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Firms Get Away with Selling Untested DRAM
peppytech75 writes "Melanie Hollands in IT Manager's Journal reports that 'In recent months, some Asian DRAM memory manufacturers have been getting away with selling untested ("UTT") DRAMs. Disturbingly, the practice seems to be getting traction at the lower portion of the module business. This is being done mostly by Taiwanese DRAM makers, who are undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit parts?" (IT Manager's Journal, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG.)
I definitely prefer to go to shop, get the die, plug it in, run a test program for a few hours and have it replaced if I find any errors, than to pay some 80% extra for a sticker saying that some malaysian kid did it for me.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
We're buying some of the highest grade PC3200 parts we can find, and 1 in 100 is defective (out of a sample of 880). They replace it for "free" (except compensating us for downtime...), but heck, 1 in 100??? That sucks.
Duh. I once received a SIMM where one of the chips was mis-placed on the PCB - the last two legs were actually hanging off the end into space.
Whenever there is competition there will be cost-cutting. The heavier the competition, the heavier the cost-cutting.
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
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because granny and grandpa don't know the difference between BrandX ram ($45) and Crucial ($55)
which do you think they'll pick
The Answer
seems like untested ram would be the perfect compliment to the worthless hd that comes in dells.
We live in an era where somepeople consider £30 ($60) CD drives "disposable". The least of our worries is testing something. Because hey to these people whats the difference between 6 months and 12 years? After all it's just "throw away".
I like muppets.
But then I pay more for organic food, I build PCs with good quality parts and pay more for an elegant case rather than one that looks like a chav car.... and would prefer a government that plans for the long term.
Ooooh look at me I'm in the minority.
The article states that the manufactorers are finding it cheaper to have customers test the RAM, and return it. This has been the case for a number of products for a number of years. Anyone remember Motorola pagers (the POCSAG and FLEX ones)? They sold millions without testing them. It was cheaper for MOT to sell them without testing them, and just accept a number of returns.
Having made a complaint to ASA about the sensationalist ad they show before the feature, I found out the above statement is based entirely on one case where someone alledged to be associated with the IRA was caught selling pirated cassette tapes at a car boot sale. Nothing to do with movies, and hardly a major source of funding for any currently active terrorist group, but it was enough for the ASA to decide that the claim was not misleading.
It's no solution if you're the one who bought the bad RAM in the first place! This kind of application of the so-called free market always entails people get conned out of their money in the first place...
Free market does *not* mean you can pass-off your shit as gold until you are caught.
You should make up some stickers that say "Ignorance funds Tyranny" and modify their signs a bit!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
They sent us ram wich didnt work too well, it was for revision 1 of our motherboard and we had revision 2. I called them up and told them that memtest86 said their ram was bad. They didn't treat me like a moron: reseat the ram, we dont support linux, etc. The guy asked me the model number for my motherboard. He said that there were two different revisions and that the ram sent to me was for the other revision. They overnighted the correct ram and paid for return shipping. I understand things like this happen and they delt with it quickly and effectively. It may be more expensive, but it's worth it to me.
-- john
The greedy assholes running the PC industry should be shot. They are the ones that said that end-users didn't need parity memory anymore because RAM quality was so good. They say end-users don't need ECC. All along, they've been more concerned about their profit margins than the reliability of their products. They aren't the ones who get stuck with a flakey computer that crashes every day, or silently corrupts the user's data, with no indication of the true cause of the problem. They just pocket the money and pass the costs to the end-user. If untested DRAM floods the market, the problem will just get worse.
The cost of ECC memory is trivial in comparison to the time and cost involved in dealing with the consequences of flakey memory.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And I know exactly what you mean about the cdrs. I've had lots of problems with cd burners or crap cdrs not being read correctly, so only portions get corrupted on the disc... but they get read perfectly from the burner that actually wrote the disk.
What I found odd, 100% odd was I could do a checksum after I installed Redhat, or Suse, or Debian for that matter, and nothing was wrong. Only during the install stage was there ever an issue. Fortunately you can install via FTP so it's not an issue.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Actually that's a fallacy. There's a long established principle in economics that whenever the cost of discernment reaches a critical level the cheap crappy look-alike beats the high quality product. This becomes a run-away situation as the economies of scale kick in as well, making the price differnetial larger and the market flooded with more lousy product increasing the consumers cost of discenrment.
This of course does not hold for all product, nor all cases since strategic marketing is indeed how one overcomes this and instills the need for quality or features on a consumer.
By the way, go stick your signature.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Isn't it just a kernel boot parameter? Sorry it's not in vanilla trees. Here's a link. It is kept up to date. Why isn't merged in the mainline? http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/