Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the chips-ain't-easy dept.
aftk2 writes "According to news.com, chip maker Transmeta - current home of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has canned 40% (200 people) of its work force, and has shifted its goals toward obtaining profitability in 2003. No word on whether there were any penguins seen leaving the building."
This is truly terrible news for Linux and the tech community in general. As the employer of Linux Torvalds, the world's greatest living programmer, Transmeta was the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. Now it's reputation is tarnished and it is but a (60%) shell of its former self.
However, this isn't completely unexpected, at least by me. We bought up a lot of TM's products on Day One because of the low power consumption and high value-add. But around Day Four we noticed a lot of problems. Specifically we found problems with code path regneration, bit concordance, executing lagging on the backend busses and even voltage differentiation. That kind of low quality product eventually brings a company down.
It's too bad that Linux will get caught in the crossfire and most likely go into a tailspin, but that's the trouble when Open Source programmers go into the commercial tech sphere.
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However, this isn't completely unexpected, at least by me. We bought up a lot of TM's products on Day One because of the low power consumption and high value-add. But around Day Four we noticed a lot of problems. Specifically we found problems with code path regneration, bit concordance, executing lagging on the backend busses and even voltage differentiation. That kind of low quality product eventually brings a company down.
It's too bad that Linux will get caught in the crossfire and most likely go into a tailspin, but that's the trouble when Open Source programmers go into the commercial tech sphere.