AMD's Worldwide Standards of Business Conduct
AMD's Worldwide Standards of Business Conduct (WWSBC) support our commitment to high ethical standards and compliance with laws, regulations, and company policies. These standards apply to all AMD directors and employees worldwide and are one of the key components of the company's compliance and ethics program. They reiterate our values and outline guidelines on a broad range of workplace, business practice, and conflicts of interest principles such as employment and labor practices, privacy, employee safety and health, business and accounting practices, political activities and contributions, insider trading, antitrust laws, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The WWSBC are currently available in eight languages: English, Japanese, German, Malay, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. All employees worldwide receive copies of and training on the WWSBC.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Corporate Ethics and Governance
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Blue Ocean Strategy
About Blue Ocean Strategy
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Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation.
Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody “red ocean” of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne contend that while most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future.
Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, Kim and Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—termed “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.
Can Data Centers benefit from Supply Chain Management concepts? - Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog
Land is not an expense, it is an investment. So, land should be looked evaluated on its ROI, not it's overall cost, including land improvements.
Which then led me to think why is it data centers don't use more supply chain management concepts which would address issues like land cost in the overall solution and most likely save you much more than the cost of the land?
Supply Chain Management is defined as.
Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996).[1] Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).
Another definition is provided by the APICS Dictionary when it defines SCM as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring performance globally."
Special Report: The World’s Largest Data Centers « Data Center Knowledge
The mega-data center has become a staple of our global technology infrastructure, serving as the backbone of the digital economy. The growth of the Internet is driving an enormous appetite for network capacity and data storage, creating a new class of data centers that can scale along with the Internet.
So who has the world’s largest data center? We’ve seen a lot of huge data centers in our travels, and have identified 10 that we believe are the largest found anywhere. These data fortresses range between 400,000 and 1.1 million square feet.
Monday, April 12, 2010
The E-Bomb: The New Threat
The ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) effect was first observed during the early testing of high-altitude air burst nuclear weapons — a rather radical way of creating an E-bomb. The threat of the E-bomb increased in 1994 when Gen. Loborev, Director of the Central Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, distributed a landmark paper at the EUROEM Conference in Bordeaux, France. In this paper, Dr. A. B. Prishchepenko, the Russian inventor of a family of compact, explosive-driven RF munitions, described how RF munitions might be used against a variety of targets including communications systems. The concepts “went public” in articles in Russian naval journals and in other professional journals and magazines.
On June 17, 1997, the US Joint Economic Committee (JEC) held a hearing called Economic Espionage, Technology Transfers and National Security, in which it heard about a new class of weapons — radio frequency weapons (RF) — and the impact of these new weapons on the civilian and military electronic infrastructure of the United States. This was followed up by a further hearing in February 25, 1998. In June 2000, James O’Bryon, deputy director of Live Fire Test & Evaluation at the US Department of Defense, flew to a conference in Scotland to address the issue. “What we’re trying to do is look at what people might use if they wanted to do something damaging,” he said. The UK magazine, New Scientist published a popularist article on the subject on 1 July 2000.
The Tec
Monday, March 29, 2010
CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA
Cost-Per-Thousand
CPM pricing was actively promoted by the big portals such as Yahoo and AOL. It was a great revenue generator for them that had the added bonus of being largely risk free. That is, the advertiser did all the creative work and made the payments while the only thing the portals had to do was display the ad as often as they could until the advertiser's budget was exhausted. It's this one-sided nature of the CPM model that has pushed advertisers to seek an alternative that can offer them some sort of guarantee of performance.Cost-Per-Action
CPA then seems to offer the best guarantee for advertisers. After all, with such a set up, the advertiser only pays when the prospect has performed a specific action such as registering or requesting information. And just to be explicit, the upside of this is that an ad can be displayed and clicked on many, many times with no cost to the advertiser. The problem here is that now all the risk has been shifted to the publisher since they now must give up their ad inventory and hope that the advertiser's message is compelling enough to result in "actions".Cost-Per-Click
CPC sits in the middle of the online pricing spectrum. It involves risk from the advertiser's side in that they pay for every click on their ad. This forces them to make sure that the ad is relevant to what is being offered so that a click has a good chance of turning in to an action. At the same time, the publisher takes on the responsibility of displaying the ad in appropriate places so that it will receive clicks. No clicks, no revenue. It's a very simple formula for both sides.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting, an Introduction:
Forecasts are the raw material of planning. For most businesses, the sales forecast is the first step. It can be the basis for developing plans to run the business and plan future strategy. If sales can be reasonably anticipated, costs and inventory can be controlled, and customer service enhanced. Sales estimates provide this help.
Even if much of the content in this paper is familiar, a review will probably provide additional information that is helpful in learning about forecasting strategy and tactics. In recent years sales forecasting has become an important business endeavor. It is essential that company personnel and small business owners understand forecasting methodology.
Forecasts can be classified in several ways: by purpose, as either operational or strategic; by type, as quantitative (statistical) or qualitative (judgment); or by method, that is, by forecasting technique.
