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AMD To Close Plants, Lay off 2300, Lose Gateway
cdrudge writes: "According to this article on CNN, AMD will be closing 2 plants in Austin, TX and also their operations in Penang, Malaysia due to slack demand. 2300 jobs will be cut in the process. The same article mentions Gateway dropping it's 'Select' line of computers. Their 'Select' line of computers were Gateway's only AMD-based systems. A Gateway spokesperson said 'We're consolidating all of our offering behind Intel, which was the biggest part of our mix already.'"
AMD sucks shit.
Yet another crippling bombshell ht th beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of ll servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
AMD is dying.
As an afterthought, it was silly to think that an upstard company could shake an established power like Intel.
Microsoft is still going steady. I've not heard of any layoffs or site closings, and they have a number of excellent products (well, your opinion may vary, but I'm of the opinion that Windows XP, PocketPC 2002, XBox, Flight Sim 2K, and so on are all great products) in line for release very soon, or already released in a few cases.
Probably not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear on slashdot, but it's the truth. Take it or leave it.
Free tip to baldies: Growing a ponytail or a beard only makes you look like a bigger dork. Buy a rug for Christ's sake and try to look normal.
This will kill their rep with the analysts. At least for a while. Thinking about buying ebay stock and taking AMD as a tax loss. If they start to improve then I might buy them again. Ebay is great. It's pretty much a monopoly and unlike MS increasing sales.
Flash market sucks. CPU price war is killing them. Their business isn't going to be good for a while. Gamers and overclockers won't make AMD's revenue grow.
I have had my fill of corporate cynicism in recent weeks. For once, I wish owners of corporations would pick a year (this year, maybe?) to not make a profit. Year after year, in all industries, the fruits of innovation and automation flow to the investor class. The flow appears to only go in one direction, for a slight recession and a single day of terrorism have spawned an outbreak of Layoff-itis. People everywhere are being layed off--an action with permanent results--in response to temporary conditions, all to maintain the level of profit that the Leech Class has grown accustomed to.
Now AMD joins the long list of companies perpetrating vast economic terrorism against people whose only crime is filling out a job application and working diligently day after day. Who will feed these 2,300 families and the ~100,000 families who were likewise fucked by the airline industry? Who will comfort the children whose parents commit suicide in desperation?
These are the people who make our laws, fill our heads with memes designed to guarantee permanently increasing profits, poison our water, and drag us into international conflict. Like the gods, they kill us for their sport. Have no sympathy for them--sell off all your stock and kiss those motherfuckers goodbye.
Jesus of Nazareth said something once that has perhaps never been more true: Money is the root of all evil.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I consider it very unethical for companies like Gateway to sell computers with buggy and unreliable Via boards and overheated AMD chips to unsavvy low-end customers.
People pay more Intel machines because you have a guarantee of what you are buying.
Back in the dark old K6 days, AMD was simultaneously shipping 300 Mhz K6-2's running at 66,75,83 and 100Mhz FSB speeds. These were mostly in cut rate Compaq, Packard-Bell and HP retail systems.
When Intel makes chips with the same speed and different internals, they designate the chip differently. (eg Celeron 300 v. Celeron 300A, Pentium 3 667/667A/667B, etc)
AMD is a crappy, cut-rate company. Their new marketing-name convention further illustrates this.
Be a Slashbot and save $20 on a chip.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK