Slashdot Mirror
IBM Looking To Sell Its Semiconductor Business
jfruh writes "Having already gotten out of the low-end server market, IBM appears to be trying to get out of the chip business as well. The company currently manufactures Power Architecture chips for its own use and for other customers. Big Blue wants to sell off its manufacturing operations, but will continue to design its own chips."
I thought IBM was able to leverage their detailed knowledge of their semiconductor processes to squeeze every bit of performance they can out of their Power architecture designs, and even tweak the processes to aid them. I doubt they will have enough volume for another company to do much of that unless they are willing to pay.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
source: http://pastebin.com/eyQ9mSnn
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: slashdot beta is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered slashdot beta community when IDC confirmed that slashdot beta market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that slashdot beta has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. slashdot beta is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict slashdot beta's future. The hand writing is on the wall: slashdot beta faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for slashdot beta because slashdot beta is dying. Things are looking very bad for slashdot beta. As many of us are already aware, slashdot beta continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Dice.com is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Dice.com developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Dice.com is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot beta leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of slashdot beta. How many users of Dice.com are there? Let's see. The number of Dice.com versus slashdot beta posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Dice.com users. Slashdot beta on Usenet are about half of the volume of Dice.com posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Dice.com. A recent article put Dice.com at about 80 percent of the slashdot beta market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Dice.com users. This is consistent with the number of Dice.com Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Dice.com went out of business and was taken over by Reddit who sell another troubled OS. Now Dice.com is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that slashdot beta has steadily declined in market share. slashdot beta is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If slashdot beta is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. slashdot beta continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, slashdot beta is dead.
Circling the bowl.
Nobody buys Playboy for the articles. They do it for the hot, nude women (sadly, sans grits). It just so happens that /. is exactly the same. No one reads /. for the articles. The articles were news two days ago. And no one reads /. for the summaries. The summaries are almost always wrong.
Everyone reads /. for the comments. The comments are the /. equivalent of Playboy's naked chicks, with one crucial difference. Without the gentlemen at Playboy, there will be no naked chicks to look at. The service they provide is, for the most part, finding women that will agree to pose nude for pictures, which they most graciously distribute to their readers.
But as for Slashdot -- the good people at Dice and their "editorial" team do diddly squat around here to generate content. The articles, old as they may be, are submitted by the users. The summaries, mistaken as they may be, are provided by the users, not by Timothy, Soulskill, et al. The comments, trollish as they may be, are written by the users.
/. is of the users, by the users, for the users. The only people at Dice who deserve their paycheck are the IT people. The rest of you -- what is it that you do for our benefit? Why the hell do we need you clowns? Your music's bad and you should feel bad!
Beta delenda est!
I know of IBM as a:
- Desktop PC manufacturer
- Server manufacturer
- Chip manufacturer
If they don't have those 3 things any more, then what are they? To my knowledge, IBM has some of the best fabs in the world. It's amazing to me that this is not part of their core business. This is... wow... just wow.
Maybe Dice could sell it's slashdot business to someone who'll roll back the beta...
And yet another American innovator who actually built things is getting out of the business.
America has tied her fortunes to copyright, patents, and 'knowledge' workers -- while simultaneously mostly switching to H1Bs, corporations which don't actually do anything, and a complete loss of manufacturing.
America is becoming a country which is staking its real economy on virtual things, and is slowly losing capacity and competitiveness on the world stage.
Fix this shit now, or in 15 years there won't be any domestic jobs, skills, or point. If you continue on this current trend, the actual economy of the US will be completely gutted and propped up with things which look good on paper but really have no value.
Dice already said they need to redesign the beta. What more do you want from them, blood? So lay off with the immature "Waaaahhh...they aren't doing what I want them to."
IBM helped the Nazis with the punchcard technology used to keep track of prisoners in concentration camps during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Maybe Taco could buy if back on the cheap.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Sad really, IBM once stood for innovation and industry leadership. Now they're all about maximizing shareholder equity and other buzzwords that have nothing to do with being a leader. The board needs to fire most of the C level MBA shit-for-brains and hire some tech talent from within to re-motivate the company before it's too late.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
GSD's motto: "Fuck the customers and provide service from a cornfield in Iowa"
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
They should make beta opt-in, instead of opt-out. For ALL users.
Plus, Dice thinks they can reach a broader audience.
It isn't going to happen this way...
We like slashdot because of the audience. Change the audience, and slashdot is over.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Selling hardware, semi conductors - moving from proprietary OSs to linux. Are they just going to be another consultancy group?
How is semiconductors not a core business for a company that still makes huge profits off mainframes and midranges?? Sure, keep design in house, but you'll lose the flexibility you have. Imagine your research division came up with an amazing new chip design they wanted to work on right away, but were told "Nope, it'll take 6 months to ramp up GlobalFoundries, TSMC, or whatever. Sorry."
The thing I really don't get (in general) is the way businesses feel like they can have no assets on their books and just run everything with a massive tower of multi-layer outsourcing. It doesn't make sense -- outsourcing something is never cheaper than doing it yourself. As soon as you do that ,you add in a layer of middlemen who need to get paid for doing a task which was previously cheap or "free with purchase of inhouse labor." It never works out. I guess I'll never be an MBA, because I don't get the accounting tricks that make a company appear profitable when they're wasting money on things they could do cheaper and better themselves.
For IBM's case, I do see what they're trying to do. Software is more profitable than hardware. But the problem is that IBM is/was a huge innovator in hardware and chips. They're one of the last US companies massive enough to support basic research that can improve those hardware innovations. IBM's software may be profitable, but I haven't seen anyone singing the praises of WebSphere or their Rational products lately. IBM also has a massive "services" division. I've had extremely good luck with the services people who service IBM hardware, but that's going away. So, we're left with the legendary crap outsourcing and offshoring stuff they do for large companies, and of course, "consulting." My experience with outsourced IT run by IBM is an ITIL nightmare of endless support tickets, revolving door engineers, meetings to plan meetings to plan the strategy for changes, etc.
It's kind of a shame if you ask me. I am just old enough to remember when IBM was as powerful as Microsoft was and as Apple is right now. They were able to command huge margins on everything they sold because it was backed up by a really good services team. People I know who worked for IBM "back in the day" tell me the corporate culture was weird, but employees never wanted for anything because they made so much money. (I also know people who worked for Sun and Digital who say the same thing.) In some ways, it would have been much nicer to work in the computer field during this "golden age of computing." I guess my main question is where the new hardware innovations will come from when you don't have a massive company and research group driving them.
How about sinply not trying to push shit on users they don't want? Instead of redesigning th shitty beta site, just drop it. This isn't some Web 2.0 site nor is designing a Digg clone a good thing. Just have the web weenies fix the current bugs rather than wasting time rewriting the site in an even buggier version.
I'll tell you what: if you assholes continue with this crap, I'll not only "join" your "slashcott" from 2/10 - 2/17 -- I'll join it for good. The caveat is that I'll be doing so to avoid people like you, who are polluting discussions with valid complaints in an inappropriate way.
(As implied above, I don't like the beta. Yet I appreciate that it is a beta. I also appreciate that there are better ways to provide input to the developers.)
Not only that, IBM also helped deliver people to said camps in the first place.
It was all a big 1930s operation in Big Data. Data mining church books for ancestry data. Who is one-half Jewish, who is one-eighth Jewish.
Worst of all, IBM knew precisely what Hollerith was doing. That knowledge was not even a speed bump on their way to the bank.
Fuck the beta though. I'd like to know what /. thinks but fuck the beta.
Digg went from $170 million asking price (although it didn't sell at that price AFAIK) and ultimately sold for $500k.
I don't know how Slashdot's peak valuation compares with Digg. If we're patient maybe we can get it for the price of a high-end automobile, which many individuals here could afford on their own. A "white knight" retired techie who doesn't need money and could afford to run it as a non-profit hobby. That'd be ideal.
IBM is primarily a professional services company. They've been evolving into that for years.
In other words - salesmen - selling other firms' products and arbitraging labor costs between the Third World and the Western World at a huge markup.
Same goes for the other big companies.
And it's funny, they're "International" when it suits them and when they need that government contract, they're all of a sudden an "American" company.
Dice made it perfectly clear that, even after all the backlash, Classic will soon be gone:
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Dice ignores our complaints, while pretending to listen. Bitching and ruining every single discussion is the only option we have left.
FUCK I forgot I wasn't suppose to visit Slashdot today, I have a habitual habbit I can't break... and FUCK BETA
At least they built something.
Oh and you forget, IBM has sold to anybody and in some cases with the Nod of the US government. This includes the Shah of Iran but lots of US companies dealt with the Nazis (Ford, ITT, US Steel etc.) It was just good business back then.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If you want to chuckle, go to the AS/400 section of IBM's website. "It's not dead, we swear!" LOL It's interesting to see how IBM is selling off, all of their commodity business (laptops, servers, chips) to focus on the high margin stuff.... people should take note.
I also appreciate that there are better ways to provide input to the developers.
And those ways are... what? Dice made it perfectly clear that, even after all the backlash, Classic will soon be gone:
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
I have come to Slashdot for over a decade to enjoy the intelligent discussion that can only be had here. So I do apologize. But Dice ignores our complaints, while pretending to listen. Ruining every single discussion is the only option we have left.
We don't want a redesign of the Beta. Are you that lunk headed to not understand what we're saying? It's obvious that Dice did not hear us and we will continue to voice our opinion and there's nothing you or they can do about it.
It absolutely sucks!
x
What more do you want from them, blood?
Yes!
Well, more actually a steak, medium rare, but there's blood in that. Maybe I shouldn't post hungry.
can we call it FriendshipIsMagic???
I'm going to put in a pony request for beta to allow ASCII art. Ya know, for "diagrams".
The "managers" at Dice are not only ruining Slashdot, they can't even run their legacy business. Look at Dice Holdings stock performance:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=D...
While the S&P 500 and Dow 30 are each up 20% and 10% over the last year, DHX is down close to 30%. I wonder if the stock analysts who cover DHX even know what is happening to this newly acquired "asset". I wonder how many DHX shareholders know.
If the decision makers at Dice won't listen to the nerds, maybe they will listen to their shareholders.
there are better ways to provide input to the developers
No shit? We tried that already. This thing didn't start overnight - this is the result of completely ignoring community input for the past several months.
It was once a fully integrated corporation, but that's not profitable enough anymore, so spin-spin-spin.
Grow up.
Manufacturing left America because China et al are cheaper
Completely off topic and completely wrong. Manufacturing is very strong in America to the tune of about $2 Trillion per year and for every dollar spend in US manufacturing it results in an additional $1.32 to the economy. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be one of the ten largest economies in the world - approximately the same size as the entire GDP of Russia even without considering the multiplier effects. The US presently has about 1/5 of global manufacturing activity. Some products are not manufactured in the US anymore (mostly high labor content low margin products) but any claim that "manufacturing left America" is completely false.
The only way you're bringing manufacturing back...
Manufacturing never left. If you think it did then you have no idea what you are talking about.
Big Blue wants to sell off its manufacturing operations, but will continue to design its own chips.
As "will continue to design its own chips" is not a complete sentence, the comma before "but" is not appropriate.
01 Apr 2014: IBM (NYSE:IBM) International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has changed back to it's original name, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and will be selling off all post 1930 technology units to focus on it's core business of dial recorders, electric tabulating machines and time clocks.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Dice already said they need to redesign the beta.
No, they didn't. They talk about "incremental improvements", which in this case is like jumping a chasm in multiple small steps.
The Beta needs to be redesigned, yes. A redesign happens from ground up. Or, to use the obligatory car analogy: no amount of tuning your Mazda Miata will make it replace a bus.
I am eagerly awaiting the day when Watson is capable enough to replace 93% of doctors and lawyers. What's good for the plebs is good for the elite, right?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
posts are makes it annoying to read here in the last few days its gonna be quite nice to not see you here for 7 days.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Their hardware business is indeed a drain on their financial resources. Intel makes chips almost as fast as POWER and faster than the mainframe CPUs. Mainframe business shrinks every year. Linux is good enough vs expensive AIX.
They make miniscule numbers of chips, compared to x86. Fabs are still extremely expensive. Intel and TSMC have blown them economically out of the water. At least they don't do an HP and still have their own chip designs.
HP once had one of the best chip designs and made them in their own fabs (PA RISC). But even then they could not compete on economics with Intel fabs, processes and manufacturing scale. So they raised the white flag around 1998.
IBM has by now only admitted half-defeat.
If IBM weren't run by MBA muppets, they would use a Strategy Of Technology and try innovative things like FPGAs and associative memory directly on CPU. Or CPUs weaved into RAMs. But all an MBA can do is to streamline some engineer's ideas and process.
Certainly IBM has to use TSMC or Global Foundries. Xilinix does it too and I think they are wildly successful. IBM simply can't afford massive capex for their puny number of chips made.
Of course, they could have tried to take x86 head-on with a competitve Linux-power offering, but that would have meant a total change in style, culture and business model. Samsung can pull that, not big blue.
Dipl.-Ing.(BA) Frank Gerlach
there is so much wrong with it (discussed on the mentioned anouncement page you mentioned), you cannot improve on something that is utterly broken in the first place
Dice is lying through their teeth to the advertisers they hope to attract to Slashdot:
Take the tour and you'll see how they claim the nerds will stick around and read their ads. They call Beta "newsier" and "nerdier", although they're well aware the nerd "audience" they're selling won't tolerate Beta.
Advertisers, don't get ripped off! Demand an advertising platform that retains the demographic you want to target!
I guess my main question is where the new hardware innovations will come from when you don't have a massive company and research group driving them.
Did you ever consider that basic research is hard to justify in a cooperate environment? Hence, better left to public entities, as done in many countries.
I think that big companies splitting up is a good thing, they'll be able to focus their research and be much more agile.. Other companies,start-up, etc. will also be able to compete better if they can purchase services from independent chip manufacturers. There will be less dirty game where chip manufacturers say they won't produce your chip because they are own by a big company (say IBM) whom you're trying to compete with.
The free market works best when companies are fairly small. Otherwise companies can't fail without it having enormous impact on society. I for one applaud IBM for trying not to be too big to fail!
For IBM this also means that they can't shop around for manufacturers, instead of being bound to use their own. Flexibility is not worthless.
US companies are selling off hardware because they discovered that bullshit (AKA "consulting") is America's comparative advantage.
Table-ized A.I.
...if it includes complete cross-licensing of all IBM's process technology. IBM still has a reputation for some of the most efficient designs for logic gates, etc. Unlimited access and cross-licensing of that IP would probably be worth more than the physical fab business.
I could see Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Apple all very interested in that...
Yes, "blood" would be nice. After all, /. is a Liberal haven.
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
-----=====##### LINKS #####=====-----
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: http://altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
" We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process. "
What is it about feature parity is it that you do not get? At least give them credit for trying. There is another way for Slashdot to die, it could die through doing the same old same old for the same old visitors.
And for a group of people who claim to be the voice of the industry in the trenches, a lot of carping seems to ignore plain business sense. If this site doesn't hold its own in a marketplace, it will go away just like every other product that fails to capture a decent return. You might not like putting it in those terms but you know it's true. Sites rarely exist for the mere enjoyment of its visitors. In the end, someone has to pay for it. The Slashdot crowd is the same crowd that will crucify government waste along the lines of, there's too few served to justify the expense.
Dice made it perfectly clear that, even after all the backlash, Classic will soon be gone:
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Dice ignores our complaints, while pretending to listen. Bitching and ruining every single discussion is the only option we have left.
And flat-out bailing, either for a while like the upcoming boycott week from the 10th to the 17th, or permanently.
How is semiconductors not a core business for a company that still makes huge profits off mainframes and midranges?
Probably because the biggest part of the value added by them is in the design, not the manufacturing. IBM does not appear to have any competitive advantage in semiconductor manufacturing plus their core business now is in services. Their mainframe business really is to some extent really just a hook for their services. It remains significantly profitable but some of the components in those mainframes have become commodities which means low margins.
Sure, keep design in house, but you'll lose the flexibility you have. Imagine your research division came up with an amazing new chip design they wanted to work on right away, but were told "Nope, it'll take 6 months to ramp up GlobalFoundries, TSMC, or whatever.
Why do you presume IBM could ramp up any faster? Just because they can do it themselves doesn't mean they automatically can do it any quicker or better. IBM has some pretty smart financial, strategy and manufacturing people working for them. I've met quite a few of them myself. I assure you that they have done the math on this and while it's possible they are making a mistake, they're pretty good at this sort of calculation.
The thing I really don't get (in general) is the way businesses feel like they can have no assets on their books and just run everything with a massive tower of multi-layer outsourcing
Because the only reason to keep something in house is if it provides you an economic advantage. You outsource when someone else can do it as well or better for less money. My company makes wire harnesses. Many of our customers are capable of making the products we supply them but because of the structure of our company and the assets we have we can produce a better product for less money. We specialize in wire harnesses and we're enough better at it that we can save them money AND make a profit doing it. If we couldn't do it better and cheaper then they should (and often do) produce the item in house.
I guess I'll never be an MBA, because I don't get the accounting tricks that make a company appear profitable when they're wasting money on things they could do cheaper and better themselves.
Nobody "is" a MBA. Some people have a MBA degree. You might accurately call someone an accountant or a manager or an engineer but calling someone "a MBA" is exactly equivalent to calling someone a Master of Mechanical Engineering. It's stupid if you actually think about it.
Look, I have degrees in both engineering and business. I'm a certified accountant and my day job is running a manufacturing company. There are cases where it makes sense to outsource something and cases where it makes sense to keep it in house. You are making a faulty assumption that it is always better to keep things in house and I can prove to you that that is frequently not true. Specialist companies can often make a component of a larger product better, faster and cheaper than a vertically integrated company. Not always but very often. Virtually all of manufacturing is based on this fact. The cost of vertical integration has to be offset by the ability to command larger margins due to that integration. \
Ford once tried doing a complete vertical integration in their River Rouge plant. They brought iron ore in one end and produced automobiles out the other end. Thing was that it failed because they didn't have sufficient economies of scale nor the domain expertise to realize the cost advantages needed to make it work. A company that specializes in making steel is probably going to be able to make steel cheaper and better than an assembly company like Ford.
I'll give you an example from my company. We make wire harnesses and one of the products our customer buys from us are sealed leads which
I know of IBM as a:
- Desktop PC manufacturer
- Server manufacturer
- Chip manufacturer
You're describing IBM as they existed 20 years ago. They haven't been primarily a manufacturing company for quite some time now. Technical and business services is the core of the company as it exists today. They still make some products (hardware and software) but they are high margin products with significant support requirements.
Your comment was Slashdotted... Here's a mirror:
This is like the old days! Crapflooding all over again... all we need are the page widening post, multiple posts, etc. w00t!
-CM
IBM should solely make keyboards. Original Model Ms. Exactly to the original specs, including the PC speaker in the bottom. No cheap shit like the Unicomp keyboards (bought one from them and the Shift key died completely internally within a year).
IBM's Model M is the best keyboard that has ever been made and will ever be made. I'm in love with it and I feel very sad about seeing IBM killing off their core business. Fuck outsourcing. Fuck the cloud. Fuck all these fucking retarded MBAs. Fuck Slashdot's new shitty site.
Fuck everyone and everything except for the Model M keyboard.
That is literally disgusting. Worst is how they place all comments in a box and label it User Engagement like it's a widget they added.
Sell all your product lines in order to raise profits to the maximum?
Actually, it sounds almost like their solid state labs have come up with an economical way to manufacture graphene based electronics. That would make their entire manufacturing line obsolete.
So they would want to sell it/them off before it becomes a loss.
But Miata is the answer to everything! Just ask Jalopnik, who like Slashdot is owned by idiots (Gawker in this case) that insist on repeatedly pissing off their users by changing the site layout and commenting system.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This reminds me of an old bit in The Onion "Nike to Cease Manufacturing Products"
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
Big Blue might as well just liquidate and give the money back to the shareholders, they just don't care anymore.
Wow. That is the clearest indication I've seen yet that there is no chance they are going to back down on this. "User Engagement", my eye.
Thanks for the link.
What more do you want from them, blood?
Oh please don't give them ideas... they may come back with Slashdot Beta in Red.
It's pretty much stopped making 'stuff' and sells intangible services while snapping up other people's software companies and rebranding them. But services require too much linear labor input even at firesale prices in China so it's probably just as well that half the employees now are lawyers and accountants. Soon IBM will be a holding company for buying and selling intellectual property and that's pretty much it.
Like William Wheton!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/
I would leave the other link about how the job market ain't ever going to recover but I don't have it handy. Its over my fellow Americans. We blew it.
Ehr, their core business would be manufacturing typewriters.....
DEC used to make everything they sold: the chips, drives, displays, circuit boards, software, you name it. Eventually, for the sake of raising profits, they sold it all off part by part. Then they were absorbed by Compaq, which in turn was absorbed by HP. Today they're nothing but a memory. So who will ultimately buy IBM and when will they do it? It's now just a matter of time...
Maybe they are looking over graphene / new breakthrough in the mid term and squashing the current tech before its too late
Look at what makes Xilinix or Apple hugely successful. It's not the semiconductor process. It's all the design.Face it.
IBM CPUs can be made at TSMC and would still be "good enough" and costs come down by 70%. IBM fabs don't add a competitive edge, but drain billions every couple of years.
Can some one give a detailed explanation as to why is the new beta broken? I see a lot of people complaining but I don't get it. I definitely don't like how it looks, it's ugly, so what? It may take some time to get used to it that's all.
I think this is a sign of intelligence. IBM sold of its desktop and laptop businesses before the value of those businesses fell. I think IBM believes that the end of Moore's Law is real close. Some double patterning immersion lithography can get to 20 nm. Some triple patterning can get to 14 nm. The cost per transistor is no longer falling. Transistor speed is not improving much. Power consumption is still shrinking, but is that enough to justify multi-billion dollar fabs? 14 nm might be around for a long time. 14 nm might be good enough for IBM.
Bush decided to reclassify fast food as manufacturers to hid the job losses last decade to China.
Since it would not surprise me if 1/3 of that is Mcdonalds alone that all fastfood joints make up most of that total.
I do not know of anything made here? All the big names in my city are all service, banking, marketing, and restaurant headquarter companies. The only thing produced a fish from the nearbye sea. It is not sustainable as it depends on other people spending. The problem is that goes out once it is spent. Producers keep making value in comparison which is why China is growing 10% annual.
http://saveie6.com/
Dice is pulling a Windows 8 Metro-forced-down-your-throat move. I would expect they would get similar market results.
This is not great news for NVIDIA (they are in the business IBM wants to be in: design chips, let someone else fab them). NVIDIA gets their chips made by ....IBM. (I think it was mostly at IBM's plant in East Fishkill New York). I know that as fab die sizes shrink, keeping up with the technology is more expensive, and if you can subcontract that part of the operation, you can stick to design work, and let someone else worry about wafer success rates, and what new technology is required to go smaller than 22nm, etc.
Caterpillar, General Motors, Ford Motors, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, United Technology, General Dynamics, 3M, Kimberley Clark, Archer Daniels Midland, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Dow Chemical, Merck, Johnson Controls, Abbott Laboratories, DuPont, Deere.
Each of these US manufacturers are alone bigger than McDonald's.
Their combined size, along with the tens of thousands of other manufacturers completely dwarves McDonald's and fast food.
That most of their products are not consumer items just goes to show how important they are to the world economy.
I'm not even an American, and I'm certainly no fan of US foreign policy, but I made a list twice this long of US manufacturers off the top of my head before deciding to make a list of US manufacturers larger than McDonald's (and I excluded companies like Cisco and Apple which outsource most or all of their manufacturing).
It is fucking ludicrous to suggest the US does not reign supreme in manufacturing. The US sucks for a hundred other reasons I can pull off the top of my head, but manufacturing is not one of them.
The slashcott is not until the 10th. It runs through the 17th. You can block the site with iptables or ufw during that time to help keep you from forgetting.
There is another way for Slashdot to die, it could die through doing the same old same old for the same old visitors.
Eh, I think you still don't get it. Consider this: "There is another way for books to die, they could die through doing the same old same old for the same old readers." Yet, books have been around for thousands of years, because they work. They well-fulfill their intended purpose. Radio and movies and TV and online video haven't replaced books, and they never will.
Slashdot is like a book in that it has a simple function: allow people to have reasonably (or comparably) intelligent discussions about topics of interest in a reasonably efficient way. Slashdot needs a redesign in the same way that books need to be redesigned: it doesn't, and they don't. Minor changes can make it more efficient, and that would be great.
Basically, you're begging the question: who says Slashdot needs to change? Dice? How do they know? They just wasted some money on a site they didn't understand--that doesn't mean the site needs to change to suit their needs; that doesn't mean they need to change it to be like their other projects. They are the ones who need to change; they need to learn to understand what Slashdot is, not what they wish it would be.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Bush decided to reclassify fast food as manufacturers to hid the job losses last decade to China.
Stop making nonsense up. Nothing of the sort happened and McDonalds is not and never has been classified as a manufacturer. Some of the products they purchase (food products) are manufactured but McDonalds themselves are not and never has been classified as a manufacturer.
I do not know of anything made here
Then you haven't actually bothered to look.