ARM is competing with itself. With all those companies making ARM chips they have significant price competition which will lead to reduced R&D budgets.

On the other hand, with so many companies trying to build their own high-end ARM cores, the total ARM R&D budget is enormous. It guarantees that there never will be a bad ARM generation, as at least a couple of those companies will have a winner in every round.

Or perhaps they'll license ARM instruction set only

ARM makes money whoever licenses their stuff. If Intel pays for it, they are only better off.

Since you are raising doubts, I decided to do a check. I remembered that AMD had layoffs in 2011. Did Charlie accurately report on those?

Again, the facts that he repeats from his sources are fine, it's the outlandish analysis that I have the problem with. Everybody and their dog in the industry knows about October 25th AMD layoffs, and that they are going to hit Markham hard. But he then takes those two (accurate) facts, and makes a crazy story about how AMD is going to outsource graphics because of "personal fiefdoms" that target the "Canadian outpost".

It's the same as the post you quote about the last round... He was told about the layoffs, but decided to add a bit of flair by saying they'll be wiping out executives, even though it ended being the usual "bottom 10%" cleanup.

He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.

I didn't disagree that that's his job, I'm just saying that he does it poorly. He has a sprinkle of insider information, and paints a very inaccurate picture around it. He probably heard that AMD is planning on licensing out its graphics cores, and misunderstood it as outsourcing. Or, he heard that Markham location will be hit hard and he thinks graphics cores are done there, but they haven't been for many years.

The graphics cores are one thing where AMD is still near the leading edge, and Rory Read has repeatedly said that he wants to restructure the company to use its strengths better. If they start outsourcing things, graphics will be the last one to go, when they sell of the company and shut the doors.

It's one thing to be harsh, AMD deserves it, it's another to be completely inaccurate.

Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests. He has a handful of insiders at mid-level positions and his views of what's going in the company are heavily skewed by those people's opinions.

(this particular machine is a ambient-microwave imager, it emits no radiation whatsoever) but as a (albiet incredibly weak) political statement -- I feel that if nobody opted out, soon enough nobody would be able to.

I don't think I understand what statement are you making? You are worried that we will never be able to choose to be hand-searched instead of machine-searched?

If you turned around and refused to be searched altogether, that would be a political statement. Choosing to be searched one way instead of the other, when you feel that they are both equally safe, is no statement at all, in my opinion.

I'd bet tempted to pay if I could watch the show clean in real time but they won't offer it except on most DVDs.

You can pay to watch many shows per-episode in close to real-time... Amazon, Google, and Apple all offer it, and there are probably others, too.

Compared to Netflix, it's expensive. But, compared to cable subscription, it's still quite cheap.

The infinite growth of difficulty will keep hooked up.

Ever seen a 3 year old? The difficulty of Tetris starts at "infinite" for them. There's no way that any 3 year old would get anything out of it.

I don't know where I can get commercial-free (and legal) content nowdays (netflix?).

Yes. Tons of ad-free content for kids.

Amazon Instant Video works well, too.

Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop.

Because time and time again, the companies that stop growing start dying... there are precious few that can just continue to do what they do forever on, and there are probably none in the fast-changing tech world.

If you aren't growing, it means you're not doing new things that people want, and in the world where hundreds of other companies are trying new stuff, your old moneymaker product will slowly turn into trash.

But, we also benefit from this desire to grow -- Google could've been satisfied with their massive PC search profits and never tried to get into mobile. So could've Microsoft. The only alternative to iOS would've still been Blackbeery.

And so they are in Canada, too. Maybe "everywhere" really means "Europe"?

You have confused performance per watt with total power consumption. ARM is very good at the latter, but is by no means the best at the former.

Performance per watt isn't a single number that can be compared to tell the full story. In an envelope desired by small portable devices, ARM has a significant edge in performance per watt over Intel's Atom.

In server market, Intel has an edge, of course, as they have chips specifically designed for those kinds of high-power workloads. ARM is still a few years away from having anything designed for similar use.

Market share numbers in both categories reflect this.

real kindles and amazon prime give you instant video on tablets along with free borrowing of a lot of books

Amazon Prime gives you instant video on anything, including the TV, which is really where you want to watch things anyway.

I love Prime, but "a lot of books" is an extreme exaggeration. I still have to buy all the books I want to read, since not one of them has ever been free to borrow.

They can, they should, and they must. They have a legal obligation to maximize profits.

That statement sounds like it came from somebody who learned about business laws from reading Cryptonomicon.

If only "maximizing profits" was such a simple formula, we wouldn't need all these expensive boards of directors and CEOs to run companies. Unfortunately, it's rarely clear what actions lead to increasing profits, and it's even less clear what "maximum" profits are. It's not even clear how far in the future are we need to look for our estimates!

A board can look at opinion polls, and determine that trying to ban a competing product will destroy enough of the consumer goodwill that it's not worth it in the long run, especially since the next-gen Samsung product would come out shortly after. That same board might decide that trying to ban a competing product will create short-term spike in that product's sales, hurting their at the time when they are about to launch a new product of their own. Considering that such an attempt might even fail to produce the ban, the overall result might be quite detrimental to their profits.

It's really not clear at all, in my opinion, that attempting to ban Galaxy SIII is in the best interest of Apple shareholders. So, to respond to your statement -- "they can" -- yes, "they should" -- matter of opinon, "they must" -- certainly untrue.

You have a point, it's not very easy to get more than 2% now. But, isn't getting 2% with money tied down for 5 years still better than giving it to the car dealer?

What can you get me with Intel offerings that can do the same, at that price?

Probably nothing. The problem is that AMD hardly makes anything on selling you that whole setup, and there are too few of you who need something like that to make it up in selling huge volumes.

It's not that their stuff is awful. It's just that they can't sell the cheap stuff at enough of a profit, and they don't have expensive stuff to make up for it.

The business side of the company is failing.