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Corporate Espionage Leads To Faulty Motherboards
Champs writes "If you've gotten the feeling that they really don't make 'em like they used to, you might be right. This article at IEEE Spectrum tells the story of large batches of faulty capacitors sourced from Taiwan causing motherboards to eventually fail, with an interesting twist on the reason why these capacitors failed."
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.
Hey, if you read the story you will find that there is a new twist to it - as in why the caps failed.
graspee
Yes, that's exactly what the US did. Look a little into what US companies did in the 19th C, when its companies stole industrial processes, published books, from European countries without permission or compensation.
Only when it had caught up and started to produce IP that it wanted to sell did it start to make and enforce such laws, and now of course uses massive pressure to force other, poor, countries into line.
Lets face it, there is a whole different set of morals over there - a whole different idea of what is right to do, and what is wrong to do.
As for "morality", the US is such an example of self interest in its relations with the rest of the world, that only your countrymen could keep a straight face when you mention it.
I hope you don't watch the news on TV or read the newspaper because when I do, they not only often have the same story on the same page with only a slightly different angle, they keep repeating the story over and over with nothing really new. Newspapers are notorious for that but people don't seem to be bothered that they pay a dollar to do so.
I miss the Karma Whores.
I think that every time a editor posts a dupe story they should be required to donate $5 to http://www.eff.org/
If this rule was put into affect, the EFF would end up with enough money to take anyone to court, even have a head on battle with Microsoft!!
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