Maven: AMD Press Does Not Compute

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The Business Press Maven is endlessly fascinated by the business media because of all the complex issues of thought and great intellectual heft it presents every day. For example, this very morning, from the wire services to CNBC, we can't tell whether analysts expect AMD(AMD Quote), the No. 2 chipmaker, to report within weeks that fourth-quarter sales were $1.85 billion ... or nearly a half-billion less?

You might think that pinpointing a past number without a half-billion dollars of wiggle room, quite a generous allotment for error in my modest opinion, is easy and hardly an intellectual exercise on par with solving the problem of cold fusion. But apparently not. The Associated Press and Reuters messed it up late last night. ...