1....Contributor lists from major Linux or related open source projects. These projects included Debian, KDE, GNOME, GTK+, Python the GIMP and many others.
So, I didn't get the letter from VA, even though they should have found my address from both GVoice and GStreamer in the GNOME software map. I'm actively hacking on GStreamer right now, with the thing pushing 17,000 lines in 0.0.9 alone. The goal is to provide functionality similar to DirectShow, and is based on research I'm involved in at work. I would have thought that I'm exactly the type of person VA would be looking for. Maybe not.
It's possible that they haven't gotten around to sending one to me yet, as I'm in the W's (they're working alphabetically, according to someone's comment), but that doesn't seem likely.
Not exactly. If you read Unisys' page carefully, you'll find that it's a slick, rather transparent way of saying the following:
"If you use GIF in *ANY* way (software, or just posting GIFs on your site), you must have the license covered. If all the software used to create/edit/view your GIFs is licensed, you're covered. If not, we can/will sue you upside-down and sideways. Just to be safe, why don't you give us $5000 anyway so we'll leave you alone."
This is called a "racket", boys and girls. If tested in court, Unisys would go down in flames. Would someone please bother to take these dumbasses to task on this crap?
And NO, I will NOT stop using GIFs just because Unisys thinks they own them. They're good for a fair number of things, and globally readable. PNG isn't (yet...).
Gee. I got mine at 10:30. It had the same originating timestamp as yours, +- a few seconds. And here's the cool part: the Alert didn't show up until the mail did. WTF? Obviously the Alert is somehow tied to the Exchange server in question (which is a pile of crap, as we all know). Is that stupid, or did the universe just invert?
I talked to several people at E*Trade, they said I simply didn't get the shares. I asked if the DSP hadn't happened yet, they said yeah, right. I'm calling them again to get someone else on the phone, see if I get a different answer (E*Trade is getting very good at that).
There have been about a hundered comments explaining the lottery system, why don't you read them.
The math works out thusly:
shared allocated to DSP: 800,000
number of 'invitations': I've heard a max of 5000, roughly
round-robin method for DSP allocation assigns 100 shares at a time to all comers down the list until shares are gone That means that every single one of the people on the DSP list (and I guarantee you a fraction of those have money to invest) should have at a minimum 100 shares.
Note that this information comes from E*Trade's website, as well as the invitation letter. If the shares are allocated round-robin, as they purport on their website, then everyone who wanted them within the DSP program should have some at $14.
I dragged my night-owl ass out of bed this morning at 7:00 AM so that I could get on the Net and the phone. I reconfirmed my order. I would like to have done it on the Internet, but there is no screen anywhere even to display my order! e*trade's rep could not tell me if my order from yesterday (after the price bump) was still effective or not!
I never even bothered to ask if it was still effective. I figured not, given past history. I did find the screen to re-submit the offer, but I couldn't tell you where it is. You wouldn't believe (or maybe you would) the kind of runaround you have to do in many parts of E*Trade's site...
He took a new order. I hope he marked it "Directed Shares Program" as I stated at the beginning, middle, and end. I suppose if it wasn't DSP, he wouldn't even be talking to me.
Most likely. That's good advice for anyone still trying to get their offer taken care of, but only for DSP people. Don't try it otherwise, you'll likely get bumped off E*Trade, not just the IPO. But yes, make sure they know you're in the DSP.
To the e*trade guy that is here asking that we not slashdot the e*trade reps: put up some better news on your site already. An "IPO HOWTO" would help, too.
They have an IPO HOWTO. Due to the fact that their site is a piece of s**t, I can't get to it right now, but I did read most of it, and it covers absolutely nothing about these kind of games (whether they're a lottery or just play E*Trade screwing around, I don't care at this point). As I told an E*Trade rep, incomplete information is worse than no information at all. At least if there's no information, you're forced to look elsewhere. The HOWTO they have looks so very much like a "complete" picture of the IPO process that I naively figured that it was telling the truth, and I wouldn't have to worry excessively about this. E*Trade: either fix/complete the damn thing, or take it down.
a) have been around long enough to understand the way these things work
Can you say 'old-boy network'? This is not a reason to screw people. It occurs to me that the stock market is dependent on people to trade. If they aren't allowed to trade, the market tanks. If one must have experience in trading in order to be allowed to trade, then the market is going to run out of people one of these days.
Yes, I know these restrictions are specifically for IPOs, but E*Trade is going way above and beyond the normal call of duty in trying to kick off anyone and everyone they can from this IPO. 20 minute windows, massive amounts of double-talk (one phone rep says one thing, another something else) and mis-information. Sounds a bit fishy to me.
b) won't feel screwed and start looking for revenge if they miss the window on this one specific equity.
This is definitely a legitimate concern, but consider the laws involved. They will have excercised "due diligence" by having people fill out that form, even if they didn't try to lock out people that didn't fit their little (big?) profile. If someone attacks them, the law is fully capable of screwing them into the ground, and believe me, E*Trade has enough weight to get law-enforcement to do that.
But your point appears to be that people might get pissed if they miss the window. Well, lots of people will have missed the window by the time this thing hits the market. If they want to get people pissed enough to potentially break the law, they're doing a damned good job of it.
Urm.... Responding to my own post, but it appear to be etrade.com site flakiness. The Alerts box is now saying "Unable to retrieve messages" on me. Wow, I didn't know I was going to have this much fun today. I thought 6am would kill it for me.
Has anyone else noticed that the real-time quotes on RHAT are returning Data is not available every once in a while? Any idea if this is an indication of their DB doing some work with NASDAQ, or just more etrade.com site flakiness?
Oh, I'm "fine", I have been up since 6am reloading etrade about 20 times faster than I've ever reloaded slashdot, so I got in. But note (read all the comments) that only a fraction (%50) are even getting the Alerts, and the majority of those are very late. I have yet to get any Alerts (since 10:09 last night), any email triggered by alerts, any mail from E*Trade saying "oops, here's another few minutes", nor any calls or v-mail from them./p.
I'm sure there is come legal requirement for this, but it seems rather fucked.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm going to call the SEC when this settles out, and see what they have to say about this. It seems that E*Trade has done everything in their power to screw the "little guys", as represented in this case by the vast majority of those targetted for the Directed Shares program. Which parts of it are SEC regulation and which are E*Trade fabrication, I'm not sure, but I intend to find out.
No clue, and good luck getting the bastards @ E*Trade to tell you, or even guess. I was told by one guy that "it's usually priced around 11 or 12am" for IPOs. Dunno if that means it starts trading then, or what. It's not trading yet, unless E*Trade has messed with their real-time quotes as well. Would I be surprised? No.
Just curious, if you don't mind, how much are you worth at E*Trade, by order of magnitude? The last E*Trade guy I talked to tried to cast E*Trade in a decent light by claiming that with "those full-service brokerages" you only get their ear if you've got $10^5 or so. I most certainly did not get a phone call. I didn't even get half the Alerts I was supposed to. My last alert is from 10:09 last night stating that you must resubmit a conditional offer. No alert about the thing opening up, no alert on the pricing of the offer, etc. I'm weighing in on E*Trade at exactly $10K. Does that make me a small-fry not worthy of any attention by E*Trade? Or just amazingly unlucky?
Ditto. I was reloading the Alerts box every couple minutes, never came. Reloaded the IPO center every 10 or so, managed to see the message there. Just checked my Alerts box again, nothing at all.
Oh, BTW: You have to explicitly configure the thing to send alerts to your email addr, as if it were some special feature. If you don't do that, you get Alerts in the Alerts box only.
I just called E*Trade to re-submit my conditional offer, and was told yet again that this is not a "normal" IPO, whatever that means. The guy I was talking to said that the opening to resubmit the conditional offer had just closed (this maybe 20 minutes after it showed up on the site). Supposedly (at least from this guy) the 2hr window has nothing to do with what's happening right now. Paraphrasing him: "If you're not in now, you're not in." Whatever. I'm in.
WARNING! E*Trade is playing one last trick. If the stock prices outside of the "original $10-$12 range", everyone is being forced to re-sumbit their conditional order. That means you may have as little as, say, 30min (never more than 2hrs, so say the critters at E*Trade) to actually call them and re-submit it.
ELSE YOU DON'T GET YOUR STOCK!
The Slashdot people seem to be completely dropping the numerous e-mails I've been sending them, which is why I'm posting a comment here, in case anyone is still reading this. Hopefully it will show on the main page soon. If you see this, poke at the Slashdot guys so we can get this info on the front page ASAP!
I did a bit of research, and for the past couple months, all the IPOs I checked on opened very close to their maximum expected offer price. The worst case was a spread of $5: max expected $25, opened at $30. Then there was one at $-7;-)
I'm not too worried about the price being significantly different than the expected range, nevertheless I've set a max price on my indication at $20, since I've only got $10K in that account. I did suddenly realize that I need to lower the share count frmo 500 to 498 so I can cover the commission.... D'oh. Not quite prepared/able to sell my SQNT stock (stupid forms) yet, and I'm not sure I want to. SQNT turns into IBM soon;-)
Actually, IIS on NT handles more big sites than Linux does. MSNBC is the number one news site on the net, whomps slashdot by several orders of magnitude, and it runs on IIS.
Reality check!!!:
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.209 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.213 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.249 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.250 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.251 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.201 msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.205
slashdot.org. 1H IN A 206.170.14.75
Have you seen what M$ recommends for a large site? They suggest using a cluster of quad-proc systems to support what a properly set up Linux machine can do with one. The smallest recommended IIS installation costs upwards of $250,000, software not included.
Comparing a dual PII with 7 quad Xeons will not give you adequate information about the software running them, nor the load being generated. Slashdot generates quite a bit of load for every page, and handles it all locally. MSNBC uses something like 20 times the hardware to provide the web serving and ASP. The database is likely stored on another half-dozen machines we can't even see.
After discovering that the "Customer service page" returned some error or another, I tried going to www.toysrus.com, but typed a little to fast and got to www.toyrus.com. Now, www.toyrus.com is owned by a company called '37' or somesuch, which points the browser directly at 37.com, which is "the worlds fastest, most complete search engine".
Obviously 37.com is not a toy company, or in any way related to toys, but at the very least it's not exactly the most honest way to get hits. And if I were Toys 'R' Us, I'd take offense just at the claim they make of being the fastest/'completest' engine out there, which is a blatantly false claim.
If I could actually get to the Toys 'R' Us Customer Service page, I would make myself very clear that when it comes time to shop for toys (no kids, no plans, but one of these days...), this little incident will most definitely impact whether or not I go to Toys 'R' Us.
I would urge Gus to not back down, as I see no legal reason for him to give up his domain. Specifically, the letter from Darby & Darby (rather lame name, don't you think?) mentions that Toys 'R' Us has a series of "'R' Us marks". Am I the only one noticing that Gus is using "'R' Gus"??? And what if his last name were Argus???? (yeah, dumb, but possible)
It's hard to hide my disgust at these kind of tactics, and I'm rather annoyed that Gus is backing down. Perhaps we can convince him not to back down so easily, and write to Toys 'R' Us in quantity sufficient to get their attention...
Slashdot Mirror
1. ...Contributor lists from major Linux or related open source projects. These projects included Debian, KDE, GNOME, GTK+, Python the GIMP and many others.
So, I didn't get the letter from VA, even though they should have found my address from both GVoice and GStreamer in the GNOME software map. I'm actively hacking on GStreamer right now, with the thing pushing 17,000 lines in 0.0.9 alone. The goal is to provide functionality similar to DirectShow, and is based on research I'm involved in at work. I would have thought that I'm exactly the type of person VA would be looking for. Maybe not.
It's possible that they haven't gotten around to sending one to me yet, as I'm in the W's (they're working alphabetically, according to someone's comment), but that doesn't seem likely.
Not exactly. If you read Unisys' page carefully, you'll find that it's a slick, rather transparent way of saying the following:
"If you use GIF in *ANY* way (software, or just posting GIFs on your site), you must have the license covered. If all the software used to create/edit/view your GIFs is licensed, you're covered. If not, we can/will sue you upside-down and sideways. Just to be safe, why don't you give us $5000 anyway so we'll leave you alone."
This is called a "racket", boys and girls. If tested in court, Unisys would go down in flames. Would someone please bother to take these dumbasses to task on this crap?
And NO, I will NOT stop using GIFs just because Unisys thinks they own them. They're good for a fair number of things, and globally readable. PNG isn't (yet...).
Gee. I got mine at 10:30. It had the same originating timestamp as yours, +- a few seconds. And here's the cool part: the Alert didn't show up until the mail did. WTF? Obviously the Alert is somehow tied to the Exchange server in question (which is a pile of crap, as we all know). Is that stupid, or did the universe just invert?
I talked to several people at E*Trade, they said I simply didn't get the shares. I asked if the DSP hadn't happened yet, they said yeah, right. I'm calling them again to get someone else on the phone, see if I get a different answer (E*Trade is getting very good at that).
I want to know, did anyone actually get any shares, or are the reports I'm seeing about the DSP shares not being allocated at all correct?
There have been about a hundered comments explaining the lottery system, why don't you read them.
The math works out thusly:
Note that this information comes from E*Trade's website, as well as the invitation letter. If the shares are allocated round-robin, as they purport on their website, then everyone who wanted them within the DSP program should have some at $14.
It's trading at 42!!!!
I dragged my night-owl ass out of bed this morning at 7:00 AM so that I could get on the Net and the phone. I reconfirmed my order. I would like to have done it on the Internet, but there is no screen anywhere even to display my order! e*trade's rep could not tell me if my order from yesterday (after the price bump) was still effective or not!
I never even bothered to ask if it was still effective. I figured not, given past history. I did find the screen to re-submit the offer, but I couldn't tell you where it is. You wouldn't believe (or maybe you would) the kind of runaround you have to do in many parts of E*Trade's site...
He took a new order. I hope he marked it "Directed Shares Program" as I stated at the beginning, middle, and end. I suppose if it wasn't DSP, he wouldn't even be talking to me.
Most likely. That's good advice for anyone still trying to get their offer taken care of, but only for DSP people. Don't try it otherwise, you'll likely get bumped off E*Trade, not just the IPO. But yes, make sure they know you're in the DSP.
To the e*trade guy that is here asking that we not slashdot the e*trade reps: put up some better news on your site already. An "IPO HOWTO" would help, too.
They have an IPO HOWTO. Due to the fact that their site is a piece of s**t, I can't get to it right now, but I did read most of it, and it covers absolutely nothing about these kind of games (whether they're a lottery or just play E*Trade screwing around, I don't care at this point). As I told an E*Trade rep, incomplete information is worse than no information at all. At least if there's no information, you're forced to look elsewhere. The HOWTO they have looks so very much like a "complete" picture of the IPO process that I naively figured that it was telling the truth, and I wouldn't have to worry excessively about this. E*Trade: either fix/complete the damn thing, or take it down.
a) have been around long enough to understand the way these things work
Can you say 'old-boy network'? This is not a reason to screw people. It occurs to me that the stock market is dependent on people to trade. If they aren't allowed to trade, the market tanks. If one must have experience in trading in order to be allowed to trade, then the market is going to run out of people one of these days.
Yes, I know these restrictions are specifically for IPOs, but E*Trade is going way above and beyond the normal call of duty in trying to kick off anyone and everyone they can from this IPO. 20 minute windows, massive amounts of double-talk (one phone rep says one thing, another something else) and mis-information. Sounds a bit fishy to me.
b) won't feel screwed and start looking for revenge if they miss the window on this one specific equity.
This is definitely a legitimate concern, but consider the laws involved. They will have excercised "due diligence" by having people fill out that form, even if they didn't try to lock out people that didn't fit their little (big?) profile. If someone attacks them, the law is fully capable of screwing them into the ground, and believe me, E*Trade has enough weight to get law-enforcement to do that.
But your point appears to be that people might get pissed if they miss the window. Well, lots of people will have missed the window by the time this thing hits the market. If they want to get people pissed enough to potentially break the law, they're doing a damned good job of it.
Urm.... Responding to my own post, but it appear to be etrade.com site flakiness. The Alerts box is now saying "Unable to retrieve messages" on me. Wow, I didn't know I was going to have this much fun today. I thought 6am would kill it for me.
Has anyone else noticed that the real-time quotes on RHAT are returning Data is not available every once in a while? Any idea if this is an indication of their DB doing some work with NASDAQ, or just more etrade.com site flakiness?
So read your email before you think your SOL.
Oh, I'm "fine", I have been up since 6am reloading etrade about 20 times faster than I've ever reloaded slashdot, so I got in. But note (read all the comments) that only a fraction (%50) are even getting the Alerts, and the majority of those are very late. I have yet to get any Alerts (since 10:09 last night), any email triggered by alerts, any mail from E*Trade saying "oops, here's another few minutes", nor any calls or v-mail from them./p.
I'm sure there is come legal requirement for this, but it seems rather fucked.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm going to call the SEC when this settles out, and see what they have to say about this. It seems that E*Trade has done everything in their power to screw the "little guys", as represented in this case by the vast majority of those targetted for the Directed Shares program. Which parts of it are SEC regulation and which are E*Trade fabrication, I'm not sure, but I intend to find out.
No clue, and good luck getting the bastards @ E*Trade to tell you, or even guess. I was told by one guy that "it's usually priced around 11 or 12am" for IPOs. Dunno if that means it starts trading then, or what. It's not trading yet, unless E*Trade has messed with their real-time quotes as well. Would I be surprised? No.
Just curious, if you don't mind, how much are you worth at E*Trade, by order of magnitude? The last E*Trade guy I talked to tried to cast E*Trade in a decent light by claiming that with "those full-service brokerages" you only get their ear if you've got $10^5 or so. I most certainly did not get a phone call. I didn't even get half the Alerts I was supposed to. My last alert is from 10:09 last night stating that you must resubmit a conditional offer. No alert about the thing opening up, no alert on the pricing of the offer, etc. I'm weighing in on E*Trade at exactly $10K. Does that make me a small-fry not worthy of any attention by E*Trade? Or just amazingly unlucky?
Ditto. I was reloading the Alerts box every couple minutes, never came. Reloaded the IPO center every 10 or so, managed to see the message there. Just checked my Alerts box again, nothing at all.
Oh, BTW: You have to explicitly configure the thing to send alerts to your email addr, as if it were some special feature. If you don't do that, you get Alerts in the Alerts box only.
E*Trade is not winning any friends here.
I just called E*Trade to re-submit my conditional offer, and was told yet again that this is not a "normal" IPO, whatever that means. The guy I was talking to said that the opening to resubmit the conditional offer had just closed (this maybe 20 minutes after it showed up on the site). Supposedly (at least from this guy) the 2hr window has nothing to do with what's happening right now. Paraphrasing him: "If you're not in now, you're not in." Whatever. I'm in.
WARNING! E*Trade is playing one last trick. If the stock prices outside of the "original $10-$12 range", everyone is being forced to re-sumbit their conditional order. That means you may have as little as, say, 30min (never more than 2hrs, so say the critters at E*Trade) to actually call them and re-submit it.
ELSE YOU DON'T GET YOUR STOCK!
The Slashdot people seem to be completely dropping the numerous e-mails I've been sending them, which is why I'm posting a comment here, in case anyone is still reading this. Hopefully it will show on the main page soon. If you see this, poke at the Slashdot guys so we can get this info on the front page ASAP!
I did a bit of research, and for the past couple months, all the IPOs I checked on opened very close to their maximum expected offer price. The worst case was a spread of $5: max expected $25, opened at $30. Then there was one at $-7 ;-)
;-)
I'm not too worried about the price being significantly different than the expected range, nevertheless I've set a max price on my indication at $20, since I've only got $10K in that account. I did suddenly realize that I need to lower the share count frmo 500 to 498 so I can cover the commission.... D'oh. Not quite prepared/able to sell my SQNT stock (stupid forms) yet, and I'm not sure I want to. SQNT turns into IBM soon
Actually, IIS on NT handles more big sites than Linux does. MSNBC is the number one news site on the net, whomps slashdot by several orders of magnitude, and it runs on IIS.
Reality check!!!:
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.209msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.213
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.249
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.250
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.148.251
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.201
msnbc.com. 1H IN A 207.46.150.205
slashdot.org. 1H IN A 206.170.14.75
Have you seen what M$ recommends for a large site? They suggest using a cluster of quad-proc systems to support what a properly set up Linux machine can do with one. The smallest recommended IIS installation costs upwards of $250,000, software not included.
Comparing a dual PII with 7 quad Xeons will not give you adequate information about the software running them, nor the load being generated. Slashdot generates quite a bit of load for every page, and handles it all locally. MSNBC uses something like 20 times the hardware to provide the web serving and ASP. The database is likely stored on another half-dozen machines we can't even see.
After discovering that the "Customer service page" returned some error or another, I tried going to www.toysrus.com, but typed a little to fast and got to www.toyrus.com. Now, www.toyrus.com is owned by a company called '37' or somesuch, which points the browser directly at 37.com, which is "the worlds fastest, most complete search engine".
Obviously 37.com is not a toy company, or in any way related to toys, but at the very least it's not exactly the most honest way to get hits. And if I were Toys 'R' Us, I'd take offense just at the claim they make of being the fastest/'completest' engine out there, which is a blatantly false claim.
If I could actually get to the Toys 'R' Us Customer Service page, I would make myself very clear that when it comes time to shop for toys (no kids, no plans, but one of these days...), this little incident will most definitely impact whether or not I go to Toys 'R' Us.
I would urge Gus to not back down, as I see no legal reason for him to give up his domain. Specifically, the letter from Darby & Darby (rather lame name, don't you think?) mentions that Toys 'R' Us has a series of "'R' Us marks". Am I the only one noticing that Gus is using "'R' Gus"??? And what if his last name were Argus???? (yeah, dumb, but possible)
It's hard to hide my disgust at these kind of tactics, and I'm rather annoyed that Gus is backing down. Perhaps we can convince him not to back down so easily, and write to Toys 'R' Us in quantity sufficient to get their attention...