Aren't our financial records our own "papers and effects"? Are they intillectual property? What are they?
I would imagine that from the government's point of view, they are the financial institution's property. I guess that the government can make a good case for that because we do not exercise control over those documents - we cannot do whatever we wish with them. For instance, if I were to close my checking account, I can't make the bank destroy the records that they have accumulated on my transactions. That's probably a simplistic view of things...I'm sure that there are plenty of attornies who could make it much more complicated.
And on a slightly different tangent, I'm happy to say that my representative, CL "Butch" Otter voted against the appropriation bill specifically because of the powers granted to the FBI. I sent him a letter regarding the PATRIOT Act and PATRIOT II and got a nice reply outlining his opposition to substantial parts of PATRIOT and all of PATRIOT II. He's a very Libertarian Republican.
The point is, the GPL is the only thing which grants you the right to use Linux. If the GPL is invalid, you do not have the right to distribute Linux at all.
That's why I said that it was a Pyrrhic victory. If they win, they really don't win.
If Wall Street is seeing that lottery ticket as a better investment, one of two things is happening: a) the odds of getting anything at all are increasing or b) the potential payout is seen as higher.
Wall Street isn't buying and selling this stock. The institutional investors who own it are holding it, either as a condition of their investments or because they're playing the lottery. The daily price changes are coming from speculators. You can see that trades are moving in 100 to 500 share blocks. That's not Wall Street - that's day trading. And it accounts for about 20% of the outstanding shares. So, it seems to me that you have the "lottery players" on the one hand and speculators on the other.
Looking around the financial pages, it looks like the street's sentiment tends towards "sell". Only one analyst covers SCO and their "buy" recommendation came last October and hasn't been updated since. I'm not sure that Wall Street is even paying a lot of attention to SCO.
At any rate, this is a common misconception. SCO winning "every single linux user (if collectable, $699/installation for single-cpu installations" is absolutely not a potential outcome of this or ANY other case. Under the terms of the GPL, you can't charge licensing fees for using linux. If in order to legally distribute linux because of SCO's submarined code you must pay a licence fee, legally, YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE LINUX AT ALL, because doing so would violate the copyrights of all contributors EXCEPT sco.
One of SCO's contentions is that the GPL is an invalid license. Thus, if (and it seems like a tremendously improbable if) the court upholds their contention, then they really don't have to worry about the limitations that the GPL places on licensing fees. That's certainly got to be one of the reasons that their lawyers are challenging the GPL. If they don't, then they win a Pyrrhic victory...assuming that they can win.
On the other hand, they also would potentially win $3 billion. Even if Linux is effectively killed and we all move to BSD, that kind of cash to a company the size of SCO isn't chump change!
I agree with most everyone else that the odds are pretty long, but they're probably better than me winning the PowerBall. Of course, I don't play it, either. Nor do I speculate in SCO stock;-)
The runup of SCO's stock seems like it's due to a couple of things:
1. Short term speculators acting on the press release of the day to time the rise and fall of the stock.
2. Medium term speculators who can afford to lose the money and see the potential gains as worth the risk. 3. The scarcity of the public stock. It's a very closely held company.
The buyers of SCO stock aren't really investors - they're in it for the short term...SCO is a vehicle for making money and nothing more. There are plenty of examples of SCO-type speculators out there. We focus on SCO because the IP issue is near and dear to our hearts, but from a financial point of view, there are a hundred SCO's to chose from if you want to put your money into an extremely volatile stock.
"Investors", the people who look out for more than a year at a time, aren't putting money into SCO or its ilk. They're looking at capital gains, not short term income. Now, there's nothing wrong with either way of investing, but I'm not sure that the volatility of SCO's stock is any indicator that we've forgotten anything.
And, to your other comment, certainly it's worthwhile to rally around IBM, but, in the end, it doesn't matter if we're all on IBM's side or not. The court will decide SCO's and IBM's cases on their legal merits, regardless of who has the larger fan club. But I understand your sentiments...and you probably already knew all of this anyway!
Besides, one wonders WHO is buying these shares as they get dumped... Someone posting on/. once posted info that a company controlled by Melinda Gates was swallowing them up when the SCOX price fell...
That's probably the best question of all! I figured that they were being bought by day traders and short term speculators. It sure seems like somebody is going to be left holding the bag at the end, though.
I bet the entire profits for SCOG in the year 2006 that the shareholders will never sue the officers. I am confident in my wager because:
1. There won't be any profits for SCOG for that year
2. The shareholders, directors, and officers are the same people
3. They will all be in jail and broke already
SCOX is mostly held by insiders. And they're selling.
I hate to be a pedantic bastard, but if the SCO insiders sell their stock, won't that mean that at some point the shareholders won't be insiders anymore?
I can only speak for my case, but I went to a state university. In Idaho, the state constitution forbids charging tuition, so there are only fees to pay. I think that right now, they amount to around $1500 per semester for a full load. Add to that the cost of books (and, of course, living expenses) and you end up with a pretty affordable education at a reasonably good school.
I went to college on the GI Bill. I started out receiving something like $400 per month and ended up at around $600 per month. Together with the internship at a local high tech company, that easily paid for all my expenses...and even left a little over to participate in the employee stock purchase plan.
But even if I didn't have access to the GI Bill or the internship, my total college expenses would have been around $28,000 over four years. I'm creeping off topic a little, but I can safely say that I recouped the $28,000 investment in the first year of my professional employment.
Sure, if you want to attend a private school or if you live in a state that does not subsidize education as heavily as Idaho does, you'll end up paying more, but there are options that don't cost a ton of money. And while a degree from a prestigious university may provide a foot in the door for a graduate with little or no work experience, a degree from a (non prestigious) state university, together with industry experience from internships or co-ops can provide just as much (or more) leverage.
thank you for the correction. My view that the technology career in general (hardware and software engineering) was fading comes not only from reading such unbiased sources as slashdot but also from reading EE Times and IEEE newsletters.
I'm not sure that I'd consider EE Times or IEEE newsletters to be unbiased sources for the state of the hardware engineering world. They serve as the voice of "the sky is falling" engineering crowd. I'm an IEEE member and I'm active in my region and section. What I read in the newsletters doesn't jive with what I see in the industry. The IEEE presents the worst case scenario for the engineering profession, which is good, I suppose, because it helps those engineers whose jobs may be threatened. Given the number of open positions in "flyover country", I wonder how much of the problem is due to engineers that won't relocate and how much is truely due to a tremendous lack of work? I have a sneaking suspicion...
And 50 is not too late to go back to school. At my alma mater (Boise State University), the EE department has students from 17 to 60. As an engineer, you ought to be taking classes from time to time, anyway.
Except the ridiculous interest and the fact that it takes years and years and years to pay it off. Item one in college: DO NOT BORROW EVEN ONE DOLLAR UNLESS IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
I agree that if it's possible to avoid borrowing money for college you'd be better off, but the interst rates aren't exactly ridiculous...in fact, for an unsecured loan, the interest rates are very low. And, in certain situations, the loans can be forgiven. And while the terms of the loan allow for an extended period of time to pay it back, you can always pay down the principle and pay the loan off early.
But for anyone who is considering obtaining a student loan, go into it with your eyes open. Plan a budget to see just how much you need and don't take any more than that. Also, the same FAFSA that you fill out for a student loan is also the same one that can qualify you for grants, so it's not a bad idea to fill one out at your campus's financial aid office...you don't have to take the money, but you may be surprised to find out that there is free money available.
I'll pipe up here, too. I did this while I was studying for my electrical engineering degree, and not only did it give me practical experience, but the company also hired me as an engineer when I graduated.
The best thing about it (other than the money, of course) was that I was doing real engineering work, not just some project created for an intern. During my junior and senior years, I filled an engineer's position. It was a good deal for the company because they got an engineer for 50% and 75% of the salary of one and a good deal for me because I got the experience (and ultimately the job). The only drawback that I had was that going to school full time and working 25 hours a week left pretty much no time for anything else. For nine months a year, I was pretty much a hermit. Fortunately, my friends and family understood what I was doing and what it meant to me and they cut me a lot of slack.
You can get an internship or a coop as a freshman at many companies. The work won't be glamorous starting out, but it will get you the exposure and money that you want. And, like somebody else said, it can get you through college without student loans.
But don't hesitate to fill out your FAFSA, particularly if you have financial need. You don't have to take the loans and you may find that you qualify for grants.
Well, look, you just don't know what you're talking about!
Micron produces the bulk of their products in the Boise, Idaho fabs. It produces some product in Japan and Singapore that is destined for Asian markets. It produces some product in Italy that is destined for European markets.
The facility in Manassass, Virginia is coming on line as an advanced, 300mm fab. The facility in Lehi, Utah was built during the previous tech orgy and is currently utilized as a test facility with several hundred employees.
Micron has offered something like two convertible bond placements in the past three years. The bond rating is the same as any other high-tech company recovering from a significant downturn in business. The stockholders don't seem to have any issues with the company taking the path that it has to raise money. Also, note that the money that is being raised is for capital improvements, not ongoing operations...that's a very important distinction and one that is important because Micron's ongoing operations have been cashflow positive for several quarters.
As far as corporate governance goes, Micron has always been extremly highly rated, including the last quarter. I'm not sure that I'd call over $1.5 billion in the bank cash-starved, but I'll leave it to your opinion. I'd say that if Micron was cooking the books, then they wouldn't have shown so many consecutive quarters of loss.
I'm not sure what your grudge is against Micron, but it doesn't seem to be based on fact.
This seems to be a bit more complicated, but if you care to plow through 10,000 pages of FTC-Rambus trail documents, it boils down to:
Well, not to be snotty, but I suspect that you haven't plowed through those pages since your list below appears to be a cut and paste from the Yahoo message boards!
-- collusion to kill RDRAM by falsely inflating pricing estimates AND production estimates to convince Intel and PC OEMs that RDRAM costs would not fall even if production ramped.
Remember that ever RDRAM chip produced has an automatic price increase due to Rambus' licensing fees. And what is alleged is that there was collusion. RDRAM really WAS expensive to make. The chip designs were more complicated and not readily adaptable to the existing manufacturing processes.
-- continued collusion to sell DDR-SDRAM below costs, at price parity with SDRAM (a public commitment by Micron, BTW).
Micron correctly pointed out that it cost the same to produce DDR as it did to produce SDR, so that set the market floor. There was no reason for DDR to carry a premium to SDR, particularly when yields were the same. Supply and demand!
-- A smear campaign managed by InQuest and CMP (paid for largely by Micron).
I don't think that smear campaigns are illegal. If Micron financed a smear campaign, how is that collusion? Besides, RDRAM really did have some performance issues that clouded Rambus' claims. In particular, the memory had significant latency issues for non-burst operations. That's not a smear, that's a fact.
-- And finally, collusion to control DDR supply and prices once Intel announced it would release DDR-based chipsets for the P-4.
Oh, good thinking...don't you think that if the manufacturers got together and decided to control the price and supply of chips that, I don't know, the supply would have dwindled and the price would have skyrocketed? No, what happened was that demand increased and the price went up. Micron never made any bones about being caught with the pants down when DDR demand took off. They always said that they were not ready to meet the increased demand for the chips. Over the course of two quarterly conference calls, they said that it was management's fault for not having DDR designs out of R&D with good yields. And it cost them a lot of money and market share. You'll note that in that period both Infineon and Samsung gained market share at Micron's expense because they were ready to meet production demands.
That's when Mikey Dell finally went crying to the Department of Justice; Dell sold RDRAM-based computers throughout, and was the last major OEM to drop RDRAM when Intel finally released the 865 and 875-based dual-channel DDR-based chipsets. Mikey got semi-screwed on RDRAM pricing, and slighly screwed on DDR pricing (after enjoying prices for SDRAM and DDR well below production cost for more than a a year).
Even at $4.00, Dell was enjoying below-production-cost pricing. Dell made the mistake of not being prepared for the emergence of DDR, just as Micron did. But instead of coming clean to the shareholders like Micron did, admitting that they made a mistake, Dell chose to toss out this red herring.
Cartels are usually pretty inefficient and ineffective; the cartel members by definition are competitors-- witness OPEC. But yeah, I agree that overall the DRAM makers were incompetent, venal, and now about to rat each other out as fast as possible.
OPEC and DeBeers are pretty good at what they do. If they weren't, we'd be paying $0.50 for a gallon of gas and diamonds would be like cut glass. As far as the DRAM "cartel" goes, I think that you, like a few vocal Rambus investors, are chasing ghosts.
And, like I said earlier, all of this hullaballoo comes from a single report from Bloomberg, based on unattributed sources and rumor. Every single report that's come out since is based only on that one story. Hardly something to build a case upon.
Yeah, it was pretty funny watching "TeamDDR" hoisted by their own petards-- they drove DDR down to price parity with SDRAM in the middle of the worst tech recession ever, and they tried to jack DDR prices after Intel finally threw in the RDRAM towel-- in early 2002, DDR prices quickly rose from sub-$2 for 128Mb PC2100 to over $4.00. They are back near their lows again (DoJ investigation has been going on for over a year).
The DOD investigation started with Michael Dell's complaints about collusion, shortly after the price spike to $4.00. But you'll notice that the price dropped nearly as quickly as capacity shifted from SDR to DDR. That's because the computer manufacturers started the switch to DDR ahead of the memory makers. You can call it collusion, but Micron never made any secret that it was bad planning on their part.
The problem with the industry is overcapacity. The solution in a free market is for producers to become more efficient, or get out of the business. Micron or Hynix should have collapsed, but didn't because of government intervention and political connections. Micron lost money for 12 straight quarters before announcing a profit of $1 million (on sales of $1.1 Billion, OUCH). The only DRAM maker that made money throughout is Samsung--the one company that made RDRAM in volume, but even Sammy is losing money on DRAM now (making up for it in other kinds of chips, particularly flash, which Micron does not make).
I'm not going to give you a lecture on balance sheets or cash flow, but the fact is that Micron plans for the bad times during the good times, so they have sufficient cash on hand to weather the storm. Sure, this has been a bad one, but obviously they had sufficient cash on hand to make it through the worst of it without resorting to Hynix's tack of seeking a government bailout. And several of the quarters were cash flow positive, meaning that they put money in the bank, even though they lost money.
In Micron's last conference call, they said that they were the lowest cost producer again, something that I tend to believe because history has shown that they tend to be the lowest cost producer by aggressively shrinking feature size and pursuing other economies of manufacturing.
For the good of the industry, Micron and Hynix should declare bankrupcy and exit. DRAM is not a strategic industry; it is a commodity, soon to be made largely in China, India, and other lowest-cost producers.
Interestingly, the cost of chip production is not in labor, but in processes and materials. It is not particularly cheaper to manufacture chips in China or India because equipment and consumable costs are the same throughout the world, and are the bulk of the cost of production.
Micron's balance sheet hardly supports bankruptcy...they have virtually zero debt and billions in assets. Again, I'm not going to give you an business lecture, but it doesn't take a Harvard economist to see that Micron isn't a company in a position to seek bankruptcy. And, apparently, neither is Hynix, since the banks effectively forgave their debt. I don't know about Infineon, but by your logic, they should also put their heads on the chopping block.
You don't mind memory makers getting together and artificially inflating the price you pay for RAM? How interesting.
If they did, they did a pretty poor job of it, seeing as they were all selling memory for less than it cost to make it at the time that they were supposedly inflating the prices.
I'd say that as far as price raising goes, Michael Dell just got his panties in a was that prices were going up some because of demand and it was costing an extra five bucks per computer to keep the same amount of memory. Just as quickly as they went up, they went down, and that was without a DOJ probe to force the issue. Huh...free markets at work!
Well, I'll point out that Micron is the only US memory maker left, so anybody that they colluded with would be foreign.
Also, they have not admitted colluding at all. They've said that they are cooperating with the inquiry, but they've said that since it started last spring. All of the articles that have been published are just rehashing a single Bloomberg article that is based on rumors and unattributed sources. Lots of smoke, but no fire.
Actually, production went down at the Manassas plant because of the time that it took to phase out the Toshiba processes and phase in the Micron processes. Also, the Manassas plant was refitted with 300mm equipment, an upgrade to what was there before.
There was no production cut in Idaho. Micron ended a number of dead-end and pie in the sky projects and laid off the associated people. The 1800 layoffs were worldwide, by the way. About a thousand in Idaho. Most of the layoffs were R&D related - production has been at nearly 100% for years.
Micron's executives have always stated that there is no advantage to moving production offshore and that they have no plans to do so. The purpose in buying Hynix was to gain production capacity, get a handle on worldwide overproduction and become the largest memory manufacturer (i.e., to make more money). The government didn't shoot down the acquisition - Hynix's board did. The government, as the primary owner of the banks, and thus the major creditor of the company, was fully behind it.
Historically, Micron has always made its acquisitions during downturns in the industry. Generally that's because Micron makes memory at a lower cost than anybody else in the business, so it's easier for them to make money when prices are low. Obviously this last downturn was a little different, but their expansion practices were not.
Micron has yet to receive any "government funding." The whole story is that they asked for countervailing duties to be applied to Hynix because of the huge loans that Hynix received from South Korea's government-controlled banks that allowed them to continue producing memory when they should have been out of business - amounting to a government subsidy of the company. And when the banks turned the loans into equity in the company, that effectively wiped the slate clean. The EU saw things the same way and imposed their own duties. And the "government funding" is the amount of the countervailing duties that equals the amount of financial damage that Micron received due to the subsidies.
I think that all of the memory manufacturers would like to see memory prices get to a certain level - something more than what it costs to make them. But that's not evidence of collusion...it's evidence of wanting to have a profitable company.
The story that all of the media outlets are reporting about originates from a Bloomberg report that is pretty much based on rumors and unattributed sources. Every other article is just a rehash of the original.
It just kills me that Rambus contends that the memory makers colluded to keep DDR memory cheap to price RDRAM out of the market, but Michael Dell says that they colluded to raise the prices of DDR to make Dell, et al, pay more money for memory.
Other than Samsung, the other major DRAM companies were in very real danger of running out of money - even Hynix, with its government subsidies, so keeping prices low just doesn't make sense. And if the aim was to raise them, well, they did a pretty piss-poor job.
So, since Bloomberg is running a story based on rumors, I'll make a wild guess of my own and say that I doubt that Micron is cutting such a deal because there wasn't any collusion at all.
You're right, it's not spam. A reasonable person should expect that volunteering their email address to the trade show gives permission for the trade show members to use it.
It's a lot like the do-not-call list. If you've had a relationship with a company within 90 days, they can call you. Giving them your phone number counts. This isn't any different. The fact that you provided a legitimate opt-out mechanism (that you mentioned a couple of posts ago) strengthens your position.
Commercial email is not going to go away. Perhaps the best that we can hope for is responsible commercial email and you've provided several good examples of it. The fact that there are people out there who don't understand that spam is unsolicited commercial email shouldn't get you too lathered up;-)
That's a good question! Sure, there are just as many birds around now as there were when I bought the house. We have bird feeders in the back yard that are packed with 'em, especially now when there is snow on the ground. They just don't fly into the transformers anymore.
We see finches, robins (in the summer), sparrows, red-tailed hawks, red winged blackbirds, magpies, a peregrin falcon every now and then and herons.
I think that some people don't give wild animals enough credit for being able to adapt to changes in their environment.
When I moved into my new house about six years ago, we suffered from fairly frequent blackouts, something like one a week, which seemed pretty excessive to me. So I called the power company to find out what was going on. The engineer I talked to said that the problem was that flocks of birds were running into the new power lines in the area and arcing across the terminals of the transformers. He said that this happened all the time when new above ground structures like this were constructed, but within a year, the birds would have adjusted to the structures and the problem would go away. He also said that the problems would probably shift further south of where I lived, where more housing development was going on.
Sure enough, the next summer, no bird-caused blackouts, but my friend who bought a new house about ten miles south of me was having the very same problems that I'd had!
Anyway, I think that it would be interesting to observe the trend, over time, of the rate of bird deaths. It wouldn't surprise me to see that they fall off rapidly after the first year as the birds become accustomed to the presence of the wind turbines. And, as many have pointed out, 22,000 bird deaths by 7,000 turbines over 20 years is quite a low rate. Everything comes with a cost.
While I don't take issue with the technical accuracy of what you've said, from a practical point of view, these "cases", while not the greatest thing from an RF point of view, probably won't radiate enough energy to bother a transistor radio sitting a foot away. I spent several years working in an EMI lab testing electronic components and from experience I know that a PC, even a multi-gigahertz one, radiates very little RF energy.
As for problems with EMI reception...well, I suppose that if my next door neighbor had a kilowatt transmitter, the antenna in the backyard would be a dead giveaway and I might think twice before building one of these systems. But, apart from an extreme case like that, PCs are really quite immune from RF interference. A great deal of the design work that goes into the actual chips on the boards is devoted to EMI and ESD rejection. Critical signals are routed differentially. Signals on the PCB are (relatively) low frequency and routed with an eye toward reducing EMI transmission and susceptability.
My current work involves designing and simulating high speed digital systems. Part of that design work is to determine both how well the network rejects EMI and how little it radiates. And, as I mentioned before, short an extreme case (like the 1000 watt Ham transmitter), it is virtually impossible to couple enough energy onto the transmission lines to cause any trouble. And the amount of energy radiated beyond a foot or so is almost unmeasurable.
So, from a practical point (electrically speaking), these "cases", such as they are, are probably not the EMI terrors that one might thing. That being said, I sure wouldn't want one around my cat.
Not at all. Suppose NG were to publish their magazine in paperback and hardback format every month
In fact, American Heritage used to do that very same thing! And you're exactly right, you could subscribe to one or the other, or both, if you wanted. I don't know, however, if there was any differentiation between the formats when it came to paying the authors, though.
Just because they bundle a swiss-army knife with one version or some search tools with another version shouldn't suddenly make the two versions new publications.
Besides, adding a search engine to a CD doesn't seem much different than publishing an annual index like many scholarly (and a few not-so-scholarly) periodicals do!
I've never understood the odd fixation the airport "security" corporations have with techie toys. Yes, I suppose you could hide a knife, or a small gun, or a small explosive charge, inside a laptop. However how does turning the bleeding thing on (which, as Mr. Berry points out, seems to be the whole point of many airport security types existance) proove that it doesn't contain hidden weapons? A smaller battery pack, designed for only a few minutes of life would provide ample space for concealing just about anything. Likewise replacing the CD or floppy bay with a false cover would provide a nice little hiding place for unpleasant things. Both would still leave the computer functional (at least long enough to get past Mr. Minimum Wage and bored).
The short answer is that your device goes throught the X-Ray machine. You're turning it on only to provide evidence that the battery is indeed a battery.
Big surprise here: private, for profit, "security" corprations have the same priority that all private for profit corporations have. They want to make the most money by spending the least money as goal number 1. Actually providing security is, by definition, goal number 2 at the best. This isn't to say that private, for profit, corporations are bad. Its just a recognition of reality, the way corporate law works their prime goal must be making money, everything else is secondary. Real security might involve several things, but at the minimum it must involve removing the profit motive from security. Why? Because every dollar that goes into profit isn't going into *security*. I'd be happy if they started using real police officers as airport security.
Airport security isn't run by private corporations anymore. It's run by the TSA...they are government employees, for better or worse. And I'm happier with TSA employees providing the security service that they provide, given that they receive at least rudimentary training in the specific security issues that are relevant to travel. Police provide the locally mandated physical security for the building, TSA provides the federally madated security for the travel system.
So, by all means, let's get busy not doing anything real to improve airport security, instead let's harrass the geek crowd.
I travel a lot with a notebook computer, a PDA and a cell phone. Nothing much has changed between now and three years ago. I still have to turn on the computer, PDA and phone and they still have to go through the X-Ray machine. I've been pulled aside for extra checking twice. Everyone that I've dealt with, in big airports or small, has been polite and professional. Nothing that I've gone through and nothing that I've seen others go through strikes me as harrassing. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of travelers giving the TSA agents plenty of crap. Anecdotally, I'd say that the harrassees are not the travelers.
Slashdot Mirror
That they can have my HP 48GX when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. And even then, I'm not so sure...
I would imagine that from the government's point of view, they are the financial institution's property. I guess that the government can make a good case for that because we do not exercise control over those documents - we cannot do whatever we wish with them. For instance, if I were to close my checking account, I can't make the bank destroy the records that they have accumulated on my transactions. That's probably a simplistic view of things...I'm sure that there are plenty of attornies who could make it much more complicated.
And on a slightly different tangent, I'm happy to say that my representative, CL "Butch" Otter voted against the appropriation bill specifically because of the powers granted to the FBI. I sent him a letter regarding the PATRIOT Act and PATRIOT II and got a nice reply outlining his opposition to substantial parts of PATRIOT and all of PATRIOT II. He's a very Libertarian Republican.
-h-
That's why I said that it was a Pyrrhic victory. If they win, they really don't win.
-h-
Wall Street isn't buying and selling this stock. The institutional investors who own it are holding it, either as a condition of their investments or because they're playing the lottery. The daily price changes are coming from speculators. You can see that trades are moving in 100 to 500 share blocks. That's not Wall Street - that's day trading. And it accounts for about 20% of the outstanding shares. So, it seems to me that you have the "lottery players" on the one hand and speculators on the other.
Looking around the financial pages, it looks like the street's sentiment tends towards "sell". Only one analyst covers SCO and their "buy" recommendation came last October and hasn't been updated since. I'm not sure that Wall Street is even paying a lot of attention to SCO.
-h-
One of SCO's contentions is that the GPL is an invalid license. Thus, if (and it seems like a tremendously improbable if) the court upholds their contention, then they really don't have to worry about the limitations that the GPL places on licensing fees. That's certainly got to be one of the reasons that their lawyers are challenging the GPL. If they don't, then they win a Pyrrhic victory...assuming that they can win.
On the other hand, they also would potentially win $3 billion. Even if Linux is effectively killed and we all move to BSD, that kind of cash to a company the size of SCO isn't chump change!
I agree with most everyone else that the odds are pretty long, but they're probably better than me winning the PowerBall. Of course, I don't play it, either. Nor do I speculate in SCO stock
-h-
2. Medium term speculators who can afford to lose the money and see the potential gains as worth the risk.
3. The scarcity of the public stock. It's a very closely held company.
The buyers of SCO stock aren't really investors - they're in it for the short term...SCO is a vehicle for making money and nothing more. There are plenty of examples of SCO-type speculators out there. We focus on SCO because the IP issue is near and dear to our hearts, but from a financial point of view, there are a hundred SCO's to chose from if you want to put your money into an extremely volatile stock.
"Investors", the people who look out for more than a year at a time, aren't putting money into SCO or its ilk. They're looking at capital gains, not short term income. Now, there's nothing wrong with either way of investing, but I'm not sure that the volatility of SCO's stock is any indicator that we've forgotten anything.
And, to your other comment, certainly it's worthwhile to rally around IBM, but, in the end, it doesn't matter if we're all on IBM's side or not. The court will decide SCO's and IBM's cases on their legal merits, regardless of who has the larger fan club. But I understand your sentiments...and you probably already knew all of this anyway!
-h-
That's probably the best question of all! I figured that they were being bought by day traders and short term speculators. It sure seems like somebody is going to be left holding the bag at the end, though.
-h-
1. There won't be any profits for SCOG for that year
2. The shareholders, directors, and officers are the same people
3. They will all be in jail and broke already
SCOX is mostly held by insiders. And they're selling.
I hate to be a pedantic bastard, but if the SCO insiders sell their stock, won't that mean that at some point the shareholders won't be insiders anymore?
-h-
I went to college on the GI Bill. I started out receiving something like $400 per month and ended up at around $600 per month. Together with the internship at a local high tech company, that easily paid for all my expenses...and even left a little over to participate in the employee stock purchase plan.
But even if I didn't have access to the GI Bill or the internship, my total college expenses would have been around $28,000 over four years. I'm creeping off topic a little, but I can safely say that I recouped the $28,000 investment in the first year of my professional employment.
Sure, if you want to attend a private school or if you live in a state that does not subsidize education as heavily as Idaho does, you'll end up paying more, but there are options that don't cost a ton of money. And while a degree from a prestigious university may provide a foot in the door for a graduate with little or no work experience, a degree from a (non prestigious) state university, together with industry experience from internships or co-ops can provide just as much (or more) leverage.
-h-
I'm not sure that I'd consider EE Times or IEEE newsletters to be unbiased sources for the state of the hardware engineering world. They serve as the voice of "the sky is falling" engineering crowd. I'm an IEEE member and I'm active in my region and section. What I read in the newsletters doesn't jive with what I see in the industry. The IEEE presents the worst case scenario for the engineering profession, which is good, I suppose, because it helps those engineers whose jobs may be threatened. Given the number of open positions in "flyover country", I wonder how much of the problem is due to engineers that won't relocate and how much is truely due to a tremendous lack of work? I have a sneaking suspicion...
And 50 is not too late to go back to school. At my alma mater (Boise State University), the EE department has students from 17 to 60. As an engineer, you ought to be taking classes from time to time, anyway.
-h-
Item one in college: DO NOT BORROW EVEN ONE DOLLAR UNLESS IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
I agree that if it's possible to avoid borrowing money for college you'd be better off, but the interst rates aren't exactly ridiculous...in fact, for an unsecured loan, the interest rates are very low. And, in certain situations, the loans can be forgiven. And while the terms of the loan allow for an extended period of time to pay it back, you can always pay down the principle and pay the loan off early.
But for anyone who is considering obtaining a student loan, go into it with your eyes open. Plan a budget to see just how much you need and don't take any more than that. Also, the same FAFSA that you fill out for a student loan is also the same one that can qualify you for grants, so it's not a bad idea to fill one out at your campus's financial aid office...you don't have to take the money, but you may be surprised to find out that there is free money available.
-h-
The best thing about it (other than the money, of course) was that I was doing real engineering work, not just some project created for an intern. During my junior and senior years, I filled an engineer's position. It was a good deal for the company because they got an engineer for 50% and 75% of the salary of one and a good deal for me because I got the experience (and ultimately the job). The only drawback that I had was that going to school full time and working 25 hours a week left pretty much no time for anything else. For nine months a year, I was pretty much a hermit. Fortunately, my friends and family understood what I was doing and what it meant to me and they cut me a lot of slack.
You can get an internship or a coop as a freshman at many companies. The work won't be glamorous starting out, but it will get you the exposure and money that you want. And, like somebody else said, it can get you through college without student loans.
But don't hesitate to fill out your FAFSA, particularly if you have financial need. You don't have to take the loans and you may find that you qualify for grants.
-h-
Micron produces the bulk of their products in the Boise, Idaho fabs. It produces some product in Japan and Singapore that is destined for Asian markets. It produces some product in Italy that is destined for European markets.
The facility in Manassass, Virginia is coming on line as an advanced, 300mm fab. The facility in Lehi, Utah was built during the previous tech orgy and is currently utilized as a test facility with several hundred employees.
Micron has offered something like two convertible bond placements in the past three years. The bond rating is the same as any other high-tech company recovering from a significant downturn in business. The stockholders don't seem to have any issues with the company taking the path that it has to raise money. Also, note that the money that is being raised is for capital improvements, not ongoing operations...that's a very important distinction and one that is important because Micron's ongoing operations have been cashflow positive for several quarters.
As far as corporate governance goes, Micron has always been extremly highly rated, including the last quarter. I'm not sure that I'd call over $1.5 billion in the bank cash-starved, but I'll leave it to your opinion. I'd say that if Micron was cooking the books, then they wouldn't have shown so many consecutive quarters of loss.
I'm not sure what your grudge is against Micron, but it doesn't seem to be based on fact.
-h-
Well, not to be snotty, but I suspect that you haven't plowed through those pages since your list below appears to be a cut and paste from the Yahoo message boards!
-- collusion to kill RDRAM by falsely inflating pricing estimates AND production estimates to convince Intel and PC OEMs that RDRAM costs would not fall even if production ramped.
Remember that ever RDRAM chip produced has an automatic price increase due to Rambus' licensing fees. And what is alleged is that there was collusion. RDRAM really WAS expensive to make. The chip designs were more complicated and not readily adaptable to the existing manufacturing processes.
-- continued collusion to sell DDR-SDRAM below costs, at price parity with SDRAM (a public commitment by Micron, BTW).
Micron correctly pointed out that it cost the same to produce DDR as it did to produce SDR, so that set the market floor. There was no reason for DDR to carry a premium to SDR, particularly when yields were the same. Supply and demand!
-- A smear campaign managed by InQuest and CMP (paid for largely by Micron).
I don't think that smear campaigns are illegal. If Micron financed a smear campaign, how is that collusion? Besides, RDRAM really did have some performance issues that clouded Rambus' claims. In particular, the memory had significant latency issues for non-burst operations. That's not a smear, that's a fact.
-- And finally, collusion to control DDR supply and prices once Intel announced it would release DDR-based chipsets for the P-4.
Oh, good thinking...don't you think that if the manufacturers got together and decided to control the price and supply of chips that, I don't know, the supply would have dwindled and the price would have skyrocketed? No, what happened was that demand increased and the price went up. Micron never made any bones about being caught with the pants down when DDR demand took off. They always said that they were not ready to meet the increased demand for the chips. Over the course of two quarterly conference calls, they said that it was management's fault for not having DDR designs out of R&D with good yields. And it cost them a lot of money and market share. You'll note that in that period both Infineon and Samsung gained market share at Micron's expense because they were ready to meet production demands.
That's when Mikey Dell finally went crying to the Department of Justice; Dell sold RDRAM-based computers throughout, and was the last major OEM to drop RDRAM when Intel finally released the 865 and 875-based dual-channel DDR-based chipsets. Mikey got semi-screwed on RDRAM pricing, and slighly screwed on DDR pricing (after enjoying prices for SDRAM and DDR well below production cost for more than a a year).
Even at $4.00, Dell was enjoying below-production-cost pricing. Dell made the mistake of not being prepared for the emergence of DDR, just as Micron did. But instead of coming clean to the shareholders like Micron did, admitting that they made a mistake, Dell chose to toss out this red herring.
Cartels are usually pretty inefficient and ineffective; the cartel members by definition are competitors-- witness OPEC. But yeah, I agree that overall the DRAM makers were incompetent, venal, and now about to rat each other out as fast as possible.
OPEC and DeBeers are pretty good at what they do. If they weren't, we'd be paying $0.50 for a gallon of gas and diamonds would be like cut glass. As far as the DRAM "cartel" goes, I think that you, like a few vocal Rambus investors, are chasing ghosts.
And, like I said earlier, all of this hullaballoo comes from a single report from Bloomberg, based on unattributed sources and rumor. Every single report that's come out since is based only on that one story. Hardly something to build a case upon.
-h-
The DOD investigation started with Michael Dell's complaints about collusion, shortly after the price spike to $4.00. But you'll notice that the price dropped nearly as quickly as capacity shifted from SDR to DDR. That's because the computer manufacturers started the switch to DDR ahead of the memory makers. You can call it collusion, but Micron never made any secret that it was bad planning on their part.
The problem with the industry is overcapacity. The solution in a free market is for producers to become more efficient, or get out of the business. Micron or Hynix should have collapsed, but didn't because of government intervention and political connections. Micron lost money for 12 straight quarters before announcing a profit of $1 million (on sales of $1.1 Billion, OUCH). The only DRAM maker that made money throughout is Samsung--the one company that made RDRAM in volume, but even Sammy is losing money on DRAM now (making up for it in other kinds of chips, particularly flash, which Micron does not make).
I'm not going to give you a lecture on balance sheets or cash flow, but the fact is that Micron plans for the bad times during the good times, so they have sufficient cash on hand to weather the storm. Sure, this has been a bad one, but obviously they had sufficient cash on hand to make it through the worst of it without resorting to Hynix's tack of seeking a government bailout. And several of the quarters were cash flow positive, meaning that they put money in the bank, even though they lost money.
In Micron's last conference call, they said that they were the lowest cost producer again, something that I tend to believe because history has shown that they tend to be the lowest cost producer by aggressively shrinking feature size and pursuing other economies of manufacturing.
For the good of the industry, Micron and Hynix should declare bankrupcy and exit. DRAM is not a strategic industry; it is a commodity, soon to be made largely in China, India, and other lowest-cost producers.
Interestingly, the cost of chip production is not in labor, but in processes and materials. It is not particularly cheaper to manufacture chips in China or India because equipment and consumable costs are the same throughout the world, and are the bulk of the cost of production.
Micron's balance sheet hardly supports bankruptcy...they have virtually zero debt and billions in assets. Again, I'm not going to give you an business lecture, but it doesn't take a Harvard economist to see that Micron isn't a company in a position to seek bankruptcy. And, apparently, neither is Hynix, since the banks effectively forgave their debt. I don't know about Infineon, but by your logic, they should also put their heads on the chopping block.
-h-
If they did, they did a pretty poor job of it, seeing as they were all selling memory for less than it cost to make it at the time that they were supposedly inflating the prices.
I'd say that as far as price raising goes, Michael Dell just got his panties in a was that prices were going up some because of demand and it was costing an extra five bucks per computer to keep the same amount of memory. Just as quickly as they went up, they went down, and that was without a DOJ probe to force the issue. Huh...free markets at work!
-h-
Also, they have not admitted colluding at all. They've said that they are cooperating with the inquiry, but they've said that since it started last spring. All of the articles that have been published are just rehashing a single Bloomberg article that is based on rumors and unattributed sources. Lots of smoke, but no fire.
-h-
There was no production cut in Idaho. Micron ended a number of dead-end and pie in the sky projects and laid off the associated people. The 1800 layoffs were worldwide, by the way. About a thousand in Idaho. Most of the layoffs were R&D related - production has been at nearly 100% for years.
Micron's executives have always stated that there is no advantage to moving production offshore and that they have no plans to do so. The purpose in buying Hynix was to gain production capacity, get a handle on worldwide overproduction and become the largest memory manufacturer (i.e., to make more money). The government didn't shoot down the acquisition - Hynix's board did. The government, as the primary owner of the banks, and thus the major creditor of the company, was fully behind it.
Historically, Micron has always made its acquisitions during downturns in the industry. Generally that's because Micron makes memory at a lower cost than anybody else in the business, so it's easier for them to make money when prices are low. Obviously this last downturn was a little different, but their expansion practices were not.
Micron has yet to receive any "government funding." The whole story is that they asked for countervailing duties to be applied to Hynix because of the huge loans that Hynix received from South Korea's government-controlled banks that allowed them to continue producing memory when they should have been out of business - amounting to a government subsidy of the company. And when the banks turned the loans into equity in the company, that effectively wiped the slate clean. The EU saw things the same way and imposed their own duties. And the "government funding" is the amount of the countervailing duties that equals the amount of financial damage that Micron received due to the subsidies.
I think that all of the memory manufacturers would like to see memory prices get to a certain level - something more than what it costs to make them. But that's not evidence of collusion...it's evidence of wanting to have a profitable company.
-h-
It just kills me that Rambus contends that the memory makers colluded to keep DDR memory cheap to price RDRAM out of the market, but Michael Dell says that they colluded to raise the prices of DDR to make Dell, et al, pay more money for memory.
Other than Samsung, the other major DRAM companies were in very real danger of running out of money - even Hynix, with its government subsidies, so keeping prices low just doesn't make sense. And if the aim was to raise them, well, they did a pretty piss-poor job.
So, since Bloomberg is running a story based on rumors, I'll make a wild guess of my own and say that I doubt that Micron is cutting such a deal because there wasn't any collusion at all.
-h-
It's a lot like the do-not-call list. If you've had a relationship with a company within 90 days, they can call you. Giving them your phone number counts. This isn't any different. The fact that you provided a legitimate opt-out mechanism (that you mentioned a couple of posts ago) strengthens your position.
Commercial email is not going to go away. Perhaps the best that we can hope for is responsible commercial email and you've provided several good examples of it. The fact that there are people out there who don't understand that spam is unsolicited commercial email shouldn't get you too lathered up
-h-
That's a good question! Sure, there are just as many birds around now as there were when I bought the house. We have bird feeders in the back yard that are packed with 'em, especially now when there is snow on the ground. They just don't fly into the transformers anymore.
We see finches, robins (in the summer), sparrows, red-tailed hawks, red winged blackbirds, magpies, a peregrin falcon every now and then and herons.
I think that some people don't give wild animals enough credit for being able to adapt to changes in their environment.
-h-
Sure enough, the next summer, no bird-caused blackouts, but my friend who bought a new house about ten miles south of me was having the very same problems that I'd had!
Anyway, I think that it would be interesting to observe the trend, over time, of the rate of bird deaths. It wouldn't surprise me to see that they fall off rapidly after the first year as the birds become accustomed to the presence of the wind turbines. And, as many have pointed out, 22,000 bird deaths by 7,000 turbines over 20 years is quite a low rate. Everything comes with a cost.
-h-
As for problems with EMI reception...well, I suppose that if my next door neighbor had a kilowatt transmitter, the antenna in the backyard would be a dead giveaway and I might think twice before building one of these systems. But, apart from an extreme case like that, PCs are really quite immune from RF interference. A great deal of the design work that goes into the actual chips on the boards is devoted to EMI and ESD rejection. Critical signals are routed differentially. Signals on the PCB are (relatively) low frequency and routed with an eye toward reducing EMI transmission and susceptability.
My current work involves designing and simulating high speed digital systems. Part of that design work is to determine both how well the network rejects EMI and how little it radiates. And, as I mentioned before, short an extreme case (like the 1000 watt Ham transmitter), it is virtually impossible to couple enough energy onto the transmission lines to cause any trouble. And the amount of energy radiated beyond a foot or so is almost unmeasurable.
So, from a practical point (electrically speaking), these "cases", such as they are, are probably not the EMI terrors that one might thing. That being said, I sure wouldn't want one around my cat.
-h-
In fact, American Heritage used to do that very same thing! And you're exactly right, you could subscribe to one or the other, or both, if you wanted. I don't know, however, if there was any differentiation between the formats when it came to paying the authors, though.
Just because they bundle a swiss-army knife with one version or some search tools with another version shouldn't suddenly make the two versions new publications.
Besides, adding a search engine to a CD doesn't seem much different than publishing an annual index like many scholarly (and a few not-so-scholarly) periodicals do!
-h-
The short answer is that your device goes throught the X-Ray machine. You're turning it on only to provide evidence that the battery is indeed a battery.
Big surprise here: private, for profit, "security" corprations have the same priority that all private for profit corporations have. They want to make the most money by spending the least money as goal number 1. Actually providing security is, by definition, goal number 2 at the best. This isn't to say that private, for profit, corporations are bad. Its just a recognition of reality, the way corporate law works their prime goal must be making money, everything else is secondary. Real security might involve several things, but at the minimum it must involve removing the profit motive from security. Why? Because every dollar that goes into profit isn't going into *security*. I'd be happy if they started using real police officers as airport security.
Airport security isn't run by private corporations anymore. It's run by the TSA...they are government employees, for better or worse. And I'm happier with TSA employees providing the security service that they provide, given that they receive at least rudimentary training in the specific security issues that are relevant to travel. Police provide the locally mandated physical security for the building, TSA provides the federally madated security for the travel system.
So, by all means, let's get busy not doing anything real to improve airport security, instead let's harrass the geek crowd.
I travel a lot with a notebook computer, a PDA and a cell phone. Nothing much has changed between now and three years ago. I still have to turn on the computer, PDA and phone and they still have to go through the X-Ray machine. I've been pulled aside for extra checking twice. Everyone that I've dealt with, in big airports or small, has been polite and professional. Nothing that I've gone through and nothing that I've seen others go through strikes me as harrassing. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of travelers giving the TSA agents plenty of crap. Anecdotally, I'd say that the harrassees are not the travelers.
-h-