IBM Looking To Sell Its Semiconductor Business 195
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."
Beta delenda est! (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Slashcott - don't visit this site from 2/10 - 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:Slashcott - don't visit this site from 2/10 - 2 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Manufacturing is alive and well in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [nam.org] 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.
Re:Slashcott - don't visit this site from 2/10 - 2 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Actually because your hate beta (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's a surprise move (Score:5, Insightful)
This is sad. I remember when IBM came out w/ some great innovations like the copper process. It's also disappointing to see even fewer, rather than more fabs. Yeah, I know that the costs are astronomical, but converting such a market into an Intel monopoly is a cause for concern
Also, once that's gone, it will be the end of the road for Power as well: as it is, Freescale has all but abandoned it, the console guys have abandoned it and now it's IBM itself. An independent fab won't free up space for IBM's Power if there are more lucrative chips available - particularly in volume. Only reason SPARC is alive is really Fujitsu, and Itanic is almost dead. Power being gone would leave only MIPS for the embedded space, and Xeon/Opteron for the server space. I doubt that ARM8 will have a significant role there.
Re:What's left? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM stands for International Business Machines.
Close, but it's now India Business Machines.