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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (158724)	2/14/2002 8:57:39 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

A Congressional bill introduced Wednesday could dampen the technology industry's widespread reliance on stock options. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., introduced Senate Bill 1940 in order to "plug a corporate tax loophole" that allows companies to claim large tax deductions without declaring the cost as an expense on earnings statements. Co-sponsors of the bill, which must first get approval from the Senate Committee on Finance as well as the House of Representatives and ultimately the president, include Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill.; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; and Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn. Supporters say the bill, if passed, would require companies to make accounting changes that would result in clearer annual earnings reports.... ...Microsoft would have posted $5 billion in net profits last year if it accounted for the stock options-based compensation in their actual earnings, as opposed to the $7.3 billion it reported without having to account for the options. And Intel may well have reported a loss. Note that Intel "bought back" 133 million shares last year, while the number of shares outstanding dropped by only 25 million. Which may indicate that 108 million shares (at a cost of about $3.2 Billion dollars) were "off earnings statement" costs. Claimed earnings before taxes for Intel were $2.2 Billion, but that's without including their "off earnings statement" costs. Expect to see some comparisons of earnings under pre-enron rules and post-enron rules. Which could show that Intel has been losing money - and that's without taking into account the increased valuation they've been assuming for their PP&E even while the market value of that PP&E and the revenue it can generate has been falling.

To: Dan3 who wrote (158724)	2/14/2002 11:27:58 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Wintel boxes haven't been stable under high load for extended periods of time. SUNs are. It's primarily a function of the OS and the drivers, but it remains the case. Companies with IT people that know what they are doing get them stable. But wintel has a long way to go to catch up to the RAS SUN has had for 10 years. Sure, the best known RAS hardware feature of them all, ECC (on L2 cache) was not implemented by Sun until alpha particles brought a bunch of their USII servers to their knees 2 years ago. And then they tried to stonewall it and threatened their customers to boot. What a hoot. Oops, there are rhyme cops out there!

To: Dan3 who wrote (158724)	2/14/2002 12:57:46 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 186894

Dan - re:"But wintel has a long way to go to catch up to the RAS SUN has had for 10 years. " Sun has deplorable RAS numbers. Their field availability is less than 98% on the UE10000 and UE6500, even when the failures caused by poorly manufactured I/O subsystems are removed. That particular problem caused field availability to fall to 95% for UE6500 and 97% for UE10000... by comparison, servers running NT4 have consistently demonstrated better than 98.5% availability, and Win2K servers better than 99%. So basically, your claim is nonsense. By the way, Sun did not HAVE any server products 10 years ago, so how could they have a 10 year history??? Their first server products were introduced about 9 years ago, and as a user of a Sun 490 I can tell you that the reliability was not something that you would have wanted to highlight. After almost a year of trying to get the systems stable, we replaced them with HP 9000 systems which had great reliability. Sun likes to pretend that they have a long history in the enterprise, and great RAS, but it is pure BS. They had nothing of enterprise class until they bought the technology from Cray which became the UE10000, and they didn't know enough to field that machine with the kind of enterprise features that were needed - Cray, after all, filled a niche market with different requirements. Non-ECC cache, the multiple failure modalities in the IO subsystems, and a host of other issues continue to plague Sun today. They had a nice run in workstations though...