Former CA Boss Gets 12 Years, $8M Fine

mwnyc writes "The BBC is reporting on the sentence issued today to former CA boss Sanjay Kumar, who had pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and securities fraud. Mr. Kumar is expected to begin serving time in February 2007. Under federal sentencing guidelines, Kumar could have faced life in prison but the judge called that punishment 'unreasonable.'"

Comments

Heh, I knew it!

[itwerx]

Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...

Re:Heh, I knew it!

[LVWolfman]

Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...

I've only used one CA product that I know of, CA Realizer. Realizer was a BASIC IDE/Compiler for Win16 and OS/2 that in my opinion blew the doors off of MS Visual Basic for Windows.

Part of this was probably due to the fact that I'm an old school BASIC programmer (TRS-80 Model I Level II, Commodore 64/128, AmigaBASIC, GWBasic, QuickBasic, MS Professional Development System 7, etc.) About the time that Realizer hit the market, VisualBASIC offered a programming paradigm where you designed the interface first, then stuck in little bits of code after the fact. This approach was totally foreign and counter intuitive to me. It made it especially hard to review code.

CA Realizer on the other hand, offered you a blank editor for programming. Oh, you want to design the GUI portion? Run the window editor, design to your heart's content and when you save it, Realizer inserted the BASIC programming code for the window and widgets into your code. So now a window was just another function.

Realizer ran quicker and provided smaller executables than Visual Basic plus it worked cross-platform. However, Microsoft marketing and lack of a desire on CA's part to move Realizer into the 32 bit world killed it. So I pretty much had to switch to Visual Basic at least until Version 6 came out.

Today, I use REALBasic... the IDE offers me blank code codes or the GUI design screens, is much more object oriented than Visual BASIC and is cross-platform (Win32, Apple OS9, Apple OS X (Universal Binary, PowerPC, Intel), Win98 and later and Linux) all from the same source code. The only real downside to it is that it doesn't have an optimizing compiler and includes all the normal runtimes in the executable. So a "Hello World" console application is 364K while a single window with static text displaying "Hello World" is 3.7M.

I hope that Real Software doesn't go the way of Computer Associates.

Re:Heh, I knew it!

[Nefarious Wheel]

CA are the trash bond merchants of the IT world. Buy, strip, dump.

Re:Where have all the mods gone?

[cunina]

-1, Offtopic.

I guess...

[fohat]

He's not going to make it to the White Castle after all...

Re:Anyone feel like posting a link to the backstor

[moatra]

When in doubt, head to Wikipedia

CA = Computer Associates

[subreality]

CA = Computer Associates for those who are WTFing.

Re:I'm not seeing the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly he should be sent to jail, but 12 years sounds like a lot of time, even if gets shortened for parole. This man cheated to make the quarterly numbers and lied to cover it up, but it doesn't sound like a totally corrupt, pulling the wool over investor's eyes like what occurred at Enron for instance.

Re:Where have all the mods gone?

[bostonsoxfan]

There is a code glitch to the best of my knowledge. I got mod points a couple days ago and I used three of them before they were due to expire, and it it four days after the fact and I still have the ones that I haven't used.

Re:Where have all the mods gone?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So what's the problem, do people just not care anymore, or is it an issue with the moderating system?"
It's an issue with the moderating system (which was put together by Diebold).

Re:RIP republic, Hello fascism

[TheLink]

Maybe the cops busted you for whatever it is you're drinking. ;)

Breaking: Transcript of CA Exec phone call Nov 1st

[ShaunC]

Kumar's phone. Kumar speaking.

Hey, what's up? It's me. What are you doing?

Nothing important. I can talk. What's going on?

Listen, I can't party tonight, okay? I gotta stay late at the prosecutor's office.

Dude, fuck that shit. We had plans.

I know, but I got a lot of work to do drawing up your sentence for securities fraud.

When has getting high ever prevented you from doing your work?

Jesus!

I got a quarter of the finest herb in New York City. I'm not smoking that shit alone, okay? So you need to just chill the fuck out and prepare to get blazed, because in the next couple of hours, I expect both of us to be blitzed out of our skulls, got it?

All right, I got it.

I'll talk to you later, some guy with handcuffs is at the door.

Re:"CA"? Show some goddamn courtesy

[jjp5421]

CA is the name of this software company. It was known as Computer Associates, Intl. about a year ago.

Re:I'm not seeing the story

[spookymonster]

In 1995, Computer Associates (now known as CA) bought up nearly every third party MVS (IBM's mainframe OS) application. In the industry, it was seen as the death knell of the mainframe; it reduced the choice of software vendors down to 2 monolithic companies. On the one side, you had IBM with their over-complicated software (a study once found that the average IBM manual read at the post-grad level) selling at loss-leader prices. On the other side, you had CA buying up their competitors, then announcing those products were being twilighted in favor of their own 'best-of-breed' (read: 'largest profit margin') software.