Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 3/29/99

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:3/29/1999; 4:45:27 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 3/29/99
Msg #:4631
Prev/Next:4630 / 4632

A little bird whispered in my ear.. On Friday Microsoft stock split, two for one. As a result there are more than 32-bits of MSFT stock out there. This has caused computers to fail a la Y2K.

Screen shot of www.nasdaq.com showing incorrect market capitalization and number of outstanding shares for MSFT.

Another concern, MSFT is part of the S&P 500, so its valuation may be off too. All this is happening on the day the Dow closed at over 10,000 for the first time in history, and people were predicting computer glitches, but this one seems to have passed unnoticed.

On further investigation, the only site that was wrong was NASDAQ's. In all likelihood, according to a couple of people I spoke with who would know, they haven't updated their database. Their website *is* wrong, but probably not because of the overflow situation, it's probably due to incorrect info about the number of outstanding shares and correct info about the MSFT stock price. The trading databases generally store the number of thousands of shares, not the number of shares. This appears to be a false alarm.

Eric S Raymond: Take My Job, Please! "You'll find you have to fight to find any time to really think or reflect about the things that put you on that road in the first place. And you barely have the energy to actually hack code any more. You listen to yourself spinning words to strangers in suits instead, and feel like a plant being pulled slowly out of the ground -- roots not tearing, yet, but feeling the strain, feeling the strain." I know what he means!

WebZine 99 Discussion List.

A thought puzzle for members of the Frontier community.

WebInformant: Beware of Microsoft's XML.

New My.UserLand.Com channels: More Like This, Liason Francophone, Beo and osOpinion. Channels are refreshed every hour on the hour.

Also available: SlashDot.Org, The Motley Fool and Mozilla.Org.

Ygenerator 1.0 generates Flash content on servers, as does Swift Generator

InfoWorld: XML Buoys Object Databases. We're there too, have been for almost seven years. Content management all the way. Relational? Great for bookkeeping apps.

News.com: Amazon to offer online auctions.

Wired: Russians Attack Whitehouse.gov.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:49:07 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.