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Pick Up A Piece of Enron
shintaro points out this massive collection of "gear from Enron on auction.
Amongst the more than 3,000 in this auction (1 of 10) are state and federal law books, and numerous notebooks sans hard drives. Might be a good opportunity to pick up a Sun Enterprise Server?
Office furniture is also on offer, Herman Miller and Knolls all over, not an IKEA item in sight. Interesting what Enron employees and shareholders must feel looking at this loot."
No paper shredders????
I'm waiting for the Martha Stewart Living auction. Mmmm, cheap pots and pans and bedspreads!
Amongst the more than 3,000 in this auction (1 of 10) are state and federal law books
...still in their shrink wrap.
Ba dump bump! Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Good luck doing that without the hard drives!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Having purchased at auction a large amount of items from one of my former employers (Sunpoint Securities, Inc - One of the largest brokerage failuers in US History) if you are careful you can make a decent profit on auctions like this.
Some of that equipement is outdated and not worth the minimum bid... I'll go back to pricewatch and ebay...
I touch computers in naughty places
Why is this under YRO?
In Soviet russia, only old Koreans profit from pictures of Natalie Portman stored on Beowulf Clusters.
I wonder if they'd have the ethics training handbook available. I'd definitely buy that.
Let it be known that we'll no longer "/." a server upon a story. Based on how slloooowwwww their servers are now operating we've "Enron'd" the Enron Auction.
/. is quick and geekie...
Nah,
If they have one, it's certainly in mint condition-- probably still in the original shrink wrap. :-)
esp. with the faux wood grain veneer finish - ahh, they don't make em' like they used to...
w eb2165924
http://www.dovebid.com/assets/display.asp?ItemID=
I'm still waiting for SCO to go down, so I get get me a load of cheap Linux licences.
Enron made campaign contributions totaling more than $5.7 million between 1989 and 2001. Republicans received 73% of this money. Ken Lay was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush during Bush's time as Governor of Texas. During the 2000 campaign, Lay allowed Bush to use Enron corporate jets to fly from stump speech to stump speech. So close were these men that Bush granted Lay a nickname: 'Kenny-Boy.'
About this time my '.com' was watching venture capital dry up. We had a meeting with Arthur Andersen to discuss our accounting product and I distinctly remember the 23 or 24 year guy not having the slightest clue why he was even meeting with us. Uniterested and pathetic questions. No wonder every audit firm in the universe used to APPROACH US at tradeshows - they must've thought EVERYONE was on the take.
Well my life since then plays like a broken country album. And Larry Ellison still looks like the devil. I hate this mellenium so far.
Stuff that matters.
These company auctions rarely offer discount prices on anything... People get caught up in the moment and end up paying crazy prices for hardware. Often times you actually do better by buying newer hardware, then picking up things from these auctions.
There are exceptions... If you don't mind picking up a couple of hundred computers you can get a reasonable price per unit, but most on slashdot are probably not looking for that, nor could they afford it...
Just my 2 cents.
Community programs are a bottomless pit into which tons of cash is wasted, I mean spent.
At least some up and coming business can get some good deals on expensive equipment.
Why is their server so slow, this happened the last time there was an Enron auction, who wants to wait 5 minutes for a search?
I've seen far better descriptions of products on ebay than this site. Looking at this storage rack, the only picture of it is the rack with thr front door closed. So you have no idea what type of disk arrays are inside. Given the age of the 10k's listed nearby I would have to assume these are at best D1000's or going as far back as SPARCstorage arrays. Also given the age the HHD sizes are most likely 9gigs or smaller, so not much space to store your videos, but you could set up a nice RAID array. Since we don't know what arrays are in the storage rack, we don't know what it would take to use them. It could be a simple wide-SCSI or ultrawide-SCSI attach, or more complicated such as a fibre attach.
So anyway, with such a poor description and supporting evidence, they should give me $200 to take it off their hands.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
11 - VCR/TV :/)
13 - plasma displays (mostly with screen burn
15 - projectors, cameras, UPS
16 - huge boxes full of keyboards, modems and other cards, CAT5,
17/18 - Compaq deskotps, in groups of 20
18 - Sat. phone, '96 Chevy truck
19 - Pallets of plastic TRASH RECEPTACLES, sate and federal law books
20 - IBM and Compaq PII and PIII laptops (NO HDD!)
21 - IBM 600 and T21 laptops
>22 - couches and other boring stuff
25/27 - SUN and IBM servers
27/28 - Compaq servers
uhh sorry don't have time to go through all of this, maybe someone could continue. just one more random page: 50, Lucent digital phones, SUN servers and Cisco switches
I couldn't resist... I did the math. Of the Compaq and Sun drive arrays that have their disk sizes/model numbers listed, there's 11.8 TERRABYTES of drive on auction!
In other news, of about 40 plasma TV's on auction, 33 of them are suffering from phosphor burn, and the rest are 'untestable.' Guess that settles my decision on whether to go w/ plasma or LCD....
It's not a question of whether they know what to do with it. They simply didn't earn it.
Every single thing in this country that we have is courtesy of business. Even government services are funded by corporations that pay taxes. A world without "greedy" business is a world of foraging for berries and dying of mysterious ilnesses like the flu.
Giving people with no ability money is a backwards way of doing things.
Considering Enrons dirty tricks during the California energy crisis this is arguable, to put it politely.
Even government services are funded by corporations that pay taxes.
Considering that the ilks of Microsoft don't pay taxes (with some 60 billion $ cash reserve) and the fine people of Arthur Anderson fled to Bermuda as a tax shelter in order to stiff the community you're talking out of your arse, sir.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
My favorite personal piece of Enron memorabilia is a yellow rubber ducky they mailed me when they were selling bandwidth.
Just the goofyness of it. It is so dotCom. Completely unrelated to networking, but here sits this happy little duck with an Enron logo plastered across it's chest and the slogon "GetCapacity" in it's URL.
I use it to talk to when I'm in my office alone and face a moral dilema. Whatever the duck says, I do the opposite.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
auctions like these have a walk-in day where you can review all the material. The online brochure is to lure buyers who don't know what they are buying.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Try quitting the Communist Party. That should improve your viewpoint.
.com that was seeking out venture capital and selling accounting products? That doesn't sound very Communist to me.
Right. Everyone who dislikes Bush and the Republicans is a Communist. At least that's what the Young Republicans on Slashdot would have us believe.
But how do you explain why the so-called "Communist" to whom you replied was working for a
What they do is keep it around, and you can call in after the auction to buy bunches of unsold items at a price.
For best results, do the webcast or go in person. There are massive deals to be had. At one auction I attended, a loaded Sun E450 (quad proc, 1gb ram, lots o disk) went for $900 + buyers premium of around 16%.
The downside to having many lots is the auctioneer will sometimes collapse identical lots into one to save time. If you've got the cash, it's a great way to get great deals. You can also propose lots, like "I'll take the next 10 sun boxes for $8000 total."
Auctions are a real trip, but you have to know how much stuff is worth, definitely. I've seen things go for above-retail prices, so be warned.
Unless my brain is still scrambled from waking up... each one of those Compaq storage servers has a total of 666GB of storage... either someone over there has a sense of humor or we're close to the appocalypse :P
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
If you haven't been following this, Glisan gave up Fastow, and Fastow gave up Skilling and Lay. We're waiting to see if Lay gives up Bush.
-
Inmate Register Number: 20290-179
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Inmate Register Number: 20293-179
Source: BOP.Name: LEA W FASTOW
Age: 42
Race: WHITE
Sex: FEMALE
Projected Release Date: 7/10/2005
Location: HOUSTON FDC
1200 TEXAS AVENUE
HOUSTON , TX 77002
Phone Number: (713)221-5400
Name : BEN F GLISAN
Age: 38
Race: WHITE
Sex: MALE
Projected Release Date: 1/17/2008
Location: BASTROP FCI
1341 HIGHWAY 95 NORTH
BASTROP , TX 78602
Phone Number: (512)321-3903
Bastrop is a low-security prison, with a plant making bulletproof vests. Houston FDC is an "administrative" facility, for short term prisoners, those in transit, and those with court proceedings nearby.
Maybe California can buy its power back?
Remain calm! All is well!
Interesting what Enron employees and shareholders must feel looking at this loot In a word... Sad. Just like most of you, I went to work everyday and worked my tail off. I worked at Enron for 3 years, right till the end. I can honestly say this, I never again expect to work with a group of people as smart, driven and passionate as I did with the crooked E. That is the saddest part. Some of the best people I have ever worked with are going through the same thing.... very sad.
I'm a grad student in the Interactive Media Division at USC. In our media lab meeting space we have 6 aerons from enron (it's been rumored they were board room chairs).
It is funny you should say that. It seems America is moving closer and closer to being a socialist society. We just had Medicare say that obesity was a sickness so now we will have more tax dollars go to people who can't stay away from McDonald's and get some exercise. We work longer and longer every year to pay our share of the taxes. Soon those who work will get no real money and everyone will be on state aid with all our earnings going to the state. Those who can't work(probably most if the current trend persists)won't.
It seems America is moving closer and closer to being a socialist society. We just had Medicare say that obesity was a sickness so now we will have more tax dollars go to people who can't stay away from McDonald's and get some exercise.
The reason that Medicare did that was that obesity-related illnesses cost them far more that addressing the problem of obesity. If they can pay for weight loss drugs along with diet and exercise counseling now, it's a lot cheaper than paying to treat diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and cancer later.
As to your concerns about a "socialist society," what is a society if not a group of people joining together and helping one another? Perhaps you would prefer to live like a pack animal, abandoning those who are sick or injured to die, but I would not. I'd rather that some of my money go to help the less fortunate. I'd rather have government/taxpayer aid help keep an unemployed person from losing their house and ending up destitute. I'd rather see someone born into poverty get government grants and subsidized loans for education. Keeping poor people uneducated and poor, and allowing the unemployed to slide into poverty, costs society far more than giving them aid.
Companies have two obligations - to make money, and to do so LEGALLY.
You can't make money for the shareholders outside the boundries of the law (Enron) or by screwing over your customers for very long though.
Unless, you know, you buy off enough officials so that the law fits your purposes. Then, you can screw the cust..erm, consumer all you want! The RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and other "fine american companies" have been doing this for years.
Pull your head out of your ass, and stop blindly worshipping at the altar of capitalism.
It is a societal obligation -- as in something that you are morally obligated to do as a member of society.
Could you point out what part of the Constitution authorizes the government to take money from one group of people (by force if necessary) and give it to another group of people?
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;..."
The OP is correct...
No, he, like you, is incorrect.
perhaps instead of being generous with other people's money, you might try being generous with your own money (or time) instead.
No, I prefer the system as it stands -- the one put in place by our elected representatives. I'd rather have laws to help ensure that everyone pays their fair share rather than having only the generous and decent people shoulder all of the financial burden of helping the less fortunate. I don't want you to be able to opt-out of helping the needy. I don't want you to be able to use the money you withold from from the needy to fund your next BMW purchase.
Now answer the remaining questions that I asked in the parent post rather than trying to come up with snappy sound bites: