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I think this is the story. If you "View Source" the Slashdot article, you see this link at the end (one of these <a href="blah"></a> things that doesn't result in a usable, or visible, link.)

If you view the source, this link exists, with no anchor text....

Nice one, eds.

http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/tech/hardware/10237 939.html

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/hardware/1023 7939.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Thanks for my good friend, view source.

http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/tech/hardware/10 237939.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Shares of Apple Computer (AAPL:Nasdaq - commentary - research) set an all-time high on Friday following a disappointing report from Dell (DELL:Nasdaq - commentary - research) and amid rumors about a major new partnership.

According to market chatter, Apple is set to announce a deal with Google (GOOG:Nasdaq - commentary - research) calling for Google to offer Apple's iTunes music store through its own site. The rumored deal would pair the nation's leading online music store with its leading search engine.

There's "speculation of an iTunes launch," says Paul Foster, an options strategist at Theflyonthewall.com. "Google is going to offer iTunes somehow on their platform," according to the rumor, he says.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said the company doesn't comment on "rumors and speculation." A Google representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, Apple's shares might well have benefited from Dell's pain. The computer giant missed Wall Street's revenue targets for its just-completed quarter by $300 million and cautioned analysts that they needed to bring down their revenue targets for its current quarter.

Dell's stumble is in contrast to Apple, which has seen its computer sales and share in the PC market surge in recent quarters.

"Some investors seem be rotating out of Dell into Apple," says Foster. "Investors kind of have the attitude that Dell's weakness is Apple's strength."

Shares of Apple closed regular trading up $2.10, or 4.8%, on Friday to $46.10. The company's shares traded up as much as $2.22, or 5%, intraday. Volume totaled nearly 33 million shares, well above its three-month norm of 18.6 million shares.

• The link on the submitter's blog
  
• The stock effect
  

Right, and I'll take this opportunity to say once again that Ballmer is the wrong person for the CEO job.

Recently Ballmer was the featured speaker during a Wall Street analyst day. This is unusual; normally the CFO has this role. Ballmer dealt the usual hand, "We have great potential! The future is ours!", etc. Why was he the speaker instead of the CFO? Common sense and small tin foil hat tell me the institutional investors are getting restless, so he now has to sell himself to Wall Street.

Microsoft can continue for quite a while on the basis of market momentum, but I'm guessing the pressure on the board to find a new CEO is increasing. Stories on /. about Microsoft tech (good or bad) are a subtheme to the larger matter of the suitability of the person in the CEO spot.

collect a levy on this!!

There's a clear reason for this newfound collaboration: The bad guys are winning.

While law enforcement was busy playing with their high tech toys chasing small fry, the real criminals continue to get away. Does anybody even care about the whereabouts of Kenny Boy?

What good is my identity if I can't safely participate in capital ownership?

http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/funds/ericgillin/10 062472.html and this one

true. And here's an article on AOL's plight in today's broadband market.

http://www.thestreet.com/_mstar/tech/billsnyder/10 223493.html?cm_ven=MSTAR&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA&pgi d=pfsnapshotbt

Intel: Microsoft dropping IA64/Itanium support in WinXP/Win2003/Clusters etc.
HP: Microsoft attempted to use OEM licensing agreement to use for free HPs intellectual property.
Cisco : Microsoft's planned Network Access Protection (NAP) technology.
AMD : At first Microsoft made a big deal about XBox2 having an AMD CPU, now using 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC.
AT+T : Going back in the past a bit, but Microsoft orignally attempted to sell Xenix as a pure clone without paying fees to AT+T for the use of the orignal Unix code. Microsoft had to back down.

You are making the mistake of disregarding the rest of the story.

But in fairness, /. isn't a site for MBAs or accountants.

Seriously. Almost every time I see Mr. Spitzer's name in the media I like what I see. He is what I view as the embodiment of what it means to be a TRUE American. A genuine good-guy who isn't afraid to stand up for what's right and fuck everyone who doesn't like it. It's pretty sad, but I've never voted for someone who I really wanted to see in some particular office, just mostly against the person who I wanted to prevent from attaining that office. If Spitzer runs for Gov. of NY it would be the first time I would be voting for someone who I really thought completely deserved to win.

Not to say the analysts are right and Apple is purusing a bad stragey, but it is not always a good direction to go.

...station to Echostar (Cablevision is the parent of Voom, Echostar the parent of DishNetwork) due to mounting losses at Cablevision attributable to Voom. Echostar was preparing to put up another satellite and the cost of the Voom bird and ground station was comparable to an actual launch, and got the new broadcast capacity operational faster. Basically Cablevision sold the assets and is now down dumping the service.

What Echostar has planned for the new satellite has not been announced (determined?), but the Apr 30 date seems to imply that we may have to wait until at least then to find out exactly what Echostar intends to do with the bird.

About the sale: http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/tech/georgemanne s/10204508.html

An overview of HDTV over satellite: http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5108854-4.html

They may not have made head way on the music side, but buying MGM sure reeks of a sure fire way to battle it's way on the Blu-Ray format. Want Singing in the Rain or Gone With the Wind in HiDef? Guess you'll be going the Blu-Ray route.

I say if you build it, they will come.

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/scottmoritz/1 0215566.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050331/315459.html?.v=1

Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway owns GEICO, which uses the gecko as its most recognizable corporate symbol.

I'd think customers would want professionals dealing with their auto insurance claims, yet GEICO (and Buffett) think a little gecko is just dandy.

Actually, we all know the accepted way to advertise to IT professionals is to either use gratuitous T&A, or else use one of those omnipresent stock-photo guys: the Asian guy with the spiky hair and the dark glasses, or the ultra-nerd guy who shows up in IT job ad sections, as if we like being insulted with a stereotype.

I mean dude, look at the charts. Notice the volume spike at around 10:00 AM. It was this sudden accumulation move that caused the prices to turn back around. The whole game is purely psychological. Today was certainly a good day to buy SCOX.

SCOX as a business is poison. Who wants to do business with a company that sues its customers? Even if they do lose. And what about a number of pending rulings on any number of the legal fronts which could sink SCOX's legal shenanigans. Pfeh! Better expected ROI on a lottery ticket.

-Blaine

Microsoft has purchased an anti-spyware company, so in fact Microsoft might simultaneously be entering the security market to compete with Symantec. This news is fresh, and might be depressing the market's enthusiasm about Symantec/Veritas.

So keep KDE "GPL OS only", and when the OS itself becomes irrelevant, so will all OS-specific apps."

That won't be happening soon:

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/ronnaabramson /10199089.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite =NA

(...$35.7 billion by 2008.")

You draw your own conclusions as to what that will mean.

Its been demonstrated that although people are willing to put up with microsoft products, they are unwilling to "trust" microsoft. Remember Microsoft Passport? Good idea, not too popular.

Some relevant urls:

http://yahoo.pcworld.com/yahoo/article/0,aid,63244 ,00.asp

http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/22777/2 2777.html

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/18366.html

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/software/1503 776.html

Significant excerpt (emphasis mine):

"Despite disappointing the Street, EA officials touted the company's success in the quarter. The company's Madden NFL 2005 title has posted double-digit growth in units and revenue over last year despite competition from ESPN NFL 2K5, which is co-published by Sega and Take-Two Interactive, said company CFO Warren Jenson."

They shouldn't have announced this today. Their stock is down today, apparently as a result of an analyst meeting.

Release the bad news, then drop the good news a day or two later. ;)

During the past seven months, our company, along with Boies, Schiller & Flexner, has uncovered a number of substantial software code issues as they pertain to our UNIX intellectual property and Linux," said Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group, Inc. "By far the most important asset of this company is our ownership of the UNIX operating system and today we are investing in the protection and future of UNIX. Boies, Schiller & Flexner is now moving beyond the contract issues we have with IBM. The firm will be enforcing and defending SCO's intellectual property rights, including the protection of our UNIX System V source code and our copyrights that were reaffirmed as a result of the BSDI settlement agreement."

"As part of the expanded scope, the firm has been engaged to support SCO regarding issues relating to copyrighted Unix code incorporated into Linux without authorization or appropriate copyright notices," the company said in Tuesday's release. "Code that has been identified includes Unix System V code as well as copyrighted code included in the 1994 settlement between Unix Systems Laboratories Inc. and Berkeley Software Design Inc. SCO acquired this code and associated copyrights in 1995 from Novell."

The SEC has also requested further information about their Playboy interview, which will delay the IPO further.

So I was trolling, heh ?

It's starting to sink in. Gone are the $135+ 'valuations':

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/georgemannes/ 10178806.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite= NA

Not that they should. Nothing is known about the direction the stock will take post-IPO. It could easily drop 25-50% in the first few days. The market for technical issues is negative right now.

There are different approaches to timing entry into a stock. Technical analysis assumes that all information about a stock is factored into the price. Indicators based on prior price history are used to determine trend. Proponents of the method say the price movement is a manifestation of crowd behavior.

Fundamental analysts study the companies financials, such as trends in earnings, price to sales ratio, profit margin, return on equity, etc.

Another approach is to find companies that are likely to profit from long term major trends in technology and/or society.

As for the Google IPO, there is no stock history on which to base a technical analysis. One might argue whether the fundamentals make the investment worthwhile, and the third approach takes a very long term view, so there is no good reason to jump on board immediately.

Lastly, if you are considering buying this IPO in speculation of it going up significantly in the next few days, have the mental fortitude to set a stop loss below your entry point and get the hell out if it drops to that point, or you stand to lose a lot of money, fast. This is no market for amateurs.

Anyone else notice the amount of FUD concerning the IPO? Google is the first to step in and help the little investor and, all of a sudden, the rich people are funding FUD campaigns so they can get in on the deal.

Mozilla Web browser 1.6 adds new features including tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and PDF support

User-Level threads increases application availability

Squid Web Proxy Cache 2.5STABLE5 with expanded authentication schemes, optimizes searching, SSL gatewaying, and more

DVD/CD recording and enhanced printer support

Perl 5.8.4

Supplemental graphics, Web and X11 libraries

Apache HTTP Server 1.3.31

OpenSSH 3.8p1

BIND 8.4.4

I learned something new today then: $4 to 5 billion in cash reserves. That is pretty impressive. I'm not sure how they could have accumulated that much cash in 25 years with the relatively small target market.

Thanks for pointing that out.

• http://www.thestreet.com/tech/internet/761537.html
  
• http://news.com.com/Yahoo+Mail,+Amazon+suffer+outa ges/2100-1017_3-216131.html
  
• http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalConte nt/0,289142,sid14_gci876675,00.html
  

Shares of players Symantec and Network Associates have gone way down due to this news.

But what about the news that Red Hat's CFO has resigned three days before their earnings report?
Why did Slashdot reject my submission about this?

Every now and then I tune into old episodes of Jim Cramer's financial news radio show at TheStreet.com in the upper right... he's also a commentator on CNBC, voice is a little harsh but given that he made his millions in funds (not communications), I'll listen. You'll have to fill out a registration, and then you can stream in a RealAudio feed of yesterday's ep anytime. I happen to like his witty style of digging into bad companies, and he relly seems more of a "watchdog" when it comes to tech stocks... plus it's better to learn how to invest your money (by someone on the radio) than being told where to invest.

Other than that, New York's WABC 770AM offers a free feed here. The afternoon crowd gets a bit too old school conservative for my liking, but Monica Crowley has her "get the government out" libertarian moments. Oh, they also carry the Drudge Report on Sunday Nights... always an interesting show.

And analysts still recommend it as a "strong buy".

Actually they don't. Only Deutsche Bank feels that way. And the analyst who formed that opinion, Brian Skiba, doesn't work there anymore. Interesting.

Basically if you want to invest in the initial price offering you must find a broker that can get you in on it. Most IPO shares are purchased by large institutional investors, but individual investors can get in on it with a little luck. I know E*Trade lets some investors get in on IPOs, but I'm not sure about the other online brokerages. For some of the basics of getting in on an IPO see these articles on IPOs on The.Street.com. You may need to contact several brokers before you find one that can help you, if at all. Of course everyone can buy once trading starts.

I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.

Retail investors are usually not paid any interest in a situation like that. Check out this article. As the article points out, there are several issues to consider, including freeing up the funds for other investments.

"I look at this as bad news for SCO," said Dion Cornett, an analyst for Decatur Jones Equity Partners - Soleil. "I don't think BayStar is going to be very successful in getting their money back. It's very difficult for a private equity investor to force a redemption on a company that doesn't want to redeem. But it makes it very difficult for SCO to raise future financing ."

SCO will certainly need lots of money if it wants to fight the likes of massive IBM, he noted. "I think they'll need all the $65 million they have in the bank to fund this fight. This is going to be a multi-year, very protracted lawsuit, if it's not dismissed."

According to an article on The Street one analyst didn't think BayStar would have much of a chance of getting their money back but this would make it incredibly difficult for SCO to raise any more money (not that they had anyone beating down their door to loan them money lately). By publicly asking for redemption over a broken clause I see this as BayStar's big, giant "FUCK YOU" to SCO.

Novell's Profit

None of SCO's desperate attempts to prop up the stock price have worked. Even the announcement of a stock buyback propped up the price for only one hour, between 0930 and 1030 last Tuesday. SCOX continues its long slide. SCOX closed at 8.71 on Friday. It started the week at 9.5, and the year around 20.

SCO has reached the point where nothing they can say can help them. Only winning some of their lawsuits can help them, and that looks increasingly unlikely. They have to win three separate suits (against Novell, IBM, and Red Hat) to even start collecting from end users.

Microsoft to spend more time on security and stability, and less time on adding new features.
- from the article

Thank God! Thank God!

Windows does not need more features. It's got plenty of features already! Any "features" it doesn't have ... let some apps developer write them!

No need for me to go on about "security" ... this is SlashDot, after all.

-kgj

In the case of Computer Associates, they did agree to pay the Canopy Group and Center 7 40 million dollars to settle a lawsuit. Perhaps terms of the settlement required them to buy a "linux license" also. What is strange though is CA is a member of OSDL.

This was, in fact, going to a question to Slashdot. But here goes anyway:

The FastTrack network (KaZaa), supports multisourced downloading. This cannot be changed in the settings. So, here's the problem: When the RIAA goes to court, how are they proving that the downloads haven't been multisourced from different people? Because if they are, at worst they're only proving that the client had SOME of A FILE which happened to come together into the song in the end. For instance, let's say I had a song that began as a sample from an RIAA-copyrighted song but then broke into a song that I created. If they're using multiple sources, how can they prove that the song they have isn't the beginning of their song with a middle and end that belong to me?

But what if, to avoid the above legal problem, the RIAA made their own client that did not support multisourced downloads, which is what I believe they have done. Wouldn't this require them to reverse-engineer the KaZaa client, and wouldn't THAT put them in violation of the DMCA AND general software copyright law since they are using it to make a profit?

What's more, I'm interested in how they are proving how many songs somebody is hosting. Are they, for instance, downloading one MD5-hashed song and then using the shared list to infer that the rest are legitimate RIAA-copyrighted songs? Or are they downloading every song and then comparing the MD5-hashes? And if the latter is the case, can it be implemented in the peer-to-peer protocols to keep individual users from uploading to the same people? That way, any lawsuit could be limited to say 5 songs or so?

"The SEC believes IBM may have aided and abetted Dollar General when it misstated financial results in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2000."

• Shares of SCO Group, the company challenging the popular Linux movement, fell sharply Monday after the company lost a court motion Friday and postponed its earnings report.

  After trading as low as $15.10 intraday Monday, SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27.

  Two events from Friday were feeding the selloff. First, SCO lost a motion asking IBM for source code. The court also ruled SCO must provide the code relevant to the case to IBM within the next 30 days. SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27. ...

  Secondly, SCO on Friday postponed its fourth-quarter earnings report, initially scheduled for Monday ...

It worked, too. See SCO's chart. The stock dropped about 10-15% in moderately heavy Tuesday and Wednesday trading, but has since bounced back by about half that much.