Hasta La Gadget!

You know, we were going to write about how NEC is cutting 20,000 jobs, and Hitachi’s plan to possibly slash 7,000 workers — but this stuff is getting kind of depressing. After a meeting of the minds between our crack team of editors, we’ve decided there’s a better way to handle this recession: giveaways. Starting today, we’re going to be giving away one item a day for as long as we can (until we run out / the companies stop giving us stuff). That means that at least for the foreseeable future, you can expect a teensy sliver of economic relief in these trying times. We’re going to start out with some games — Skate 2 and The Lord of the Rings: Conquest for the Xbox 360. Check the rules below, and get to winning!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share a tale of heart wrenching economic strife, that’s good too.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive two Xbox 360 games. Approximate value is $120.
• Entries can be submitted until Monday, February 2nd, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Announcements

Engadget’s recession antidote: daily giveaways! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re getting rather tired of having to “roundup” the misery, loss of profits, and layoffs in this modern era of plenty and luxury, but there’s seemingly no end in sight, so here we go. Texas Instruments announced plans to cut 12 percent of its workforce (apparently as a safety measure as its profits last quarter actually topped analysts’ estimates). Meanwhile, Panasonic’s announced some modest cuts of roughly 600 workers, in addition to closing some of its plants in Asia as it posted a net loss for the first time in six years. Moving on, Hewlett-Packard’s laying off nearly 25,000 people in a “restructuring” scheme, while those IBM losses we’ve been hearing about (and which have been rumored to number nearly 16,000) are now quietly happening in several locales across the U.S. Finally, big boxer Best Buy’s just confirmed impending cuts at their headquarters in Minneapolis, but won’t release any hard numbers until February. Seriously, world: the future is disgusted with us.

Read – Texas Instruments cutting jobs
Read – Panasonic to cut 560 jobs, close plants
Read – IBM, HP quietly cut thousands of jobs
Read – Best Buy plans layoffs at headquarters

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Recession roundup: volume eleventeen zillion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It wasn’t that long ago that Monday mornings in the office were a depressing time — another cheerful weekend gone; another long week of work ahead. But, these days, being in the office on a Monday is a good thing, because if your login still works you’ve survived another scary layoff Friday. Spare a thought, then, for those whose system access has been cut off, including 1,300 from Sun (the first wave of a total of 6,000 planned job cuts), 8,000 workers at Sprint who are due to receive pink slips, 6,000 from Philips, and an unannounced number of IBM workers (rumored to be 16,000) who have also found themselves to be on the wrong side of the cost-cutting ax. In one final bit of cheery news, AMD has reported a $1.4 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 and, after shedding its handheld graphics unit, is now selling its manufacturing operations to Advanced Technology Investment. Oh, sorry, you were hoping for some genuinely good news? How about this: that loss is smaller than AMD’s $1.8 billion loss from the same time last year. Now have a great day!

Read – Sun confirms 1,300 layoffs
Read – Sprint Nextel Plans to Cut 8,000 Jobs in Quarter
Read – Philips to Release 6000 Employees into Wild
Read – Several IBM employees report being laid off on Alliance@IBM
Read – IBM Confirms Layoffs
Read – AMD Reports $1.4 Billion Loss

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Recession roundup: Monday morning edition originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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