck to paycheck and started checking out personal finance websites, such as The Motley Fool. I got myself a free 30-day membership and visited forums to learn about living below your means, cutting credit card interest rates and playing their "balance transfer games", and the "paying yourself first" method. With the lowered expenses, I put away at least $100 a month toward savings and investments. I treat that $100 or more as a bill that I must pay (thus "paying your self first") before any other bills. Otherwise I'll found a way to spend that money.

I have saving and non-retirement investments of $1200 right now. That's not that much but that's way better than being broke. It took me about 6 months to save up that much, and I estimate that I'll need $6000 for the 3 months worth, so at this rate, I'll need about 2 more years (yes, I wish that I started sooner).

Oops bad link.
The Motly Fool has some interesting comments on R&D.

My point wasn't about their policy with regard to defective items, or returning things; in that they are fantastic. My reference was to how they've been doing as a business. Two decades ago, they were the largest (by far) business of their type, and had been so for a while. But they've been coughing up blood for going on a decade now, and are going downhill steadily. Check out some of the historicals (and commentary) on The Motley Fool if you'd like (free, but benevolent, registration probably required for some of it). While most of the "bricks and mortar is dead" talk of the dot-com era was way overblown, it is true that things have changed, and Sears is a shining example of a company that has utterly failed to react to the changes brought about in retail by that era.

Several years ago I read an article asserting that Microsoft was essentially behaving like a middle-aged adult hanging onto adolescence. This article might have been on the Motley Fool site, I forget. The gist of it was this:

Companies typically innovate and take huge risks when they are young, because they have to in order to survive against their entrenched competition. Once a company becomes profitable and has a solid product line, it goes into the very different mode of repeating what it already knows how to do and improving itself. The focus is then on expanding market share, improving efficiency, making better financial deals and so forth. A company that succeeds at this phase accumulates a store of cash and starts focusing on things like mergers and acquisitions. By this time a company has evolved a complex management structure and a lot of rules and processes, which make everything the company does slower and more deliberate than before. These mature companies are much better at investing in other companies and leaving them to do the actual innovation.

Microsoft, the article said, had already entered the mature stage and yet was still trying to act like a startup. That was a couple years ago. Today I think we are seeing this view of Microsoft vindicated. Anything it does now is on a much vaster scale than when Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Every big release now involves thousands of developers and millions of customers around the world. With a multi-year release cycle, Microsoft can't possibly respond to the market; they can only try to dictate to it. Everything they release was planned several years ago.

The statement that Microsoft has enough money to survive 5 years without any sales is an interesting bit of arithmetic, but that scenario is never going to happen. MS is a public company with thousands of stockholders, many of them large financial institutions. If Ballmer announced that Longhorn won't be ready until 2009 and will cost $30 billion, I doubt that the stockholders would let him or the existing board stay in place. There might even be talk of using that cash to buy a whole bunch of other companies and move away from doing actual development. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It would just mean Microsoft was finally acting its age.