Little more than a year ago it seemed as if AMD was unstoppable, with Intel’s chips becoming ever more inefficient and running at ever higher temperatures. But then, seemingly out of the blue, Intel introduced the Core 2, and everything changed. Intel’s new chips dramatically outperformed the competition in almost every testable category, and they were aggressively priced as well. In a desperate attempt not to fall too far behind the market leader, AMD was forced to act. Their product had to remain alluring, so they drastically cut prices on all chips – as much as 40% or more in some cases.

Over the course of the next fiscal year, the company saw its market share plummet, resulting in the loss of more than $1.2 billion in expected revenue. To complicate matters even more for AMD, they were already down an estimated $5.4 billion as a result of the recent ATI and AMD merger.

Unfortunately, There seems to be no easy way out of the current slump, especially considering that Intel is already well on their way to pushing out their new 45nm Penryn chip – AMD is still trying to push out their first 65nm chip, which might even be delayed until next year. There is, however, one rumor that might allow AMD to survive if the situation gets worse: sell of the fabrication plants, and only design chips, leaving the manufacturing to a third party.

As unfortunate as this rumor may sound, this scenario is plausible. AMD currently operates two fabrication facilities: Fab 30 and Fab 36. The proposal to sell is anything but definitive, and there are still plenty of possible outcomes. AMD may decide to outsource the manufacturing of its lower-end lineups, and keep the high-end stuff in-house – or it may decide to sell it all. As it currently stands, some of the R&D (Research and Development) work, along with some manufacturing, is already being handled by IBM and Chartered Semiconductors. It is foreseeable that if things don’t start looking better for AMD pretty soon, Chartered, IBM, or another one of AMD’s partners, might take over a hefty part of the fabrication process – if not the entire procedure.

If this rumor does pan out, however, the impact on the end product and the customers will probably manifest itself in terms of longer turn-around times. In the past, when AMD was in charge of all of its own manufacturing, it was all in their own hands and they could design chips with their own fabrication model in mind. With a third-party making the parts, adapting plants and designs will inevitably take longer.

As part of its asset-light strategy, AMD is looking to do whatever it can to keep down the costs of business. As of yet, AMD’s PR department is denying the rumors that plans are underway to outsource the entire fabrication process, but the rumors seem to have some merit. In the spirit of competition, let’s just hope that AMD will be able to remain a leader in the chip industry along with Intel.

A few weeks ago, in an effort to get back on track towards once again making quality products, Dell started an initiative called IdeaStorm. The basic gist being that costumers can make suggestions about what they would like to see from Dell in the future. It didn’t take too long for the open source community to take notice and flood the suggestion site with recommendations suggesting that Dell “offer the top free Linux versions for free pre-installation on all Dell PCs.” This suggestion has already garnered more than 115,000 votes and the idea seems to have caught Dell’s attention, since they are now hosting a Linux survey.

So, is there any hope for Linux fans; will Dell ever offer Linux right out of the box, for free? I doubt it, and the reason for this is really simple: economics.

The Linux crowd is made up in large part of individual who know a lot about computers, and who also know exactly what they want and how they want it, which makes the whole “one size fits all” philosophy of Windows unfeasible. Chances are that most users will want, or need as the case may be, a certain distribution of Linux, and possibly even a specific edition of that distribution. So, in order to appease even a minor portion of this tech-savvy Linux crowd, the number of option that Dell would have to offer would be overwhelming to say the least.

Profit margins on PC sales are incredibly narrow, and the substitution of Windows with a free alternative will definitely not aid the situation. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like Dell, HP, IBM, and the rest of the lot, are all pushing cheap computers out to the masses, while trying to earn a profit. In order to stay competitive (and in business), prices have to stay low, and production along with customer service has to be as cheap as possible. With the current state of domestic affairs, this means that outsourcing is an absolute necessity. It’s hard enough for someone who knows next to nothing about computers to get decent customer support for the world’s dominant operating system, and having to verse the reps in the nuances of Linux as well would create an absolute nightmare. If Dell were to offer Linux as a mass market option is would have to provide customer support for it as well. There wouldn’t be much of an option. If this ever goes through, I bet that there’ll be plenty of people who will end up getting Linux, thinking that maybe it’s the newest version of Windows, only to end up calling “Bob” in India asking why they can’t find Internet Explorer or install iTunes. Or, even if you’re a more experienced user, imagine calling in to “John” trying to explain that you’re missing a library in some obscure root directory, or that you can’t compile the code to some SourceForge project.

And then there’s the inevitable price increase for the end user. Have you ever wondered how companies like Dell and HP can afford to offer full-fledged PCs for way less than a thousand dollars? If you’ve ever bought one, you probably know the answer: “crapware” (thanks to Jack Schofield for that term). Internet advertising and Crapware work in a very similar fashion; simply by having tons of useless applications installed on a computer, there exists the possibility that someone might end up actually using it and thereby making the developer some money. In other words, this means that Windows machines are cheap because of all the junk that companies like Dell and HP are paid to include, regardless of whether the consumer actually wants any of them. If Dell were to start selling systems that are geared towards the open source market, then those would, by nature, have to be more expensive, because there would be “crapware” packages available for them. Considering all this, it would probably be cheaper to purchase a Windows machine, nuke it, and install a fresh copy of your favorite Linux distribution.

I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be nice to see OEMs start to offer Linux and other open source packages, like Open Office, right out of the assembly line, but I think that with the current state of the market it wouldn’t be economically feasible for companies like Dell to pull this of. In the short term a far better solution would be for the OEMs to simply give customers the opinion of purchasing a bare-bones computer without an operating system of any sort, much like a lot of them already do for business and enterprise customers. Most Linux distros are easy enough to install without the need for a “professional” to do it and this would also allow the user to customize the setup to their desire. The only thing that an OEM would have to do is make sure that all of the computers that they offer are hardware compatible with the vast majority of Linux operating systems and software packages. I for one would want to know for certain that I can purchase a laptop and install Ubuntu or SuSE on it without having to scour through hundreds of forums to figure out what to change to get the microphone to work properly.

Ever since its inception, The Pirate Bay has had nothing but legal trouble with such organizations as the RIAA and the MPAA, to name a few.

The tracker site is currently located in Stockholm, Sweden, where the legal tensions are on the rise. Last year, on the 31st of May, a major raid against The Pirate Bay, involving more than 60 police officers was executed, which resulted in the temporary closure of the (in)famous site. The website was down until the 1st of June, 2006. Some have speculated that the raid was the result of threats that the Swedish government had received from the United States, regarding WTO trade sanctions – however, neither government will confirm this allegation.

Well, what better way to avoid any further legal trouble than to simply flee the jurisdiction, or move to some African country that doesn’t support international copyright laws? Better yet, why not go to the extreme and buy your own nation!

The guys over at the Pirate Bay announced last week that they are now rallying for monetary support so that they can buy the micronation of Sealand, located approximately 6 miles off of the coast of Suffolk, England. The term “micronation,” might suggest something that is far bigger than what Sealand really is: a World War II era, off-shore, man-made outpost, which sort of resembles a small oil rig. Since the 550 square meter rig is located more than 3 miles of the shore of southern England, it is outside of British legal jurisdiction – as well as outside of anyone else’s jurisdiction for that matter.

If the Pirate Bay were to get the rig, they would then have to set up their servers on Sealand, which sounds very idealistic at this point. Having the servers in one, very specific location might not be that great of an idea, since if wouldn’t be too hard for the authorities to pressure the internet provider of Sealand to kill the connection and simply be done with the whole site. Since Sealand wants to be an independent nation, other countries, like the United States, will have very little trouble attacking their resources, without any fear of offending other nations or companies in the process.

Personally, I think that the whole notion of wanting to purchase Sealand for the asking price of half a billion U.S. dollars is pretty ludicrous – although I must admit that the concept of such micronations is quite interesting. At this point the purchase sounds a lot more like a publicity stunt than something that might actually end up happening, but we’ll just have to wait and see…

If you want to donate and be part of this effort, check out the following link:

http://buysealand.com/