Let's roll us some MS employment numbers.

If 18,000 jobs is 14% of the total work force, so 18,000 / .14 = 128,5000 total MS jobs

80,000 were contract workers, who are now on a 50% on/off schedule = effectively 40,000 "whole job" equivalents lost by this one cut alone

So, 128,500 total jobs - 18,000 hard cut and 40,000 effective contract cut = 58,000 jobs cut or 45% of the total MS work force were just cut.


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A 45% manning reduction, now do you understand why everything older than last year is getting "non-supported" now?

The big prediction has now been made, now we start looking for confirmation of big stockholders quietly dumping their stock pending a stock meltdown panic a' coming ....

How about this for a sorta confirmation ???

http://www.mideasttime.com/microsoft-director-sells-184618300-in-stock-msft/1...

Microsoft Director Sells $184,618,300 in Stock (MSFT)

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Director William H. Gates III unloaded 4,145,000 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, July 24th. The shares were sold at an average price of $44.54, for a total transaction of $184,618,300.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 313,847,107 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $13,978,750,146. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which can be accessed through this link.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) traded down 1.19% during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $43.97. The stock had a trading volume of 29,653,196 shares. Microsoft has a 52 week low of $30.84 and a 52 week high of $45.71.

So, when Bill Gates begins to quietly sell off some stock, do you think that has any meaning ????

So, Intel once again fires a big blast of brown far future vapor with much blowing of the trumpets and beating of the PR drums.

"Why" is always the question that pops up when Intel pushes out a big "year plus out into the future" butt gas blast -- this generally only happens whenever they have to explain themselves to their stockholders.

Still, SOME relevant information is released at that point in time.   Here is the gist of what Intel will be able to do in volume sometime in 2015 at 14nm making a 5% speed upper and a 20% energy savings on their existing totally non-integrated design.  

A non-integrated design that is still too porky go go into a phone and can only go into larger tablets and laptops.



Remember, Intel is talking about a year out into the future with all this -- so let's compare it to what Samsung will be shipping inside of 30 days in their new mid-line phone, the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.


THIS IS A MID-LINE SAMSUNG PRODUCT FOR NOW THROUGH CHRISTMAS, IT IS NOT THE LATEST AND GREATEST SAMSUNG SUPERPHONE OR SUPERCHIP (which is called the Exynos 5433 and will become product shipping & real exactly when Apple announces their new A8 chipset and the IPhone products in October)   Samsung and Apple jest really love each other, can't you tell?


http://liliputing.com/2014/08/samsung-launches-exynos-5430-octa-core-20nm-pro...



"The Samsung Galaxy Alpha smartphone will be the first device powered by a 20nm Exynos 5430 processor when the new metal-clad phone ships in September.

Samsung says the new chip will use about 25 percent less power than its predecessors, which helps justify the decision to use an 1,860mAh battery in the Galaxy Alpha instead of a larger 2,800 Ah battery like the one used in the Galaxy S5."

1860/2800 = 33% reduction in real battery size so I would say the 25% claimed power reduction is about right.

Speed is claimed to be a little faster than the current primo 5422 chipset, so Samsung is now swinging a new mid-line phone that has all the performance of their old primo phone in a thinner cooler running package that only needs 33% less of a battery.

Let's talk about package size a bit -- how big is the new 5430 chipset?   You would think since it is fully integrated (has everything inside it, GPS, radio, etc etc it would bulk pretty large compared to just a simple daughter-board containing the CPU and GPU the way Intel has to do it, right?  

Nope, it is considerably smaller.

This entirely integrated fully functional 8 CPU cores, 6 GPU cores, Radio and GPS already in there cell phone ready system on a chip that already OUT PERFORMS Intel's promised vapor specs for 2015 is a small <28mm square chipset that is already smaller than the Intel's vapor promised 14nm chip's 30mm length dimension.

Here is a pic of the last gen Odroid board showing the actual Exynos 5422 chipset (the one which was die shrunk to make up this latest Samsung Octa 5430 chipset).   The old 28nm Exynos 5422 measured ~28mm square as shown below in a real product, so the new 20nm Exynos 5430 die shrunk model will of course measure smaller accordingly.



Note how full integration means there isn't much on that Odroid motherboard other than the connector jacks ?????   Please remember, this is a fully operational PC motherboard, not a stripped down tablet or phone board.

<28mm square for a fully integrated 8 core Exynos chipset right now vs a 30mm x 16.5mm daughterboard that requires all those additional main chipsets to make up a functioning unit of any kind.

Intel's vapor plan for next year has to include spending all that red ink support money to pay for all the extra components that their vendors will still need to put on the larger motherboards make up a STILL slightly non-competitive Intel based product.


Sorry Intel, you just told us yet again that you are still going to be 2 years behind the times in mobile even with your wonderful new 2015 vapor plan.


LASTLY, INTEL'S LAST CLAIM TO "TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP" JUST WENT UNDER THE WHEELS OF THE REALITY BUS -- SAMSUNG AND QUALCOMM AND APPLE ARE NOW ALL CURRENTLY SHIPPING 20nm LITHOGRAPHY PRODUCTS AND INTEL IS STILL JUST SHIPPING 22nm.


      ..... not to mention everything you sell in mobile costs you far far more to build than you can sell it for in the real world.  
Right now you approach 100% total loss on your mobile division and are well over the 100% loss position on some of your chipsets.

Pay attention Intel, Tegra K1 is the first ARM chipset that is actually aimed at your bread and butter laptop/PC business.   Samsung is coming out with one in a month or two, as are Qualcomm and (don't forget about them) Apple and their A8 and A9  64 bit generations which will hit your high end tablet and laptop businesses pretty hard.    

Americans like their Apple stuff, better than they like yours and Microsoft's stuff as a matter of fact.

Once you see some more real ARM pc/laptop competition (and a general purpose ARM OS to support it) then you will have much more of a even playing field in the PC/laptop world.  

Then Intel will lose all the excess profitability in PC that currently funds their  "total loss leader mode" in their mobile products.

NO FAIR !!!  scream again all the dozen or so rabid Intel lovers out there .... compare a properly super-powerfully strong per each individual CPU core ARM chipset for size when you talk about our beloved one year away from being really real vaporous Intel 14nm Broadwell chipset.  

Pick something with the same or better through put per core instead of overwhelming us with 197 cores .....    (and yeah, we know about all them dirty GPU compute sharing tricks that ARM is a' doing -- that is cheat'n, cheat'n real bad because we can't do that yet)

OK, since you are a real glutton for punishment (and since it will hit before Christmas when the Apple A8 stuff comes out) I give you the 64 bit Denver cored Tegra K1 WITH ONLY TWO DENVER CORES THAT WILL STILL OUTDO YOUR 4 CORE FUTURE VAPOROUS 14nm BROADWELL.

(please also note that if they decide they really need 4 Denver cores to do even more serious Core i5 level laptop/desktop evil to you Intel lovers
later on down the road, they do have a 14nm design already laid out for a K1 quad core Denver already .....)

Each individual Tegra Denver core is indeed stronger than an Intel Broadwell core.    And smaller.   And completely integrated with the rest of the chip, including GPU work sharing, etc.    And they will hit reality by this Christmas which your Intel stuff will never do.

23mm x 23mm again, as shown, the same die size as the other K1.



.... and yes them whopping strong Denver cores can share compute tasks with all 192 of the Kepler graphics cores -- after all spreadsheets don't do much of a graphics work load you know and all them GPUs were just a' sitting there being all bored, so ARM decided to put them to work ....

NO FAIR !!!!   PERSONAL  FOUL !!!!   RED CARD !!!!  scream the Intel fanboys .....

Don't you dare show us a fully integrated AMD Mullens chipset when we don't have a fully integrated anything to show anybody just yet ---

It isn't fair, we have totally destroyed AMD three times now and you are saying that they are BACK again !!!!



Sorry dudes, butt-hurt you may be but you have to admit that new $199 Stream Laptop from HP might just tell the world that you guys really AREN'T any form of real low end technological leader really any more.

Just some really out of date really really slow guys with deep deep pockets .....

My wife just told me her home Windows laptop had locked up and was "doing something bad".

I immediately looked at it of course (that's my job, dealing with computers) -- it was MS priority level pushing 63 updates at her machine to undo all the crap they did on the 12th of this month with their standard monthly update's big arsed disaster.

Once the 63 updates were in the machine, it immediately priority asked for 47 associated file updates to associated files that were required to support the new files.  

(going backwards is never clean or easy in MS's world).

Microsoft is backtracking like two full levels of security updates, replacing I would guess about 1/3 of the total active windows installation in the process between the primary push and the associated files requirements.



This mess has already taken her machine out of use for two solid hours so far at the Time Warner standard package download speeds, with a Malwarebytes scan and a defrag still yet to go when MS finishes getting all their little bits and pieces in proper order.  

I count 4 5 6 reboots so far, and the count is still building.

I started a Linux Mint update on my machine at the same time as my wife's Priority Windows Update (while it was still downloading files) just to compare the two.   I was done with the Linux Mint update inside 2 minutes and it required no reboot and no defrag -- it just downloaded and installed the handful of new files and said "Done".


================


On the Windows machine 409 files were fragmented by this action, a mass of files like I said of about 1/3 of the operating system files.   Just to defragment the system after the full update set had landed took 16 minutes and the Malwarebytes scan when it was all MS happy took 13 minutes to complete by itself (and it found 4 dodgy items when I did the scan).

MS is simply an overly complex pain in the butt to take care of -- no wonder IT departments the world over absolutely love them Chromebooks.