An interesting turn of events as an Abu Dhabi firm invests some much needed capital into AMD for an 8.1% stake in the company. Hopefully AMD can combine their gains from ATI and this money boost to pull the ailing corporation out of its slump. An Intel world without competition would not be advantageous.
"With oil prices surging and U.S. stock prices slumping, chip maker
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s sale of an 8.1 percent stake to the Abu
Dhabi government's investment arm represents the latest plunge by a
wealthy Middle Eastern nation into a troubled U.S. corporation.
It
also raises fresh questions about the appropriateness of Middle Eastern
firms owning large chunks of U.S. businesses that specialize in
advanced technologies.
Sunnyvale-based AMD, the world's No.
2 microprocessor maker, needs the $622 million investment from the
Mubadala Development Company to help lift the company out of a deep
financial slump.
AMD has lost more than $1.6 billion so
far this year, and has just $1.5 billion in cash on hand as it works to
pay down $5.3 billion in debt. The financial woes have caused AMD's
stock to fall more than 35 percent since the start of the year, a slide
that has wiped out nearly $4 billion in shareholder wealth.
The
infusion, announced Friday, is a necessary jolt for AMD is it hunts for
money to fund its counteroffensive against Intel Corp., the world's
largest chip maker, and amid a huge spike in investments in U.S.
companies from Middle Eastern nations..." JORDAN ROBERTSON
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer of books, is now entering the E-Book market with its very own branded E-Book Reader, The Kindle. Apart from the fact that the E-Book format has never really gone anywhere, along with the fact that the print business is experiencing a moderate surge in this day of supposed paperless (yeah right) lifestyles, we have to wonder exactly who Amazon expects to pony up for this $399 device.
Coming in a roughly 5x7.5 inch form factor with a 6-inch 600x800 display, and sporting a massive (this is blatant sarcasm) 256MB of internal storage, It raises the question, who in their right mind would pay the estimated $399 Amazon expects? Rounding out the specs, it does posess a standard SD card slot for memory expansion and supports Wi-Fi and EVDO data services, though it lacks support for open document formats.
A $400 device I can use to read electronic books that usually cost as much as a paperback on sale? With a 6-inch E-Ink screen, and a form factor larger than your average PDA? No support for open document formats? Where do we sign up!
Amazon, drop us an email when your device has a better screen and costs at least a little less than 50 paperbacks. We'd suggest something like an Archos 605 Wi-Fi instead. Their 160GB model (apart from having over 600 times the storage capacity of The Kindle) features a touch screen with nearly the same resolution (800x480..and it's color), support not only for open documents formats and web browsing (at an additional cost) but video and audio as well.
For the same price, we'd rather carry around 159GB of video and audio and a few E-Books too. Or purchase a laptop.
This is hubris on steroids.
{correction: What seems to be incorrect from the initial
reports of the device is third-party format support. The Kindle is
compatible Microsoft Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP files,
however not the popular PDF format out of the box. Amazon will convert
PDF files to the Kindle format if they are sent to the company via
e-mail.....addendum courtesy of Betanews}
A recent survey conducted by AirDefense inc., which is a wireless security company, provided some shocking data about physical retail outlets and how easy it was to obtain credit card information from wireless sources. The survey asserts that more than half of the 4,748 access points studied at 3,045 stores around the world were susceptible to attack.
As proof positive of the relative disconnect mainstream media experiences on the Internet, multi-billion dollar news organization CNN is now outranked in sheer web traffic by...a torrent search engine. Mininova.org surpassed CNN in September. As can be seen from the accompanying Alexa graph, mininova traffic continues to skyrocket well above the worlds #1 news organization. It seems that people are more interested in the next episode of CSI than the 2008 Presidential Election. The Inquirer reports...
"The honor of beating one of world's leading news sites goes to staffers from Mininova.org, who overtook CNN.com back in mid-October, but now it seems that ThePirateBay.org is also on the move. Lads from TPB.org just overtook News.com, and are on a way to overtake CNN.com as well.
In order to get the traffic back, Foxnews.com could consider introducing torrent search on its site."
Last week, FastSilicon.com reported the image leaked by Chilehardware. At the time, the validity of the image was questionable. Today we were able to access the full document and confirm that the diagram came from AMD. Go here for resampled and enlarged images of the new diagram.
