Dell Settles With the SEC For $100M 239
Sri.Theo writes in with news of Dell's humbling settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The core of the complaint is that Dell took secret payments from Intel to keep AMD's chips out of Dell's machines. The SEC calls it "accounting irregularities" — Dell was dipping into this secret slush fund to bolster its results, quarter by quarter. At one point the payments from Intel made up 76% of Dell's quarterly operating income. "For years, Dell's seemingly magical power to squeeze efficiencies out of its supply chain and drive down costs made it a darling of the financial markets. Now it appears that the magic was at least partly the result of a huge financial illusion. ... According to the commission, Dell would have missed analysts' earnings expectations in every quarter between 2002 and 2006 were it not for accounting shenanigans. ... (Intel is expected to settle a long-running anti-trust case that has highlighted these payments in the next couple of weeks.) ... Michael Dell... and Kevin Rollins, a former boss of the company, agreed to each pay a $4m penalty without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations."
dell shop, looking to jump ship (Score:5, Interesting)
My company currently runs a dell shop, running a mix of vostros, optiplexs, and over $100,000 in Dell servers.
I have been having issue after issue with the power supplies in pretty much every dell I run. We really like to run the SFF style units and they use a specially sized power supply. Dell refuses to acknowledge that there is an issue even though I have a 25% failure rate in power supplies at the one year mark. They offered to give me a SWEET deal of $120 for a replacement power supply (on a $400 unit), down from the $150 list.
So Dell has screwed consumers over on systems with bad capacitors, screwed consumers over with bad power supplies, cheated their shareholders by falsifying earnings, and competed unfairly by accepting bribe money from intel. bad company, bad products.
Just Dell? (Score:5, Interesting)
During that period, whenever I went shopping(either for personal use, or doing comparisons for employer bulk purchases) Dell always had very competitive prices; but not wildly different from comparable stuff from HP and friends. Either Dell's supply chain management absolutely sucked goats through capillary tubing, or some of their competitors must have had similar slush funds to work with.
And yet the geeks/nerds/uninformed... (Score:1, Interesting)
keep on buying MonopolisTel chips. AMD processors are just as good, cheaper and you don't support the Microsoft of the hardware world. There actually is a good alternative here.
VermIntel has a lot of shills online, who visit online forums/message boards trying to downplay or dismiss the vast amount of illegal activity they've been up to.
And no friends, this isn't just from 2003 onwards. There are many OEMs, resellers and industry analysts who knew they were doing the same stuff way back in the late 80's at least.
Look at the Nvidia (another anti-competitive corp) vs Intel lawsuit... making OEMs buy atom chips with their accompanying chipset CHEAPER than buying the atoms alone.
Then there's the Vista-capable lawsuit... guess what happened there? Intel had a ton of useless slow video chips but forced Microsoft to allow them to call it Aero (Vista) capable.
Remember how much Intel cheats on benchmarks? How much they pay reviewers? How they cripple non-Intel CPUs in their "industry standard" compiler?
Remember that Skype deal? http://slashdot.org/articles/06/02/13/2015236.shtml [slashdot.org]
The list goes on and on and on. This is just off the top of my head.
Microsoft (that worthless monopolist scum) gets a well-deserved "fart in their general direction", yet Intel walks scott free.
Intel has been accused and convicted multiple times on several continents. They only just pay a small fraction of the money they fraudulently and illegally made and they walk with nary a geek/nerd/joe sixpack the wiser. They still have a sterling reputation.
Intel = Microsoft (of the hardware world).
Let's see how many slashdotters and/or people of conscience can bring themselves to even acknowledge this.
BTW, I've been Intel and Nvidia-free since 2001. I'm working on the windows part. (I'm a gamer)
Re:dell shop, looking to jump ship (Score:5, Interesting)
hundreds of workstations and a dozen servers, in nearly 50 different locations through the US.
Older machines seem fine, but the units purchased in the last 12-14 months have been dropping like flies.
Re:dell shop, looking to jump ship (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:dell shop, looking to jump ship (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dude! (Score:2, Interesting)
The right thing to do would be to expropriate all these companies and make them transparently run non-profit organizations, democratically administered by their workforce, supplying technology to us all for cost + labour.
Companies that engage in this sort of fraud should not be permitted to ever be run for profit again. The necessity of their existence should be something they are required to justify to the citizenry regularly, and when they are no longer able to do so, they should be dissolved.
Those who perpetuated this fraud should be publicly executed. They have misdirected millions if not billions of people for many years, and caused more harm and suffering in their time than any rapist or serial killer.
Hello, I'm a PC (Score:1, Interesting)
no offense intended, but why would anybody be a "dell shop"? Sure, pick up a couple here and there, but what do they offer outside of:
1. Green + Purple plugs so you don't plug the mouse and keyboard in wrong.
2. Charcoal grey cases, so they don't look like whiteboxes (which they are).
For half the price you could have tonnes of "standby's" and be way further ahead. If you really wanted to use your money wisely, become a mac shop.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like a Rube Goldbergian way of doing business.
You'll probably want to sit down for this.
Most of the business world based on lies, because most of the business world depends on marketing. And marketing, once you break it down, is manipulation. Why does your girlfriend want a common blood stained rock on her finger to symbolize fidelity? Why do some people spend two hundred dollars on a steak one night, instead of cooking one for themselves every night for a month? Why did everyone think that home prices should outpace inflation for eternity? Because businessmen are very good at lying to you, and conning you into buying things - ideas, products, services, status - that are worth far less than you think they are. That's where the money is.
When men thought capitalism could lead to liberty, the world was radically different. Manufacturing was just hiring enough people to hand-make everything that you could sell. There was no automation, no assembly lines. Laissez faire makes sense when it's hard to hide cheating. Plus, most of the population believed that charging interest was a mortal sin, because making money without working was immoral.
In today's world, people often have no idea of what they are buying. Bonds in financial markets are purposefully inscrutable. Required company filings are mangled beyond comprehension. As proof of this, just look at the subprime meltdown. One guy in California figured it out, and had to beg Goldman Sachs into creating the instrument that would allow him to short the housing market bonds. They had gotten so good at selling, and so bad at actually analyzing the market, that Wall St conned itself into trillions of dollars of debt. Luckily, "main street' - ie, the people who actually perform economic work - were there to bail them out. And Wall St, since a few of them had figured it out early, was busy selling the debt to public entities like schools, county governments, and retirement funds because they were easy marks.
And now, since a company's value is perceived to be the things Wall St says about it, you have a totally fucked up system, where companies are trying to seek the approval of these greedy, useless motherfuckers, who wouldn't know a day's work if it hit them in the mouth with a sledgehammer. We have an entire industry - the financial system - that doesn't perform any useful work. It's like a cancer on the economy, but one that's very successful in centralizing wealth into their own corner. We could replace all of the banks, insurance agents, and ratings agents with totally transparent branches of government, and get on with the business of really innovating - new technology to improve the world, not just figments of financial imagination, repacked and resold to sucker after sucker. But for some reason the American people think that would be the end of the world. Socialism! Communism! The loss of liberty and freedom and democracy!
I wonder who gave them that idea.
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Re:Best Alternative(s) to Dell (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD: seek RIAA-like punitive damages from Dell (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And yet the geeks/nerds/uninformed... (Score:3, Interesting)
Show of hands (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hello, I'm a PC (Score:4, Interesting)
Whether or not that's a good way to do things is irregardless.
You mean irrelevant. Irregardless is not a real word. Even if you want to argue that it is a real word, it does not mean the same as irrelevant.
Getting back on topic, Dell does some things right. The most important thing for me is support. People often ask me for advice on what computer that they should buy. I always say Dell, because if something goes wrong then you can go back to them for help.
This is especially important, because if something does go wrong, I don't want them coming to me to fix it. Just because I gave them advice on what to buy doesn't make it my responsibility. Since I have started suggesting Dell (and explaining why) I haven't had a single person ask me to fix things when they download the lasted virus or when they want to install some new bit of hardware. For me, that is priceless.
But no, I wouldn't ever buy a Dell for myself.
AMD duped me, too (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but AMD isn't clean either.
I've often been called a "troll" here for stating this simple fact, but AMD invented a certain "megahertz myth" [wikipedia.org] that's a half truth and for a time invested massively in marketing based on that.
I once bought a notebook with an AMD CPU labeled "2200+", which was meant to imply it was faster than an Intel Pentium 4 with a 2200 MHz clock. That could be, for that specific benchmark AMD created, but it was not true for my own applications. For me, that "2200+" actually meant about "1500-".
It's one thing to state that a computer's performance does not depend on CPU clock alone. It's an entirely different thing to create a fake number and pretend that this number is an exact measure of performance.
In the end, the almighty market fixes things up, but not before innocent people waste money. AMD has stopped with that fraudulent practice of inventing fake numbers to pretend having superior performance. It's obvious now that it backfired on them, but many people, me included, bought computers with inferior performance based on those fake numbers.
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