Slashdot Mirror
ASUS Running Out of Hard Disks
The hard drive crunch continues; reader Thorfinn.au writes "ASUS has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November. 'Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop,' Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters."
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hdd_flooding/
Frankly, on a netbook, how would Win7 be less comfortable on those 32 Gigs? Depending on what use you see for a netbook, of course. For me, it's not a mediaplayer and not a gaming rig. So what would I need more than 32 gigs for, even with Win7? Office does not produce files THAT bloated and my email account isn't that overfilled either.
build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
US workers won't work in a HDD manufacturing mill without getting $15+/hr plus benefits and a labor union to strong arm management. That cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar and minimal benefits and dictatorship rules over every employee.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I have a media center at home. I installed Vista about 4 years ago. I let it run and update itself automatically. All data was on other drives (music, pics, recorded TV, etc...). C: was a 30GB partition. I was under the assumption that this was more than enough.
One day, toughly 3 years after install, the thing displayed a whole lot of error messages and whatnot. I decided to reboot it. The same error messages were displayed, do I dived in.
C: had filled up entirely. 0 bytes available. So I looked up on the internet and cleaned up what was not necessary - namely all packages and updates ever received through the net were still there and everything that was patched was also backed up. I freed about 18GB in 5 minutes of worthless files.
As a matter of fact, I just checked my HDD while writing this post. To make sure the size was correct. I only have about 400MB of free space on C:. Time to garbage collect, but this time, I think Vista will be part of the garbage and will be collected as well.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Uhh another MBA?
Because it's cheap to have workforce with special education standing around and waiting, keeping equipment maintained and updating manufacturing processes every once in a while?
Keeping idle production capacity around is extremely expensive.
Because of Black Friday around the corner and other holidays coming up. I tend to buy my large capacity HDDs online due to insanely low prices.
But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Believe it or not, 1/4 of my drives I bought as refurbed and have yet to crap out *knock on wood*, so if you want a cheap large capacity HDD, then a refurb drive might be your only option if their prices do not shoot sky high as the brand new ones...
I might also have better luck scoring a cheap drive locally...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
The original Sony C1XS (1999-2000) was the perfect netbook. I just wish they built a new hardware version with the same design. Mine is still kicking, be it at 400Mhz with 64MB RAM. The 40GB hard drive was a great upgrade from 12.
This may be more difficult than you'd imagine.
I doubt we currently have the infrastructure to manufacture the drives, or else some manufacturer would be doing just that and hugely advertising "Hey, we've still got drives!" Considering production of hard drives is only supposed to be down for a year or so, by the time the ones here were ready to go, so would the foreign ones. Domestic can't keep up with cost, and were back to where we started.
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
Lemme guess, you don't?
Nah, but when I was 12 I got kicked in the head by a horse, which I figure is pretty much the same thing.
US workers won't work in a HDD manufacturing mill without getting $15+/hr plus benefits...
My god! $30K/year and health insurance? What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
You get rid of the backed up system updates via CCleaner (Advanced > Hotfix Uninstallers). But it won't remove the downloaded files so manual remove from %WINDIR%\softwaredistribution\download. I do this after every Patch Tuesday.
When Microsoft was first getting started, they knew they wouldn't make enough money just from the profits of their operating system. Everybody knows people pirate Windows. So they had to get creative. A guy named Chris Liddel came up with the idea to put a folder called "system32" in the Windows folder that literally slows down your machine--on purpose. "System32" holds 32 GIGABYTES of deleted files, internet history, uninstalled programs, and other worthless crap that intentionally clogs up your machine. Why did they do it? Because Microsoft owns several PC "cleaning" tools, like TuneUp Utilities, Norton Antivirus, etc. More money for them. I'm not cool with that, however. Here's how to outsmart those assholes once and for all. Open notepad:
Type the following text:
Save as "speedup.bat" (select "all files" instead of "text document") .bat file.
Double click the
Reboot, and your PC is twice as fast. (You didn't hear it from me)
Source(s):
My computer is fast.
I like how one little country that normally doesn't play a big role in the world, is flooded and suddenly its a big deal. How many of the disk makers have factories located there?
And here I was all set to buy two 2 TB disks.
I thought pancreatic cancer was killing jobs. (Too soon?)
The article doesn't make that clear, although 7% is consistent with the size of the HDD market. But the impact on the market is more severe than that. Anybody using WD as a primary drive brand (for uniformity in enterprise applications) is going to get stuck with massive price increases: The cost of WD drives has more than doubled over the past few weeks, with a 3TB drive going from ~$130 to ~$280. Companies that aren't forced to stick with WD (computer vendors perhaps) will still face the task of validating new drives. And on top of all this, there is the hit in component manufacturing. Nidec makes 75% of all HDD spindle motors globally, and one quarter of their production capacity was in Thailand. That has been heavily disrupted, although they're starting to start those factories back up again. But the hiccup in production is certainly being felt.
Yes, companies can turn up additional production capacity elsewhere, but that takes time, and everybody is feeling the pinch in the meantime, with the inability to get drives.
In terms of a consumer trying to purchase drives, pretty much all stores (in Canada, at least) are limiting consumers to one or two drives per person (putting a real crimp on my plan to add another five disks to my fileserver), and ASUS is reporting that they'll run out of drives by the end of the month, at which point they won't be able to keep up with demand for their computers. So yes, it's pretty dire, although it's not exactly earth-shattering.
He didn't say U.S. workers were greedy, he said that $15/hour+benefits "cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar". And he is right. People do not realise how low Chinese wages are. A factory worker gets about $0.50/hr. They work 100 hours a week. They have limited benefits, but sometimes the employment does include housing and food. They have massive factories where tens of thousands of young people (mostly women) do nothing but eat, sleep and work. The pay at Foxconn - generally recognised as being one of the better employers - was less than $150/month before the string of worker suicides. Imagine what conditions and pay are like with a worse employer. Americans are not willing to work under these conditions and pay, and even if they were, it wouldn't be financially viable for most of them.
But when labor has more money, they can buy more goods. That makes more jobs, and everyone is better off. A rising tide raises all ships.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The solution is to prohibit corporations that want to do business in America from sidestepping American laws on environmental regulation and wages. Won't ever happen, but that would solve the problem.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sure.. let solve the problem of workers in some other countries being so desperate for a job that they will work in terrible conditions... by taking the demand for their job away! The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The best thing that we can do for workers in those countries is to increase the demand for products produced there, leading to a labor shortage that benefits the workers.
"His name was James Damore."
Two of the countries we're talking about have over a billion people.. might want to think about your plan a bit more.
Yes, cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download is perfectly safe but usually unnecessary.
Updates are downloaded into that folder and then installed. If the installation of an update is successful, the installer is deleted from the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. If it is unsuccessful the installer remains in the folder and the installation will be attempted again the next time Windows Update is run.
I have seen systems with a lot of installers in the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder for updates that were installed successfully. Further investigation revealed that the antivirus client on the machine was keeping a file handle to the installer open after the update was installed. As a result, when Windows failed to delete the installer because the antivirus client never closed it's handle to the file.
The way to fix this problem was to reboot the PC (to make sure there are no more open handles) and manually delete the contents of the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. I usually follow this up by removing the installed antivirus client and installing a more well-behaved one such as Microsoft Security Essentials.
1. Make laptops with 60GB SSDs instead of 250GB HDDs.
2. Offer them without Windows and package an Ubuntu CD instead.
3. Sell them at the same price as before.
4. Profit!
thegodmovie.com - watch it