AMD To Lay Off 10% of Global Workforce

Luyseyal writes "Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs Thursday as the company seeks to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas. This amounts to over 11% of its global workforce, including Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List."

Comments

I guess ...

[PPH]

... they'll just have to overclock the rest.

Re:I guess ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't help much considering they'r already water cooled :(

Re:I guess ...

[Anonymous Coward]

More insightful than funny. Might start acting a little buggy though.

Re:I guess ...

[Taty'sEyes]

Have you ever tried to work in Liquid N2?

Re:I guess ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they'll just have to overclock the rest.

Maybe they just fired the ones with locked multipliers :P

Re:I guess ...

[Tomato42]

The cracking is unnerving, but you can get used to it. Thawing is completely different matter though...

Re:If they need something to do,

[Fluffeh]

I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.

Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.

Bonus time.

[RyanFenton]

Expect to see EXTREMELY large executive bonuses come December.

It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.

So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.

Thus solving the problem once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Bonus time.

[jtownatpunk.net]

So am I an asshole for making a note to check out AMD as an investment opportunity?

Re:Bonus time.

[Moryath]

The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more. Which is the fundamental problem for stockholders and employees alike - long term health of the company is meaningless to the PHB's trying to ramp up profits to look good when their yearly "performance review" is due, and the quickest way to do that is to fire employees.

Sure, the company's in the shitter two years down the road, but by then the CEO's quit and taken his stock options to the bank.

Re:Bonus time.

[lgarner]

No. But most likely this news is already incorporated into the share price (I know the market is closed now), so this may or may not be a good time to buy.

Re:Bonus time.

[peragrin]

No it doesn't make sense.

I am going to fire a bunch of people to save x millions of dollars over the next 3-5 years but right now I am going to pay out x millions (yea it is often a similar number) right now to give a bonus to a multi millionaire who doesn't need it.

The worst part is that next year they pay the bonus out again, and again all while the company loses money.

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away. But you almost never here about a CEO or board, or congress who is willing to put the company(or country) before their own salary.

Re:Bonus time.

[0123456]

The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more.

You can't invest long-term when government economic policy is swerving from side to side like a twelve year old who's emptied his Dad's liquor cabinet and then borrowed the Porsche.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%

In the prosperous 1960s, CEOs made about 30x the salary of the average worker for the same company.

Today, it goes higher than 1000x.

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future. It's stunning, really, to hear how out of whack our system has become thanks to the laissez-faire, supply-side, "trickle-down" economics that have been the policy of every US government since 1980.

It's the kind of intractable, illogical, unjust mess that can make people very angry.

Re:Bonus time.

[artg]

Why would you invest in a company that has lost confidence in it's own future ?

Re:Bonus time.

[jd]

No, but you might be a poor investor. Yes, it'll boost immediate returns but only by sacrificing long-term benefits. The benefit will be brief. It's things like this that are why investment is almost entirely cognitive illusion and not based on skill or rational thought. The ones who are any good work along selective inaction. Responding to the market is the worst thing you can do.

Re:Bonus time.

[jd]

Nobody with any cents invests long-term but, as I noted earlier, anybody with any sense certainly does. If you don't, you have a 66% chance of losing on any given transaction.

Re:Bonus time.

[inviolet]

And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future.

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more.

You can't invest long-term when government economic policy is swerving from side to side like a twelve year old who's emptied his Dad's liquor cabinet and then borrowed the Porsche.

If you plan for the long term, stuff tends to even itself out. But I disagree with the idea that government policy is careening. It seems to have been on a pretty straight course for a long time now. They all spend as much as they can, then when the bills come due, Republicans squelch any options that could bring in direct revenue to pay them, claiming that what really needs to be done is to cut future spending (a concept my creditors would never let me get away with). Not that they're actually willing to cut anything that is likely to pass. The only thing worst than tax-and-spend is to not-tax-and-spend, and that's been Republican policy for over a decade.

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends. That's like saying that the more you pay the executives, the more jobs they'll create. The only jobs that the executives directly create out of their own pockets are things like the illegal maid and gardener. It's the company that does the serious hiring. Or not. And when an executive makes 400 times what a regular employee does, that's an awful lot of potential hires diverted.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Show me a large corporation that can't stand to cut the bottom 10% of dead wood, and I'll show you Santa Claus riding a unicorn.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

Sure, if you like to short stock. AMD can't seem to stop sucking for the past few years. They almost ate Intel's lunch, but he with the deepest pockets wins. Too bad that now they will take ATI with them if they go under.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

Yeah, he needs to learn that trading on "news" is possibly even worse than trading completely at random. Besides if you look at the past 13 years of the stock market, you are just as likely to make money in the next 5 years or so by buying stock as you are by selling it. The market has been jogging in place since 1998.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away.

And that way upper management will all quit and go work somewhere else, and the company won't have managers left (except of course the bad ones who can't go anywhere else). Believe it or not, management is actually an important part of a company. They don't just sit on their asses all day and tell people to get to work on time.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

OK, I noticed that yesterday and today there were two national polls taken that show if the elections were held today, the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and Obama would be re-elected. Do you believe that the elections should be cancelled because you don't believe that decision is wise or meaningful?

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

Every one of us has a stake in the output of elections. We benefit or are hurt to varying degrees. We vote based upon our own interests.

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful"? Or will we have a system where people have some say in the way they are governed?

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern.

Since all corporations make "short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern" then you must agree that they should not be allowed to participate in elections at any level, including financially. Especially since corporations are not citizens.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

The "market" is paying less attention to Greece than the news media would have you believe. Other things like Bernanke's announcement of QE3 (sorry they call it accommodation now), increased productivity (+3.1%) and factory orders (+0.3%) have much more impact on the market than Greece. Have to buy now before printing-press driven inflation sends prices up even further, especially when the promise of more cheap money is on the horizon. But all the press sees is the "drama" in Greece. And of course this works in favor of the politicians since it gives them an excuse to transfer wealth from you and me a little more in the name of crisis prevention.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy

The German economy is not a dead economy. Oh wait, what?

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

If you decide that the voters don't get to make a decision because it is short sited, how are you not a tyrant? Of course an omniscient tirent with perfect intentions can make better decisions than a set of human voters. Until you find that omniscient tyrant, the choice should be made by the voters.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

The German economy is not a dead economy. Oh wait, what?

You make a very good point, friend. German workers retire earlier than Greek workers and the German economy is even more worker-friendly than the southern-European governments. They are every bit as "socialist" as France or Italy or Greece or Sweden, yet they are strong enough to lead Europe economically.

They one big difference is that Greece doesn't tax its rich people and Germany does. In fact, there are a bigger percentage of millionaires and billionaires with Greek residency as any other EU country just for that reason.

Re:Bonus time.

[icebraining]

That referendum is a joke. Asking the people if they want external help *after* they accepted billions of Euros from the IMF and fucking up the economy with their demands?

The Greeks are fucked (and so are we, the Portuguese). They, like us, will spend the next decades slave laboring to their news masters until the debt is paid.

Re:Bonus time.

[Radical Moderate]

Show me a company that actually knows which 10% constitutes dead wood, and....

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially when you're talking about AMD, the volume of speculation on the options, and the correlation with other (bigger) tech companies make the AMD share price move in the opposite direction of what makes sense almost all the time...

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir need to stop watching TV.
more than 50% are in public sector???????
you are I N S A N E, where did you heard that please? i REALLY want to know.

feel free to check for yourself http://laborsta.ilo.org the real number (and its going down day by day)

Re:Bonus time.

[rtb61]

The question is how much are they worth. Are they worth 1,000 times the cost of the labour actually doing the work and earning the profits, keeping in mind management is a overhead not a profit centre and 1,000 additional worker could be earning a profit. It is easy to see how corporate executive remuneration has been corrupted via collusion and multiple appearances of the same psychopathic executives faces on the boards of multiple companies.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

The question is how much are they worth.

The problem with talent is that the rate is set by your competitor - not by you. It's not how much is it worth to your company - it's how much is your competitor willing to pay. Certainly management is worth the value of the whole company, because the whole company would cease to exist without it. That's the difference really between line workers and management. You can pretty much be guaranteed homogenity across factory workers - their skills are largely dependent on culture and education of the society your company is in. Firing some and training up some others will result in pretty much the same productivity. But management talent is highly specialized and individual. Smart people are hard to come by.

Re:Bonus time.

[peragrin]

never said it wasn't. managers and especially good mangers are tough to find.

however no one is worth 1,000 times the janitor. without whom the place literally turns to shit. No one is worth 800 times the salesmen who actual drive the profits. or the workers without whom your orders don't actually get filled.

For this Circuit city is my favorite punching bag. They fired all their top salesmen, to save money hired new people, paid out bonuses at like 75% of the money they saved by firing people to the board, and a little over a year later declared bankruptcy.

All so a manager can get a bonus.

that is the skill set your defending.

Re:Bonus time.

[Pseudonym Authority]

Nobody with any cents invests long-term

A typo, likely, but amazingly amusing and insightful none the less!

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, cut spending. It will not solve the problem, when the next elected official comes in and decides to cut taxes even more (because after all there is more money than ever freed up).

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs...to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas

Phrases like re-balance work force to pursue new product areas make me want to vomit.

So am I an asshole for making a note to check out AMD as an investment opportunity?

Yes and a pawn.

Re:Bonus time.

[Runaway1956]

The dead wood is mostly at the top, with some of stuck in middle management. The worker bees may or may not have some deadwood among them, but the majority of the deadwood is all located at the top. And, cost wise, cutting a little deadwood from the management structure saves more money than cutting a ton of deadwood from the bottom. One executive bonus equals about 20 employees annual salary these days, often times more!

Re:Bonus time.

[timeOday]

Theory, meet fact..

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with you up until you mentioned taxation

Whey does a problem of spending negate a problem with taxation? Why can't both be faulty? Oh, because it's easier to manipulate people by pointing at one or the other and refusing to except that both could be a problem. Spending is a problem therefore nevermind any issues with taxation. Taxation is the problem nevermind any issues with spending.

Re:Bonus time.

[Runaway1956]

I've not noticed much swerving in economic policy. The government has steadily been working to wreck the United States economy.

For fifty years or more, we've had no immigration policy worth mentioning.
NAFTA
China "free trade"
CAFTA
outsourcing
exporting jobs
"work visas" freely passed around like candy at halloween, and the conditions unenforced
rewarding illegal aliens with free college tuition
rewarding illegal aliens with free legal counsel
rewarding illegal aliens with free health care
tax cuts for companies that export jobs

Have I missed anything important? If I have, I've included enough to show that our government is NOT swerving back and forth. They are on a steady course to destroying the middle class.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

All the nicest forests are already harvested. All the easy wells, dams, bridges and reservoirs are already built. Any further growth is either going to be very, very expensive or is going to put a lot of strain on existing resources.

And all the good wells have been drilled. Blah blah.

People innovate. That's what they do. But innovation comes from healthy societies and with increasing income disparities and growing populations of economically threatened people, we are not a healthy society.

Governments around the world have fallen into the trap of thinking that they can spend forever without any consequences.

I'll give you that if you agree that corporations have fallen into the trap of thinking that they can grow forever. That economies can grow forever. That profits can grow forever.

Fact is, there is plenty wealth so that nobody has to live in poverty. And by "poverty" I mean that if your wife gets sick you can't afford to get her good medical treatment. By that measure, there are a lot of Americans in poverty. There are actually people in the US who don't have enough to eat, who don't have access to health care, and are working 40 hours a week or more.

Government, at least in the US, is us. If we believe we can "spend forever without any consequences" it's because we are well aware that we are an economy out of whack, out of balance. The problem is not spending, it is insufficient revenue. With a healthy economy, reasonable trade policy and progressive taxation we can do the things that Americans agree are worthwhile, like provide health care, retirement and a decent infrastructure.

But now we are bumping into real limits.

Limits of what? Of fossil fuels? Of rates of corporate growth and consolidation?

It seems the only "real limit" we are bumping into is the limit to people's patience with "supply-side" economics.

Things are changing faster than I ever thought they would. Two polls in two days show that congress could swing back to the Democrats. We could end up with another "wave election" next November going back the other way. People are so pissed that they're going to start throwing people out every two years until there is some accountability.

All that will result is that the smart rich people will leave

Baloney. John Galt is the fantasy of people with daddy issues. He's not real. And with people all over the world starting to get sick of this "trickle-down" baloney, John Galt may just have to go off-planet to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. Another "real limit" that's being reached is the limit of how rich a person needs to be when there are people without enough to eat. That sounds harsh and anti-capitalistic, but shit, if the economic and political elite had been a little more reasonable instead of stealing everything that's not cemented down we wouldn't be in a position where they have to start worrying about pitchforks and guillotines. And yes, automated trading is stealing. Usury is stealing. CDOs are stealing. Bailouts of big banks is at least as much "stealing" as a 90% top tax rate like we had in the '50s.

Re:Bonus time.

[jtownatpunk.net]

So I _am_ an asshole. Just not for the reason I was hoping. Oh, well. It's a start.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is sad, because they are in on it too.

That's why I don't get the tea party hate, the ones who want to stop bail outs and listen to their people.

B B B BUT THEYRE RACIST!! goebels was right, repeat it enough times.

The OWS has more in common with the tea party than democrats.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

Fact is, there is plenty wealth so that nobody has to live in poverty.

So in your fantasy world you see everyone at the top of the pyramid and no one at the bottom? There is no room, friend. There will always be people who achieve more with less. There will always be people who have more than most. That's just the way of the world. Resources such as wealth, brains, talent, are not uniform but scattered in clumps. Those who have it will guard it jealously from those who want to take it but don't know what to do with it. While I admit that the general "standard of living" can get better for the whole society, wealthy as well as poor - there will always be an elite class and a much larger jealous class. It was even this way in the Soviet Union, and I bet you Chairman Mao never lacked for food even when millions of Chinese were starving in the 1960's.

This increase in standard of living is brought about by technology. Technology is driven by (cheap) energy. There are limits to our energy production, too. There's 40 years of oil left in the world, at current consumption levels. Less if you account for growth. China is adding demand to the equivalent of Australia, every year. You wonder why oil doesn't budge from $90-$100 a barrel anymore? Cheap oil is gone forever. People claim there's 200 years' worth of coal and maybe the same for natural gas - again at current levels of consumption. And once it's all burned - then what? The law of thermodynamics won't change, no matter how innovative we get. You cannot create energy out of thin air, and technology is not magical. Eventually we will run into the inefficiencies inherent in the laws of the universe and the price we will pay is quality of life and standard of living. And the poor will suffer much, much more than the rich.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not in upper management. If you're working your ass off you're doing it wrong. You should be implementing procedure, providing tools, evaluating workloads. If you do this right you shouldn't be doing anything all day besides wading through presentations with buzzwords and emphasis on length over content (thanks to educations emphasis on lengthy essays over content). Every pay raise/promotion I have ever received meant less real work.

I take that back. Middle management does that. No neither of us are in upper management as we are posting on slasdot. I only know that my pay scale has always been inversely proportional to the amount of hard work I do. Sure as you make more money you live in neighborhoods that make more money. If you get caught up with keeping up with the Jones's you will be stressed out. But hard work. Bah.

Re:Bonus time.

[mojo-raisin]

That is because top CEO positions are quite rare and difficult.

This is the free market at work, and is a corollary of individual freedom.

Where you should direct your ire, is at large gov entities: Freddie/Fannie, Fed Res, IRS, DHS, DOD, etc. Those are the leeches destroying our economy.

Not CEOs.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, let's hand over our Linux customers to Intel!

Re:Bonus time.

[bloodhawk]

source please? While I agree upper management is way overpayed, from what I can see the average is still around 30-50 times. seriously what companies are paying 1000x? at that rate even the less highly skilled industries would have to be paying close to 100 million or more per CEO?

Re:Bonus time.

[jthill]

As I recall, the Temple of Man was built wide, and low to the ground.

Attracting income is a separate skill from creating wealth. Wealth is designed and built and grown, and the people who generate it design and build and grow. It's written and painted and sung.

There are people who can only attract income and social position. They're the ones who think it's smart to get other people to generate the wealth but keep the income for themselves. They call themselves "the productive people".

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

[The] one big difference is that Greece doesn't tax its rich people and Germany does.

I was with you until this post. Germany and Greece are culturally different in a much more extensive way than the tax difference, and of course their histories and national circumstances are a lot different also. Fix the tax issue, and Germany will still have a much stronger economy. I say this as a person who's part German and part Greek. I don't mean that German culture is better overall - Greek culture has it's own strengths. And I'm in favor of much higher taxes on the rich. But I think to attribute the economic difference to the tax difference destroys the credibility of your otherwise reasonable argument.

Re:Bonus time.

[syousef]

Where you should direct your ire, is at large gov entities: Freddie/Fannie, Fed Res, IRS, DHS, DOD, etc. Those are the leeches destroying our economy.

Not CEOs.

Ha hahaha HAHAHAHA

I haven't laughed so hard in an age. Greedy CEOs who literally make millions in salary increases and bonus the same day they shaft their workforce aren't the problem. It is those meddling government men......and pigs fly QANTAS. Or rather run the damn airline.

Re:Bonus time.

[rtb61]

That would have to either the funniest or most psychopathic response I have ever had. It's like government bailouts have never happened (banks, savings and loans, car manufacturers) or "golden parachute" is an unknown term or "dotbomb" never heard of it. It is becoming pretty apparent psychopathic corporate executives are only interested in creating an illusion of how well the companies they are running are doing, sucking a huge salary out of investors, creating a complete insane you are fired package for themselves, staying out of jail, taking credit for everything that happens and blaming everyone else for problems especially the government even though they own the government to ensure deregulation and no prosecution. Reality is if corporate executives where legally liable for the actions of the corporations they were running, they majority would be heading of to jail and quite a substantial portion would be looking at worse where the death penalty is legal (exploding oil rigs and coal mines ring a bell or pharmaceuticals with lethal side affects wrongly but profitably prescribed, how about contaminated foods as a result of inspection and control short cuts).

Re:Bonus time.

[Man On Pink Corner]

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.

What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."

Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an idea! Lets offshore managers overseas, like India perhaps, and make money on good managerial skills and decisions?????
I mean, obviously they need good managers more than you, Americans!

This is funnies statement for today in slashdot about good managers!

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

German workers have to work till 67 till they can retire and it is talked that they rise this to 69. The early retirement in Germany is long gone.

Re:Bonus time.

[demiurg]

Are you really sure that the US system is worse than Greek ? Will you emigrate to Greece ? Have you been there recently or read any news about what happens in that country ?

Re:Bonus time.

[Anthony Mouse]

NAFTA
China "free trade"
CAFTA
outsourcing
exporting jobs ...
tax cuts for companies that export jobs

All you've done is list "outsourcing" over and over. And that isn't even the cause, it's the symptom. The problem is that we need to adopt policies that make hiring Americans more competitive, but most of those policies aren't as egalitarian or redistributive as people might like.

Let me give you some examples:

We take the principle that everyone deserves a quality education, so we take the resources (tax revenue) that we have for education and try to divide it equally between all students. But some jobs require a better education than others. Complete fairness is not a competitive advantage. You can create a basic level of education in everyone without striving for perfect equality: It would be far better to have schools for smart kids that we spend substantially more per student on, and schools for less smart kids that we spend less money on. It doesn't really matter that the future retail workers don't have a strong grip on calculus. It does really matter that the future doctors and engineers don't because we reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.

Likewise, you look at the nominal corporate income tax rate. It's one of the highest in the world. Then you look at the effective corporate tax rate. For multinational corporations it's extremely low (because the nature of a multinational corporation allows them to report profits in lower-tax countries), but for smaller corporations it's much higher. It puts US small business -- who employ the largest number of Americans -- at a disadvantage compared to multinationals. Eliminating the corporate income tax would create no benefit to large corporations (which already don't pay it), but would help the job-creating small businesses that do. But the national feeling is that large corporations should pay more taxes, and we can't actually do that in a way that doesn't have ruinous side effects (e.g. tax on gross rather than net income), so keeping up appearances forces us into the charade that causes actual harm to small business. (The problem is that the only kind of tax you can force a high-mobility corporation to pay is a consumption tax on their products -- you can tax them on their customers that are in your jurisdiction. But that burden is then shared in part by customers, and that tends to raise the price of goods in a regressive way.)

The general problem is that we try to make everything fair on paper, but what is fair is not always what is competitive. There is sometimes a trade off between more jobs and more equality, and we have to be willing to admit that before we can make a rational decision about which is more important and when.

Re:Bonus time.

[TheEyes]

What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.

What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."

Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up. These days shareholders are largely incapable of enforcing a long-term perspective on executive officers; the rules these days are written by boards more interested in hiring a CEO for a few quarters to juice profits, siphon as much money as they can, and let the CEO take a multi-billion dollar golden parachute to the next sucker play. This quarter-to-quarter thinking isn't fostered by pensioners investing in index funds for 20-30 years for retirement, but by the giant money-printers of Wall Street. The whole system needs to be fixed, and executive compensation is a small, but important piece of the puzzle.

Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.

Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare. Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore, with their Fox News propaganda machines and well-funded astroturf campaigns, but it won't go away just because they keep denying it's there.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because it's a really fucking good idea to buy low and sell high.

And why would you say it has lost confidence? Because it is laying off some people? Did I miss some part in the article where they quoted an engineer going "what the fucking am i supposed to be doing?" and an accountant going "oh...shit"?

They're just trying to make their balance sheets look a little better. AMD's future looks pretty damn good.

Re:Bonus time.

[citizenr]

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Yes, like Iceland did. Just look how bad it turned out for them ... oh wait, it DIDNT.

Re:Bonus time.

[TheEyes]

Which is sad, because they are in on it too.

That's why I don't get the tea party hate, the ones who want to stop bail outs and listen to their people.

B B B BUT THEYRE RACIST!! goebels was right, repeat it enough times.

The OWS has more in common with the tea party than democrats.

The Tea Party had it right by being angry; they just had it wrong by being angry at the wrong people. Tea Partiers are mostly people who bought into the great lie that governments, and unions, are always inefficient and can't do anything right. They took that lie and ran with it to the "obvious" conclusion: if there's a problem in the US, then the government and the unions must be the cause of it, and if we get rid of them, thereby handing all our power and wealth to the only large collective entities left (corporations), then we'll solve all our problems!

Unfortunately for the Tea Party, their central assumption isn't true, and so their conclusion is necessarily false. It remains to be seen if OWS comes up with any better ideas.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

1981

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart people don't work in management. Your argument is irrelevant.

Re:Bonus time.

[evilviper]

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

No, it's not ironic at all, as greece most certainly is a functioning and healthy democracy.

What you're talking about is DIRECT democracy (also known as "mob rule"), which, while it has some pros, has far more cons. Voting for representatives, who then make decisions for you, is still democracy, and reeally is a much healthier and more stable form of democracy.

There's good reason to avoid mob rule, and instead choose your representatives wisely. Where you might disagree with them could very well be where they are right and your are wrong...

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

The German economy is not a dead economy. Oh wait, what?

You make a very good point, friend. German workers retire earlier than Greek workers and the German economy is even more worker-friendly than the southern-European governments. They are every bit as "socialist" as France or Italy or Greece or Sweden, yet they are strong enough to lead Europe economically.

Sorry, but that's simply wrong. German workers do not retire earlier than Greeks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement
And your statement about "every bit as socialist" is off the mark too. The German labour market isn't as flexible as the UK's or the USA's, that's true, but it's certainly easier to fire someone here in Germany than it is in, say, Spain or even France.

Also, the grandparent's idea that Germany's economy is moribund is rather, well, interesting, given that Germany is the number 2 export nation of the world, right behind China, which has more than 10 times its population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

They one big difference is that Greece doesn't tax its rich people and Germany does. In fact, there are a bigger percentage of millionaires and billionaires with Greek residency as any other EU country just for that reason.

There are quite a number of major differences, mostly on the expenditure side of things. Examples include Greek military spending which, at (IIRC) 4% of GDP is far too high, certainly much higher than Germany's (at some 1.3%).
Add to that a highly uncompetitive economy and it's no wonder that none of the financial types believe that Greece can repay its debt, whereas they have no such qualms about Germany, although it's also highly indebted.

Re:Bonus time.

[rrohbeck]

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%

In the prosperous 1960s, CEOs made about 30x the salary of the average worker for the same company.

Today, it goes higher than 1000x.

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

George Mobus has a hypothesis about that.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, management is actually an important part of a company. They don't just sit on their asses all day and tell people to get to work on time.

As a worker for a multinational firm where the top brass regularly send out emails about what they are doing, can I just say "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA".

Re:Bonus time.

[AmiMoJo]

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

Not just economically, socially as well. Remember when one person could provide for a family? That meant that the other person was able to not work and be a full time parent. Now we have problems with children's behaviour and have to prop up families where both parents work with benefits and subsidised child care just to make bringing up the next generation feasible for an average family.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

WARNING: Goatse alert! Don't click that link!

Pathetic.

GP's link is probably the most interesting article/research about human behaviour I've read in the least few months. Why would someone would want people not to read it, luring them to believe it's a goatse link, it's something that goes behind my comprehension.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable."

It's very stable. Feudalism lasted for thousands of years in Europe.

Re:Bonus time.

[Alex Belits]

at that rate even the less highly skilled industries would have to be paying close to 100 million or more per CEO?

They do.

Re:Bonus time.

[Alex Belits]

That's like telling German Jews to go to Poland in the middle of WWII.

Why, yes, the comparison with Nazi is entirely appropriate here, so shut up about that.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

Then don't invest in corporations.

Seriously though I agree with you that a lack of accountability is what is driving the inequities in the system. The fact that shareholders, who are the (initial) investors, have absolutely no say in the day to day operation of the corporation but rather elect people to do this for them by proxy, opens the corporate assets to be pilfered for personal gain, just like the people's assets are pilfered by politicians. When access to a lot of money is too easy, that money is just going to disappear - people will find a way to transfer that wealth to themselves. Therefore in the corporate world you end up with a sort of inflation - because John Smith of ABC corporation decides to pay himself a million dollar salary, so Frank Green at Megacorp says "what? we're much bigger than ABC co, I deserve a bigger salary" and so he decides to pay himself a million and a half, and Bob White of OtherCorp sees this and says "well we're Megacorp's competitor and we gained 5% market share this year, I deserve at least a million three hundred", etc.

Just like Hollywood bends over backwards every year to make even more expensive movies, causing actors to demand even higher salaries, corporations suffer from inflation too. It's just human nature when money is cheap and easy to come by, and people (not market forces) are allowed to write their own paychecks.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

While I agree that not all managers are smart, all of them should be, and some of them actually are. You can't dismiss an argument with a (n incorrect) generalization.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

It's written and painted and sung.

When you are going hungry, I challenge you to eat a painting and see how nutritious it is.

I see it differently. I see it as there are people who are lazy - either physically or intellectually - and people who can motivate others to get them to do things for them. It's not a King's job to die in a battle, it's a soldier's. And with the right type of King, people will gladly give up even their lives. For a charismatic religious leader they are willing to blow themselves up - they think its for a god but really it's for politics and power in the name of a god. And people do this willingly. So while it's easy to cast leadership (and by extension, management) in a sinister light - they are simply harnessing the energy that is offered voluntarily by people to make them achieve things that they would not normally achieve.

Do you really think that global companies just happen? If it was so easy to make one - why isn't everyone doing it? No - global companies first make products that everyone could use because it makes all our lives simpler - be it toilet paper, toothpaste, headache pills or microchips. And secondly have a structure that contains talented leaders that manage to organize all the suppliers, all the factories and all the sales and distribution channels around the world towards a common goal - getting that product into the hands of as many people as possible, in exchange for as much money as possible.

There's nothing sinister about this. No one is forced to buy the products - but they are good products and people want them. Certainly before the large corporations products similar to these existed. You CAN wipe your ass with newspaper, like my grand-father used to do, instead of ultra-soft 10 ply whatever. You CAN bush your teeth with baking soda and tree bark. But then there are questions of product quality, and quality of life. You have to get the newspaper at least once a week and spend time cutting it up. You have to go out and strip the bark from trees. And you'd still have to go to the store anyway to buy baking soda. Much easier to buy a toothbrush and a couple tubes of toothpaste and a 12-pack of toilet paper every month or so, and just make the one trip to the store. Why? Because people are lazy.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what OWS should be asking for. Corporations be held liable for their crimes with prison time. I'm looking at all the mortgage-backed securities sellers for their sentences to start.

Re:Bonus time.

[Lakitu]

how do you think all of those large government entities you listed are destroying the economy?

If you believe that they are, which you seem to, then it should be obvious that they are destroying the economy basically by funneling money to large corporations at taxpayer expense. Large corporations are, of course, run by "greedy CEOs", who use their undue influence to make sure they are funneled lots of money at taxpayer expense.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, here!

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

however no one is worth 1,000 times the janitor. without whom the place literally turns to shit.

What about the engineer behind the Roomba?

Re:Bonus time.

[dbIII]

I'm not in the USA, but I really would like to point out that those people are already in your country. There's nothing that can be done to move them out of the country (and your economy would collapse furthur if there was anyway) so reality has to be faced and they have to get some sort of place in society. You can't close the floodgates any more than George III could when he wanted to stop the colonies expanding beyond the Appalachians. It may suck but it comes down to trying to get the best of some bad choices. The USA is far too addicted to low priced low skilled labour anyway, and while that continues there will be very little done to stop the trend at any level. Even senators have disposable servants at less than the minimum wage who can't complain or they might get deported. Making them illegal immigrants instead of just immigrants like a century ago actually makes things worse. The bottom is getting pegged lower and lower and as you say there has been a lot of deliberate destruction of the middle class as part of a race towards what looks more and more like a parody of Feudalism.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks asshole. I click on that link expecting Goatse and what do I get?

Re:Bonus time.

[del_diablo]

And that does not adress the argument:
What happens if we build infastructure and make sure people can get the food? And what happens if we tax the rich enough to provide such a system to work?
Scandinavia is already doing it, and it works. Poverty is just a "pens strike" away from being removed, if somebody bothered.

Re:Bonus time.

[Talderas]

I doubt it will and they're beginning to show their ineptitude. Their plans I've seen so far for cold weather has been humorously misguided. The one example that comes straight to mind is asking for cots to get people off the cold ground. They have devices to connect to the Internet and they can't even get info on the types of preparation they need for cold weather. They're just children, even if they are 18 years of age, who have no idea about the world around them.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tea Partiers are mostly people who bought into the great lie that governments, and unions, are always inefficient and can't do anything right.

As someone who has been in government contracting, this statement is absolutely true (regarding governments, not unions). Everything from their requirements to their restrictions were almost designed to produce the most WTF worthy "solution" possible.

Government is like that poorly maintained, piece of shit small car you see teenagers drive: it gets shitty gas mileage, breaks down a lot, belches fumes, but at least it can get you from point A to B when required. The problem is we're not using this vehicle when we need to, we're using it for all of our trips. We're refusing to borrow Mom and Dad's well-maintained vehicle that won't break the fuck down and be over budget and late.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to make that point in my company for some time. Yet they persist in "offshoring", "outsourcing", "strategizing on low cost geographies" in ways that only affect the peons. I hear they have perfectly good managers and executives in India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brazil. But no, we only send helpdesks, development, and server operations over to those places. Why can't we get a cheaper executive over there too? I have a feeling I should tell the stockholders about this. But then, those guys are all on each other's boards of directors so they won't offshore their friends...

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

OK, I noticed that yesterday and today there were two national polls taken that show if the elections were held today, the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and Obama would be re-elected. Do you believe that the elections should be cancelled because you don't believe that decision is wise or meaningful?

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

Every one of us has a stake in the output of elections. We benefit or are hurt to varying degrees. We vote based upon our own interests.

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful"? Or will we have a system where people have some say in the way they are governed?

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern.

Since all corporations make "short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern" then you must agree that they should not be allowed to participate in elections at any level, including financially. Especially since corporations are not citizens.

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

OK, I noticed that yesterday and today there were two national polls taken that show if the elections were held today, the Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and Obama would be re-elected. Do you believe that the elections should be cancelled because you don't believe that decision is wise or meaningful?

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

Every one of us has a stake in the output of elections. We benefit or are hurt to varying degrees. We vote based upon our own interests.

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful"? Or will we have a system where people have some say in the way they are governed?

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern.

Since all corporations make "short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern" then you must agree that they should not be allowed to participate in elections at any level, including financially. Especially since corporations are not citizens.

Look to history and perhaps you might not make the same mistake as others. Greece is said to be the birth place of Democracy yes -- but what isnt said is it also birthed or tried out virtually every other form of government to include communism and anarchy.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long the Greek citizens are prepared to accept the consequences of their vote, they should be allowed to decide their future -- even if it is possible default with insanely high interest rates.

Re:Bonus time.

[The Grim Reefer2]

I think this is the first time that I've found myself wishing I had mod points.

Re:Bonus time.

[cheeks5965]

Should we just toss the constitution and go back to having only white male landowners vote because their vote is more "correct" and "meaningful

Reverting back to the vote of white landowners is not tossing the constitution, but reverting back to its Original Intent. Many people would celebrate that.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if it is really a short sighted boost to profits for the CEO to look good.
Companies do get bloated with people that just don't pull their weight. I believe if you lay off over 10% you stop having to justify a lot of details, and there are some other benefits, but I forget what.
Point being, it all depends on what is really going on inside the company and what is behind the decision. There is a chance that they just cut a bunch of dead weight, and will produce better products for it. People that come in late, miss dead lines, and generally throw up problems and nay-say instead of finding solutions tend to be the first ones on the chopping block in these situations.

Also I still think AMD is a "buy" stock, they are making money in both Video cards and processors, and are even taking market share from Intel in the server market.
Yeah there stock is down now, (but so is the whole damn market) I expect them recover with the market, and that's why you buy low and sell high.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes both ways.

People are lazy? Sure they can be lazy. So can leaders and managers

Not every king is a good king. Bad kings *usually* don't last long, but they can still do a lot of damage while they're in power.

You say there's nothing sinister about management and leadership? Sure, but there's also nothing sinister on people labeling them as sinister. That's just a symptom of the leaders doing a bad job at motivating people to keep working for them.

Just like how global companies don't just happen, all the protests don't just happen.

Re:Bonus time.

[Runaway1956]

Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay. It's all a matter of deciding that it needs to be done. And, THAT isn't going to happen so long as politicians and corporate chiefs are smart enough to make politicians wealthy secretly.

"Congressman, I don't know how I can ever repay you for your tax break support. How about we invite your daughter to sit on our board of directors? Oh, no sir, that can't possibly be called 'bribery' or a 'payoff', because you'll never get a red cent from us! But, your daughter will appreciate the gesture, I'm sure!"

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it cherry season again? Someone started picking them early, I think.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

So am I an asshole for making a note to check out AMD as an investment opportunity?

I'm not sure what sort of a portfolio of investments you could build if you excluded any company that had ever made workers redundant.

Re:Bonus time.

[Dunbal]

I agree. In fact there are a lot more mediocre managers than good ones. So imagine how good the really good ones are, that they manage to achieve something DESPITE the bad ones. Eh I'm hardly partial - I'm married to a "good" senior manager at a Fortune 500. You would not believe (no, actually you would) the shit that goes on. Politics, favoritism, nepotism, good people getting fired for no reason to make room for "friends", etc. All that is part of shitty management, and we end up paying for it. But in theory, management is crucial. An army without officers is just a collection of men. Likewise a corporation needs leadership and vision to organize and motivate.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

Meh. Show me a large corporation that can't stand to cut the bottom 10% of dead wood, and I'll show you Santa Claus riding a unicorn.

You must make a fucking fortune as a management consultant if it's that easy.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

WARNING: Goatse alert! Don't click that link!

Yes, moron, I'm sure someone's managed to get the goatse guy picture showing on the Guadian's web site.

Re:Bonus time.

[Man On Pink Corner]

Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up.

Translation: "Looks like a malignant melanoma... honey, do we have any cortisone ointment?"

Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare.

No, that pretty much is the definition of modern class warfare. Trying to enforce some misguided idea of "equality" just gets millions of people killed. You can't fool Dr. Darwin.

Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore...

Yeeeaaah. Ahem. About those guillotines. See, the thing is, they're all owned by the nobility these days. Your friendly Democratic gun-control activists have done a yeoman's job at making sure that 1984 isn't going to be anything like 1789.

In the modern age, any attempt at a genuine revolution will be over before the first tweets go out.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

Trying to start a class war in America

Nobody needs to start anything, it's already happening, just on a low level.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

Greece is called the birthplace of democracy. Isn't it a little bit ironic that today in Greece it is announced that no, the people should not have a voice in their future because they have a stake in the outcome of the vote?

No, it's not ironic at all, as greece most certainly is a functioning and healthy democracy.

What you're talking about is DIRECT democracy (also known as "mob rule"), which, while it has some pros, has far more cons. Voting for representatives, who then make decisions for you, is still democracy, and reeally is a much healthier and more stable form of democracy.

There's good reason to avoid mob rule, and instead choose your representatives wisely. Where you might disagree with them could very well be where they are right and your are wrong...

Direct democracy is not the same thing as mob rule, you sillu person twerp. The Ancient Greeks had direct democracy because their society was based on small city states like Athens (and women, slaves and others weren't included anyway)..

Unfortunately, you can't have a weekly meeting of the entire population of France or the US to discuss and vote on things, it would be literally impossible, even with simultaneous video conferencing, there are just too many people. So you have an elective democracy as a way of making things manageable, but underneath the pinciple is exactly the same. One person, one vote, all counted equally, and no tyrant can impose his will on the majority.

Papandreou has the same right to impose the financial settlement as Tony Blair had to drag the UK into the Iraq war. The difference is, I don't think the Greek people are going to settle for a mass peaceful demonstration that the politicians can just ignore.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anthony Mouse]

Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay.

No you can't. Profits are defined as revenues minus costs. What multinational companies do is to pay a sister company in another jurisdiction for products or services. The sister company makes a big profit on the transaction, the US company offsets almost all of their US revenues with it, but it's a legitimate product or service that they actually need. They just arrange to buy it from a sister company.

So you want to stop it, how do you do it? The first attempt would be to say that costs paid to non-US companies should not be able to offset US revenues. The effect of that is very similar to an import tariff. It probably violates a list of treaties as long as your arm and it would have all the countries that sell to us screaming bloody murder. On top of that, you would quickly get scams where a nonprofit conducts a "fund raiser" where they buy foreign goods and then resell them in the US at low margins to 'raise money' but really to import the goods without paying the tax and then sell them to a US company that in effect donates the nonprofit's 2% margin to charity instead of paying 35% in tax. To fix that you would have to make it even more like an import tariff, and good luck with that.

So let's make it more targeted at the problem then. Make it so only costs paid to foreign companies that are in the same corporate family tree can't be deducted against US revenues. But now if Volkswagen manufactures a car in Germany and sells it in the US, they pay income tax on the whole cost of the car because the cost is paid to their own German subsidiary, whereas if Toyota manufactures in Alabama from US parts they only pay income tax on the profit instead of the whole cost of the car. That still seems like a problem, international relations wise.

So we need to not discriminate against foreign products. The way you do that would be to impose a tax on just revenues and not allow anyone to deduct any costs. That wouldn't discriminate against foreign products, but "tax on revenue" is a synonym for "sales tax." I don't think that's what we were going for.

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

I was with you up until you mentioned taxation. The problem is not one of insufficient income. Rather it's one of too much expenditure

But GP's whole point was that Germany had as much expenditure as Greece, it's just that they raised enough taxes to pay for it. So I don't really see how you could have been with him at all.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think many people are anarchists or extreme libertarians who want zero leaders whatsoever, but the feeling is that the valuation of leaders has gone way out of whack.

So imagine how good the really good ones are, that they manage to achieve something DESPITE the bad ones

See, I believe the forces of "good" will triumph over time. As such, while I do think good leaders are a good thing (they lead us to that triumph sooner rather than later), I don't praise them much more above a good plumber or a good doctor or a good farmer, etc.

Sure, free market may decide that a manager "deserves" to be paid more than a plumber/farmer/doctor, but something tells me the free market is distorted on the value of managers, or worse: the free market, such as it is, isn't even a factor in the valuation of managers. Every CEO getting golden parachutes and getting raises while the company crash and burn further fuels this belief.

Furthermore, I would say that the presence of "bad" managers and leaders is a sign of failure on the part of the good managers and leaders. Part of a good leader's job is to prevent the interference or even existence of bad leaders. So maybe even "good" leaders aren't so good after all.

And that's probably why there's the general hostility to leaders and managers as a whole. The bad ones are bad, and the good ones do little/nothing to stop the bad (or appear as such)

Re:Bonus time.

[tehcyder]

There will always be people who have more than most. That's just the way of the world.

The few are vastly outnumbered by the many. Once inequality becomes too large, human nature will result in a realignment.

It is sheer ignorance for the rich to think they have some magical protection. A people's army can capture all their houses and yachts if they choose. They just need to need to be desperate enough.

Re:Bonus time.

[bzipitidoo]

What kills me is people thinking a few executives earning ridiculous pay is not significant because there are so few of them. You are wrong.

I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.

I hear that at the big financial institutions, pay of $50 billion (that's billion, not million) goes to executive cadres numbering around 100 people.

These guys are colluding with boards to loot our businesses, and no one is seeing or stopping them. Then they go cry loudly about how they're burdened with regulations and uncertainty. I'll believe all that when they make serious cuts to executive pay. Until then, nothing they say should have any credibility.

Re:Bonus time.

[Egregius]

Where are my mod points..

Re:Bonus time.

[marnues]

The "small" city-states of Ancient Greece may be small by our standards, but they were certainly large enough that mob rule is what happened. Any society that sentences Socrates to death is not functional. The Ancient Greeks had some of humanities greatest thinkers, but do not extrapolate that to mean that Ancient Greece was filled with intelligent thinkers. Quite the contrary from my readings.

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Greece a socialist country?

Though, I agree the compensation system is out of whack. But it is a private company. Though, the leadership appears not to have much sensibility.

Re:Bonus time.

[marnues]

Greece Iceland Greeks Icelanders Generalizing in economics is what screws up models. Iceland had a banking problem. Greece has labor, welfare, and corruption problems. These are not similar problems.

Re:Bonus time.

[marnues]

Bah, stupid tags. Let's try this again:
Greece != Iceland
Greeks != Icelanders
Generalizing in economics is what screws up models. Iceland had a banking problem. Greece has labor, welfare, and corruption problems. These are not similar problems.

Re:Bonus time.

[wytcld]

You can't invest long-term when government economic policy is swerving from side to side

Nonsense. Would it be more fruitful to invest in the short term if government was presently doing more to boost employment so that people earn more money to spend? Sure. The failure of government policy is why businesses that depend on broad consumer spending (as compared to the luxury markets) are not making those short-term investments now. And part of what broad consumer spending supports is the CPU market, thus AMD's contraction.

But long term, it is always riskier not to invest than to invest. The only question is the distribution of your investments. Large corporations have decided in large to invest in US dollar holdings. Contrary to those who expect inflation to be right around the corner, the corporations are betting that the dollar will appreciate - which is to say, we'll see a period of deflation. Deflation is already happening in much of Europe.

If the government were to create an active jobs program and institute a mildly inflationary monetary policy we'd be in business. But meanwhile, the truly smart businesses do all they can to be ready to ride the front of the wave in the next expansion. That means, among other things, not being stuck with last year's tech when it happens - another reason to hold onto money to buy the newest tech just ahead of the wave. That wave will come. It's being held back now by the stupidity and greed of an obstructionist party in Washington, but also by the lack of compelling new tech to leverage the advance. The latter is more important than the former, in the larger picture. And there's plenty of start-up ventures fully invested in filling that void. Some of them will succeed, if not this year, soon after. We just have to hope that the obstructionist, anti-science, tech-ignorant, economically-stone-age party doesn't gain control in the meanwhile.

Re:Bonus time.

[stdarg]

however no one is worth 1,000 times the janitor.

You're kidding right? The janitor is the classic example of an outsourceable completely replaceable person.

Ok let's say the corporation we're talking about is an NFL football team. You have 1000 janitors cleaning your locker room. They get in a fight with your star quarterback. Who do you fire? Is the one quarterback worth firing 1000 janitors for? Obviously yes.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

They're just children, even if they are 18 years of age, who have no idea about the world around them.

Day before yesterday, there was published a profile of the 800+ Occupy protestors that were arrested.

They are not children. They are not unemployed. They are middle-class and homeowners. They come from poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods. There are military veterans, firefighters, teachers, nurses. In other words, the people that used to make up the middle-class, back when we had a middle-class.

There is a concerted effort to make the Occupy Wall Street protestors out to be something that they are not. of the thousands of protestors in Oakland, a handful of them became violent long after the general strike ended. We've already had members of the editorial staff of right-wing newspapers (Weekly Standard) admit to trying to incite violence to discredit the Occupy Movement.

The public acceptance and agreement with the Occupy Movement is growing, steadily. The disapproval has halted at about 19%. The policies that the Occupy Movement is calling for (and yes, they have a very well-delineated set of proposals, if you cared to look) are supported by 70-80% of the US population. The Occupy Movement, in a few short weeks, has managed to change the discussion about politics and economics in the US in a way that no other activist group ever has. Hell, 4 weeks after the Tea Party started (the month after the black guy took the White House) they were still at the "Keep the government out of our Medicare" stage.

I've been to the Chicago Occupy several times in the past month. It's walking distance from my house and a short bike ride. These are BIG groups of people. Every time there were 30 tea party folks together in one place, it made headlines nationwide. Well, there were over 10,000 OWS protestors one day when I went down to LaSalle Street and even on off days there are hundreds. They are nothing like they are being portrayed in the corporate media. Yes, there are Lyndon LaRouche types off to the side with their lunacy, and some ANSWER marxist types just as far off to the side. For some reason, these are the protestors the media chooses to talk to and portray on camera. You don't see the firemen, physicians, nurses, teachers, tool and die makers, truck drivers that are down there. You don't see the veterans, the professors, the telecom repair guys. They're all there.

The people who are trying to minimize OWS, to laugh them off, to trivialize their message, call them "dirty hippies" and "loafers" and "violent radicals" are well behind the reality curve. They make a big mistake by underestimating this movement.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

Have to buy now before printing-press driven inflation

The M2 money supply has not grown.

There is no "printing press driven" inflation. Inflation is being driven by energy prices and health care costs.

.

Re:Bonus time.

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Yeah, they look absolutely awesome. Cant make money. Cant compete on performance or power utilization. Latest offerings combine piss poor cpu's with mediocre gpu's and expensive high end cpu's that arent as good as intels high end.

Then of course, theres that whole problem of taking on a company with a ton of cash in their pocket that has pretty much the best manufacturing business around...and AMD has to sub all of theirs out...

Its simply been a case of how long AMD can lose money and how long idiots will keep giving them cash to light on fire. Not one iota of 'good looking future'....

Re:Bonus time.

[fireylord]

Nobody with any cents invests long-term

A typo, likely, but amazingly amusing and insightful none the less!

Way to completely miss the rest of the post!

Re:Bonus time.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth remembering that the Greeks were looking to vote on whether or not they would accept the austerity measures that are a condition of receiving further bailouts. Voting against that was the first step in a short journey to Greece dropping the Euro, setting up their own new currency and turning their back on all of the commitments and responsibilities they have as EU members.

They want a financial etch-a-sketch reset after years of indefensible fiscal policy. If the Greek people had been screaming all these years about financial mismanagement when they were benefiting from it, I would feel they deserved to drop out of the single currency system (which is prohibited by EU law; no country can abandon the Euro as a currency and no country can be forced out of using the Euro by other countries). but they didn't bitch when things were good because of unsustainable policies and practices, they took what they could get while the getting was good. Now the roof is caving in and they want to act like someone, anyone else should pay the price.

Re:Bonus time.

[Man On Pink Corner]

I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.

So? Sell your Lennox stock if you don't think they're behaving rationally. That is, and should be, your sole remedy.

Re:Bonus time.

[jthill]

I see it differently.

Nice job addressing six words, pretending the rest aren't there. Care to explain how the people who design and build and grow are lazy? Or why you think the people who make their living writing and painting and singing are lazy? Or in what world anyone believes global companies aren't designed and built and grown?

There's nothing sinister about this.

Of course there's nothing sinister about the parts you're willing to discuss, but your devotion to discussing only the good parts of your model and the bad parts (even when you have to invent them) of anyone else's can convince no one but the lazy.

Re:Bonus time.

[PopeRatzo]

It's worth remembering that the Greeks were looking to vote on whether or not they would accept the austerity measures that are a condition of receiving further bailouts.

No, they were "looking" to vote on whether they would go on the hook for bailing out the bankers who tore up the place by betting on bad investments.

The deal said the bankers would take a 50% haircut, but in the last week it looked like they were trying to weasel out of that haircut.

This referendum was not about the austerity measures. It was about the bailout. There's a lot of bad information in the US media about this.

The best thing that could happen for the future of Greece would be for them to default on their debt, let the bankers walk, leave the EU and start printing drachmas tied to some fraction of the dollar. It would mean a LOT of "austerity" for Greeks, but at least they'd be out from underneath the banking system that is using them as a tax haven for billionaires.

Re:Bonus time.

[rtb61]

It is not human nature, that is a lie, it is the nature of psychopaths and narcissists. Those who by principles of lying, cheating and stealing are running the system. Never put to the rest of humanity, the actions of a genetically damaged minority. A destructive minority who thrive in the chaos and degradation they create. Eliminate them and there is no doubt you will eliminate most of humanities problems, no war, no corruption of democracy and a humane human society will be the result. The psychopaths those the cause the greatest problems should of course be the priority.

Re:Bonus time.

[TheEyes]

Oh, I see what the problem is: you work in government contracting. "Contracting" is what you get when you put anti-government people in charge of the government, that is, a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to make government as inefficient and wasteful as possible while extracting as much money to outside corporations as possible.

Contracting begins when some pointy-haired politician decides he doesn't like a functioning piece of government and decides to dismantle it. He fires all the productive people, and tasks the rest with drawing up the most byzantine requirements possible, such that the contract can only be fulfilled by one firm, somehow unsurprisingly the one who just brib--I mean lobbied their way into said pointy-haired politician's good graces. The company gives a lowball estimate for the first X months worth of contract--usually the length of time to the next election--so the politician comes up smelling like roses, then suddenly the company uses some damn excuse to double or triple its rates, but by then the government has fired all the workers who used to be able to replace the contractor, so the company keeps getting its money and the government is "forced" to contract out another piece of itself, to "save money."

I'm not surprised that someone in government contracting is cynical about the functioning of government. The company you work for exists for an anti-government politician to carve out a monopoly-shaped piece of a government organization, hand it to your company, and leave it to exploit that monopoly to make its stakeholders wealthy enough to support that politician's re-election. I'd be cynical too, if I were in your shoes.

Re:Bonus time.

[Urkki]

Not all statements are correct. Not all opinions are wise or even meaningful. Asking for economic advice from Greek citizens, more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy, is unlikely to yield anything useful.

In fact, left to their own devices, most citizens (not merely Greeks) will make short-sighted short-term-pain-minimizing decisions that will eventually wreck their culture's pattern. Democracy exists as a check on tyranny, NOT as a source of omniscience.

Yeah, but in this case, the Greeks look hosed. Up shit creek without a paddle. Royally shafted. Staring at a business end of a fan being hit with a stream of shit. Pick your metaphor. It'd be decent to let them vote which way they'd like to take it...

Also, on a more practical level, if the people of Greece aren't behind what ever the Greece ruling elite decides to do, it simply will not work. First there will be increasing amount of demonstrations, turning into riots, eventually devolving into curfew and tanks on the streets watching the country's own citizens.

Correction

[gorilla_au]

Is it 10% of AMD's global workforce or 11%?

Re:Correction

[ackthpt]

Is it 10% of AMD's global workforce or 11%?

Rounding error, Luyseyal ran the article through an early Pentium with the FDIV bug.

shoudda got AMD!

Re:Correction

[Luyseyal]

Yeah, the editor (samzenpus, I guess) took the title from a different submission. 1400/12000 = 0.11666666...

-l

Going to be a tough market anyway

[ackthpt]

With the disruption of technology firms in Thailand, I expect more companies to follow suit.

Sacking developers

[Tomato42]

Sacking one of the people responsible for good Linux performance on servers is not just stupid... it's cutting the branch which you're sitting on.

Re:Sacking developers

[jd]

I wonder if the "final" set of patches from AMD include an easter-egg encouraging you to buy Intel.

Re:Sacking developers

[no-body]

Long term, the goons sitting in the lofty cream layer will notice more and more that their branches are getting thin.
Richard Wolff has some good facts how this come together - or not, as it stands right now.

http://www.alternativeradio.org/products/wolr002
The MP3 dl is $ 2, I am not affiliated with them.

Re:Sacking developers

[FithisUX]

I believe Linux is their future. I cannot see any reasoning behind their acts. Personally I would take people from windows business to work on linux/bsds and illumos and even help qnx people to have a decent port and invest more on R&D. Those who laid him off do not know what hard work means.

Re:Sacking developers

[turgid]

Big companies do this all the time.

Many years ago, I worked for a Californian computer outfit called Sun Microsystems, but in the UK. I was doing a very low, unimportant job as I'd just changed careers but I worked in an office staffed by very intelligent and accomplished engineers.

Some very important Solaris projects came out of that office.

When Solaris 10 came out, we had the party on the Friday. On the Monday, we were all (apart from 3 people) made redundant, including some very senior engineers and project leaders.

About five or six weeks later, one very senior guy who had architected and lead a very important Solaris project received an angry phone call from a senior Sun PHB asking where on earth (but in more colourful language) this project was. His reply was, "Well, you tell me mate." After some more foul language, he managed to explain to the PHB that the team had all be laid off before the delivery. The PHB was forced to eat his words and apologise.

The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.

American jobs were to be protected above those of foreigners. And what serious engineering could those pesky Limeys have been capable of anyway?

Re:Sacking developers

[Tomato42]

Just because it happens all the time doesn't mean it creates good environment for the engineers and makes the company successful. But it's the only possible result if the manger has no idea what programming really is and what takes to be a good programmer.

Re:Sacking developers

[turgid]

Just because it happens all the time doesn't mean it creates good environment for the engineers and makes the company successful.

That was part of my point. The rest of my point is that big business has lost the plot. One company embarks on a hare-brained scheme and next thing you know their all at it. [Hint to PHBs: stop trying to copy HP. They're on their way down and the staff only cling on to their jobs there because they haven't found any elsewhere yet.] It (big business) doesn't understand how engineering works, what engineers are, what they do and what they know. It doesn't understand the "value" that engineers provide and the "untapped value potential" they have in their heads, and the future developments that engineers can create by their drive to learn and explore new technology. That was deliberately phrased in PHB speak in case any are reading.

I'm currently the victim of outsourcing to an Indian company. The corporation said that we were forming a partnership and that we were going to be getting offshore help to accelerate our deliveries - to "leverage their talent pool." These are "motivated" and "empowered" people (mostly fresh out of university and costing 0.1 to 0.25 of what we cost to employ).

The outsourcing company told us that as much of our current work would be offshored as possible to get the costs down. Perhaps the other side is still labouring under the misapprehension that all of us with the knowledge and expertise will still be working on their products? They cut the R&D budget then engaged an outsourcing contractor with thousands of its own staff and sold us to them. You do the maths.

The new company is allegedly looking for new work for us from other clients. Meanwhile, I have the honour of training up and Indian for a few months who will then be going back to India to start up a team to do what mine currently does... and we'll be freed up to work on these fabulous new opportunities. But any new work will allegedly be sent to India as quickly as possible after the deals are signed to keep costs down.

Sounds great?

We are finding that these motivated and empowered young Indians are just as naieve and inexperienced as young and enthusiastic (but unemployable by their standards) British and Americans of the same age range.

I'm trying like mad to find a new job. The trouble is recruiters see "test-driven development" on your CV and think that you're a software tester... and C# is the same as C is the same as C++ :-(

No company names are being mentioned for obvious reasons.

Re linux:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok, the source is there and I'm sure anybody would be able to understand and maintain it.

Where's the Bailout?

[RobinEggs]

Man, if anyone's "too big to fail" it's the second largest company in a critical industry with just two major players. Maybe that would be too small too fail. Whatever.

Intel's certainly done well at keeping up a legitimate release schedule in the last five years, especially for a company with no real competition at all, but I'd hate to see the world where Intel suddenly gets that last 20% of processor market share by default. Their prices aren't exactly low to begin with.

I mean really, what's the most recent company that had any real development capability and brand presence besides those two? Cyrix? Via?

A world without AMD would suck...

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[couchslug]

If it "fails" perhaps a Chinese investor will buy it. There is no inherent reason that AMD can't implode then be reborn elsewhere.

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[ackthpt]

If it "fails" perhaps a Chinese investor will buy it. There is no inherent reason that AMD can't implode then be reborn elsewhere.

If they've done any classified design work for the DoD I don't think the US gummint would allow it.

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[Dunbal]

China probably already has copies of the "classified work".

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[edxwelch]

They're not failing just yet. They clawed back some market share this quarter because of the success of fusion. Although AMD can't compete with Intel on CPUs, Intel can't compete with AMD on integrated graphics. Don't know if what will happen when Intel's 3D transistors come out though.

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[gerddie]

How do you come by that they need a bailout? AMD's profits, forecasts exceed projections, share price jumps (10/27/2011).

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure the current Saudi prince who owns the majority stake in it and the foundry will if it makes him money.

Re:Where's the Bailout?

[serviscope_minor]

Intel's certainly done well at keeping up a legitimate release schedule in the last five years, especially for a company with no real competition at all,

Huh what? No real competition?

Firstly, it's been less than 5 years since the core2 was released, which was when Intel started to make their big comeback in performance (though sales never seemed to be a problem for some reason...).

On the server, it's still very hard to beat the density, price and performance and power draw offered by a good Teir II (e.g. Supermicro) 1U quad sockey Opteron 6100 box.

On the low-end of laptops, it seems like bobcat stomps all over the competing Atom.

On desktops thing are matched a little differently. Nothing seems to beat the Core i7 2600K in single-thread performance (except the i7 990 in some cases). If you want the fastest desktop money can buy, then the only choice is Intel.

If you're a bit more price sensitive, then it really depends on what you are doing (see my previous Ask Slashdot about building a cluster---I went with a big old bunch of PII x6 CPUs as they seemed to hit the sweet spot).

On the low end, AMD integrated graphics win every time, unless you're not doing anything graphics intensive. I actually prefer Intel graphics on my laptop since they support in Linux is top notch.

Intel have the edge in power draw, but even if you're doing solid number crunching 24x7, the lifetime electricity costs will not be that high.

For most stuff, intel has the edge in terms of speed, though usually at a slightly increased price. For some stuff (heavily multithreaded), AMD has the edge.

When it comes to running your own code with GCC, who knows, since the intel compiler is fixed to give AMD and VIA processors bad results.

In mid to high end laptops, Intel is the clear winner due to superior power performance.

But that's hardly no competiton. Intel are not that far ahead. If they get it wrong (like the P4) then they will fall behind again.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Ethanol-fueled]

I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD.

Have you met my friend, mister Breach of contract suit?

ouch

[mirix]

Hope that AMD pulls through, intel fanboys should too.

Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.

Re:ouch

[RobinEggs]

Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.

As far as I'm concerned Intel went straight from Pentium 2 to Core 2. Whatever that crap was in between, it sure wasn't the product of an industry leader.

Re:ouch

[Khyber]

Umm, Tualatin did rather well.

Re:ouch

[mirix]

Ah, I thought PIII was pretty solid, it was just bloody expensive. I seem to recall the frequencies going up faster and the prices being cut more often once the athlon started to get a decent chunk of the market.

P4/netburst was a shitsack, though, especially the early ones. IIRC the 1GHz or 1.13GHz, whatever was top of the line at the time, PIIIs were still blowing the first gen P4s out of the water... pathetic.

Re:ouch

[cnettel]

Remember the early PIII era? What fun that was, until AMD got competitive again.

As far as I'm concerned Intel went straight from Pentium 2 to Core 2. Whatever that crap was in between, it sure wasn't the product of an industry leader.

Coppermine, the little L2 that could. First released just before the Athlon and staying competitive by rapidly racing from 500 MHz or so up to 1 GHz.

Re:ouch

[Daniel Phillips]

As far as I'm concerned Intel went straight from Pentium 2 to Core 2. Whatever that crap was in between, it sure wasn't the product of an industry leader.

PIII is the basis of Intel's "core" architecture including Core 2.

Re:ouch

[toddestan]

The PIII was pretty solid. Given that the typical AMD system from that period was running the horrible VIA KT133 chipset, Intel had the superior platform though you had to pay for it.

Re:If they need something to do,

[postmortem]

*here you are laid off and also you can't work for the competitor, go die of hunger*
Even on link that you left, that clause is forbidden in California, where AMD has its headquarters.

Re:If they need something to do,

[subanark]

Non-compete clauses are pretty much not allowed in California, and AMD is located in California.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Desler]

I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD.

I'm sure they'll also love the lawsuit from AMD for breaking trade secret laws. If the company is smart they'll give up any employee attempting to do so and let them get the lawsuit instead.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Desler]

Great, but tons of AMD employees both don't reside in California nor in the US..

Re:If they need something to do,

[Desler]

So then they'll just slap them on to people who don't live in California. Mark Langsdorf, for example, worked for the Austin TX branch so California law has no jurisdiction there.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Fluffeh]

I'm sure they'll also love the lawsuit from AMD for breaking trade secret laws.

Bring in detailed plans on a USB and it's easy to prove by your former employer. Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove. Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.

In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.

Is it more expensive today to develop a processor?

[poly_pusher]

Sure it's more complicated but is it actually any harder, does it require a larger investment than it did 10 years ago? I ask because there was a time when AMD seemed much more competitive. They were usually a little ways behind but would have big products like the Thunderbird and the X2 pop up every now and then giving Intel a run for their money.

Now we've seen 2 consecutive product releases that pale in comparison to Intel. Bulldozer was supposed to be big.

Intel has way more money to invest in R&D. The newer fabrication methods such as moving to 28 nm seem to be giving everyone trouble, Intel, AMD, Nvidia. Does it cost so much now to develop a chip that a relatively small company like AMD just doesn't have enough money to research these more challenging technologies? After all, Intel is going to release Ivy Bridge in 6 months featuring tri-gate technology and it will be that long before AMD tunes their new architecture.

AMD just seems to be slipping further and further away from Intel and it's sad...

Re:If they need something to do,

[Desler]

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.

Trade secrets involve more than just schematics and diagrams. Long term plans are also trade secrets and if you think Intel is dumb enough to try that, you are an idiot. Intel has itself gone after people who have left them to go to AMD for trying to steal trade secrets. They aren't going to open themselves up to similar lawsuits. They'll throw that employee to the wolves and let them enjoy the lawsuit from AMD.

In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.

Except that people have been successfully prosecuted for doing that. But hey, go ahead and try it. I'm sure you'll love losing that lawsuit as you get thrown under the bus.

"Often posts"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Mark Langsdorf authored a grand total of 22 patches in Linus' git tree since August 2005. Either slashdot editors have a very strange definition of "often posts", or this guy's patches are often lousy.

Re:"Often posts"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably 22 more then you have....

Re:"Often posts"?

[artor3]

More than three per year seems pretty often to me. Are there really many people churning out a patch every couple weeks?

Re:"Often posts"?

[scdeimos]

TFA doesn't even mention Mark Langsdorf. His LinkedIn profile still shows him employed at AMD, and so does his homepage. So where did the news that he's been sacked come from?

Re:"Often posts"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zing... oh wait, you are talking about a guy who was paid to do this and he averaged 4 a year with corporate backing versus an anonymous coward.

Re:"Often posts"?

[cbope]

This is the kernel we are talking about, I'd say 22 patches is quite a lot for a single contributor.

Re:"Often posts"?

[Desler]

Notice how all his employment dates end at November, 2011? If he was still employed it would say "Present" instead.

Re:"Often posts"?

[Luyseyal]

He's a friend of mine. I know him socially through my wife. I'm not on LKML but that was one of the first things that comes up when you Google for Mark Langsdorf. I just thought that tidbit might be 1) interesting to slashdotters and 2) garner him some attention in getting a new job.

-l

The amd chipset offer alot more choice then

[Joe_Dragon]

with intel all the Sandy Bridge chipsets offer the same # for pci-e lanes and only small changes like # of sata ports and or usb ports also some don't pass though cpu based video.

The AM3 / AM3+ amd chip sets offer.

Integrated graphics at different levels some even with on board ram just for the on board video chips that is WAY better then intel video.

Hybrid video.

Lot's of pci-e choices so you don't have to buy a $280 + cpu to get a lot of pci-e IO.

The lower end chipset have like 22 pci-e lanes + 4 for chipset link. so you can have 16 for video + x4 slots + some x1 slots.

with intel you get 16 for video + 4 for chipset link.

Re:Is it more expensive today to develop a process

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it's more complicated but is it actually any harder, does it require a larger investment than it did 10 years ago?

Yes

It's all downhill from here

[sqrt(2)]

I encourage everyone to read The Lights In the Tunnel, as a primer on the coming age of technologically driven systemic unemployment.

Think of an idealized chip factory/company. The machines run themselves, AI systems design ever better version; raw material goes in one side and pallets of CPUs come out the other side.

This is a 100% capital intensive business, and has almost zero labor requirements. We're not there yet, obviously, but every year we'll get closer. Companies will be able to do more with less workers, prices will drop, and supply will be limited only by how much resources you have to turn into chips. That's ONE side of the equation. The other side is that such an efficient and streamlined business is destined to quickly go bankrupt.

In a capitalist economy, every worker is also a consumer. There will be no other sector of the economy to shunt those unemployed workers to, especially not at the level they were employed at previously, because all the other businesses have gone capital-intensive too. Strangely, the most secure jobs will be the lowest paid and traditionally least desirable jobs such as janitors, cleaners, cooks, and other services. It's actually easier to build an automated chip factory than it is to produce a robot that can do everything a human janitor can do. When you lay off a worker, you're also getting rid of a potential customer. Now, one business doing this when all the others don't would benefit and outcompete the others. So to keep up, they all have to become more efficient (which in modern times means becoming less labor intensive). Each business doing what's best for itself in isolation ends up ruining everything for everyone. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, but it's applied to the mass market itself as the common good, something that most mainstream economists, politicians, and citizens don't yet accept.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[Anonymous Coward]

once we get automated enough bet on the elites genociding everyone else

Re:It's all downhill from here

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, yet impossible solution.

Decline all borders, make one set of laws to all countries. Super tax ritch people to point when they get really only a few percent of money they make, it still will make them feel 'special' and 'worth their time'. Increase many times social benefits. Insure all products are modularized, that you can simply exchange microwave parts for it to be more eficcient etc. Attempt to make most of devices recycable, by enforcing producers. Count how much people can stay on earth and limit reproducive abilities somehow. Allow mortal combat style shows, that will decrease populationa and make life certainly more enjoyable for others. :)
Eliminate religions by better education.(proly will take a few generations)

Things not to do: medicine should stay on current level. Instead of pumping money into medicine(there is always something to improve! theoretically with some fucked up cybernetic enhancments you can make body live for ever) pump them into profilactic actions. Force people to do sports and healthy activities. Say no for DNA changes.(very personal opinion, though i have nothing DNA based selective breeding, take moms and dads DNA, see what best the can produce, and in scientifcal way, take that special litle bastard and make a baby witht his precise little mother fucker). Either way, messing with DNA is sin against nature in my opinion. 'overspecialise and you breed weakness'(ghost in the shell)

Re:It's all downhill from here

[dotancohen]

I encourage everyone to read The Lights In the Tunnel, as a primer on the coming age of technologically driven systemic unemployment.

Or Atlas Shrugged, which describes almost this exact scenario of regulation and company-destroying in the interest of the public good.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[Anonymous Coward]

I encourage you to go and study economics before quoting nonsense like that.

It's not technology that's causing the problems but rather the Fed and central banks that are hell bent on setting low interest rates. In a regular capitalist economy, capital cost is one of the major factors of business profitability along with labor. When capital is expensive and labor is cheap, businesses prefer to hire - this is an arbitrage of investing in relatively cheap labor to create "expensive" capital. In the crony capitalism like today capital cost is near 0 as set by "The Bernank" and the Fed, while labor is expensive due to union laws. Therefore, businesses lay off workers and the reverse arbitrage takes place - business prefer to increase their capital by laying off workers.

Purge corruption from the government, disband the Fed and let market set the "price of money" and employment will return. It's not done because the fox is not interested in giving up its control of the hen house and because the vast majority of the voting population is economically illiterate like you.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology increases wealth in real terms for given work but is balanced out by declining market.

So full employment with current purchasing power while working 1 day per week.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[dbIII]

This is a 100% capital intensive business, and has almost zero labor requirements.

I've been in a couple of industries very close to that - steelmaking and electricity generation. In both industries there are many examples of bad management fucking things up by obsessing over wages and turning profitable operations into abandoned buildings.
If something works and you want it to continue to you should learn which bits keep it working before you cut it to pieces.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[Egregius]

This is called the Luddite Fallacy, and there are clues the fallacy won't be a fallacy much longer. In the old days workers had alternative industries to relocate to, and automation basically meant more productivity per worker. But there's a limit to that, and I think we're reaching that limit.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[sqrt(2)]

The book I mentioned makes note of that. The author concludes that the Luddites were probably right in their assumptions, but a few hundred years too early. It has only been a fallacy so far because there has always been another sector available for displaced workers to move to. I'm not comfortable saying that will ALWAYS be the case, just because it has been in the past. It's not difficult for me to imagine a future Earth where there simply isn't enough work to go around for every human who wants a job. So the question is, what do those people do for a living? Not everyone is capable of being an artist or a creative type (or, more accurately, not everyone is capable of doing that well enough to make money at it), and people like that will be cut out of participating in the economy by no fault of their own. Simply being born with no remarkable skills (being of average intelligence) shouldn't cause someone to be sentenced to poverty by the cold laws of the economic system. If that's happening, the system is broken.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[sqrt(2)]

You're still thinking in terms of traditional economics (which I can easily tell by your obsession over things like "the FED", and government corruption), the whole point is that those paradigms are going to break down eventually and become useless to understand and manage the economic activity of humanity. Read the book before you try to talk about this because you're really just showing how little you understand of what's being said in this conversation.

Re:It's all downhill from here

[sqrt(2)]

Except that Rand, like everyone else, was still stuck using a brain that was fossilized by traditional economic ideas. So her conclusions, even if they were true (and they're not), would only apply to past economies.

Would you rather the Chinese own the market?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you rather have? An American dominated market, or a Chinese one? Be careful what you wish for.

Re:To bad intel bullied AMD and that hurt AMD long

[lexman098]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131759

PCIe x16, x8, x4 + sata 3 + usb 3.0, what more could you ask for on a micro ATX for $170

Re:Is it more expensive today to develop a process

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem was that when AMD was kicking Intel's ass, Intel was using illegal tactics to keep AMD out of the market. They did that for a couple of years while they re-designed their products to be competitive. That was AMD's one shot to get some great market share and Intel stole it. Later Intel paid AMD over a billion dollars to get AMD's cooperation to end the DOJ antitrust investigations of Intel. Once AMD lost that large amount of cash back then they didn;t have the budget to upgrade their fabs. It was just a matter of time before AMD couldn't compete.

Re:Is it more expensive today to develop a process

[tukang]

I wouldn't count AMD out just yet. They've delivered on combining the CPU and GPU and their integrated GPU is far more powerful than Intel's. Their CPUs are lacking but if they can catch up to Intel a bit, they already have all the other pieces in place and will be in a very strong position to compete, so I wouldn't count them out just yet.

Horrible news, idiotic "analyst"

[serbanp]

From TFA:

"This comes after the arrival of a new chief executive and it is after the successful introduction of new products, so it is about right-sizing the company," said analyst Cody Acree with Williams Financial Group in Austin.

"You don't cut until you have done all the work you need to get new products out," he said. "But once you have them out and have identified what you need to do to keep moving forward, then you have more of a reason to go ahead and take job actions. You don't want to make the cuts before the CEO gets in, and you don't want to make the cuts before you get the products out. Now that those two are passed, it is time to get the cost structure in line with the rest of the fabless semiconductor industry"

This a**hole talks about the layoffs as one would discuss tree pruning. I guess that the whole "anal-yst" trade group is full of psychopaths, devoid of any humanity.

Re:Horrible news, idiotic "analyst"

[Tomato42]

So he's a prime candidate for C*O position!

Re:Horrible news, idiotic "analyst"

[AmiMoJo]

Interesting that their latest product, Bulldozer, is shit. Maybe the engineers saw this coming and the good ones left, leaving the rest to struggle on apathetically until it was out the door.

Re:Horrible news, idiotic "analyst"

[Anonymous Coward]

Cody

Isn't that that, like, a dogs name?

Re:Horrible news, idiotic "analyst"

[N1AK]

You prune a tree to keep to keep what is left healthy and doing what it should, if you don't you risk it dying or getting in the way and needing to be cut down. The only reason the same analogy is remotely contentious with companies and lay-offs is because the things you prune are sentient. I worked for a company that was bought and shut down. It couldn't turn a workable profit, in part because it was over-staffed and the pay and benefits were excessive. A cleaner earned over £40,000pa (admittedly by working ~55hrs a week). If the people running the business had done the right thing, not replaced people as they retired etc and held pay until it was close to in line with the value of the work, then at least the 90% of the staff who were left might have kept their jobs.

You can't make effective business decisions without accepting that sometimes companies need to decrease the amount of staff they've got to be viable.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Runaway1956]

So, they all need to go get the job they prefer, then wait for AMD to file suit, and fight it.

Personally, I have zero respect for any non-compete clauses. The company claims to have rights and authorities regarding employment, whether it's written into a contract or not. And, the employee has none.

Around the world, if a company decides to fire you or lay you off, you find out two minutes before you are on the pavement, wondering what just happened. BUT - if you plan on moving to another job, the company demands a two week notice. I say, "WTF?" When I decide to move on, I figure that calling my old boss from my new desk to tell him that I won't be back is good enough.

Re:If they need something to do,

[neonmonk]

In Australia, at least, they are required to pay out your notice.

I'd rather be given the heave-ho with a month of salary in my pocket than be forced to come in day after day knowing I'd been laid off.

Re:Why should they?

[ackthpt]

"GOP has no sympathies for California companies."

Well, they're so busy donating to Obama hoping for GE-like tax subsidies... of course the GOP won't support them.

Maybe they'll consider that next election. If you're going to pick a winner, then be prepared to live with the consequences.

As to the rest of your idiotic rant, its Obama that bailed out all the banks and financial institutions, but I guess you're too busy playing with your iPhone to notice.

That's what I'm talking about - the first bailout was passed while he was still running for President. Well done, you prove my point with emphasis of calling me an idiot.

The GOP through the George W. Bush years didn't care much for California (or really much else of the country) It's largely assumed because despite a great many republicans living in California, many of whom are very conservative, the state appears to the rest of the country as Liberal or Moderate at the very most, so not a lot of interest in the GOP doing anything for anyone or business in the state. Aside the push to get Gray Davis ousted, after the administration overlooked the criminal manipulation of the power industry (hey, deregulation is good, right?) there was genuine hope of a conservative being elected - alas, Arnold stepped in and derailed that train.

Meg had all sorts of good ideas - mostly theories, as she'd never held office, nor taken interest in the political affairs of the state (or nation) by voting for years. Yet, millions believed she was the one to save California. Now HP are saddled with her - good luck giving her the boot without having to pay her tens of millions in an exit package.

Really did have high hopes for HP, but the writing was on the wall when they picked her.

Very unlockable

[qualityassurancedept]

I would say 10% of just about any corporation on earth is fluff anyway. I love my Phenom II x2 which allowed both disabled cores to unlock and now runs as a Phenom II x4 955... and so I bought an Althon II x3 which also allowed for the 4th core to unlock and it now runs as a Phenom II x 4 940. In total I spent about $200 for 8 stable cores. Well done AMD!

Basically ...

[Grieviant]

"I'm proposing a zero-profit operating budget this year. That would mean savings of almost twenty-one million kronor and the chance to beef up SMP's staff and finances. I'm also proposing wage cuts for management. I'm being paid a monthly salary of 88,000 kronor, which is utter insanity for a newspaper that can't add a job to it's sports desk."

"So you want to cut your own salary? Is this some sort of wage communism you're advocating?"

"Don't bullshit me. You make 112,000 kronor a month, if you add in your annual bonus. That's crazy. If the newspaper were stable and bringing in a tremendous profit, then you could pay out as much as you wanted in bonuses. But this is not time for you to be increasing your own bonus. I propose cutting all management salaries by half."

"What you don't understand is that our stockholders bought stock in the paper because they want to make money. That's called capitalism. If you arrange for them to lose money, then they won't want to be stockholders any longer".

"I'm not suggesting they should lose money, though it might come to that. Ownership implies responsibility. As you yourself pointed out, capitalism is what matters here. SMP's owners want to make a profit. But it's the market that decides whether you take a profit or a loss. By your reasoning, you want the rules of capitalism to apply solely to the employees, while you and the stockholders will be exempt. "

Trade secrets are separate from non-compete

[perpenso]

Non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California but non-disclosure is something entirely different. Former AMD employees will never be allowed to disclose proprietary information (trade secrets, business plans, etc) of AMD.

Can you invest in AMD though?

[LostMyBeaver]

As far as I know, they're not issuing new shares. If you buy AMD stocks... not a single penny of that goes to AMD unless it's AMD selling the share itself. You'd just be buying an old share that's already in circulation.

What is accomplished in buying an AMD share from the stock market though is to show confidence in AMD as a company. This has a short term impact of helping to increase the value of the share enough to make it so that the controlling shareholders in the organization will not say things like "Our share prices are down, you need to do something to bring them back up even if that means firing a bunch of people". So, instead of trying to buy shares at this point in time to give them kudos for canning a bunch of people just before Christmas, hold off until AMD starts showing weakness in the market again and help increase the overall feeling as to the future of the company at that point. It could in fact save jobs.

Alternatively, often there is some method of purchasing non-public shares in companies over the counter which would put money directly into the firm and actually help secure some jobs.

Personally, now that Microsoft is porting Windows to ARM, I don't think AMD will have a very strong future. This isn't 1993 when AMD produced Intel socket compatible processors and therefore provided a second source of chips for system builders. In fact, at this point in time, I think the strongest future for AMD is that ARM has made it possible for Intel to acquire AMD for their assets and IP. Intel would definitely benefit from owning what was once ATI and they can save many millions (if not billions) on lawsuits from AMD as has been the case in the past.

Frankly, I think combining the two companies together could be great for all of us. The battle is no longer Intel vs. AMD. In the future, it'll be Intel vs. ARM. And that'll be a much more interesting situation. AMD's leadership has completely destroyed that company by being arrogant and sloppy. They were a little dog that got ahead at one point in technology and just sat back saying "Intel will never beat us again". The end result was that Intel decided not to just let AMD take over their entire business and, while unfortunately employing terrible business tactics during the bad times, they did make a long term investment in the Core technology which just creamed AMD and left them wondering what happened.

So, if I were making an investment in AMD, I'd make it in the hopes of saving jobs, but pray that Intel isn't going to just sit back and wait until AMD is in receivership to swoop in and buy up all the patents.

Re:Can you invest in AMD though?

[unixisc]

I don't think that Intel has much to gain from buying AMD. As it is, the entire semiconductor sector is now commoditized, and there's not much of a future there. As you noted, the biggest threat to Intel is ARM, but Intel still has the PC market to itself, and buying AMD won't do squat to either help nor hurt it. Only thing that can hurt Intel is a paradigm shift to ARM on PCs - which can happen if MS ports Windows 8 and major applications to ARM. But given that they didn't do that w/ Windows NT, I don't see why they would do that now. And until they do, don't expect the Dells, the HPs, the Acers to start building desktops or laptops based on ARM.

AMD itself has gone thru a lot of such cycles before, and in those times, it was in a far worse shape. All they were doing was cloning Intel (this was before the first Athlons) and they didn't have an architectural identity of their own. Things like x64 and Athlon/Opteron changed all that. I expect that even the Fusion will do well, particularly for Windows 8 tablets, where Fusion could run all PC software, whereas ARM can't. Same would be true of Atom.

Re:Can you invest in AMD though?

[petermgreen]

now that Microsoft is porting Windows to ARM,

Sure MS has "ported windows to ARM" but IIRC they are planning to make windows 8 arm metro only and will not be implementing any form of compatibility layer for running x86 apps on it. So unless everyone suddenly ports their apps to metro/arm the windows port won't really help arm's prospects on the desktops.

Seriously weak argument

[LostMyBeaver]

There's a huge difference between Greece and Germany other than the system itself. It's the Mediterranean syndrome. I've been to multiple areas of Greece several times. I have been to many cities in Germany and have worked with Germans for years. I have been to many western and central European countries and there are some things which are just plain obvious and any northern Italian will gladly tell you it's true.

The further south you get in Europe, the lower your motivation seems to be. Just last month I was in Crete and I'm not joking, all the frigging stores close in the middle of the day and all the coffee shops and bars fill up. Drivers of trucks on the island stop driving in the middle of the day and stop to have a glass of stong wine or moonshine. The only people working on the entire island at that time of day is the restaurant staff.

It is similar in many places in Spain as well. Malta..... well let's not bother with Malta and Gozo. Southern Italy as well.

On the other hand, if you go to Germany, from the time the day starts, you work and you're efficient. People take pride in their efforts. They set standards for themselves which are high and they achieve the goals they set for themselves. Germany's biggest problem is the cleanliness of their cities. People don't walk the extra 3 steps to make it to a trash can, but there are a lot of workers cleaning up the streets most of the time, so it's not that big of a problem.

Sure taxing the rich would help a bit in Greece, but size of the numbers we're talking about in Greece, if you taxed the entire top 5% of the country a total of 25% of their gross worth each year, it wouldn't touch it. The problems are much bigger than that and they would have to fix it by making people actually change their ways. The goal isn't to tax the people themselves but to produce things in a way which would bring money into the country. Closing down the parasitic tourist industry which barely works in Greece would be a great start.

Nearly every island in Greece is supported by the tourist industry which exists for about half the year. A waiter at a restaurant I frequented in Crete let me know that his personal income after tips is 12,000 euro per year. He works 14 hours a day 6 days a week during the tourist season to accomplish this and he's highly motivated and a hard worker. Problem is, when the winter comes, he uses his savings during that time for food and necessities and then uses oil he produces in his parents green house to heat his apartment on their property.

These establishments are supported by hotels built, maintained and later abandoned by owners in other countries. These companies exploit cheap labor and build these massive resorts at disgustingly low rate and perform all transactions outside of Greece to avoid paying the Greek taxes and costs of maintaining the money in multiple countries. They fly people from richer countries into Greece using their own airlines (or from other companies similar to their own like Thomas Cook) and their excuse is that they're bringing tourist money to Greece and helping the economy. The problem is, when the economy strengthens in a given area, the resort company practically closes down the last hotel and builds a new one further down the beach where the local workers are willing to work for less money. They don't totally abandon their old hotels, but they'll attempt to sell them to lesser resort companies which have a lower level of patrons with less purchasing power.

These resorts also do everything they can to make a closed environment where they cater to a specific nationality. So the German hotels have German restaurants with German beer and German speaking staff. The Scandinavian hotels have Swedish food with Swedish speaking staff and Swedish convenience stores. They do this so that their guests will be less likely to spend their money outside of the hotel and instead spend a great deal more inside of the hotel. They also attempt to build these hotels as far as possible from cities. Th

Re:If they need something to do,

[serviscope_minor]

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

So, you're saying that if some company hires an ex AMD employee and then doesn't do something (in secret) that AMD did do (in secret) then when it inevitebly gets leaked that the company simply didn't do something that's a trade secret of AMD, the company will be sued for not doing something because they shouldn't have not done it because it's a secret that it shouldn't be done except that if they do do it then they get sued because they shouldn't have done it because whatever it was, it was a trade secret, along with the knowledge that you should never do it, whatever it was.

Do I have that right?

This is what Hector "ruinz" did to the company

[gr8_phk]

AMD is now a fabless company. That means what it does is DESIGN CHIPS. When Hector took over, the K8 design was so far along all he did was focus on marketing it. That's an easy job when your new design is better than the competition. He didn't focus on maintaining fab capability and AMD is now a full generation behind Intel. He didn't focus on new design, so AMD is now behind Intel. So now that they're fabless, the only thing they do is design (and drivers for the GPU side). So this new guy apparently thinks they can just sell the existing fresh designs for a while. They mentioned cutting costs to go in a new direction - low power - but ANY direction they want to go will require design because that's what they do. On the other hand, if they want to just bolt ARM cores onto their GPUs the cuts make sense. I don't think going with ARM makes sense, that would be outsourcing half of their design business, or just the low power end of the CPU design business.

If they have next generation designs on track that will beat Intel in performance, and another to beat ARM in the low power areas, then they might feel free to *consider* cuts. Otherwise they are certainly killing themselves for short term gain.

AMD layoffs

[Michael Meissner]

I was laid off by AMD 3 years ago. I hope the people affected will eventually land on their feet and go on with their lives. Even three years ago, AMD was getting into the bunker mentality of just trying to survive. The trouble is they made some missteps starting with Barcelona and Bulldozer, and Intel has woken up and become much more competitive.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Runaway1956]

That is something I'd never heard before. Sounds reasonable to me. "Runaway, we don't need you anymore, you're fired (or laid off). You just go on to the house, and we'll send you a paycheck next Friday, and the next, then you're on your own."

Here, in the US, you can drive to work in the morning, pick up your tools, or sit at your desk, and the boss comes along, hands you your notice, and escorts you out the door. In such cases, you generally don't even get paid for showing up at work. The more considerate bosses wait til Friday, hand you your paycheck, and tell you not to come back on Monday.

At my company, they let two management people go just three weeks ago. No severance, no nothing. Those of us not in management have no reason to expect anything - not even a "Thank you" on our way out!

Re:If they need something to do,

[tehcyder]

Great, but tons of AMD employees both don't reside in California nor in the US..

Outside the US, the onus is heavily on the (ex-)employer to show it is reasonable to restrict their (ex-)employees freedom of trade, rather than the other way round.

Simply signing an employment contract doesn't bind an employee to it if it is against the law.

Re:If they need something to do,

[tehcyder]

Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove.

Keep telling yourself that.

So, you're saying that if some company hires an ex AMD employee and then doesn't do something (in secret) that AMD did do (in secret) then when it inevitebly gets leaked that the company simply didn't do something that's a trade secret of AMD, the company will be sued for not doing something because they shouldn't have not done it because it's a secret that it shouldn't be done except that if they do do it then they get sued because they shouldn't have done it because whatever it was, it was a trade secret, along with the knowledge that you should never do it, whatever it was.

Do I have that right?

Yes. Or maybe no. But don't take that as legal advice.

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

If your reasoning were true we would already live in your dystopia, because 99% of the people employed in the weaving industry were made redundant by weaving machines. In Prussia, the weavers even staged a revolution against these machines, which was suppressed by military force. But 200 years later, still 80 to 90% of able and suitably aged people in Germany have a job. There are now industries which did not exist 200 years ago; take software development, car manufacturing, chemicals or telecommunications as an example.
Last time I checked Intel, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and Xilinx did extremely well and employed literally armies of engineers and technicians.

Re:Nonsense

[sqrt(2)]

Just look over what you said one more time and you'll see where you messed up. It's a difficult thing to think about so I don't blame you. The weavers were replaced, but they had other industries and jobs they could go to in their same skill level. In the past, people have been pushed up the chain, but there IS a limit, there IS an end. Eventually there won't be enough work for all those people to do that they are ABLE to do.

Can every displaced worker be retrained into a useful engineer, forever? No, I don't think so. So what happens when we reach some point where only 50% of the population needs to work, and there simply aren't any jobs available to the rest?

Yes, Semiconductor Innovation is Extremely Costly

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel and others such as Toshiba, Samsung, TSMC, IBM and TI spend in the order of 5 billion dollars for a next-generation fab (sub 30nm). If you want to compete with Intel, you need to push the very limits of photo-lithography at breakneck speed. Only then you can achieve the transistor counts you need for parallel execution units, caches, branch predictors, multimedia instructions and so on.
It appears that only Intel can fund this technology race alone, while the others have to pool resources - including IBM ! AMD simply does not make the necessary revenue to fund their own sub 30nm process technologies. There are also competitors like ARM, who are quite successful without a fab. Whether this is possible in the high-performance computing business is not clear, though.

Free Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

..will find a fix for that. Maybe the Chinese take over that business or maybe NAND memory will see to that. It would also be an excellent opportunity to rip out the cruft of windows, so that it fits on flash memory with all applications.

Re:If they need something to do,

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds reasonable to me.

Dat der fella sonds lik a soshulst ta me

Good point, but this is Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

And just because Microsoft isn't releasing a compatibility layer, it doesn't mean someone else won't. This isn't 1993 when apps barely ran worth a damn on 66mhz pentiums so running at half speed on a 166mhz Alpha was agonizing. It's also a different era for emulation altogether. Making a dynamic recompiler for full system emulation of x86 on ARM is actually not that complex. Most instructions and nearly all data access map nearly 1:1 between the two architectures. Extending the recompiler in virtual box which performs primarily as a soft MMU to handle full instruction set interpretation would be more than possible. It would even run quite well. This is why ARM emulation on x86 through QEMU is so nice. JIT technology on the scale employed in college education courses is far more refined today than the state of the art back then and since full PC emulation isn't just good, but even accelerated with 3D device drivers and NCQ pass through IDE drivers, it should run quite well. So on a 2Ghz ARM should be able to perform as well as a 700Mhz x86 by my estimation which should be nice enough to run most applications.

The next thing to consider is that instead of implementing API level call emulation as before and using full system emulation instead, the next big bonus is RemoteApp which is when Remote Desktop is used for displaying an application remotely instead of the desktop. This is the same in nature to how you would redirect your X windows display on a remote machine to your local machine. Windows even has features enabled in it to allow things like starting up a RemoteApp session by clicking an icon. Smooth integration.

This matters because running a windows virtual machine with shared folders and remote display could make it possible for the user to see those apps as if they were run locally. Try it out on Windows 7 professional which includes XP compatibility through an cp virtual machine. It's quite smooth.

Point being, that while Microsoft doesn't intend to support x86 apps on ARM themselves, all the technology exists already to do it... In the open source even. All it needs is an installation program.

So, dont discount the x86 software on ARM thing just yet. Times have definitely changed since it was last done. Several eras have passed.

BTW... I'm planning on buying an ARM based tablet/transformer for Windows 8 so I can run Office and Visual Studio on them even if I have to do all the work to make it happen myself. I've already been experimenting using QEMU on Linux with rdpclient. It works really well actually.

Race to the bottom meets the singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point, the sophistication of the computers used at a fab will allow them to control the entire process, from design and manufacture to sales (and subcontract the few jobs only humans can do, like paint the signs in front of the company.) to where we may have a total employment of 1 (either a human representative of the company, or the AI itself), perhaps 0 if we grant corporations full human rights

Goodbye AMD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was going to buy an AMD computer. Now I'll go for intel even if it costs more. AMD has been slacking on linux support already. I don't think Intel will follow that route. This is also the most stupid thing AMD could do. What hope AMD had, they just lost. Hire more people, make better chips, get market share. This is stupid, it's not a car factory, the best technology wins here.

Re:If they need something to do,

[KingBenny]

my though as well, intel could scour them for the people with most knowledge, pay them a fair price and kick them back out to the streets after they have extracted all relevant information, not that they need it since AMD somehow saw fit to pursue a product doomed from the start, labelled as inferior by the whole potential customerbase and incapable of technically competing even with any of the most recent yet older products of their only competitor, a clear cut case of ego in the way of business and its always the same layer who has to pay the price

Re:Is it more expensive today to develop a process

[petermgreen]

AIUI intel still does a lot of manual design. Manual design tends to get the best results but it is also EXTREMELY expensive for something as complex as a modern CPU.

AMD OTOH have apparently moved towards a more automated design process. This should reduce R&D costs but it comes at a price in terms of the competitiveness of the final product. Bulldozer currently has worse IPC then it's predecessor!