Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes

Sherloqq writes "Tom's Hardware recently ran a story about major hard drive manufacturers drastically reducing their warranties on many of their products. Effective Oct 1, 2002, many IDE hard disks from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital will now come with just a 1-year warranty. This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention). Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure, need to cut costs to remain competitive, advancements in technology used in manufacture of drives ("they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway") as well as warranty period mismatch with OEM computer manufacturers (std. 1-year). Good news in all this: there are no plans for warranty period reductions for SCSI drives. For now... :)"

Comments

FIRST POST!

[Arminius]

For my homies on slashnet!

read more link did not work.

[murat]

404 File Not Found

The requested URL
(articles/02/10/17/1353246.shtml?tid=137) was not found.

If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.


This was the message when i clicked (read more...)

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2)

[Anonymous Coward]

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

1. THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
2. THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
3. THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
4. THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
5. THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
6. THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
7. THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness' requires us not to notice the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the population.

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

Eric S. Raymond
16 October 2002

Re:I blame the overclockers

[Anonymous Coward]

you are out of touch with reality.
joe sixpack does upgrade and add new hard drives/burners etc.

goto bestbuy some time and take a look around, then come back and tell me what think

Re:Well, this only can mean one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay nobody was talkin' about cmdrtaco's PENIS

He said don't bring that up anymore

Ever wnoder why he don't got no kids with the buck toothed beaver that be his WIFEY

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

This might be a reason....

ESR explain yourself!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should read the lunatic manifesto in the parent post.

Eric S. Raymond really should explain himself. That kind of racist, intolerant, jingoistic warmongering is not fitting for a man who commands so much respect in the Open Source community.

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

And pee with the forrest newmans!!

Re:I blame the overclockers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll. The DRM bit at the end was a nice touch, you sliped it in after that long, but mostly meaningless overclocker bash. Good to see that some moderators just dont pay attention to what they read.

Re:Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version

[Anonymous Coward]

by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil

That is just so fucking stupid argument. I wish it would die already!

There was nothing incomprehensible in the motives on terrorist act. It was not about "they're just jealous of our freedoms and democracy" either. It is about our blind support of Israel.

Hysterics like you should realize that every year 7000 people die on the our roads. Less than 3000 died on 9/11. There is a tolerable level of terrorism.

Re:Warrenty changes because of damage Linux causes

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the kernel developers mailing list for a week, and you'll see that your comments are almost all completely inaccurate.

ESR? "Commands respect?"

[Anonymous Coward]

*giggle*

"Respect" among the balding, wild-eyed, gun-nut Open Source community, maybe.

The rest of us (the normal ones) view him as a freak.

Re:IBM still going

[Toraz Chryx]

Who the hell modded that post as offtopic?, how is it offtopic to discuss HARDDISK FAILURE in reply to an article about harddisk warranties...

(this post OTOH, IS offtopic, and should be moderated as such.)

Re:This is stupid

[SparkyTWP]

Yes, I suck at my job.

Even though I've built hundreds of machines with other drives and hardly ever got those back, it's quite obvious I am bad at my job because a batch of these drives consistently came back bad.

I can't believe I did not see the correlation before.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

At least, you seem to realize it now. Acceptance is step one.