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Rei writes: When Tesla announced late last year that it was targeting sustained profitability in the second half of 2018, reaffirming this target throughout the year, the markets reacted with skepticism. Indeed, despite repeated insistence that the company had no need for a capital round, news analysts have treated the concept of Tesla dilution to raise more capital as inevitable and urgent to pay off convertible bonds next spring, even suggesting insidious theories that the reason it hadn't was that it "couldn't."

Well, today Tesla put the doubts to rest with a blockbuster Q3 report -- not simply eking out a profit and small free cash flow growth, but $2.92 per-share profit and $881 million free cash flow -- almost raising the entire value of their convertible bond debt in a single quarter. While many were skeptical about Tesla's claims that it would go from near zero profit margin on Model 3s to their claimed target of 15%, Tesla instead hit a 20% margin on the Model 3 (now the highest-revenue car in the U.S.), with a 25.8% overall automotive gross margin. This was all achieved with only $52 million worth of zero-emission vehicle credits claimed this quarter. While Tesla bears will likely claim that this quarter was a one-off that won't be repeated, Tesla reiterates guidance for sustained profitability from herein, barring a force majeure event.

Micron is planning to exercise a $1.5 billion option to buy Intel's 49% stake in the companies' IM Flash Technologies Joint Venture. "The option is exercisable on Jan. 1, 2019, and Micron says the deal will close six to 12 months after," reports TheStreet. From the report: In a statement, Intel suggests the timing of the deal's closing is at its discretion for up to a year after the option is exercised, while indicating it long expected Micron's decision. The companies have already made a pair of announcements this year that between them that signal the end of their age-old R&D partnership for developing non-volatile memory technologies. IMFT owns a manufacturing plant (fab) in Lehi, Utah that both produces NAND flash memory and is for now the sole manufacturer of 3D XPoint (pronounced 3D cross-point), a memory technology that Micron and Intel co-developed and announced to much fanfare in mid-2015. Intel, via its Optane product line, has a head-start on Micron in launching 3D XPoint-based products. However, Micron, via its QuantX brand, plans to launch its own 3D XPoint offerings in late 2019, using a second generation version of the technology.

What's so great about 3D XPoint? In a nutshell, it carves out a middle ground between DRAM (very fast, but not dense, relatively expensive and volatile, or unable to retain its data when power is lost) and NAND (cheap, dense and non-volatile, but relatively slow). Though more expensive than NAND -- particularly in these early days -- and not as fast as DRAM, 3D XPoint is much faster than NAND and much cheaper than DRAM, and like NAND is non-volatile. That opens up a lot of potential applications. Games can get a boost from using 3D XPoint solid-state drives (SSDs) for storage rather than conventional NAND SSDs, as could demanding workstation applications. Within data centers -- probably the largest market for the technology over the next few years -- 3D XPoint could improve the performance of demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications and enable larger deployments of high-speed, in-memory databases than what's possible using DRAM. And in both the PC/workstation and data center markets, 3D XPoint drives can work in tandem with slower types of storage to act as a high-speed cache for important or frequently-accessed data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TheStreet: General Electric stock was little changed on Friday, August 3, as a GE engineer with ties to China who has been accused of stealing proprietary power-turbine technology has been released on bond. Xiaoqing Zheng, 56, has been in custody since Wednesday when the FBI raided his home in Niskayuna, New York, near Albany. A federal judge on Thursday set a $100,000 bond; Zheng offered his family's home as collateral and was released on Friday. He was ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device and limit his travel, according to multiple media reports.

Zheng, who is a U.S. citizen, was hired by GE in 2008 to work as a principal engineer for the company's power division, according to an affidavit by an FBI agent filed in federal court in Albany. Zheng is "suspected of taking/stealing, on multiple occasions via sophisticated means, data files from GE's laboratories that contain GE's trade secret information involving turbine technology," the FBI said in its affidavit. He also took "elaborate means" to conceal the removal of GE data files. "The primary focus of this affidavit is Zheng's action in 2018 in which he encrypted GE data files containing trade secret information, and thereafter sent the trade secret information from his GE work computer to Zheng's personal e-mail address hidden in the binary code of a digital photograph via a process known as steganography," the FBI said. "Additionally, the secondary focus of this affidavit is Zheng's actions in 2014 in which he downloaded more than 19,000 files from GE's computer network onto an external storage device, believed by GE investigators to have been a personal thumb drive."

Zheng's attorney disputed the allegations, saying Zheng "transmitted information on his own patents to himself and to no one else."

In an interview with The Street, Domino's Pizza outgoing CEO Patrick Doyle said in three to five years at the earliest he expects driverless cars and voice orders to shift the way the world orders pizza. From the report: "We have been investing in natural voice for ordering for a few years. We rolled that out in our own apps before Amazon launched Alexa and Alphabet launched Google Home...[and] we are making investments...to understand how consumers will want to interact with autonomous vehicles and pizza delivery," Doyle said.

"5PM CT is the start of Bitcoin futures trading and the $CBOE website appears to be down," one market watcher posted on Twitter (and his observation was quickly confirmed by other cryptocurrency-watching accounts and confirmed by CBOE). "I'm guessing watching Bitcoin futures start trading is a more popular spectator sport than anticipated."

Bitcoin futures will also begin trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in eight days. The Street report that the anticipation of that "has triggered wild swings in bitcoin prices over the last week." Overall, trading bitcoin futures is a positive development for the cryptocurrency says the research team at Fundstrat... The introduction of derivatives lays the necessary market structure for institutions to allocate cash towards cryptocurrencies, points out Fundstrat... Short sellers may now express negative views on bitcoin, which could lead to short-term pricing pressure. But the ability for short sellers to hate on bitcoin could be viewed as a longer term positive, Fundstrat says. Shorting essentially creates true price discovery and means that hedge funds could take bitcoin more seriously. This should improve the long-term prospects of bitcoin as it broadens sponsorship, Fundstrat believes.

Slashdot reader pefisher writes: A lot of us on Slashdot have noticed that potential employers advertise for things they don't need. To the point that sometimes they even ask for things that don't exist. Like asking for ten years of experience in a technology that has only just been introduced. It's frustrating because it makes you wonder "what's this employers real game?"

Do they just want to say they advertised for the position, or are they really so immensely stupid, so disconnected from their own needs, that they think they are actually asking for something they can have...? Here is a Harvard Study that addresses one particular angle of this. It doesn't answer any questions, but it does prove that you aren't crazy. And it quantifies the craziness.
The study's author calls it "degree inflation," and after studying 26 million job postings concluded that employers are now less willing to actually train new people on the job, possibly to save money. "Many companies have fallen into a lazy way of thinking about this," the study's author tells The Street, saying companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.

The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."

The race is on: who will be the first to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in the United States? From a report, shared by a reader: In Europe, there is already a Bitcoin exchange traded note (ETN) available to investors. In the U.S., it is widely anticipated a Bitcoin ETF will be be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) very soon. In Europe, ETNs are designed to track the movement of Bitcoin against the U.S. dollar. The ETNs are Bitcoin Tracker One, which is traded in Swedish krona and Bitcoin Tracker EURO, which is traded in euro. Both ETNs are issued by XBT Provider AB and traded on Nasdaq OMX (Stockholm). Dave Nadig, CEO of ETF.com and previously the director of ETFs at FactSet Research Systemsm believes we can expect to see Bitcoin Futures-based ETF launched in the U.S. by the end of this year. "Yes, you can already trade a derivative in Europe, an exchange traded note which tracks Bitcoin," Nadig adds. "Then the race in the U.S. is the race to see what gets approval first. Will it be a Bitcoin future or a straight up Bitcoin holding ETF? My bet is that we will see Bitcoin futures approved fairly quickly."

Long-time Slashdot reader rudy_wayne writes: J.C. Penney CEO Marvin Ellison recently said that e-commerce companies' biggest challenge is that they are all expanding their businesses and pushing for faster delivery, but UPS, Fedex and especially the United States Postal Service aren't able to keep up, at least not at same cost that exists today, because they're not increasing their delivery capacity at the same rate e-commerce is growing, He said this will cause a supply and demand issue "that's going to be apparent here pretty soon."

From a report: The U.S. Commerce Department will remove Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp from a trade blacklist after the company admitted to violating sanctions on Iran, the Commerce Department said in a notice made public on Tuesday.

schwit1 quotes The South China Morning Post: Stanford University students have recreated a Chinese beer using a recipe that dates back 5,000 years. The beer "looked like porridge and tasted sweeter and fruitier than the clear, bitter beers of today," said Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology, was quoted by the university as saying. Last spring, Liu and her team of researchers were carrying out excavation work at the Mijiaya site in Shaanxi province and found two pits containing remnants of pottery used to make beer, including funnels, pots and amphorae. The pits dated to between 3400BC and 2900BC, in the late Yangshao era. They found a yellowish residue on the remains of the items, including traces of yam, lily root and barley...Liu taught her students to recreate the recipe as part of her archaeology course.
One student following a second ancient beer recipe created a beverage that "smelled like funky cheese."

An anonymous reader writes: More than 13,000 Amazon customers (including upwards of 5,000 Amazon Prime subscribers), have signed a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos calling for the company to stop selling Trump's line of menswear. UltraViolet Action is the organization hosting the petition, which calls for Amazon to "stop profiting off of [Trump's] brand of hate." The letter reads: "Donald Trump has consistently lobbed racist, sexist, and xenophobic attacks against entire groups of people, encouraged violence and vitriol against his political enemies and perpetuated a culture of violence against women. Amazon.com should want to distance themselves from this hateful rhetoric, but instead, they're profiting off his brand," explained Karin Roland, Chief Campaigns Officer at UltraViolet, in a statement. "Jeff Bezos needs to listen to his customers and ensure that Amazon doesn't profit off of Trump hate, and take immediate steps to dump Trump." If Amazon does take action, they wouldn't be the first. Macy's stopped carrying Trump's products last summer, and Univision and NBC cut ties with Trump over his statements as well.

smitty777 writes "China will start to publish air pollution reports, possibly in response to reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing which has been publishing its own data. This report is significant in that it's based on the PM2.5 standard, which measures the more harmful particles that are less than 2.5 microns. This comes on the heels of a separate report that lists China as the worst polluter worldwide. According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971. While the U.S. is in second at 5,195 m, this represents an increase of only 21%. This article notes 'the rapid growth in emissions for China, India, and Africa. This will continue as their middle classes buy houses and vehicles. The growth in Middle East emissions is staggering, a reflection of their growing oil fortunes.' While we're on the subject of India, their pollution levels are thought to be responsible for a dense cloud of fog that is so thick it created a cold front, and is repsonsible for a number of deaths."

itwbennett writes "Following Tuesday's report that HP is looking to sell WebOS, CEO Meg Whitman and HP employees gathered for a late-afternoon meeting. According to The Verge, Whitman told those gathered at the meeting 'It's really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,' adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks."

An anonymous reader writes "The Chronic Dev Team have rolled out Greenpoison RC5_4 aka Greenpois0n RC5 b4 for both the Mac and Windows platform, which brings untethered jailbreak for the Verizon iPhone." Since 500k iPhones were sold on the first day it'll be interesting to see how Verizon throttles users.

An anonymous reader writes 'Multiple sources say Google is preparing to launch Google Audio. According to people familiar with the matter, Google has been securing content from record companies. Is Google about to go head-to-head with Apple's iTunes?'

yerktoader writes "There are rumors that Apple might buy EA, but some interesting counterpoints abound. File this one firmly under 'unconfirmed,' but it's nevertheless a tantalizing rumor. According to Fast Money's Guy Adami, Apple is 'eyeing Electronic Arts as a takeover target.' EA is currently the second-largest games publisher in the world and owner of the smash hit NFL-licensed series of football games. Could we be facing the possibility of an iMadden? Well, probably not. Apple has indeed been bolstering its games know-how, hiring a major Xbox strategist away from Microsoft in recent weeks. And EA is no stranger to Apple platforms: in the last year it's brought several of its major franchises to the iPhone (with more on the way), including Sim City, Tiger Woods, and Spore, with considerable success. But it's a far cry from there to a takeover, and that's putting it mildly. Video games analyst Michael Pachter seems to agree. Speaking to Gamasutra, he pointed out that if Apple was looking to make some entertainment acquisitions, it could buy Warner Music — which controls 20% of the music industry — for roughly half of EA's estimated price."

explosivejared writes "TheStreet discusses Google's possible strategy options in the bid for the 700 mhz spectrum. The end goal of getting the government to put an open access stipulation on the spectrum, Google's end goal, is almost a given — in the author's opinion. At this point, he says, Google hardly even needs to win to 'win.' From the article: 'Rather than actually winning the auction, Google's participation is likely intended to secure what it sees as the real reward: ensuring that whoever ends up owning the spectrum allows the open access of applications and devices. Indeed, as long as this goal is met, it's hard to see why Google would want to take on the costly task of building and running its own network. But given how much is at stake when it comes to the mobile market, Google's vigilance is shrewd, even if it never planned to own the spectrum.'"

Via Gamasutra, an article at TheStreet.com talking with the interim CEO of Take Two Interactive. In the wake of the chaos of the board overthrow, Strauss Zelnick is taking pains to reassure investors that stability and security are now the company's goals. He also pointed out that his position as CEO is a short-term situation: "Before we seek to fill the CEO slot we want to stabilize morale, develop our strategy and improve the structure of the company... So, I don't think we will have a new CEO right away but I would guess we have someone in the chair permanently within the next 12 months."

Two stories in the news offer contrasting approaches by Web companies to questions of free speech. First YouTube: reader skraps notes that the Google property has recently banned the popular atheist commentator Nick Gisburne. Gisburne had been posting videos with logical arguments against Christian beliefs; but when he turned his attention to Islam (mirror of Gisburne's video by another user), YouTube pulled the plug, saying: 'After being flagged by members of the YouTube community, and reviewed by YouTube staff, the video below has been removed due to its inappropriate nature. Due to your repeated attempts to upload inappropriate videos, your account now been permanently disabled, and your videos have been taken down.' Amazon.com provides a second example of how to react to questions of free speech. Reader theodp sends along a story in TheStreet.com about how Amazon hung up on customers wanting to comment on its continuing practice of selling animal-fighting magazines. The article notes that issues of free speech are rarely cut-and-dried, and that Amazon is doing itself no favors by going up against the Humane Society.
Update: 02/11 04:25 GMT by KD : updated Nick Gisburne link to new account.

head_dunce writes "Red Hat has reported earnings from its third quarter, and it did quite a bit better than expected. Even with the movement within the business by Oracle and SuSE/Microsoft, Red Hat came out quite a bit ahead. TheStreet.com reports on the company's $29.6 Million dollars windfall, and some of the tough times the company has had in the past year. From the article: 'CFO Charlie Peters said on a conference call with analysts that the company is "cautiously optimistic that competitive efforts by some of the largest technology companies in the world are actually expanding our opportunity."'"

cvos writes "Yahoo has been under fire recently. The common wisdom is that they are losing marketshare to Google, and now MSN. Many executives have departed in the last few weeks, and Yahoo has received a lot of unfavorable press. Their CEO let out a (unintentional) personal and heated response to media critics." From the article: "At the next all-hands. Just as a reminder. I'm sorry I didn't do it today. I'm gonna put up there all of the press reports on how Yahoo! was going out of business 5 years ago. And of how we were gonna be swallowed up by AOL, owned by Time-Warner, and by Microsoft, and by everybody else. And Yahoo! looked like it had a dim future. Well those headlines, of course, were used to wrap a lot of fish in a lot of people's houses, as the expression goes. And they were all full of [expletive deleted], and they had no idea what we had planned for them. And they do not now as well!"

AMD has unveiled its vision for the next generation of microprocessors that will integrate both the CPU and the graphics capabilities on the same chip. Codenamed 'Fusion', the "processors will provide significant improvements in performance-per-watt compared with current microprocessor architectures, and will offer the best user experience as advanced graphics becomes a more important part of computing, according to AMD." Selling complete 'platforms' puts AMD on more equal footing with Intel, and shows that innovation is at the heart of AMD's strategy. "In Wednesday's announcement, AMD said it would begin selling CPU and chipset-based platforms in 2007, with a focus on several key markets including commercial PCs, laptops and gaming and media PCs. AMD said it will be able to get its newest technology to market sooner by selling a complete platform, while providing better performance and, in the case of laptops, longer battery life."

Talking to 'The Street.com' EA Worldwide Studios president Paul Lee gets grilled on game delays and industry stagnation, and reaffirms EA's commitment to new IP. From the article: "There [have] been countless games in our industry that have looked great and didn't play particularly well. Going forward, there's going to be a lot of me-too products that look great -- because they all look great -- that aren't necessarily going to do great. But if you take a look at what we have -- you know, Spore is innovative game-play, and at the same time it's got great graphics. And I think that's what really knocks it out of the park. Innovative game-play helps drive [the cause] of gaming. And if you can do that, and you can have great graphics, I think that the market is bigger than just having one of the two."

hisham writes "On the heels of the bad news on SGI's financial health, another former giant of the tech world announces concerns of bankruptcy: 'Bad times got worse at Atari as the company posted a loss and a 35% decline in sales in the important holiday quarter.' The CFO has resigned, and the company released a statement saying 'the uncertainties caused by these conditions raise substantial doubt about [Atari's] ability to continue as a going concern.' An icon of videogame history; if things turn sour, it will be sad to see Atari go (again)."

mesowarny writes "The street writes: Vonage Holdings, moved to become the first major Internet telephony player to go public by filing Wednesday to raise up to $250 million via an initial offering of stock and named a Tyco International executive as CEO. Our revenues were $18.7million in 2003, $79.7million in 2004, and $174.0 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2005," the company's prospectus says."While our revenues have grown rapidly, we have experienced increasing net losses, primarily driven by our increase in marketing expenses. From the period of inception through Sept.30, 2005, our cumulative net loss was $310 million. Our net loss for the nine months ended Sept.30, 2005, was $189.6million. During the same nine-month period, our marketing expenses were $176.3million."

Eric Newman writes "TheStreet.com is reporting that America Online has purchased Truveo.com. From the article: 'Truveo has a proprietary technology called visual crawling that lets it automatically discover video files on Web pages, enabling customers to see updated information on news, sports and entertainment. The acquisition, which closed Dec. 21, was AOL's fifth last year. News of the deal wasn't released until Tuesday. Terms were not disclosed.' Note that the deal closed the same week that Google bought a 5% stake in AOL, in part to collaborate on video technology."

TheStreet.com is reporting that the 360 has captured the hype machine for this Christmas season. The PSP, meanwhile, is still struggling for mindshare compared to Nintendo's offerings. From the article: "Sony launched the PSP in the U.S. to great acclaim earlier this year and sold more than half a million units in the first two days. The device marked the first effort by Sony, the leader in the console game industry for the last 10 years with its PlayStation and PlayStation 2 systems, to enter the portable game market, which has been dominated by Nintendo ... Right now, the PSP's threat to Nintendo -- much less to Apple -- remains hypothetical. Sales of the PSP are disappointing thus far, particularly this holiday season. Through the end of October, Sony had sold just 1.6 million of the devices after the first days' sales flurry."

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle's CFO and Co-President Greg Maffei has quit. He will be succeeded by Safra Catz, who has been with Oracle for a while, and it will be interesting to see how long she lasts. Before Maffei, Harry You was CFO for 9 months, and before him was Jeff Henley. What's with the CFO shuffle at Oracle?"

Corrado writes "The Mercury News is reporting that Apple is still planning to use PowerPC chips well into 2008 for its low end and portable systems. Does this increase the "warm fuzzes" for the Intel move? More information from TheStreet and lots more links from Google News."

Baher Al Hakim writes "The Street suggests in a recent article that Apple is about to announce a deal with Google to offer Apple's iTunes Music service through Google's site. The rumored deal would pair the nation's leading online music store with its leading search engine." Update: 08/13 22:00 GMT by T : Truncation untruncated.

MarkEst1973 writes "Sun Microsystems Inc. is buying Storage Technology Corp. in a $4.1 billion cash deal, the companies announced Thursday. The acquisition answers lingering questions about what Sun would do with about $3.1 billion of balance sheet cash. StorageTek is a profitable company with $191 million in profit in '04 on $2.2bn in sales while Sun posted a loss last year (albeit a much smaller one than the year before)."

frikazoyd writes "According to Gamespot, Microsoft corporate vice president J Allard discusses potential pricing and release targets for the XBox 360 in a TheStreet.com interview. From the article: '"It's going to be in the neighborhood [of $300]," he said, apparently dispelling fears of a $399 or even $499 machine, although $350 could still be possible.'"

upsidedown_duck writes "According to an article at TheStreet.com, Microsoft is opting not to support Itanium on its coming release of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. Instead, Microsoft will focus on AMD's offerings and Xeon."

A reader writes: "Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies - may be up for sale. " There's also an AP report out as well. The online advertising market has been hard lately - but there's also been a widespread perception that DoubleClick has been resting on their laurels.

cyngus writes "IBM has announced they will add 18,800 jobs worldwide in 2004. They say about a third will be in North America. I don't know how many they have added this year so far. After the new hires IBM will employ about 330,000 people worldwide." More good news for the unemployed techie. Although things are far from the halcyon days of dot-com yesteryear, it's good to see companies doing better.

LukePieStalker writes "TheStreet.com is running a story by Ronna Abramson that makes a case for Linux cutting into Microsoft's server business and forcing Redmond to trim margins. A particular vulnerability is seen in overseas markets, but the heat should be turned up everywhere once Unix replacements are pretty far along by then end of next year. A quote from one CTO: [Linux is] "going to force Microsoft to spend more time on security and stability, and less time on adding new features.""

Bootsy Collins managed to combine all of today's SCO stories. He writes "The firm of David Boies, SCO's attorney in charge of their Linux IP cases, has announced their compensation (so far) from SCO: $1 million USD in cash, and $8 million in SCO stock. Keeping that stock price high until they can sell is clearly of some importance to Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. Given the cost of selling a $50 million convertible note to fund their legal actions, the actual cost to SCO is more like $17 million USD. Meanwhile, SCO CEO Darl McBride is saying that Novell's purchase of SuSE violates a non-competition agreement reached when SCO bought the Unix source, and thus is legally actionable by SCO. Over at the Register, they've noticed that SCO's latest SEC filings indicate how firmly they're putting all their eggs in the legal basket: the filings effectively say that 'SCO has already lost business from its loyal customer base, and it expects to lose more.' And finally, in response to a poor response to SCO's attempts to get Fortune 1000 companies to pay $699/server for 'Linux licenses' before the fee jumped to $1399, SCO has announced that the $699 discount rate will apply to the end of 2003. Hurry before time runs out again."

Barkmullz asks: "I just recently finished yet another security review on the network at my place of employment. I designed the different security features from scratch and I am using a variety of devices and software (firewalls, IDS, DMZs, and so on). I like to look at network security with the same attitude as I look on the stock market: diversify. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. As I was pondering the review results I wondered what a completely unbiased observer would think of my security. I remember thinking that someone should start a radio show similar to James Cramer's RealMoney and ask the listeners: Are you secure? I am aware of what the NSA considers to be a secure network, but, honestly, who has read that stuff? What do you consider to be a secure network? What low-budget security features have you come up with? I don't think I am the only one spending evenings and weekends playing around with yet another IDS."