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And these secret back-door meetings helped out the energy companies soooo much that Enron filed for bankruptcy within a year and the entire sector dropped by almost 50% over the 2 years following it. Either Cheney really sucks at helping out his buddies, or he didn't help them as much as you seem to think.

No. You have completely overlooked 'short selling', which is what is happening with SCOX. Go look at the short stats on SCO. See how the amount of shorting has risen from 33K in May to 2 million in Dec? Gosh, that's a lot of investors who want SCO to tank, dontcha think?

Spammers may infect PCs and intercept the ordinary outgoing e-mails (ingoing is also good, except it may itself be spam). They then can use them to send out spam. Examples:

1)

Spammers may infect PCs and intercept the ordinary outgoing e-mails. They then can use them to send out spam. Examples:

BTW, I am typing this on a new Dell computer, check the photo here.

2)

Jenny told me you have a small penis. Wanna increase it?

> Spammers may infect PCs and intercept the ordinary outgoing
> e-mails. They then can use them to send out spam. Examples:

3)

Spammers may infect PCs and intercept the ordinary outgoing e-mails. BTW, you can make a lot of money very fast online. They then can use them to send out spam. Examples:

Positively weighted keywords might overweight negative. This will be especially useful when sending mail to people from local addressbook, but might work in other cases as well.

VaLinux is doing its best to keep offshoring viable. Check out their recent press releases:

They are also doing their best to mangle links posted by people who do not post in html. In the interest of sacrificing some karma for the good of humanity and the information of slashdot users, here are the first and second press releases. For the WTF crowd and the vast majority of slashdot that do not read links or articles, the links are to press releases from slashdot's parent company crowing about SourceForge Enterprise Edition and its ability to make offshoring more viable.

VaLinux is doing its best to keep offshoring viable. Check out their recent press releases:

They are also doing their best to mangle links posted by people who do not post in html. In the interest of sacrificing some karma for the good of humanity and the information of slashdot users, here are the first and second press releases. For the WTF crowd and the vast majority of slashdot that do not read links or articles, the links are to press releases from slashdot's parent company crowing about SourceForge Enterprise Edition and its ability to make offshoring more viable.

3)Sue until your stock price doubles!

SCO stock didn't just double, it went up twenty-fold at one point. If you are as smart, you'll short the stock like some of the smarter geeks out there. The stock will eventually be sued into the ground and you'll have made 100 percent on your investment (minus comission and interest).

Check out the latest press release from VALinux (slashdots parent corporation) HERE VALinux doesn't care about us, the professional programmer. They are producing tools that are geared to take more of our jobs overseas. It is tools like this and open source which are DESTROYING the profession. What does Slashdot have to say for itself?

Can I point out something to you:

The Dow Jones Index 1990-1999

The Dow Jones Index 2000-2009

Please note the current US administration is proudly featured over the top of the chart.

Here's another good one: The NASDAQ

The NASDAQ from Oct 97 - Sept 03.

Our economy was driven into the ground by two things: 1. 9/11 2. The war on Iraq. If you notice, the economy started to recover after 9/11 but then the decision to go to "war" in Iraq and driven the economy down even further.

Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.

I wonder why ;)

Last three months: 12 sells, 0 buys.

I wonder why ;)

...many major analyst forecasts which see TMTA hitting 2.50 in the next year.

• 2002 $90,260
• 2001 $107,720
• 2000 $166,067
• 1999 $68,385

• 2002 ($381,314)
• 2001 ($1,867,125)
• 2000 ($316,858)
• 1999 ($61,138)

As you can see they're not making money at all, and it's surprising they're managing to stick around for so long. And you have to admit 7 years is pretty long for the net... They've beat out some pretty big guys too... Prodigy, Compuserve, Tymnet, shit the list could on for Eons... As for the company financial-wise I wouldn't touch their stock even at the low rate of $8.99ps

How many stock ticker listings are there for Sony? One: SNE. It is one company. The profits from each division eventually get funnelled up to the top, then divided back down.

So by buying a PS2 from Sony, you are helping fund the RIAA and MPAA.

Have a nice day.

Is this the final, last gasp of the Beos team that went to palm? By spinning the Palmsoft into their own company, they must fend for themselves as an independent profit center. It also means that others can develop their own OS for plams, and market them to palm-clones, and potentially to Pa1mOne themselves.

Interestingly, the remnants of Be have more than doubled in the past quarter; see the chart here

If you check out the Nasdaq stock report for sco the following shareholders with >5% is shown:

Ralph Yarro
Darcy Mott
Canopy Group Inc
John Wall

If you then check out The Canopy Group website you will see the following as board members

Ralph Yarro - CEO & Presedent
Darcy Motto - Vice President, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer

This gives the Canopy group at least a 15% stake in SCO, possibly more.
If you look at SCO's board and then have a look at their share trading, you see the following:-

Charles BROUGHTON (VP world ops) sold about 120,000 USD worth of shares in the last two months
Robert BENCH (CFO) sold about 120K USD in last few months
Jeff HUNSAKER (s. VP)sold about 120K USD in last few months
Other than McBride (CEO) most of the board have ofloaded shares in the last month or two. To give you an idea of the "peak" of share selling. According to the Nasdaq the number of "insider" trades (i.e. board members) in the last 12 months was 15, and 12 (all of which were sales) of those were in the last 3 months (or as its know just after the Linux thing).

Yarro and Mott both also sit on the board of SCO.

Does that stink or is it just me?

Jaj

If you check out the Nasdaq stock report for sco the following shareholders with >5% is shown:

Ralph Yarro
Darcy Mott
Canopy Group Inc
John Wall

If you then check out The Canopy Group website you will see the following as board members

Ralph Yarro - CEO & Presedent
Darcy Motto - Vice President, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer

This gives the Canopy group at least a 15% stake in SCO, possibly more.
If you look at SCO's board and then have a look at their share trading, you see the following:-

Charles BROUGHTON (VP world ops) sold about 120,000 USD worth of shares in the last two months
Robert BENCH (CFO) sold about 120K USD in last few months
Jeff HUNSAKER (s. VP)sold about 120K USD in last few months
Other than McBride (CEO) most of the board have ofloaded shares in the last month or two. To give you an idea of the "peak" of share selling. According to the Nasdaq the number of "insider" trades (i.e. board members) in the last 12 months was 15, and 12 (all of which were sales) of those were in the last 3 months (or as its know just after the Linux thing).

Yarro and Mott both also sit on the board of SCO.

Does that stink or is it just me?

Jaj

If this insider selling continues as an IBM vs. SCO trial were to draw closer, that would mean that SCOs own top brass don't think they much of a chance. Of course of SCO winds up going under, those same top brass will probably have questions asked of them for why they sold before IBM destroyed them (if it happens that way).

Benifit of the doubt though, insider selling does happen in companies to take profit, and if you look at SCO's 1 year preformance going from 95 cents to 16 dollars at it's recent peak (an increase of nearly 1,700%), you would see why it would seem intelligent to sell.

I'm in awe...

I'm very impressed IBM was able to arrange this many claims simultaneously. For a lawsuit of this size, that was very fast. Even if SCO wins the entire $3 billion they want, IBM's response will probably ruin them.

...obviously, I'm not the only one that sees it that way. SCOX. As of this post, they're down 11.67%.

The SCO stock is so much shorted that is has become diffcult to borrow the stock to short.

Yes, apparently so...
SCOX short interest

Increased 728.8% from May to June. Then another 41.4% from June to July.

SCO has buried itself. I can't believe that anyone is still buying their stock, all they are doing is making McBride richer.

Short Interest
The total number of shares of a security that have been sold short by customers and securities firms that have not been repurchased to settle short positions in the market.(See also Short Selling,Days to Cover, Settlement Date,and Average Daily Share Volume.)

Analysis of the Issue

Regardless of the "fault" of piracy, here's an interesting thing I have noticed with most industries where something can be pirated - music, software, literature, movies, and the like. They always claim that "piracy cost us N dollars". Now, how can this be the case? Generally, when you think of "cost", you think of a sum that someone must pay. For instance, when the automotive industry says "warranties cost us $2 billion" it makes sense, because they must spend $2 billion of their own cash to cover the warranties. That means they have to take $2 billion they already have and spend it on something.

Compare and contrast with "lost sales due to pirating". The music / software industry does not have to give any of the money they already have because of piracy. They still sell some number of product, and obtain revenue from those things they do sell. The question then becomes, if there was no piracy, would they sell more items and thus increase their revenue?

Any person with a good business brain should see that piracy is not a cost in the strictest sense. It is simply untapped potential, or evidence of a poorly priced product. It is simply supply and demand. The public is willing to purchase a number of items at the set (by cartel or whatever your opinion my be on that one) price. There is demand for more product, but not at the going price, so the public finds an alternative. Because there is an alternative, at a much lower cost (the cost is not dollars but risk associated with ownership of unlicensed product), some people choose the alternative.

A New Business Model

A good solution, if the content industries were real business-savvy, would be to find the price at which they would sell the volume they want to sell. If they cannot make ends meet at the revenues they are currently getting, they should implement some other form of cost-cutting or whatever. And in the content industries, cost of distribution is almost zero - CDs cost pennies each, and packaging, printing, and shipping are also insignificant. (Proof - go to NASDAQ and look up M$s financials - note their revenue of $28 billion and cost of revenue is only $5 billion - gross return of 460%. (Constrast with Ford - revenue $165 B, cost = $125 B; gross return 32%) )

This means that their business structure is not right - they have too much overhead, or are too greedy. Their cost/pricing structure is not sufficient based on the demand for their product at the prices they want to sell. Sure, they will yap that if they sold as many CDs as people are downloading, at the price they want, they would get N more dollars. However, to sell that many more CDs, they'd have to drop the price and only then get M more dollars. But, if by dropping the price 5% increases volume by 10%, then they'd end up with more than they estimate.

Hypothetical Finances

Let's say for instance that CDs would retail for $10 each, say $5 wholesale. If you sell 100,000 copies, that's $500k. I'm guessing production costs are around $50k for tooling and such and $0.01 for each disc at that volume - or $1000. So cost of product is only $51 k. I don't know what labor is to make 100k CDs, but I'm guessing the machines can crank out 5000 / day for sure - that's only 20 days of production. At (auto) union costs of $50 / hour, say for 10 employees for those 20 days, labor would cost $80k. So now our total cost of producing those 100k CDs is $131k. That leaves $369k to split between the band (estimate 5 people) and label people (how many does it take to get a record going? Let's be conservative and say it takes 20 people).

Anyone else notice that the NasDaq Summary Quotes for SCOX nasdaq.com has a article link at the bottom called /K I L L K I L L K I L L -- The SCO Group/ ? I wonder if it works?

Maybe you should buy some shares in ARM then?

Pray tell, how can you possibly figure out the capitalization requirements from this article. The corporation DOESN'T have to be public. In fact, in this case having it be public is probably not a good idea...

In the article, were you to actually read it, he describes going public on the NASDAQ for $20/share. Assuming he means the NASDAQ National Market, that requires the company to have, among other things, $1 million in profits last year or $75 million in assets. Regardless of what his business is, that's the NASD requirement. Going public these days is Hard, even if you have a profitable business. The business he describes is not profitable until after it is public.

I was under the impression we were discussing the business Mr. Cringley described in his article. If you wish to describe a different business, we can talk.

What about a non-profit corporation?

Again, I thought we were speaking of Cringley's described company, which he clearly wishes to list on the NASDAQ. If you are aware of any nonprofit companies listed on the NASDAQ, I'd love to see their symbols. Public companies are for-profit entities, thus, the presumption in law is that they do what they do for profit. Yes, private, nonprofit companies don't do things for profit, but that's not what we were discussing, here. I'll head you off before you suggest a nonprofit to do this: 1) I'm not clear you can issue shares in a nonprofit. 2) If you put together a nonprofit clearly and only to engage in piracy, I'm pretty sure the courts would see through it and bust you anyway. 3) Even if they didn't, congress would change the law and the net effect would be that you'd eliminate CDs from libraries.

Come the fuck on jack. Is this logic applied to a co-op apartment? No.

Were we talking about co-op apartments? No, we were talking about US music copyright law, which has quite different rules governing it than the rules governing cooperative rental of apartments. One of the standard tests in US copyright law for if an action is fair use is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." Which is usually translated into non-lawyerese as, "would it replace a sale?" or, in other words, "would you normally need to buy it to do this?" Another important factor to weigh is "whether such use is of a commercial nature," which this clearly is. Mr. Cringley's business, as described, is a clear violation of the law. If you wish to describe another business, I'll listen.

The shareholders can decide to do with their collectively owned property whatever they wish.

As long as they don't break the law with it. Copying it 60 million times and distributing it to the shareholders would be a clear violation of the law, because it is clearly not "fair use." Since the company he describes is a for-profit entity, the presumption would be that it engaged in such copying for profit, and it would therefor need a licensing agreement with the copyright holders. This is exactly what mp3.com got slapped with on its "Beam It" service.

Just wondering, I haven't really heard much more about in a while, but whatever happened to the huge rollout of 3G services that we were promised back in 1999-2000. I remember one company in particular, Qualcomm, had wonderful times in 99 on the 3G hype, but it never really delivered as much as promised, and only had a huge rollout in Japan. Is that finally changing, and are these 3G phones that we look at actually ready to be used nationwide yet, or are we still talking major-city-only deals?

Microsoft (market cap: $275B) is a long way from California and is the world's largest software company by a wide margin. Er, by a wide, Wide, WIDE margin (Oracle market cap: $65B).

I'm not boosting or bashing any particular company here, just making a point that the tech world does not revolve around California.

Microsoft (market cap: $275B) is a long way from California and is the world's largest software company by a wide margin. Er, by a wide, Wide, WIDE margin (Oracle market cap: $65B).

I'm not boosting or bashing any particular company here, just making a point that the tech world does not revolve around California.

While some idoits are buying, it is not surprising to see what SCO insiders are doing.
Cash out while they are hot!

According to this site, the currently outstanding shares of SCO are worth less than $150 million. That doesn't mean that the company could be bought for that, but it would be certainly less than a billion. At this point, it would seem to behoove IBM to launch a hostile bid for SCO and go ahead and offer about twenty bucks a share for all outstanding shares. I'm sure they could do it. It is ridiculous that a penny-ante company like SCO is risking a multi-billion dollar per year business.

Have just read the SCO 10k SEC filing of today (06/13/03) and they basically say IBM is right:

The Companyâ(TM)s SCOsource licensing revenue to date has been generated from license agreements that are non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, paid up licenses to utilize the Companyâ(TM)s UNIX source code, including the right to sublicense.

How do they intend to revoke IBMs UNIX license if they say in their own 10k filing that so far only perpetual deals have been made?

--
Andre

IBM's stock is at $84. Compared to the rest of the players in this drama I do not think that they have anything to worry about. IBM's stock has followed the trends of the DJIA almost exactly for the last 8 years (DJIA up, IBM up etc.) Stock prices depend on more factors than this one little incident. Even SCOX has bounced back to $8.

If one takes a look at the insider trading at SCO one can find out that the last insider trader was Bawa Opwinder, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Global Services, who sold 23k shares on 6/5/2003.

Maybe there's a relationship between the moves of this individual, but jumping to conclusions about the motivations of the entire executive team seems jumpy to me.

I personally think they blundered quiet a lot, but they probably guess this suit can have the same effect on them as the antitrust case.

Anyway, the responsible lawer(s) did a lucrative thing by selling this to some individuals who really didn't have a clue what else to do.

I would recommend to wait for IBM to countersue. Any 'cease and decist' letter from SCO would have lead to compliance within minutes or hours, in the case code was actually copied from SCO to Linux.

As all the source code in the Linux kernel states who is the Copyright owner, one or several individuals (or companies) can be held responsible for those 80 (or more to come?) lines. The patents remained with Novel according to their statement, so this is purely a copyright case...
No judge will believe 80 lines of code can be vital for a 'program' this size (linux kernel), and lots of points raised by ERS (and more) come into play as well - in the assumption that SCO really had these lines first.
If SCO thinks IBM wins the most from Linux, why not wait for their reaction on this FUD?

gotta catch them all:
seems like it's benefiting everyone

Isn't hurting them yet.

this may be offtopic but it's a great example of how companies can bounce back from bad press: SCOX. come on, what happened!

Isn't hurting them yet.

this may be offtopic but it's a great example of how companies can bounce back from bad press: SCOX. come on, what happened!

It's interesting, the earliest slashdot story I could find on the SCO saga is this one from January, and look at the 6 month graph. Stock price going up as SCO gets more and more media attention, perhaps?

Finally, something we can all agree on.

Yes, but it's about tripled since this whole thing began.

SCO stock today. Down 25% yesterday, and an additional 12% today, Thursday, May 29, 2003.

SCO dropped 25% yesterday, and another 10% today (so far)

I guess Nasdaq could be wrong.

To be serious, seems to be plunging since 27/5, I wonder why :-)

Thanks Novell.

WTF is up with VA Software? LNUX

nasdaq

http://quotes.nasdaq.com/quote.dll?page=charting&m ode=basics&intraday=off&timeframe=1y&charttype=&sp lits=off&movingaverage=none&lowerstudy=&comparison =&index=&drilldown=off&selected=SCOX

I would like to see it going down, but why do I see it going up in the long run recently? I hope I am just reading that chart wrong..

SCO stock price is dropping fast.

Keep an eye on all of them

Down about 20% at last check. The chart is beautiful to see.

For up to date (well, 20 minute delayed) comparisions between the two, try http://quotes.nasdaq.com/quote.dll?mode=stock&page =quick&symbol=SCOX&symbol=NOVL

(I presume that Nasdaq is able to withstand a mild slashdotting.)

It appears that investors weren't too pleased with what SCO could report, as SCOX is down more than 10% as of this posting, while Nasdaq itself is up.

By Hour Might be better...as the conference occurred, much negative movement began..

what's next in this saga?
Reatity TV: The fall of SCO house

Bookmark this baby, and watch them fall back down.
Hopefully.