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RAM Manufacturers Fined for Price Fixing
TufelKinder writes "From Law.com: 'In the largest fine ever obtained by San Francisco antitrust prosecutors, a Korean company has agreed to plead guilty and pay $185 million for its role in a conspiracy to drive up the price of computer chips.' Micron and Infineon have also been fined for their role in the scheme." From the article: "It's the third-largest fine of its kind in the United States, and it could be just a preview of even bigger penalties. The far-reaching computer chip investigation, which alleges wrongdoing from 1999 through 2002, affects thousands of consumers."
Ram is pretty cheap as it is, it's gonna be awesome if somehow prices drop even more because of this.
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I did hear a small blurb in the media about price fixing this last week, but that was it. But well...that was it. I would THINK the media would be jumping on this with more force then with happend with Enron. So that leaves me thinking one of two things.
1. It was all made up and thus gained no support.
2. The government stepped in and "unofficially" told the media to keep shut on this subject. If word got out on price fixing, we could end up with a panic and people rushing to the gas pumps like in the 70s. Such an event would really be a problem out of interests of national security and destabilization of our ecconomy.
I'm not saying those in the oil industry shouldn't be punished. But would it really be wise to get all in a frenzy over it at this point in time?
Life is not for the lazy.
How much did they make during that time?
I'm often dissappointed in fines like this when I find out that the execs did a little jail time, paid a fine, but still have 6 Lamborghinis in the garage. It's important to implement fines that are severely punishing...like the people involved would have been WAY better off not pulling this kind of crap. The should be destitute. I can't stomach the wealth accumulated on the backs of the bruised.
I'm not saying that's what is going on here, I don't know. It just makes me sick when most people involved still come out ahead, and there is maybe one or two sacrificial lambs.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
After joining/initiating price fixing with its competitors and making good profits, you rat out on your competitors without paying the fines.
The problem with such a plan is nations that are part of OPEC are full members, not some company mind you, but the government itself. Regulation of the oil industry would be far harder as it would directly involve the host nations who tend to like to do what they want on their own soil where they directly make the laws.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Look at gas prices near the Illinois/Indiana border. With the taxes that Cook county has there should be no way that the prices in Indiana cities close to the border should be anywhere near the prices of those on the Illinois side.
Yet for some reason they are on most occasions the same price or even slightly higher.
RAM is a commodity, much like LCD displays, CPU's, and GPU's.
By itself, it isn't very useful, but when combined with other systems (desktops, laptops, PDA's, mobile phones, handheld consoles), it becomes a very useful item.
As with all commodities, the price will always go up whenever demand exceeds supply. And the suppliers will always try to achieve this; either by sophisticated marketing to boost demand (eg. the diamond market, the power generators warning of a shortage of electricity) or by matching reducing supply to match demand (OPEC, the RAM market).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
They are currently charging as much as they feel they can without losing market share.
Your logic implies every one of your examples should have been selling their products at a higher rate, because all you need to do is raise prices to make more money.
On the other hand, if all memory manufactures agree that they need to raise prices to make up for the fines....
I do work with music synthesis and man, can that shit eat RAM. I have a sample DVD of a drumkit, just a normal trap set with 5 toms, a selection of cymbals and so on. It's 2.4GB, oh and it's the small one. Their full one, with all different styles of kits (like using brushes instead of sticks) is 35GB (comes on 4 DVDs). The same company makes an orchestral sample set with basically all instruments from an orchestra in 3 different mic positons. 68GB.
Now the sampler technology is advanced enough that it can load just the start of the samples in RAM and then stream off the disk as needed, but there's limits to that (only so fast the disk can go) and you still need part in RAM. Eating up the 2GB I have is cake, and I don't even have the really big sample sets.
Now pro apps like those aside, normal apps will grow to use the memory, if it's available. Games can almost always use more memory, if for no other reason than to eliminate any kind of load times (by loading more data further ahead). I'm sure most game makers would like to use more RAM than they do. However, you won't sell many games if you require something most people don't have. If RAM prices go down and amounts go up, they'll start using more.
Some games already do. World of Warcraft just isn't happy unless you have a GB of RAM. It'll run on less, but you'll find it lagging and stuttering as it scrambles to get the graphics off the disk. You give it a GB, it gets pretty happy and smooth.