Hasn't SCO heard? Never get into a fight with someone who owns a printing press. (forgot who said it) Taking on Hollywood is a great way to get the media to make you look really really bad.
I can't figure out what people are complaining about. It was a great movie, particularly if you consider all three movies to be one story. Granted, you have to like that sort of movie and you have to actually have an attention span, but if you do you should enjoy it. Basically if you like anime movies like Akira or the Gundam Wing series or Marvel's X-men comics (lots of action and some heavy pontificating) it should be right up your alley. I really enjoyed it.
Maybe folks are complaining about the ending. (no I'm not going to give it away) It was surprising and very non-traditional but really good too. I thought it was a great close to the story arc. Leaves future sequels as a possibility too.
Sweet thanks for the info - no why doesn't it come up on ATT under Blue Tooth phones:)
It doesn't seem to be a phone they are pushing. (no idea why, it's a great phone) I found mine in one of AT&T's stores and even got an $80 rebate. I presume you could buy it from Nokia or a vendor (say, Amazon) and use it with AT&T.
One item to consider, you may want to send it off for a firmware upgrade (at least version 5.5) to ensure the bluetooth works smoothly. Took me a while to find out about that.
Try to upgrade the firmware for your 6310i to version 5.5 or above and all the bugs get fixed.
Yeah, that's actually the next thing I was going to do. Unfortunately there is no place in my city that can do it so I have to mail the phone off for a week. Very annoying...
I am very annoyed that Nokia still doesnt have blue tooth in any small form factor phone that I can buy in the US (let alone at AT&T Wireless).
I have Nokia's 6310i and use AT&T Wireless. There are smaller phones, but it's pretty compact, doesn't have a lot of stupid & unnecessary bells & whistles (like a color screen, camera, etc) and has great battery life and reception. I'm pretty happy with it. It's slicker than heck to dial wirelessly.
Only real problem is that Nokia's software for connecting to a laptop sucks sour frog ass. It works for some people but it's very hit/miss and Nokia tells you to try a different bluetooth device if it doesn't work. (my response was uhh no, I think they should make the software work... the device works fine) Fortunately I can work around their software most of the time.
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million. Why didn't they accept?
Because valuing a company is as much art as it is science. Especially for companies like SuSE whose assets are largely intangible. They don't have much in the way of hard assets like manufacturing equipment or buildings. They have no proprietary code to speak of. Their only real assets are their brand name, whatever cash they have and the people they have working for them.
So how do you value that? It's tough. Companies are considered to be worth the present value of all their future cash flows. But how fast is SuSE going to grow? What sort of margins will they pull down? What does the competitive landscape look like? Will they grow steadily or will they grow fast and then slow down? I don't know about you, but my crystal ball isn't that good.
It's not a trivial problem to value a company. You can't answer it just by checking their market capitalization. That's just the market's current concensus on the value of the equity in the company. But debt holder, preferred stock holders and the government (taxes) all have claims to the cash flows of the company that come before the common stockholders. And the market doesn't even get the equity part right all the time. Witness the recent tech bubble bursting.
So in short, there probably was a difference of opinion on the valuation. If I think my business is worth $150 million and you think it's worth $100 million, who is right? Hard to say. It's also possible that they didn't sell just because the key shareholders didn't like the buyer. Happens all the time. Maybe the terms of the deal weren't good. If I'm the buyer and Novell is offering me stock, I'm going to think about it real hard. Novell's stock isn't exactly blue-chip. What happens if I sell and Novell tanks? Could be SuSE management wanted cash and Novell wasn't offering.
In short there are lot of reasons why it fell through. Some reasons are very sensible, some aren't. Why they turned them down? I have no idea, but I can think of a lot of possible reasons.
I think hospitals need to get off their high horse and get real here. People would be much better off if hospitals had more computers. I mean this isn't the 1800's. Doctors are allowed to use computers too aren't they?
To paraphrase Jamie Zawinsky (sp?), computers aren't magic pixie dust. Without exagerating at all, hospitals are among the most complex organizations you will ever run across. Did you know there are about 50 steps to just performing an Xray? And most of those steps have nothing to do with computers and never will. Medicine is really hard to simplify. I've spent a lot of time in manufacturing as well as healthcare and I promise you, the manufacturing guys have it easy.
Anyway just installing a few computers isn't going to solve the problems. Hospitals have lots of computers and use them pretty heavily. But computers are not reliable enough for some purposes. (yet) Patient records are not typically kept on computers in part because people would die if the power went out. Are mistakes made? You bet. Plenty of them. But that has more to do with the complexity of the task and the management systems than anything else. Computers are not some magical cure-all. Hospital admins care a lot about their patients, and doctors care even more. But if solving all their problems just required installing a few computers, don't you think they'd have done that already?
The biggest problem hospitals have with computers is the system adminstrators they hire. I worked at one of the "10 Best" hospitals in the US recently. Medically speaking they are amazing. (my wife is a doctor for them) But their computer system admins are incredibly incompetent. Worse, they don't seem to be willing/able to pay the bucks for really good help. If you are a good sysadmin and want to make a difference, work for a hospital if you can afford to. Lord knows they need the help.
Isn't HIPPA supposed to protect us from this type of thing?
IANAL but actually no, HIPPA does not cover this. HIPPA simply says don't show stuff to people who aren't directly involved in medical treatment, payment or important administration. These folks are doing a service which is paid for by the hospital and thus can legally look at the documents. Granted it might violates the spirit of the law but as written it is legal.
Plus they are overseas so HIPPA really doesn't apply to them anyway.
Disclosure: I've worked in hospital administration so I've seen this stuff first hand.
Medical service providers are under a lot of pressure to reduce costs. So outsourcing isn't surprising and can work really well. Outside of medicine, hospitals tend to be pretty technically unsophisticated. But there also is the fact that medical organizations tend to be very rigidly heirarchical. Once data or a patient leaves the department, no one cares what happens to it. It's not right, but it is reality. Once you combine the two we have problems. Stuff gets outsourced and no one follows up to find out where to.
There has been a big stink about medical privacy (and rightly so) but in real terms it is not as private as it should be. HIPPA? Please. HIPPA just codifies what medical personnel were supposed to be be doing anyway. And if you think your charts don't get discussed and shared you're kidding yourself. Medical people are some of the most gossipy folks I've ever met.
You do know that the software happily handles mice with a kajillion buttons, they just ship with a single button mouse.
Yes, I know that. Not the point. The point is that I shouldn't have to buy another mouse due to some obsolete interface guideline. Simplicity is a virtue only if it makes things easier. I love Macs, but this is one interface idea I think they are dead wrong about.
Furthermore, while it is a minor limitation on a desktop machine where you can swap mice, it is a major inconvenience on a laptop. Good luck swapping your trackpad button. And no I'm not willing to lug around an external mouse. Defeats the whole point of a portable machine.
Also I cannot believe that Apple still does not ship most of its machines without some sort of mouse wheel device. Those are mandatory as far as I'm concerned. A mouse wheel even passed the mom test in my family. (believe me, that's saying a lot in this case) It makes things easier and doesn't confuse anyone.
There is a reason Apple's sticking to mice with one button. And this is not ment in any condescending way.
Of course they could give two buttons and just default to having them do the same thing via software... It would let those of us with a clue work efficiently and keep it simple for those who can't handle it.
The one button thing is a triumph of dogma over common sense.
Yeah, because there's a huge audience of 3D golf afficiandos with $3300 spare.
You should see the resolution on the 3D golf game I play. The color depth and lighting effects are amazing and you can even *feel* the wind. It's a bit frustrating because it's such a tough game but the realism can't be matched. And it's no trouble at all to find someone to play with a spare $3300. They're more likely to drop it on a new set of clubs though...
I have an question about stocks, as I'm completely financially inept.
I've heard of 'put' options, basically betting that a specific stock is going to fall through the floor. Is it possible for me to buy put options on SCOX and make a shitload of money when their stock drops through the floor?
Several things. I'm not going to try to say everything about options, just answer your question.
First, options aren't stocks. I don't say this to be rude and it seems obvious but people forget it sometimes. Related, yes but they are a completely different animal as far as investing goes.
Second, yes it is possible to make a ton of money with options. It is much more likely that you will lose money on them however. Why? Let me see if I can explain.
A put option is the right, but not the obligation, to sell a stock at a future date for a fixed price. You purchase the option and if the stock moves sufficiently in the correct direction (down in this case), you make a lot of money. Sounds great but it isn't that easy.
What makes it complicated is two things.
Options are a "time-wasting" asset, meaning that they are only valuable until their expiration date. You have to not only be right about the direction the stock moves, but it has to move before the option expires.
The option costs money to buy. Other folks know that there is a value to holding that option and you are charged a price for it based on how likely it is to become profitable. You can buy a put and lo-and-behold the price moves in the right direction but if you pay too much for the option you lose money anyway. This means that you have to be right and someone else (who is probably pretty smart) has to be wrong. Think you know more about this than a professional who does options for a living? Unlikely.
So you have to be right about the direction of the move, the timing of the move, the magnitude of the move, and other investors have to be wrong for you to make money on an option. That's a lot of stuff to get right. For stocks, all you have to do is be right about direction. Most people should stay far away from options unless they work with them professionally or have a lot of experience.
Hehe, a squeeze already happened, when it peaked near $21. That was scary...
Yeah I noticed. Wish I'd bought then...:-) Squeeze risk is why I'm keeping some extra cash on the sidelines. I'm confident this will be a profitable short but don't want to get nailed because some idiots can't do research. If it really gets out of hand, I'll hedge but I'd rather not if I don't have to.
One more thing, short interest is at about 12% of the float. That's a LOT of short interest. Days to cover is something near 30. That means that there are a lot of people convinced the stock will go down but they aren't the ones actually selling. We'll have to wait for the buyers to come to their senses which might take a little while. Normally I wouldn't short a stock with this much short interest but SCO's case is so weak IMO that it's worth the gamble.
It is possible that if the stock price were to spike up dramatically we could see a short squeeze. But it's pretty high IMO already so it doesn't seem too likely.
Hate to break it to you, but more often than not scox goes up on bad news. Remember SCOForum, when scox showed the code, and it was debunked within an hour? Scox share price went up 50%, to about $15/share, in the next trhee sessions. Then the share price went up another 50% to about $20/share in the two weeks or so.
And on September 26 when IBM announced their countersuit SCOX dropped from around $17 to $13.8 a few days later. The difference? The debunking of the code didn't show up on Reuters which investors are far more likely to read than Slashdot. The crowd driving SCOX's price are not likely to be techies and won't be hanging out here. If "news" doesn't show up on the newsfeeds they check, it may as well not have happened. Besides, the only "debunking" that really matters is the one IBM (and RHAT) will do in the courtroom.
.The only reason not to answer that question is that there is no infringing code.
Right... Which is why I wrote "You can argue that they don't deserve such protection anymore because of what they are sueing for (and I wouldn't argue with you over it)..." Apparently that wasn't clear enough. I didn't say it was a logical arguement on SCO's part, just that we shouldn't be surprised that it is happening.
I think it is also funny that they are concerned about "trade secrets" when everyone knows how Unix works. There is no big mystery.
Disclosure IANAL...
Don't be quite so quick to jump on this one. While I agree with you completely in principle, SCO does need to be careful in reality. Trade secrets are just that, secrets. Once they are discovered, they are no longer entitled to trade secret protection, meaning they cannot sue the releasing party if they were released illegally. Typically if there is a real trade secret, most reasonable judges will (rightly) make some accomodations for that fact.
Presumably SCO has a few trade secrets even though you are right that we basically know how all their stuff works. Just because we can figure it out, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't protected as a trade secret. So it's not surprising that they would be careful about trying to ensure they aren't unecessarily made public. Any company with proprietary assets in a legal battle would do the same. You can argue that they don't deserve such protection anymore because of what they are sueing for (and I wouldn't argue with you over it) but you should not be surprised that they are seeking trade secret protection. It's just a normal part of the legal proceedings.
hear hear! And I thought $14.25 was a good price to jump in on a short...
It will be. Just be patient. $14.25 is a P/E of about 80/1. The market is just being (stupidly) speculative right now. I love it when a stock gets unreasonably inflated like this.
Alright! Keep the bad press on SCO coming! The more bad news the faster their stock price drops and the faster my short sale makes money. Buy on rumor, sell on news is the old saying and there has been a lot more rumor than news lately. Outside of/. that is...
Geez, people, do all of you guys file as your own business? Personal taxes are not that hard. At least, not up here in Canada.
Don't know how they do it in Canada but here in the US doing taxes by hand sucks. At least if you have an estate of any real complexity. (i.e. more than a salary and maybe a few stocks) The tax rules are byzantine and the forms make no sense to people with college educations. I have both engineering and business degrees. My wife is a physician. So it's not that we lack the brainpower or skills to figure it out. Despite that we find it *much* easier and faster to either use a piece of software or hire a CPA. It's just not worth the time and aggravation to do it by hand. Think of it as a cost benefit ratio.
If the US government ever simplified their tax code it would kill Turbotax as a product. It's sole use is to make doing taxes easier. Of course I won't be purchasing it this year anyway given last year's debacle...
The problem with shorting the stock is to know WHEN. Unfortunately, no one can read the future, so no matter how certain you are that the ultimate value of SCO stock is some approximation of zero, you can't short on the infinite time. You have to say WHEN, and that's risky.
This is true but it is true of any investment, not just shorting. Granted, shorting has some issues peculiar to that investment strategy but there always are timing issues with any investment. We want to buy low and sell high but how do you know what consitutes "low" and "high"? (or in the case of shorting sell high/buy low) Those are relative factors which change over time.
Now your were pointing out that there is some added risk from shorting due to the fact that most stocks tend to increase in value over time. (which I'm sure you know) So, statistically speaking, time is not likely to be on your side for shorting any randomly chosen stock. True but it's just an added risk beyond the exposure risk that exists with any investment. Time can be your friend but it is a fickle friend sometimes.
My point is that, ultimately, determining what "low" or "high" is comes down to a guess. Preferably a highly informed guess, but a guess nonetheless. For example if you bought long Cisco two years ago and held, you probably aren't really thrilled about that now despite it still being a great company. You just bought at the wrong time. it happens. Much effort is put into strategies to minimize investment timing issues, and sensibly so, but there always is some element of timing to any investment. Long, short, or otherwise.
You can't short a stock that is on the down-tick. SCO's been on it for awhile.
True, you can't short on a down tick, but it hasn't been on a continuous down tick. I shorted it within the past week. Maybe it would be a problem if you want to short a huge number of shares (the float isn't enormous) but you can short SCOX right now if you are so inclined.
Considering their record, no one will loan you the stock to short it even if it is on the uptick...
Don't know where you got this idea but it isn't true. You can easily get the shares.
Slashdot Mirror
Hasn't SCO heard? Never get into a fight with someone who owns a printing press. (forgot who said it) Taking on Hollywood is a great way to get the media to make you look really really bad.
I can't figure out what people are complaining about. It was a great movie, particularly if you consider all three movies to be one story. Granted, you have to like that sort of movie and you have to actually have an attention span, but if you do you should enjoy it. Basically if you like anime movies like Akira or the Gundam Wing series or Marvel's X-men comics (lots of action and some heavy pontificating) it should be right up your alley. I really enjoyed it.
Maybe folks are complaining about the ending. (no I'm not going to give it away) It was surprising and very non-traditional but really good too. I thought it was a great close to the story arc. Leaves future sequels as a possibility too.
Sweet thanks for the info - no why doesn't it come up on ATT under Blue Tooth phones :)
It doesn't seem to be a phone they are pushing. (no idea why, it's a great phone) I found mine in one of AT&T's stores and even got an $80 rebate. I presume you could buy it from Nokia or a vendor (say, Amazon) and use it with AT&T.
One item to consider, you may want to send it off for a firmware upgrade (at least version 5.5) to ensure the bluetooth works smoothly. Took me a while to find out about that.
Try to upgrade the firmware for your 6310i to version 5.5 or above and all the bugs get fixed.
Yeah, that's actually the next thing I was going to do. Unfortunately there is no place in my city that can do it so I have to mail the phone off for a week. Very annoying...
I am very annoyed that Nokia still doesnt have blue tooth in any small form factor phone that I can buy in the US (let alone at AT&T Wireless).
I have Nokia's 6310i and use AT&T Wireless. There are smaller phones, but it's pretty compact, doesn't have a lot of stupid & unnecessary bells & whistles (like a color screen, camera, etc) and has great battery life and reception. I'm pretty happy with it. It's slicker than heck to dial wirelessly.
Only real problem is that Nokia's software for connecting to a laptop sucks sour frog ass. It works for some people but it's very hit/miss and Nokia tells you to try a different bluetooth device if it doesn't work. (my response was uhh no, I think they should make the software work... the device works fine) Fortunately I can work around their software most of the time.
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million. Why didn't they accept?
Because valuing a company is as much art as it is science. Especially for companies like SuSE whose assets are largely intangible. They don't have much in the way of hard assets like manufacturing equipment or buildings. They have no proprietary code to speak of. Their only real assets are their brand name, whatever cash they have and the people they have working for them.
So how do you value that? It's tough. Companies are considered to be worth the present value of all their future cash flows. But how fast is SuSE going to grow? What sort of margins will they pull down? What does the competitive landscape look like? Will they grow steadily or will they grow fast and then slow down? I don't know about you, but my crystal ball isn't that good.
It's not a trivial problem to value a company. You can't answer it just by checking their market capitalization. That's just the market's current concensus on the value of the equity in the company. But debt holder, preferred stock holders and the government (taxes) all have claims to the cash flows of the company that come before the common stockholders. And the market doesn't even get the equity part right all the time. Witness the recent tech bubble bursting.
So in short, there probably was a difference of opinion on the valuation. If I think my business is worth $150 million and you think it's worth $100 million, who is right? Hard to say. It's also possible that they didn't sell just because the key shareholders didn't like the buyer. Happens all the time. Maybe the terms of the deal weren't good. If I'm the buyer and Novell is offering me stock, I'm going to think about it real hard. Novell's stock isn't exactly blue-chip. What happens if I sell and Novell tanks? Could be SuSE management wanted cash and Novell wasn't offering.
In short there are lot of reasons why it fell through. Some reasons are very sensible, some aren't. Why they turned them down? I have no idea, but I can think of a lot of possible reasons.
I've yet to meet an intelligent person who bought something off a spam.
I've never seen anyone in the act of purchasing the National Enquirer either but obviously it must happen. Frequently.
Not sure if that's funny or depressing...
I think hospitals need to get off their high horse and get real here. People would be much better off if hospitals had more computers. I mean this isn't the 1800's. Doctors are allowed to use computers too aren't they?
To paraphrase Jamie Zawinsky (sp?), computers aren't magic pixie dust. Without exagerating at all, hospitals are among the most complex organizations you will ever run across. Did you know there are about 50 steps to just performing an Xray? And most of those steps have nothing to do with computers and never will. Medicine is really hard to simplify. I've spent a lot of time in manufacturing as well as healthcare and I promise you, the manufacturing guys have it easy.
Anyway just installing a few computers isn't going to solve the problems. Hospitals have lots of computers and use them pretty heavily. But computers are not reliable enough for some purposes. (yet) Patient records are not typically kept on computers in part because people would die if the power went out. Are mistakes made? You bet. Plenty of them. But that has more to do with the complexity of the task and the management systems than anything else. Computers are not some magical cure-all. Hospital admins care a lot about their patients, and doctors care even more. But if solving all their problems just required installing a few computers, don't you think they'd have done that already?
The biggest problem hospitals have with computers is the system adminstrators they hire. I worked at one of the "10 Best" hospitals in the US recently. Medically speaking they are amazing. (my wife is a doctor for them) But their computer system admins are incredibly incompetent. Worse, they don't seem to be willing/able to pay the bucks for really good help. If you are a good sysadmin and want to make a difference, work for a hospital if you can afford to. Lord knows they need the help.
Isn't HIPPA supposed to protect us from this type of thing?
IANAL but actually no, HIPPA does not cover this. HIPPA simply says don't show stuff to people who aren't directly involved in medical treatment, payment or important administration. These folks are doing a service which is paid for by the hospital and thus can legally look at the documents. Granted it might violates the spirit of the law but as written it is legal.
Plus they are overseas so HIPPA really doesn't apply to them anyway.
Disclosure: I've worked in hospital administration so I've seen this stuff first hand.
Medical service providers are under a lot of pressure to reduce costs. So outsourcing isn't surprising and can work really well. Outside of medicine, hospitals tend to be pretty technically unsophisticated. But there also is the fact that medical organizations tend to be very rigidly heirarchical. Once data or a patient leaves the department, no one cares what happens to it. It's not right, but it is reality. Once you combine the two we have problems. Stuff gets outsourced and no one follows up to find out where to.
There has been a big stink about medical privacy (and rightly so) but in real terms it is not as private as it should be. HIPPA? Please. HIPPA just codifies what medical personnel were supposed to be be doing anyway. And if you think your charts don't get discussed and shared you're kidding yourself. Medical people are some of the most gossipy folks I've ever met.
You do know that the software happily handles mice with a kajillion buttons, they just ship with a single button mouse.
Yes, I know that. Not the point. The point is that I shouldn't have to buy another mouse due to some obsolete interface guideline. Simplicity is a virtue only if it makes things easier. I love Macs, but this is one interface idea I think they are dead wrong about.
Furthermore, while it is a minor limitation on a desktop machine where you can swap mice, it is a major inconvenience on a laptop. Good luck swapping your trackpad button. And no I'm not willing to lug around an external mouse. Defeats the whole point of a portable machine.
Also I cannot believe that Apple still does not ship most of its machines without some sort of mouse wheel device. Those are mandatory as far as I'm concerned. A mouse wheel even passed the mom test in my family. (believe me, that's saying a lot in this case) It makes things easier and doesn't confuse anyone.
There is a reason Apple's sticking to mice with one button. And this is not ment in any condescending way.
Of course they could give two buttons and just default to having them do the same thing via software... It would let those of us with a clue work efficiently and keep it simple for those who can't handle it.
The one button thing is a triumph of dogma over common sense.
Yeah, because there's a huge audience of 3D golf afficiandos with $3300 spare.
You should see the resolution on the 3D golf game I play. The color depth and lighting effects are amazing and you can even *feel* the wind. It's a bit frustrating because it's such a tough game but the realism can't be matched. And it's no trouble at all to find someone to play with a spare $3300. They're more likely to drop it on a new set of clubs though...
I've heard of 'put' options, basically betting that a specific stock is going to fall through the floor. Is it possible for me to buy put options on SCOX and make a shitload of money when their stock drops through the floor?
Several things. I'm not going to try to say everything about options, just answer your question.
First, options aren't stocks. I don't say this to be rude and it seems obvious but people forget it sometimes. Related, yes but they are a completely different animal as far as investing goes.
Second, yes it is possible to make a ton of money with options. It is much more likely that you will lose money on them however. Why? Let me see if I can explain.
A put option is the right, but not the obligation, to sell a stock at a future date for a fixed price. You purchase the option and if the stock moves sufficiently in the correct direction (down in this case), you make a lot of money. Sounds great but it isn't that easy.
What makes it complicated is two things.
So you have to be right about the direction of the move, the timing of the move, the magnitude of the move, and other investors have to be wrong for you to make money on an option. That's a lot of stuff to get right. For stocks, all you have to do is be right about direction. Most people should stay far away from options unless they work with them professionally or have a lot of experience.
Hehe, a squeeze already happened, when it peaked near $21. That was scary...
:-) Squeeze risk is why I'm keeping some extra cash on the sidelines. I'm confident this will be a profitable short but don't want to get nailed because some idiots can't do research. If it really gets out of hand, I'll hedge but I'd rather not if I don't have to.
Yeah I noticed. Wish I'd bought then...
One more thing, short interest is at about 12% of the float. That's a LOT of short interest. Days to cover is something near 30. That means that there are a lot of people convinced the stock will go down but they aren't the ones actually selling. We'll have to wait for the buyers to come to their senses which might take a little while. Normally I wouldn't short a stock with this much short interest but SCO's case is so weak IMO that it's worth the gamble.
It is possible that if the stock price were to spike up dramatically we could see a short squeeze. But it's pretty high IMO already so it doesn't seem too likely.
Hate to break it to you, but more often than not scox goes up on bad news. Remember SCOForum, when scox showed the code, and it was debunked within an hour? Scox share price went up 50%, to about $15/share, in the next trhee sessions. Then the share price went up another 50% to about $20/share in the two weeks or so.
And on September 26 when IBM announced their countersuit SCOX dropped from around $17 to $13.8 a few days later. The difference? The debunking of the code didn't show up on Reuters which investors are far more likely to read than Slashdot. The crowd driving SCOX's price are not likely to be techies and won't be hanging out here. If "news" doesn't show up on the newsfeeds they check, it may as well not have happened. Besides, the only "debunking" that really matters is the one IBM (and RHAT) will do in the courtroom.
.The only reason not to answer that question is that there is no infringing code.
Right... Which is why I wrote "You can argue that they don't deserve such protection anymore because of what they are sueing for (and I wouldn't argue with you over it)..." Apparently that wasn't clear enough. I didn't say it was a logical arguement on SCO's part, just that we shouldn't be surprised that it is happening.
I think it is also funny that they are concerned about "trade secrets" when everyone knows how Unix works. There is no big mystery.
Disclosure IANAL...
Don't be quite so quick to jump on this one. While I agree with you completely in principle, SCO does need to be careful in reality. Trade secrets are just that, secrets. Once they are discovered, they are no longer entitled to trade secret protection, meaning they cannot sue the releasing party if they were released illegally. Typically if there is a real trade secret, most reasonable judges will (rightly) make some accomodations for that fact.
Presumably SCO has a few trade secrets even though you are right that we basically know how all their stuff works. Just because we can figure it out, doesn't necessarily mean it isn't protected as a trade secret. So it's not surprising that they would be careful about trying to ensure they aren't unecessarily made public. Any company with proprietary assets in a legal battle would do the same. You can argue that they don't deserve such protection anymore because of what they are sueing for (and I wouldn't argue with you over it) but you should not be surprised that they are seeking trade secret protection. It's just a normal part of the legal proceedings.
hear hear! And I thought $14.25 was a good price to jump in on a short...
It will be. Just be patient. $14.25 is a P/E of about 80/1. The market is just being (stupidly) speculative right now. I love it when a stock gets unreasonably inflated like this.
Alright! Keep the bad press on SCO coming! The more bad news the faster their stock price drops and the faster my short sale makes money. Buy on rumor, sell on news is the old saying and there has been a lot more rumor than news lately. Outside of /. that is...
Geez, people, do all of you guys file as your own business? Personal taxes are not that hard. At least, not up here in Canada.
Don't know how they do it in Canada but here in the US doing taxes by hand sucks. At least if you have an estate of any real complexity. (i.e. more than a salary and maybe a few stocks) The tax rules are byzantine and the forms make no sense to people with college educations. I have both engineering and business degrees. My wife is a physician. So it's not that we lack the brainpower or skills to figure it out. Despite that we find it *much* easier and faster to either use a piece of software or hire a CPA. It's just not worth the time and aggravation to do it by hand. Think of it as a cost benefit ratio.
If the US government ever simplified their tax code it would kill Turbotax as a product. It's sole use is to make doing taxes easier. Of course I won't be purchasing it this year anyway given last year's debacle...
I just tell anyone who needs any work done from me to file it in our intranet bugzilla site. Tracks status, assignment, etc.
My computer's down...
The problem with shorting the stock is to know WHEN. Unfortunately, no one can read the future, so no matter how certain you are that the ultimate value of SCO stock is some approximation of zero, you can't short on the infinite time. You have to say WHEN, and that's risky.
This is true but it is true of any investment, not just shorting. Granted, shorting has some issues peculiar to that investment strategy but there always are timing issues with any investment. We want to buy low and sell high but how do you know what consitutes "low" and "high"? (or in the case of shorting sell high/buy low) Those are relative factors which change over time.
Now your were pointing out that there is some added risk from shorting due to the fact that most stocks tend to increase in value over time. (which I'm sure you know) So, statistically speaking, time is not likely to be on your side for shorting any randomly chosen stock. True but it's just an added risk beyond the exposure risk that exists with any investment. Time can be your friend but it is a fickle friend sometimes.
My point is that, ultimately, determining what "low" or "high" is comes down to a guess. Preferably a highly informed guess, but a guess nonetheless. For example if you bought long Cisco two years ago and held, you probably aren't really thrilled about that now despite it still being a great company. You just bought at the wrong time. it happens. Much effort is put into strategies to minimize investment timing issues, and sensibly so, but there always is some element of timing to any investment. Long, short, or otherwise.
You can't short a stock that is on the down-tick. SCO's been on it for awhile.
True, you can't short on a down tick, but it hasn't been on a continuous down tick. I shorted it within the past week. Maybe it would be a problem if you want to short a huge number of shares (the float isn't enormous) but you can short SCOX right now if you are so inclined.
Considering their record, no one will loan you the stock to short it even if it is on the uptick...
Don't know where you got this idea but it isn't true. You can easily get the shares.