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Illicit Leaky Capacitors Killing Motherboards
mcd7756 writes "The IEEE Spectrum magazine has an article about how capacitors made with a stolen formula for the electrolyte are leaking and causing motherboards to fail. Some computer manufacturers are admitting to the problem; others are hiding it."
other than this is just further proof of the lenghts corporations will go to in order to make more money. Theft, lies, deceit, are all perfectly acceptable business practices these days, especially in east Asia.
This story has been circulating around for a long time, but this article is a good update on what's going on. I was very surprised to read that manufacturers actually threatened that guy who put a list of problem boards on his website.
You know, this is an all-too-disturbing trend. If you look at the behavior of media-giants, RIAA, MPAA, and now computer hardware makers - they'd all like to see us just locked in our homes, doing what they want us to do, seeing only what they want us to see, and not having any communication with anyone else... because if we can communicate with other people (i.e. by publishing a list of boards that are prone to failure), we'll realize just how badly we're being taken. That would eat into profits, and therefore should be made illegal. Heaven forbid consumers are allowed to make informed decisions..
Starting to sound like Soviet Russia?
This shows that quality comes at a cost. If you truly want to get good quality goods, don't expect to keep forcing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products.
Why would a company steal a formula such as this? so they ddn't have to pay as much for the 'real deal' and then henceforth could sell at a cheaper price and undercut others. When this happens quality suffers.
It has happened in many other industries and frank, I'm surprised it hasn't yet happened in something as stressed and pushed-cheaper as the motherboard and other componentry markets.
Rampant commercialism is causing problems like this
It's starting to sound rather like America, and exactly the sort of capitalistic tyrany the founding fathers were afraid their republic could turn into.
You see, the difference is, in Soviet Russia the government owned the means of production.
In America the means of production are in private hands ( the very definition of capitalism) but own the government.
A subtle difference to the man on the street perhaps. After all, at serf level tyrany is tryany, but it isn't fair to slander it with the label of the great "evil empire." It's pure laissez-faire capitalism and a "free" wage slave is still a slave.
KFG
only works if the govt. lets it work
Notice that mp3 trading is a classic example of the free market applying pressure to the suppliers and yet instead of heralding it as a success of capitalism in action the US and others are applying protectionism to the music industry.
CDs are too expensive. The only analysis I need is that people are putting effort into copying them for free. The market wants to see a CD album for somewhere in the $3.99 region.
The CD producers have been prosecuted for running cartels and still they whine.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Here we go again! Yet another base compound which was poorly made, put into a product, sold to others, put in their products, sold to OEMs, built into PCs, bursting and leaking, in the house Jack built. In this instance, instead of having one big company to point the finger at, we've got loads of little ones all over Asia. Fun!
Power Supplies also use low ESR electrolytic capacitors. I'll bet some of the bad capacitors turn up in power supplies too.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Then you wouldn't be a "wage slave" in those terms. You would have risen to the status of "the help."
While there is a difference in class status between the scullery maid and the corporate manager their *state* is the same.
I used the term "wage slave" in the sense of ability to personally control ones working conditions or not. The classical form of wage slavery that you refer to still exists in a form though, but it's slavery to the interest charged by lending institutions rather than the company store.
If you need to borrow money to own a car so that you can get to work, you may well be a wage slave, even in the classical sense. It's just less obvious.
I fully admit that I'm an odd bird in today's world. By *my* standards the guy who barely scrapes by with his own pool cleaning business is of a higher status than a corporation president, no matter how much he "makes."
The classical American Dream is *independence,* not income.
KFG
Oh pulleaze. People are bad. When the right sequence of events occurs, evil can propogate from bad person, to bad person, magnifying itself. This happens regardless of the legal framework. Some frameworks are better than others. Soviet style socialism was probably more corrupt than global corporatism, and far more secretive. "In Soviet Russia..." this story would not have appeared in any of the state controlled news outlets. In fact, in the real Soviet Russia exploding TV sets were a leading cause of fire because the tubes were bad.
Exactly what is the conspiracy here? Are you trying to tell me that the Japanese engineer who stole the formula had a meeting with the contractors who cut corners, who then agreed to threaten the manufacturers so they wouldn't say whether or not they were guilty? And since I've got the Simpsons on my mind now, I want to know exactly how the saucer people were involved in all this.
No, this is not starting to sound like Soviet Russia at all. Don't you see the irony in complaining that we "can't communicate" by "publishing a list"? First, we are communicating on Slashdot. Second, the IEEE article already contains some preliminary investigative work that can be used to develop such a list.
No, it won't be easy to track down all the bad boards. Nobody ever said freedom was easy, but at least it's possible. So kwitcherbitchin, open your case, check the caps, and start asking questions.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ah, a marketing opportunity.
Pray to the Gods of 'protect us from what we don't understand well.' heh.
Back when I was a board troubleshooter at a company with notorious quality problems I used to scoff at the dogmatic ESD protection rules they implemented. Lord help us from mandatory wrist-strap policies at stations where only bipolar assemblies are being worked on. It's cheaper to invoke a near-religious fear in the staff than to properly educate them. I used to chime in at 'ESD Protection Pep-Rallies' that it isn't the 100,000 volts that does the damage, but the charge behind said voltage.
Still, there's no reason not go overboard when it comes to the general public, especially when there's money to be made. Surge protectors and UPS boxes are big markup items in many stores.
Last week I received a shipment of used Pentium chips I bought from a complete idiot. They were nicely sealed in a fresh anti-static bag, but inside the bag I found them all pressed into a big hunk of regular white styrofoam, a notorious source of static charge. I hope they are going to be okay processors, but I'm not betting on it. I only paid $5.50 for all seven. Some QA staff at a place I once worked were reprimanded for doing something similar with a whole batch of expensive SRAM chips they shipped back to a vendor stuck in white styro.
I've seen single resistors sealed in ESD protection bags at surplus stores. Then again, with that kind of ninnys running the project, it isn't surprising that their parts all ended up in the bin at a surplus store.
Ah, but here you admit that the name-brand foo does in fact taste better than the generic, even if it's not enough to be worth the price difference. The original poster claimed that Coke tasted worse than the competition.
I'm not swayed by marketing, but I will admit I prefer Coke over any cola competitor I've tried. But when I'm at the grocery store I still buy the generic because it's close enough, and so much cheaper. Doesn't mean I think it tastes better. I also prefer expensive gourmet restaurants to more mundane places like Chili's, but I'm not willing to pay $30+ per plate every time I go out.
This is one of the reasons why I am an advocate for heterogeneous systems for server farms, clusters, labs, and such. If you have a server farm, you have some sort of tolerance for loss of systems. That redundancy works if systems fail at random, but this shows that that doesn't always happen. Let's say you have 200 machines with the same motherboard with the leaky caps. They all start leaking at about the same time, so they are all starting to wear out at the same rate. Now, let's say that the power company puts too much voltage on your line for a few seconds, the heat rises in the room, what have you, and all the motherboards blow at once. Or just 80% over an hour, it doesn't really matter. In any case, you're screwed.
Now, if you had differing systems, only half the systems are affected by the design flaw. The key here is to have systems with nothing in common. Power supplys, motherboards, cases, even cables must come from different companies. For example, half my server group is x86, the other half is SPARC. One runs Solaris, one runs NT. No matter what happens, with any design flaw, only half the servers will be affected at one time.
-twb