Intel Revenue Dives $1bn On Hard Disk Shortage

nk497 writes "The hard disk shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand will cost Intel $1 billion in lost revenue, the company said. It had initially predicted revenue of $14.7bn this quarter, but that will now be $13.7bn, it said. 'Sales of personal computers are expected to be up sequentially in the fourth quarter,' Intel said. 'However, the worldwide PC supply chain is reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases as a result of hard disk drive supply shortages.'"

Comments

SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The perfect time for Intel to push SSDs?

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I just purchased one. I was planning on buying a HDD until prices went up. Then saw a deal on an Intel 320 series 120gb that seemed decent, plus I'd been wanting to try one. They were running a nice rebate not long ago. I haven't regretted it (yet), and I've noticed a major difference in boot time.

Re:SSD

[Grishnakh]

Sure, as soon as they come up with $100 1TB SSDs.

SSDs are fine for OS disks and applications, but for anything requiring serious data storage, they're just too small and expensive. Lots of people these days use their computers for storing and watching movies; you need terabyte hard drives for that.

Re:SSD

[tepples]

I thought most people streamed movies as video on demand over the Internet instead of buying a permanent download.

Re:SSD

[jedidiah]

The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.

You don't need to be a video hoarder to run out of space on a smaller drive. You just need to use your machine for more than a web terminal. If you are a producer or consumer of anything, all of the stuff together will likely exceed the capacity of a smaller SSD drive.

It's not just one thing but a combination of things that could push you over the rather meagre 120G you are likely to find on a cheap-enough SSD.

Beyond that, things tend to get expensive quick.

At that point, an oversized and somewhat overpriced HDD is still cheaper.

Re:SSD

[gorzek]

Some people (like me) do both. There are some things I want to stream. Other things, I'd like to have a copy around to watch whenever I want, including when I'm offline. Movies and TV shows are not all created equal.

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the MPAA and RIAA conspired to keep people from retaining any of their questionable downloads? Along with disk manufacturers wishing to spur sales of new SSD drives?

Re:SSD

[Synerg1y]

SSDs came long long after 1 tera hard disks, so no ssd prices won't drop as a result of this, not by much more than they are already declining anyways. I'd just assume everybody ALREADY HAS their spinning disk storage solution, and if not your timing makes you unlucky unless you can hold off, the prices really are bs right now.

Re:SSD

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Plus, streamed movies have crap quality because of the extreme compression used. For many things, it's sufficient, but if you want to watch BBC's Life movies, for instance, it's definitely not.

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that like it hasn't been in the works for 10+ years...

Re:SSD

[ackthpt]

SSDs came long long after 1 tera hard disks, so no ssd prices won't drop as a result of this, not by much more than they are already declining anyways. I'd just assume everybody ALREADY HAS their spinning disk storage solution, and if not your timing makes you unlucky unless you can hold off, the prices really are bs right now.

I'm waiting to see how well SSDs hold up. Probably a couple years before I buy a large one. I've had some poor luck with high density non-volatile memory and am interested in the durability and reliability of SSDs.

Re:SSD

[TooMuchToDo]

My Netflix 720p instant watch movies streamed over to my WD Live Hub look pretty glorious on my 70" LED Samsung TV. I wouldn't call that "crap" quality.

Re:SSD

[Imbrondir]

Not bad but 720p is certainly not "glorious" on a 70" TV. I was pretty impressed with blu ray movies on my 1080p 90" projector in the beginning. But it doesn't take that much time before you notice how much sharper things are on a 40" TV. I hope 4k ever gets to the mainstream.

Re:SSD

[jon3k]

I didn't spend all this money on a SAN to have users storing files on local hard disks. Small, fast, quiet, low-power, low-heat disks for the desktop and a combination of fast/slow on the network storage system to store files. The reality is manufacturers stuff 500GB HDD down our throats for desktop computers, when I could just as easily get a 50GB SSD for the same price, which is more storage than any of my workstations need (disclaimer: healthcare).

Re:SSD

[jon3k]

You've got a lot of factors at work there. First is pixel density and seating distance, then the quality of the projector and room setup, and finally the quality of the TV you're comparing it against. Yes a poorly setup room with a low quality projector would be vastly inferior to a good 40" TV.

Re:SSD

[jon3k]

So far so good, I've still got original OCZ Vertex MLC drives ticking along just great. I think a lot depends on what kind of life expectancy you need out of a drive. Typically I was replacing desktop HDDs every 3-5 years which, for even a "power user" at home, is a fraction of the lifespan of an SSD. After putting an SSD in one computer I was hooked, the difference is just crazy. If you're trying to decide whether or not to spend another $100 to upgrade the CPU in a new computer build, just replace the HDD with an SSD. The difference will be far more dramatic than a couple hundred megahertz of clock speed.

Re:SSD

[Grishnakh]

Maybe for your environment, SSDs and a SAN makes sense. Not everyone has the same environment: home users with desktops, and developers at smaller companies (places that don't have SANs), for instance, need lots of space. Yes, for a big company with a well setup IT department with centralized storage, you really don't need a big HD on each desktop, but lots of places aren't like that. In fact, at the large companies I've worked at (including Intel), they didn't have SANs either (or at least not set up properly so that desktop users could make good use of them).

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought most people streamed movies as video on demand over the Internet instead of buying a permanent download.

Most people don't "buy" movies period. Most people use the pirate bay or some other site to get the content these days.

Re:SSD

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...Tiger is selling a 1Tb Seagate for like $60, I'm sure you can find the link on sellout.woot if you didn't get the email. While that isn't as cheap as the $35 I paid for a 1Tb Samsung frankly that isn't THAT bad a price, hell the 1.5Tb was like $99,its not gonna break the bank.

Re:SSD

[TooMuchToDo]

I don't notice a big enough difference between Blu Ray and Netflix HD streaming to buy any Blu Ray discs/rent them from Redbox, etc. I'd rather be playing Portal 2/MW3/Battlefield 3/Gears Of War on the ol' 70" before watching some HD film on it.

Re:SSD

[Synerg1y]

Wow, I haven't been to woot in ages, I've been using techbargains for the longest time, I am thinking of newegg however when I think of the hdd costs since the flooding crisis. And of course you do realize on a hdd you have to factor a lot more (well not A LOT) than storage = money (ex. wd green, wd blue, wd black).

Re:SSD

[LordLimecat]

The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.

Quoted for truth.

I have many friends who could possibly do with just 60GB; but I also have a lot of friends who have 100GB+ of baby photos and movies. How smart would it be to suggest a SSD to one of my friends knowing that it may be a matter of short while before they too are filling their tiny SSD with baby photos?

Suggesting anything less than 160GB for a friend seems like taking a gamble, unless I know a lot about their usage patterns.

Re:SSD

[karmarep]

SSDs came long long after 1 tera hard disks, so no ssd prices won't drop as a result of this, not by much more than they are already declining anyways. I'd just assume everybody ALREADY HAS their spinning disk storage solution, and if not your timing makes you unlucky unless you can hold off, the prices really are bs right now.

I'm waiting to see how well SSDs hold up. Probably a couple years before I buy a large one. I've had some poor luck with high density non-volatile memory and am interested in the durability and reliability of SSDs.

I had a 3 year old Seagate1 TB drive shit the bed this week and I had to shell out $180 for a new 2TB, indeed bad timing.
I am waiting to purchase a SSD drive as well.

The SSD manufacturers seem to be updating the firmware almost monthly to fine tune for errors,problems, read and write speed and other compatibility tweaks. Users still need to set up the operating system and settings to use the SSD correctly; they aren't quite at the plug in and forget it level yet...

The value of a SSD is speed, not lifetime. I have read that it is still best to store large and frequently written data on spinners?
SSD's have a limited lifetime write capacity and if used as a normal platter drive the life is sucked out of them all that much faster.

I may pick up a 80GB SSD for operating system in the next year and try my luck, I have heard that the speed gain is miraculous.

Re:SSD

[fsckmnky]

had to shell out $180 for a new 2TB

Wow. Last year on black friday, I got a 2TB Samsung drive from newegg for $70 delivered.

Bad timing indeed.

Re:SSD

[jon3k]

Sure, I absolutely agree with you. I'm just making the counterpoint to the parent post. Not everyone needs massive slow hard drives, especially in a typical business environment. I can't imagine why our accountants need the standard 300+ GB HDDs in their workstations. The only reason they have them is because it's the smallest drive that's being manufactured anymore. Never once have I had an anyone in operations, accounting, or HR or any clinician (or anyone I can think of, ever) ask for more local storage space, but I couldn't possibly count the number of times someone complained about how slow their computer booted up.

And when did you work for Intel that they didn't have a SAN, are we talking like 1992? You know this for a fact, or was it just possibly abstracted from your viewpoint (eg front ended by NFS/CIFS, etc)?

Re:SSD

[hairyfeet]

You aren't thinking of all their other content, the pictures (which modern cameras can suck up space quickly) the videos, the music, the documents,etc. I've had quite a few of my "Plain Jane" customers come in and change out their 200-400gb HDDs simply because they had loaded them to the brim and needed more space.

That said if you keep an eye out you can still get decent prices on the 5400RPM drives which make great storage drives and depending on the model even great OS drives. I'm typing this on my main machine at home which i changed out the 400gb 7200RPM Seagate with 8Mb of cache for a Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM with 32Mb of cache and my benchmark went from a top burst of 104 to 131, and it loads the desktop plenty fast while being a good 25f degrees cooler than the Seagate was.

I'm just glad i got my family and myself set before the flood so I can simply wait it out. All I have left on the SATA front is a 640Gb and an 80Gb, the 80Gb will be going in the spare office box I keep for clients and the 640Gb in it will be going in the new box I'm building my GF for Xmas. I don't even want to know what a 640gb 7200RPM SATA would cost me right now, probably more than the quad core CPU AND the 4Gb of RAM I bought for this new build put together!

Re:SSD

[hairyfeet]

Well we ARE talking about cheap storage so frankly the speed shouldn't matter, you could always put a small fast SSD as the OS drive. that said the main machine i'm typing this on has a 5400RPM Samsung as the OS drive and I jumped a good 30 points in the HDDTune scores by switching from a 7200RPM Seagate, even though we are talking about a slower rotational speed. That is because the Samsung drives are damned good about utilizing their 32Mb of onboard cache when compared to the 8Mb the Seagate had.

So I'd say it all comes down to what you are gonna do with it. If you are like my "must have teh biggest ePeen and win teh benches!" gamer customers frankly the HDD shouldn't be anything but storage for your media, and with everyone else Windows 7 with a decent amount of RAM just loads all your apps into memory anyway so drive speed frankly isn't that big a whoop. i like to game and mess with audio/video editing and having 3Tb of HDD space to me is well worth having them both be Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM, and with 8Gb of RAM frankly if anything the larger caches on the Samsungs makes them snappier than the Seagates they replaced.

Re:SSD

[Grishnakh]

I was there in the early/mid 2000s. I'm sure they did have SANs, but at least some of the time I was working there, I didn't use them (except for whatever they had connected to their Exchange machines of course). In one group for instance, we were doing some Linux device driver development, and we didn't have any access to IT facilities, so we had to manage our own server.

At the last mid-size company I worked for, we did all our development locally, and committed changes to an SVN repository (which I have no idea how exactly its storage was set up). That's also how I currently work in a small company.

Re:SSD

[Talderas]

I'm just glad i got my family and myself set before the flood so I can simply wait it out. All I have left on the SATA front is a 640Gb and an 80Gb, the 80Gb will be going in the spare office box I keep for clients and the 640Gb in it will be going in the new box I'm building my GF for Xmas. I don't even want to know what a 640gb 7200RPM SATA would cost me right now, probably more than the quad core CPU AND the 4Gb of RAM I bought for this new build put together!

Only on Slashdot would you hear someone talk about getting themselves set before a flood and be talking about hard drives.

Intel sells hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[petermgreen]

Intel sells computer components, mostly processors, chipsets and ethernet controllers. Each computer uses one CPU, one chipset, one ethernet controller (occasionally two) etc.

The majority of those parts are sold (either directly or indirectly via a motherboard manufacturer) to OEMs who turn them into computers. Hard drives are a key component in most computers (occasionally you see a SSD only machine but it's pretty rare) so if the OEMs are supply constrained on hard drives they will reduce their purchases of everything else to match (companies HATE keeping stock these days).

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[ackthpt]

Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...

Somewhere I saw the figure on how much of their income comes from commodity PCs vs servers - servers are where the money is. Servers without drives would still be in demand, but servers with drives wouldn't meet demand. Not sure what the split is now. I don't think Intel makes much off storage devices.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[Shatrat]

Intel does not sell computers. They sell processors to people who sell computers. Those people can't built computers without hard drives, so they are buying fewer processors. Not that hard to figure out.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, and potentially just as bad for Intel, they're using a lower-speced and likely lower margin CPU to make up some of the cost difference due to the HDD.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[MikeyO]

Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...

Those people can't built computers without hard drives, so they are buying fewer processors. Not that hard to figure out

I agree that it seems fishy. To say "I was guessing I would make $14, but it turned out I only made $13" and then to make the leap to "therefore I lost $1" seems wrong. You didn't lose $1, you just guessed wrong. Then to go farther and say "I can say that the $1 I lost was all because of this reason." makes me want to ask how you could know this. To me it seems like a good case of "correlation is not causation."

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they're using AMD processors?

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[ackthpt]

So, they're using AMD processors?

I'm certain AMD are feeling the pinch, as well.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[Mister Whirly]

Because Intel has never sold computer technology in the past, so they really have no idea what their sales would likely be. Even though they have 40+years of sales data to correlate this information. Something tells me their speculation is built on much more solid data and algorithms than your analysis is.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[bws111]

It doesn't say they 'lost' $1B, it says they lowered their expected revenue by $1B. How do they know the amount and reason? Simple. There are only 3 weeks left in the year. Their sales are not where they expected/wanted them to be - they are $1B lower. They call their largest customers and say 'why are your actual purchases lower than projected' and the customer says 'can't get hard drives, so no need for processors'.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[hairyfeet]

I don't know about that, because while Bulldozer wasn't a big hit Bobcat is frankly selling so fast the CEO had them ramp down some of the desktop production to give them more Bobcats, along with ending production of all the Deneb and Thuban chips. I just walked into Walmart today and they were unpacking a pallet load of desktops loaded with e-350s (not bad at $399 with a 20 inch TFT and 500Gb HDD), and looking at their laptops and netbooks I'd say a good 80%+ were E-Series or A-Series. And of course all of the all in ones were E-350 chips. Those Bobcats are selling like hotcakes and as an owner of a EEE E-350 i can see why, its low heat, last 6 hours on a battery, plays full 1080p over HDMI and most importantly doesn't feel like its got a boat anchor tied to it like Atom does.

So this HDD shortage may turn out to be even more of a boost to AMD as by buying the cheaper AMD chips the OEMs can absorb the cost of the higher HDD without raising prices and running off customers. I'm just glad i scored my Thuban when i did because a lot of the Thubans were selling out, my guess everyone that wanted one doing like me and trying to snatch one before they ran out.

So let me leave everybody with my new happy Xmas song! "We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban and a happy six corrrrreeee!"

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[slashmydots]

I'm fairly certain that Intel made the sandforce controllers that almost all SSDs use and they "make" their own line of SSDs as well, though I'm not sure if they're actually a flash chip manufacturer or not. So maybe they should start selling them some SSDs or at least make more money off other people's SSDs with their controllers. I mean seriously, I just built 2 customer computers with 60GB Patriot Pyro drives because after like 5 years, they filled up 3 whole GB of documents. Those things felt faster than my $1000 system with a 1TB Seagate drive. People didn't mind low capacity netbook drives so they could market SSD-based PCs all the way to the bank.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[LtGordon]

(companies HATE keeping stock these days).

Consider the PC component market: products constantly being introduced, replaced, obseleted, along with pretty considerably-paced devaluation; parts that were fairly recently top-of-the-line are now middle-of-the-line. It's no wonder an OEM would want to minimize stock on hand.

Re:Intel sells hard drives?

[swalve]

On one hand you are right, sales projections aren't guarantees. But if your boss lowers your pay because of lower sales, you are certainly going to feel like you "lost" that money.

Revenue?

[mfwitten]

Is Intel still making a profit? Is Intel at least breaking even?

Ideally, if a company is breaking even, then who cares what its revenue is.

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft; it represents an imbalance of energy/value/worth in an exchange (one party to the exchange is taking advantage of the other party).

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Wrong. In American capitalism, if your company isn't constantly growing or constantly making a bigger profit, then it's "dying". Then your stock will be downgraded by ratings agencies and stockholders will sell it off.

It isn't true for privately-held companies, but for publicly-traded companies it is.

Re:Revenue?

[quintus_horatius]

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.

A company may boost it's profits for any number of reasons, not all of which are driven by pure greed - bankrolling some money for future growth being the obvious one. Or would you prefer that companies grow by borrowing, which involves usury (which, by your too-much-profit principle, may be a more pernicious form of theft)?

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

Really? Tell you what you swing by my house I will pay you only in your material cost to paint my house. You dont deserve anything beyond that. It would just be you stealing from me. You may be a bit angry at this point at what I said. But it is the logical extreme of what you are saying.

You know what those profits pay for? Expansion, peoples salaries, bonuses, dividends, new product lines, R&D, etc... Multi billion dollar fabrication plants do not build themselves.

Or to take my painting example. I am willing to pay someone money to do it for me. Why? I *really* do not like to do it. It is worth it to me to work on something else I enjoy and give someone else the money to do it. Even if it costs me quite a bit more than if I do it myself.

If you dont see that as good, then you know what keep your mouth shut. As you have no idea how the real world really works. When you get out of your parents basement and realize money is earned not some magical thing that your parents give you, you will start to realize this. People do things for selfish reasons. For example in my painting example. I am taking advantage of someone else to do grunt work I do not like. They are getting something in return... money. They in turn take advantage of me by charging for it. I get a house painted they get money. However, you seem to be under the impression people should not be compensated for what they do. You will find very few people willing to work that way.

Re:Revenue?

[Baloroth]

Profit is inherent in the concept of trade. Two people agree to an exchange because both value what they receive more than what they had. In a very real way, a fair trade involves both parties profiting. In different ways, true, but profit nevertheless. This drives trade, and has for thousands of years. For producers, they generally receive the profit as money. Intel is a producer.

If this fact did not hold, trade would not create profit, there would be no incentive to trade or produce, and the entire system of production would collapse. Incidentally, this is also why Marxist Communism doesn't work... or one reason, anyways.

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given inflation, a company that isn't showing at least a couple of percent growth is, in fact, dying.

Re:Revenue?

[DaMattster]

Unfortunately, Capitalism is a form of Social Darwinism in which the strong. It is inherrently unequal and unfair. That much said, as imperfect as the system is, it is better than Communism.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

The problem with a company that isn't growing is that it isn't making any progress expanding into new areas and finding new customers. Which means it's just waiting for the next generation of tech or (for non-IT companies) the first disaster/neighborhood change/etc to kill the business. In other words, it's just waiting in limbo for bankruptcy. Fact is markets change.. what you sell today is tomorrows commodity, or worse, an obsolete good. Companies and business models have to change. Anyone who doesn't will eventually die.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Or maybe they're just having an off year.

If you don't make more money this year than you did last year (because of lower bonus perhaps, due to bad economy), do you get gun and shoot yourself in the head? "Oh no! I made 3% less money this year than I did last year! It's the end! I'm dying, I might as well end it all now."

Re:Revenue?

[gorzek]

Yeah, it's weird how being consistently profitable is viewed as a bad thing, isn't it? If you aren't doubling your profits every few quarters, by golly, you're a failure.

Incidentally, this is what leads companies to boost their profit levels through massive workforce cuts. Then the CEO can say, "I doubled profits in the third quarter!" He just leaves out the part where he did it by slashing a third of the staff, which means all the customers get shitty support/service, and whatever it is the company actually makes will see either reduced output, reduced quality, or both, and in a few quarters the profits will have declined substantially thanks to all the pissed off customers who ditched you.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Oh please, what an utterly stupid attitude. Not all companies are tech companies. If the makers of Twinkies find their company isn't growing, what exactly is the problem as long as they're profitable and their workers are well-paid (and presumably their executives too)? There's only so many Twinkies you can sell; people aren't going to abandon all other foods and only eat Twinkies (and even if they did, eventually your company's growth would then be tied to the population growth rate). You don't need to move into new areas; there's already other companies selling other types of food, so they're probably going to do better at it than you are since they've been doing it longer and have a brand reputation in those areas, whereas you have a brand reputation for unhealthy junk food, so you're not likely to find much success moving into, say, high-priced organic snack foods compared to the companies already competing in that space. Twinkies have been around forever, they're not going anywhere, so even if the Twinkie company stops growing, that doesn't mean it's dying, it means it's reached a plateau.

There's tons of small companies that have been around for many years (or decades, or even longer), that haven't grown because they don't need to or want to grow. As long as the owners are happy with the profit they're making, why would they want to make the company bigger, and have to deal with all the headaches that come with having a bigger operation and more shareholders yelling about how they want to do things?

Re:Revenue?

[spidercoz]

In which the strong what? You want to finish that thought there? Never mind, I know where it's headed. And to which I say, you are correct, but our system is NOT capitalism. If it was, there'd be no such thing as "too big to fail" and government bailouts of stupid corporations who can't manage their money intelligently would never happen.

Re:Revenue?

[spidercoz]

Good qualifier, "American" capitalism, as in "not" capitalism.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Yes, but by the time the shit hits the fan with pissed-off customers ditching the company, the CEO will have taken his giant bonus (from doubling profits for one quarter), and moved on to "explore other opportunities" or collected a golden parachute.

Re:Revenue?

[gorzek]

Yep. That's why this sort of thing can just keep happening. The CEO won't be around for the long-term fallout, so all the blame will fall on the next guy, and the one after him, as the company keeps floundering and no one can figure out why.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Don't be silly. American capitalism is indeed a form of capitalism. Another name for it is "crony capitalism". It is capitalistic, but it's tilted massively in favor of the cronies (and their lobbyists), rather than being a system where there's a "level playing field" and new and upcoming players can unseat older companies by having better products or services.

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not arguing your specific point, but unfortunately, it's less common for "two people" to exchange things.

Usually, the exchange is between a large business and a person. A business has a lot more resources and power to tilt the exchange in their favor.

If libertarians started all examples with "A corporation and a person" instead of "two people", they would have a lot more factors to consider.

Re:Revenue?

[StikyPad]

Only if you work on Wall Street.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Somehow I think even most of them are smart enough to know that financially, it's more important how much you have in your bank account, not how much you make every year or quarter (so for instance, if you get a giant windfall one year and save it up, it doesn't matter if you don't get the same windfall every single year).

It's only the idiotic sycophantic fans of American crony capitalism that try to convince us all otherwise.

Re:Revenue?

[krinderlin]

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

Really? Tell you what you swing by my house I will pay you only in your material cost to paint my house. You dont deserve anything beyond that. It would just be you stealing from me. You may be a bit angry at this point at what I said. But it is the logical extreme of what you are saying.

Repeat across 3 paragraphs

This falls apart very quickly. What you will be charged by the painting company is the exact amount needed to cover: materials, wages of the workers sent out, and the projected costs of the new van we are buying to allow us to haul around more paint. As you'll see, I agree with you in the end, but "risk" covers future investments. You're doing the argument wrong.

The appropriate response is that there are no profits. Profits is simply money not spent today. In the end, all of the money in a company goes into something. Even the company's liquid cash hoard is a hedge against debts, sudden disaster, and the possibility of acquisition. That money is in a bank that is leveraging it to circulate back into the economy. (A protest on leveraging is a separate argument, no need to respond to this. The point is simply the money is doing stuff.)

The OP has missed the point that money made is money spent from the perspective of the company-as-entity. Now, executive pay and bonuses are a different story. I don't have a big hate for the actual cash salaries they make. However, I've got plenty of frustration at the rigged bonus schemes and separation packages that encourage a nomadic executive class that has no real concern than to walk in, cut costs to the bone, and walk back out leaving a wake of destruction behind them. Sure, pay the millions. Just don't give them a shred of stock till 10 years in.

Re:Revenue?

[mfwitten]

I don't think that what I've said has anything to do with either capitalism or communism.

Specifically, even under capitalism, what I've stated is valid.

Let's say a factory owner makes widgets. It costs $10 to make a widget, and he sells a widget for $11, so he records what would normally be called a $1 profit for himself. The factory owner is very happy about that, and the consumers are very happy about that.

Now, let's say the factory owner makes a simple adjustment to his factory, such that now it's actually possible to make a widget for $1. At this point, the factory owner has some interesting choices. For instance, he can sell his product for the same $11; in this case, his own situation has been much improved, but the situation of the consumers remains just as happy as it was before (unchanged). Alternatively, he can sell his product for $2, thereby still making a $1 profit; in this case, his own situation remains just as happy as it was before (unchanged, except that now he also enjoys a significantly cheaper widget!), but the situation of the consumers has been much improved.

Perhaps you notice an imbalance in the two choices above: Under the first choice, only the factory owner benefits. Under the second choice, everybody benefits; in fact, under the second choice, if the $1 profit that he makes is meant for unfortunate events like a fire in the factory, then the factory owner makes no profit and receives exactly the same benefit as everybody else: A cheaper widget.

Perhaps this is where some kind of marxist idea comes in: The factory is a means by which to make widgets, and everybody is a consumer of widgets (including the factory owner). Thus, consider abstracting this conceptual world into two entities: The Factory and the Consumers. In this view, if the Factory can be made more efficient, then it would be logical for all of the Consumers to benefit equally; it makes sense for widgets to be priced at $2.

What I've written about does not detract from free markets; it simply points out that there is a kind of moral choice to be made about how products and services should be priced.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

Twinkies are made by Hostess, a company that owns quite a few food brands. They filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and laid off 1/3rd of their workforce: 10,000 people. Also, they lost $150 million last year. I'm sorry, what were you saying again?

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.

Wrong. Assuming equal access to perfect information, you can claim agreement on a price was reached. If one company knows the price a lot better than the other, than there's no way for it to be fair; just because the company with worse information doesn't know it's getting screwed doesn't mean it isn't.

And you can't claim the American economy is based on free access to information - in fact, I would argue the opposite. Patents, intellectual property, PR, marketing. All are designed to promote a "monopoly" of sorts (of course, there are laws against being too obvious about it, but even those aren't absolute.) and to exploit the fact that it's not an honest system and most buyers are woefully uninformed.

Re:Revenue?

[gtbritishskull]

But you also have to factor in being paid back for risks you have already taken. If I start my own company, which I bankroll with some of my own money as well as free (or underpriced) labor, then shouldn't I get paid back for the "risks" over the subsequent years? What about the other people who bankroll my company by buying "stock"? The whole financial system is based upon being rewarded for taking risks. You seem to be arguing that companies are making to much money for the risks they are taking, but the only case in which that is true is when they have manipulated the system (usually by buying politicians) to give themselves an unfair advantage and distort the market in their favor. All other profits, by your logic, are fair and deserved because they are paying back previous risks. So there is no point in worrying about "profit beyond which is necessary to cover risk" because it never exists except in the case of fraud or political manipulation.

Re:Revenue?

[spidercoz]

Yes, the invisible hand has been shackled and had several fingers liberated. One of the fingers, the middle one I believe, said "no government bailouts." It was replaced with a stick with dog shit on the end that says "too big to fail."

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

It's called an example. Maybe if Hostess listened to me instead of some moron MBAs chasing after constant growth, they wouldn't have filed for bankruptcy. Lemme guess, sometime before they filed bankruptcy, they laid off some people so the CEO could show they doubled profit for one quarter and collect a big bonus before looking for a new gig, and then his successor got blamed for the ensuing problems.

Re:Revenue?

[ackthpt]

Wrong. In American capitalism, if your company isn't constantly growing or constantly making a bigger profit, then it's "dying". Then your stock will be downgraded by ratings agencies and stockholders will sell it off.

It isn't true for privately-held companies, but for publicly-traded companies it is.

What rubbish!

Go back to playing your video games, twittering or posting your life to Facebook and leave assessment of corporate growth, finances and stock prices to people who have at least a middling understanding of them.

Never seen a stock price go up when a company slashed workforce? That's not what you do when you are growing a company, you're hiring when you are growing (or at the very least you are contracting labour to be performed for your company.) It's hardly anecdotal, either, with decades of this behaviour - Company X culls 4,500 positions in cost savings, stock goes up. Paring losses when a company has stagnated or the market for goods is in decline is alleged to keep a company competitive, but in reality only results in less red in the ledger. Growing companies are rarely turning a profit as net earnings are regularly turned back into the company for expansion. The bet on stock price is for the future of the company when growth tails off and it is making big profits without expending much more on growth or maintaining its position in the market.

Shrinking companies are highly profitable, if only for a few years (until the keystone employees have left) There are vultures who know this and buy up companies only to gut their cash reserves, sell off properties (including IP) and then flip them (re-list on stock exchange) or simply run into the ground (as was done to one of my previous employers.)

Re:Revenue?

[gtbritishskull]

Even if we didn't have the screwed up financial system that we have, we still would not have capitalism. We have public schools, public sewers, public defense (police, firefighters, national guard, military). We have never had capitalism (at least according to your definition) and I prefer it that way. While it may sometimes screw things up (like "too big to fail") and we have to modify the system to fix prevent those problems from occurring in the future, I much prefer it to the absolute anarchy that "true" (by "true" I mean your definition) capitalism would be.

Re:Revenue?

[Nocturnal Deviant]

if you are going into levels of inflation then obviously you are thinking about supply an demand and how badly the computer industry as a whole has been hit by this shortage...so logistically i would buy companies who's stock's plummet(to a certain percentage of course) and wait it out...same thing i do in a recession is buy all the downtown office space and sit on it...people will come back. and instead they will be paying me for it's usage. which yes takes time, but eventually turns a profit far more than the amount invested.

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

This falls apart very quickly. What you will be charged by the painting company is the exact amount needed to cover: materials, wages of the workers sent out, and the projected costs of the new van we are buying to allow us to haul around more paint. As you'll see, I agree with you in the end, but "risk" covers future investments. You're doing the argument wrong.

I suspect the owner of the painting company didn't start it up as a non-profit venture.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

No. Hostess specifically blamed low-carb diets: link

You imagine twinkies aren't going anywhere, but you forget/ignore the incredible number of brands that disappear every year. Foods go in and out of style all the time. Considering the restaurant industry has one of the highest failure rates of any market, it's really a terrible example.

And small businesses are vulnerable to all kinds of changes. How many SMBs have been put out of business because a walmart or homedepot opened in the neighborhood. How many have closed up because the neighborhood had too many foreclosures or the demographics of the neighborhood changed, and their customer base disappeared.

What type of business are you imagining where it is invulnerable to change? Because I really can't think of even a single one.

Re:Revenue?

[DrgnDancer]

It's really kind of worse than that in this case. Intel *is* growing, it's profits *are* increasing, and by every single reasonable measure they're a secure company with good potential for future profits. They're being punished for failing to meet their own quarterly estimates. Estimates that they *clearly* missed for no other reason than a completely unpredictable natural disaster that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon. Next quarter Intel will be back to making more money than they can spend... hell, this quarter they made more money than they can spend, just slightly less than they expected to.

This is like me going to my wife and saying: "Well all our bills are paid, and we have a healthy savings account, but obviously Johnny's broken arm cost us a couple grand last quarter so the saving account isn't quite what we planned", and her leaving me because I can't manage money.

Re:Revenue?

[the eric conspiracy]

And if you are smart you will take advantage of this irrational short term dip in Intel's stock price by purchasing some INTC shares.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

Hate replying to myself, but...

What type of business are you imagining where it is invulnerable to change? Because I really can't think of even a single one.

I do know lots of small businesses owners who think they are invulnerable. Because what's great today will always be great tomorrow. But they are wrong.

And here's a real example: My uncle's father started a construction company, and handed down to his son. He (uncle) ran the company for 25 years, and had a half-dozen employees, and several million in revenue. That company is dead now, thanks to the recession. He doesn't know what he's going to do, but he doesn't own a construction company anymore.

Why do you think there's a small business somewhere that has a goose that lays a golden egg? History is full of dead companies, big and small. Millions of them, in fact.

Re:Revenue?

[the eric conspiracy]

Basically the value of a share of stock is determined from a discounted cash flow analysis of future earnings of the company in question. Since this analysis includes an estimate of the growth of the company any change in the growth outlook must then in fact affect the value of the stock.

Re:Revenue?

[StikyPad]

In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.

Agreeing to a price based on incomplete knowledge may be legal, but it's not what I'd call fair. And most people make purchasing decisions with little or no knowledge other than what someone else is asking for a similar or the same item. Indeed, that's often the only information that's available.

With many items/services the buyer doesn't have to worry too much about it, because other providers will step in if there's a chance to sell at a lower cost, which drives prices downward. The problem is, the consumer begins to expect this market efficiency, but when the barrier to entry is too high for competition (whether that barrier is startup cost, availability of infrastructure, or just patent protections) then prices and profits are allowed to grow nearly unchecked. "What the market will bear" trends toward a function of available funds for the average buyer -- the way corporations like it -- rather than a function of the efficiency of the corporation -- the way consumers like it. (I think government-granted monopolies should come with a stipulation that their implementation be limited to something like a 20% profit margin, though that would be nearly impossible to enforce, and I digress.)

The thing is, corporations benefit more from efficiency than from maximizing profits, because taking all of the consumer's available funds (and more) leads to economic stagnation. It's killing the golden goose. It might not seem to matter if corporate exec Alice already has all the money she could ever use, but that's the problem, isn't it? The people who have to suffer for extremely successful short-term strategies are not the same people who execute those strategies. Alice's personal long-term success is guaranteed even if her short-term strategy proves ruinous to the company. This is a fairly serious failing of the market, and we're seeing the results manifest in income disparity of third-world proportions, which is exactly where we could be headed if we don't create a disincentive for irresponsible profiteering.

Re:Revenue?

[gman003]

Ah, but remember, corporations have been legally declared people. The only difference between John Q. Citizen and Ubercorp GmbH-LLC, Incorporated is... well, campaign donation limits and taxation.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

You imagine twinkies aren't going anywhere, but you forget/ignore the incredible number of brands that disappear every year. Foods go in and out of style all the time. Considering the restaurant industry has one of the highest failure rates of any market, it's really a terrible example.

Sorry, it was just supposed to be an example, which I picked off the top of my head. Maybe I should have picked a fictional company making manhole covers or something.

And small businesses are vulnerable to all kinds of changes. How many SMBs have been put out of business because a walmart or homedepot opened in the neighborhood. How many have closed up because the neighborhood had too many foreclosures or the demographics of the neighborhood changed, and their customer base disappeared.

That's one of the risks of small business. But one really stupid thing to do in small business is to pick a market where you're competing directly against a giant corporation like Walmart or Home Depot. Unless you're trying to go for rich customers who want something better or more unique than what the big companies have (for instance, back to food, you're a bakery but you're selling high-quality, high-priced gourmet gluten-free breads and pastries rather than mass-market stuff that Walmart or the local supermarkets sell), it's a losing proposition.

Furthermore, you never know if something bigger/better is going to come along and make you obsolete; it's like that in any business, it's just that small businesses have less inertia so they're more vulnerable. So you always make sure you're ready for your business to dry up, so if that does happen, you can close the doors without going bankrupt yourself (only the business does), and then take some of the money you earned in that business and go start another business doing something else. The business is just a way for you to make money while isolating you from the liabilities by making the business a separate entity. If your bakery goes belly-up, but you had a good 5 year run with it, you should have plenty of money saved up to go open a pizza shop.

What type of business are you imagining where it is invulnerable to change? Because I really can't think of even a single one.

No business is totally invulnerable. That doesn't mean it needs to grow constantly. It just needs to make money for its shareholders, and provide employment for its employees, and do something positive for its community. Back to the restaurant example, if you have a highly successful pizzeria and you're happy with that, you don't need to expand to multiple locations; if the one location is profitable and popular, that's good enough. There's been too many times where someone had a successful small business, but then instead of just letting things be and keeping the profits, they reinvested them back into the business to grow it as fast as they could (such as by opening new locations which weren't profitable), and this rendered them bankrupt, when they would have been fine if they just stayed small. How many locations does Brennan's in New Orleans have? Have they expanded to a nationwide chain? Of course not. They're successful and they've been around for ages, without needing to grow.

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the owner of the painting company didn't start it up as a non-profit venture.

If the owner has a single lick of sense, he's an employee of an LLC and profits from his salary that the company pays him.

ESPECIALLY since he's, you know, painting houses. My partner runs an advertising, marketing, web site, social marketing, etc. type company and he's an employee of an LLC where the law is concerned. Single proprietor, in today's litigious culture, is pretty much saying you're a non-profit.

Re:Revenue?

[bws111]

You are only looking at the 'factory' side of the question. Who makes a buying decision based on the 'cost to produce'? No one. People, including people in companies, make buying decisions based on value to them. In your example, the widget must have been worth at least $11 to you. What if the widget, that you think has an $11 value, actually cost $100 to make? Would you be willing to pay $101 for it (even though the value to you is only $11) just because the factory is only making $1 profit? On the other hand, what if you found that that widget that you paid $11 for actually saved you $100, would you sent the factory another $40 so the factory shared in your windfall? Of course not.

Each party is trying to get the maximum benefit out of the transaction, and neither is required, morally or otherwise, to ensure that the other party gets equal benefit. The only way either party can 'lose' is to pay more (or accept less) than the value of the thing TO THEM. And why would anyone enter such a transaction?

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pricing a good or service does not have a moral consideration if the consumer has choice. Selling product through force, coercion, or extortion is immoral. Pricing a product based on free market forces is the most moral path you can take.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

If your bakery goes belly-up, but you had a good 5 year run with it,

You're describing your business as a job. Some (many?) business owners start small businesses with such a mindset. And that is perfectly ok. But when the company eventually fails, and you get a new job working someplace else, that does not transform the business' failure into something else. Whether the owner was ok with the failure is irrelevant.

You attempt to reclassify the failure as a simple job change. But what you describe ("business drying up") is exactly the type of thing that could have been prevented if the owner continued growing their company and finding new markets to satisfy.

How many locations does Brennan's in New Orleans have?

They get a round of applause for surviving the economic disaster that was Katrina. Most were not that lucky.

Re:Revenue?

[TheGratefulNet]

therefore, I must conclude that public ownership of stocks is inherently evil.

(I'm half serious, too. but we'd have to redo the whole company, stock, ownership, voting and 'personhood' crap, too, while we're at it).

companies are non-ethical and we allow that! that's problem #1. an entity that only exists to line its pockets is against the goals of a peaceful society.

remove the 'we must always make more,more,more money!' motive and you remove most (if not all) of the evil.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

But what you describe ("business drying up") is exactly the type of thing that could have been prevented if the owner continued growing their company and finding new markets to satisfy.

Or, by getting distracted by attempting to grow the company for no good reason and find new markets instead of continuing to keep their existing customers happy, they end up pissing off all their existing customers and then they go bankrupt.

How would Brennan's do if they tried to turn into a nationwide chain?

Re:Revenue?

[darkwing_bmf]

Fair? Perfect information is impossible. Not even the CEO of Intel knew Thailand was going to flood as much as it did.

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

companies are non-ethical and we allow that! that's problem #1. an entity that only exists to line its pockets is against the goals of a peaceful society.

The thing is, I'm not really sure what you'd replace this system with.

After all, the only reason most people bother to show up at work every days is so they can collect a paycheck and "line their pockets" so to speak. Who'd really want to bother being an accountant if they weren't getting paid for it, after all? Or a janitor?

There definitely needs to be some sort of requirement for being useful to the community, I think, rather than something that only makes money but doesn't do anything useful for society.

Re:Revenue?

[RightSaidFred99]

There definitely needs to be some sort of requirement for being useful to the community, I think, rather than something that only makes money but doesn't do anything useful for society.

No there doesn't. Down that path lies lunacy and various evils. We don't exist as cogs in society to provide benefit to society. It's antithetical to a free society to even think that way.

Re:Revenue?

[RightSaidFred99]

Your entire way of thinking is idiotic. Theft is taking something from someone against their will. Profit is taking something from someone _with their consent_. Your failure to understand the distinction clouds anything you say under a pall of idiocy.

Re:Revenue?

[Forbman]

If you're only metric is money, then, yes. Fair trade is (or should be...) equitable, not "fair". Money allows some degree of realization of "equitability", but it is fundamentally just a physical realization, but a very useful abstraction indeed (even if said money is backed/legitimized by gold, umbilical cords, whatever). That most of our currencies these days are fiat currencies doesn't really diminish that role of it in the economy (you know, the abstract realization of "value"), as said money is worth what it is more or less arbitrarily at any given point in time, and we all agree one way or the other on that value. Would a Gold Standard have prevented Italy, Zimbabwe, etc. from printing their ludicrous notes (1 billion lira, 1 billion zimbabwe dollars, etc)? Hmm... probably not.

Compare money exchange to bartering...which is still useful, but doesn't really scale out. I just want to trade something for a loaf of bread. I don't want to have to sing a song or few to get a couple of bags of wheat, then barter something else for my wheat to get milled into flour, then barter my kids out for "services" to get my flour made into bread, etc. But some could do it and do it well (e.g., the coupon-cutters, junk metal collectors, etc.)...

Re:Revenue?

[Grishnakh]

Spoken like a true sociopath.

Re:Revenue?

[rgbrenner]

Or, by getting distracted by attempting to grow the company for no good reason and find new markets instead of continuing to keep their existing customers happy, they end up pissing off all their existing customers and then they go bankrupt.

Yeah.. if you aren't capable of satisfying your customers, then you'll go bankrupt. I never said, piss off everyone, tell your customers to go to hell, and always search for some other business to be in.

All businesses eventually end, and it is not a given that whatever you do after the company ends will be a success. The only question is whether you want to start working on your next company/job while you have an existing income stream, or you want to do it after you've lost your existing business.

How would Brennan's do if they tried to turn into a nationwide chain?

I don't know. It depends on how well they execute it. It isn't like they would go out and purchase a thousand restaurants, and open them all at once. They would open 1 new location. Maybe across town, or in the next state. That wouldn't be very risky, and it would provide them more stability than having 1 location in NO. All of the chain restaurants started at 1 location.

Re:Revenue?

[Kjella]

Amateur. First you cut R&D, that's long term. Then you cut the engineers, that's mid term. Then you cut support/service, which is short term. Then you bail for a competing company so you're forced to sell your options and shares. As it crash and burns, paint yourself as the great CEO that was the only thing holding that company together. Do it with enough confidence and they won't see you were the one tearing it apart. Non-sociopaths tend to believe sociopaths because they themselves couldn't pull off such a baldfaced lie. That's how they get to hop from one top position to the next...

Re:Revenue?

[gorzek]

Your plan is fucking diabolical. I love it!

Re:Revenue?

[blahplusplus]

"If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair."

Incorrect. Human minds can be manipulated.

http://bit.ly/dYaWUc

Most people aren't intelligent enough to know when they are getting ripped off there is huge assymetry of information in the costs of goods people buy and the price they see. We don't work on rationality, the mind does not work according to enlightenment principles which the free market is a descendant of.

Re:Revenue?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I have 1000 customers, then I piss off 500 of them and they leave, then I lost 50% of my market.

If I kiss up and get those 500 customers back, then I just increased my market by 100%.

So although I'm back where I started, the numbers make it sound like I more than made up for my initial fuckup. The shareholders will look at that and say "See, the guy's not so bad, he made a mistake but he netted an extra 50%!"

Re:Revenue?

[cheekyjohnson]

Isn't loss of potential profit theft? Isn't it the exact same thing as breaking into consumers' homes and stealing some of their money?

Re:Revenue?

[swalve]

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft; it represents an imbalance of energy/value/worth in an exchange (one party to the exchange is taking advantage of the other party).

Bullshit. Nobody is forced to buy (almost) anything.

Re:Revenue?

[swalve]

You work for free, then, right? On your last job, you negotiated DOWN from what their salary offer was?

Re:Revenue?

[swalve]

The disincentive towards profiteering is competition.

Re:Revenue?

[swalve]

All capitalism means is that those with the money can buy/own the means of production. It doesn't require a libertarian completely free market.

Re:Revenue?

[spidercoz]

Don't mistake, I'm not endorsing pure capitalism. I think it's a selfish and wrong-headed way to be. However, some tenants can be useful, like not allowing corporations in the first place, particularly LLCs. "Too big to fail" is a crock of shit. Let 'em fail and let their ashes serve as a warning to others.

Re:Revenue?

[StikyPad]

Of course, perfect *anything* is impossible, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be the goal.

Re:Revenue?

[StikyPad]

*One* disincentive is competition, but competition isn't always possible, or practical, or successful. What do we do in those cases? "Suck it up," seems to be the refrain from the people who benefit from such arrangements, and from people too short-sighted to care about the consequences. Unfortunately those two groups combined seem to form a majority.

Re:Revenue?

[RockDoctor]

a completely unpredictable natural disaster

That was predicted for years before the event.

that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon

Until the next time, which is likely to be nearer in the future than the previous such event was in the past.

Or haven't you heard of climate change?

Even if you're American, you're going to be paying the costs of climate change as your insurance companies increase premiums to account for these "unpredictable" events (which they're predicting to become actuarially more frequent in the future).

No HDD? No Problem, we sell SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this not an opportunity for Intel to sell more SSDs?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's tough being 15 isn't it? Gotta direct all that angst somewhere, thank goodness for the internet!

Shortage of Critical Component drives down markets

[ackthpt]

Well, who would have foreseen this?!? Aside about 10,000 slashdotters, that is.

Planning to build some heavy lifting workstations, have them all spec'd out and all, but everything is on hold until the price on 3TB drives comes back down.

Really sad, too, as I believe Windows CHKDSK corrupted one of my older drives with it's half-arsed attempt to clean it. Anyone know of a good tool to try recovering directory structure and data?

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know of a good tool to try recovering directory structure and data?

SystemRescueCd
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

And specifically, the ddrescue command.
https://www.gnu.org/s/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html

Re:Who cares?

[jedidiah]

Yup.

"Getting laid" simply doesn't take that much time.

Leaves plenty of time for other persuits...

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had foreseen it, you wouldn't be "on hold" right now, just like $1bln worth of Intel's other customers.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Shikaku]

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page (For linux, but you can do some NTFS recovery as well. Not for anyone who hates command line)

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ Windows oriented but has some Linux stuff in it too.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

DD + AWK + GREP

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[MightyMartian]

A little scary for us, as we have precisely one 1TB drive on the shelf right now. One of our notebooks had its drive go south, and I had to rob an old 80gb from a dead notebook. Still, I'm holding out. I don't particularly feel like paying three times or more what they were worth a few months ago.

I'm hopefully going to get some budget for some custom routers and I'll be going with SSDs so my next project won't be impacted.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

R-Studio

Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[jedidiah]

The loss seems all big and impressive and such until you actually bother to look at both numbers and realize that it really isn't so bad after all. What this really goes to show just how BIG the PC business is and how a relatively small setback can be portrayed as this dire tragedy.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[PerfectionLost]

This relatively small tragedy resulted in a 10% reduced income (profit) for the company. Imagine if your paycheck was %10 smaller for a quarter (or more). I think you would be upset as well.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> it really isn't so bad after all

Unless you're Thai.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[jedidiah]

Been there. Done that.

Thinking ahead and having a backup plan and some reserves help avoid the situation where you are running around like Chicken Little. Hopefully Intel runs things better than you do.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the same. It's as if after you have paid for your house, car, electricity, heat, water, cable, internet, food, all the different insurances and any improvements you were going to make, that you had 10% less money to blow on hookers and beer. Am I sad because I can only purchase hookers 28 times a month instead of 30, and have to drink a case a week instead of a 6 pack a night, sure, but I am not starving or about to die.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because you can totally "help avoid the situation" when the country where most of the world's hard drives are manufactured gets flooded.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[PerfectionLost]

For anyone other then Charlie Sheen, 3 less hookers and %10 less coke can be horrendously depressing.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[Hadlock]

What part of "7% revenue drop" isn't impressive? We're discussing an industry whose stock prices fluctuate 2-5% based on missing revenue projections by a tenth of a percent.

Re:Lies, D*mned Lies, and...

[Kjella]

What part of "7% revenue drop" isn't impressive? We're discussing an industry whose stock prices fluctuate 2-5% based on missing revenue projections by a tenth of a percent.

If those changes are representative of the future, perhaps. Yes, things are slow now but all the companies and individuals that have put their purchase on hold still want a new computer, it's not really affecting the balance of power between AMD and Intel - it's just a temporary slowdown. Yes, 7% is significant but the bulk of the stock price is based on who will continue to dominate the CPU industry the next 5-10-20 years.

Prices were nuts recently

[mandark1967]

I tried to order a Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drive and Newegg and they wanted $400. I ended up buying two Seagate Expansion USB 2.0 3TB Drives for $199 each and I removed the Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drives from the enclosures and saved $400 on my total order.

Re:Prices were nuts recently

[David89]

What you saved 2 dollars?

Re:Prices were nuts recently

[mandark1967]

Count much?

(1) internal SATA 6GB Seagate Barracuda costs $400

(2) External SATA 6GB Seagate Barracudas in USB 2.0 enclosure cost, $399.99

Re:Prices were nuts recently

[Anonymous Coward]

Saved roughly a penny, but got double the storage.

Re:Prices were nuts recently

[Anonymous Coward]

The prices you people put up with are just stupid. If its more than .03-.04 cents per GB, just wait until next year. You could even get $100 3 TB drives at multiple locations this year, one without black friday madness.
Maybe you think you're paying a premium for the speed? In that case you're better off grabbing a 64 GB SSD for critical stuff and use the cheap, slow external storage for data.

Re:Prices were nuts recently

[Anonymous Coward]

SATA 6Gb/s != SATA 6GB

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

http://runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm -- GetDataBack NTFS. I have used it and it works pretty well.

It's still a risk

[tepples]

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

Like the risk of investors cashing out because they see better returns elsewhere.

Take advantage

[1080bogus]

IMHO: I'm surprised that SSD manufacturers are not taking advantage of the HDD shortage and giving deals left and right. Intel could profit greatly right now lowering their SSD prices just slightly. PC manufacturers will benefit by selling computers and the end user will get that "speedy" system for only a slight increase in price. The higher price will definitely pay for itself considering the boot and operating speed of a SSD over HDD. Granted that's with the consideration you didn't buy a system with 1GB of memory and a Celeron proc running Win7.

Obviously anyone looking for large capacity drives is still SOL. I know some local stores in the area are still selling drives for reasonable prices until they run out. I doubt they'll bother to stock some or any at all after that. I'm sure they don't want to be left holding $2-300 drives that will be selling for at least half that a couple months from now.

On another note, who had the bright idea of creating a single point of failure? I wonder if WD, Seagate, etc setup their networks all with single points of failure. I understand it's cheaper but if you can't make drives, you're not making money.

Re:Take advantage

[viperidaenz]

unless lowering their profit margins "just slightly" makes it non-profitable

Re:Take advantage

[pz]

unless lowering their profit margins "just slightly" makes it non-profitable

Given the opportunities that the current market presents, it is in the SSD industry's best interest to take a hit on profit today to secure larger market share tomorrow. Even more so for an single player to gain a long-term competitive advantage over its peers. Regrettably, as we all know, public US companies have a 3-month horizon making strategies that sacrifice short-term profits for long-term gains extremely difficult to implement.

Re:Take advantage

[pz]

When flooding takes out an entire geographical region, it's hard to think of that as single point of failure, no?

Re:Take advantage

[viperidaenz]

To me it seems there isn't really separate ssd and "traditional" hard drive markets competing for each other. They're both in the storage market.
To do the auto-analogy: Selling sports cars at a loss to increase the share of sports cars on the road isn't going to do much for the long term share of sports cars. People will still buy the type of car that meets their criteria: Price, practicality, ego/car-peen. A temporary reduction in price will mean a temporary increase in sales.

There are other industries that this would make sense however: eg: gaming consoles/printers/ebook readers/anything where the profit is in the proprietary content or consumables

Re:Take advantage

[Kjella]

If you assume everything's going to go back to the way it was, then yes. But you assume people aren't creatures of habit and will always to a proper evaluation of the alternatives, particularly a SSD they've never tried. Right now they have an opprtunity to say "Hey SSDs are expensive but HDDs are expensive now too. So why not try an SSD?" and chances are they'll like it. You have to believe that in a few years SSDs will be big enough and cheap enough for "most people" and that this will accelerate that transition in volume, mindshare and so on. Of course nothing is going to compete with the 3-4TB drives in cost/GB, neither now nor when it returns to normal but most people don't actually store terabytes of stuff.

Re:Who cares?

[TheRaven64]

"Getting laid" simply doesn't take that much time.

In that case, you're probably doing it wrong...

Re:So fucking what? Shit happens.

[dskzero]

Someone doesn't understand the basic concept of "news".

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

SpinRite is the tool I'd try to use recover from more serious errors, especially from really old drives.
2nd on GetDataBack - have had success with it too.

If the drive doesn't spin and the data is worth over $2000, try Kroll Ontrack. Physical drive surgery is expensive, but sometimes works on what you'd think was impossible.

All eggs in one basket.

[Beelzebud]

Good thing we can't make hard drives any where else in the world! I love globalization. I don't know anyone in the states that could be trusted to work at a plant making hard drives. They'd expect to be able to pay for food, shelter, and clothing, and we can't have that!

Re:All eggs in one basket.

[edxwelch]

Actaully, only 25% of the world supply of hard drives is made in Thailand. I wonder if things are being exaggerated a bit. Some of the factories are already back running again and I'm sure companies outside of Thailand have ramped up production to make up for the shortfall.

Re:All eggs in one basket.

[Hognoxious]

Actaully, only 25% of the world supply of hard drives is made in Thailand.

25% is quite a lot.

I'm sure companies outside of Thailand have ramped up production to make up for the shortfall.

Yeah, I'm sure they were all designed with 33% of spare capacity (that's been sitting idle and costing money up till now) just in case.

Re:All eggs in one basket.

[edxwelch]

http://themalaysianreserve.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1080:major-hard-disk-makers-to-ramp-up-production-in-msia&catid=36:corporate-malaysia&Itemid=120

Re:All eggs in one basket.

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA said 40% of all drives come from Thailand.

Re:All eggs in one basket.

[swalve]

If you remove 25% of the supply from a marketplace, prices will almost always go up more than 25%.

Re:Who cares?

[jedidiah]

Even if you could last for the entire movie you appear to be getting your fact from, that still leaves plenty of time for other things.

NoScript

[pudding7]

Can someone tell me which of the 45 or so domains at that link I should allow through NoScript?

Re:NoScript

[roc97007]

I'm gonna go with "none of them".

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the only time it takes that long is when drugs are involved. :-P

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. 8 hours of work, 2 hours of drinking, and 6 hours of sex leaves me pretty much no time for personal pursuits. I pass out at the end of the day drunk, dehydrated, and happier than you can imagine.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like learning to spell "pursuits"....

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[sabs]

Just because we foresaw it, does not mean we were allowed to buy in anticipation, or to skip part of our 2 month purchasing approval process to get our stuff in before this happened.

Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.

brain half empty or brain half full?

[epine]

If you can't do, report: you're smart enough to s/loses/dives but not smart enough to s/dives/forestalls.

Now the reader who ordinarily fails to distinguish "dives" from "loses" as processed through the filter of law-of-the-jungle public-company quarterly reporting intervals will fail to notice the giant Bill Gates reality-distortion-apparatus strapped to face.

They have been

[Sycraft-fu]

They offered some major, like $100+, rebates recently. However even so, they are still pricey. SSDs are coming down in price, but for most users they are still too much money. While most people don't need the multi-TB drives they can get these days, they also can't function very well with a tiny 80GB SSD. Somewhere in the 200-500GB range is probably what most people need. At that size, they are still pretty expensive.

Eventually I'm sure SSDs will take over, though it make take a new technology (as in something better than Flash) to do it, but it isn't there just yet.

(re)location

[Corson]

Perhaps Intel should not put all their eggs (hard drives) in one basket (Asia)?

Re:(re)location

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel doesn't make hard drives, nor have any say in where the companies that do make hard drives locate their factories.

Re:(re)location

[JStyle]

They do have a say in what companies they used to make those hard drives. "Oh you're located in the same vicinity as all my other suppliers? No thanks, I'll go with [Other Company], wouldn't want a natural disaster to ruin my product pipeline!"

Re:(re)location

[RightSaidFred99]

Sigh. Intel doesn't give a shit about hard drives directly, they don't use them. Intel sells parts to other companies, _those_ companies source hard drives and use them.

Imagine you sell 2x4's for construction and the global nail market goes to hell and nails cost 100x as much. Your 2x4 business is affected, even though you don't use or give a shit about nails directly.

Re:(re)location

[EnsilZah]

What are you talking about?
Intel doesn't even produce eggs, it makes bacon.

Re:(re)location

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the previous post didn't sink in, so I'll try saying it louder: INTEL DOESN'T MAKE HARD DRIVES!!!!!!!!

Do you get it? They don't make them. They have nothing to do with making them. They have no say in how they are made. They can't choose a different supplier because they have nothing to do with buying hard drives. They are a component maker. Nothing more, nothing less.

Let's put it in easier terms. Company A makes nails. Company B makes wood. A bunch of other companies (not A nor B) buy nails from A and wood from B and use it to make houses. Neither company A nor B has any say over how or where the other company manufactures their product. If one company's production gets shut down, then the people making houses can't make more houses, so they have no need to buy product from either company. One company shuts down, and both company's suffer, but neither company has any control over what the other does.

Re:(re)location

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd, you made the same analogy as me. I swear I didn't read your post before I typed my response, but I guess I must have seen a few keywords out of the corner of my eye and subconsciously latched onto the same idea.

Re:(re)location

[swalve]

Intel is (purportedly) losing the money because people aren't buying as many new computers because the cost of a whole computer has gone up due to the higher cost of hard drives.

Re:(re)location

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you were modded up. Intel is saying that processor orders decreased due to the lack of HDD supplies. Companies like Dell, HP, etc won't order as many processors if they cannot match the amount of hard drives. You wouldn't be buying systems with no hard drives these days, would you?

Intel's SSDs on the other hand, are still expensive enough so people won't jump from the HDD market into the SSD bandwagon yet.

Cloud

[Nom du Keyboard]

So how does this bode for the cloud computing services? Rather than try to buy another external backup drive, I'm now looking more seriously into the cloud for those needs myself.

Re:Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

So how does this bode for the cloud computing services? Rather than try to buy another external backup drive, I'm now looking more seriously into the cloud for those needs myself.

Cloud services should work great for you, so long as you have no problem with storing all your data in a form that's accessable to third party employees, federal agencies that want to look through it, and any hackers that get into their systems *cough* google *cough*.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[viperidaenz]

So you expect to pay $45 for a 1TB 2.5" drive instead of the $130 they're going for now?

Remember When

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. used to know how to manufacture its own high-tech gear?

Re:Remember When

[swalve]

Sure do. And that shit was fucking expensive.

Re:Remember When

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Hmm, losing a billion from lost sales kind of makes that point moot now doesn't it.

Re:Who cares?

[Jeng]

I know you have probably been told that geeks don't get laid your entire life. It's a lie. If you got out more you would realize that.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Spinrite (grc.com) may have avoided this if you ran it before CHKDSK,
If it there is still physica data corruption it may still help, but i'm not sure.
the damage may be done (I'd still run spinrite anyway though, before doing anything else with the drive)

Serves you right

[atari2600a]

If you hadn't (publicly!) conspired to kill off the netbook then everyone would have been more contempt with smaller SSD's & cloud storage.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[LordLimecat]

Trying to do NTFS recovery from linux has NEVER ended well for me, unless it involved backing data up with ddrescue. Stick with Microsoft's tools, theres a reason so few (if any?) linux tools are capable of dealing with NTFS corruption. Plug the drive into a second computer and do chkdsk /v /f /r on it, in my experience it is VERY unlikely that it will not make things better (if at all possible).

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone doesn't understand the basic concept of "news"

You're absolutely correct.

Most people these days can't tell the difference between news and business bullshit hype. Clearly, the Slashdot 'editor' that approved the subject 'article' can't.

Re:Shortage of Critical Component drives down mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Testdisk worked nice for me...

Come on, geeks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the "3D printing will change the world" crowd now? Why don't you print some more hard drives? Hmmm? Or could it be that misshapen lumps of fragile plastic with crude features are really just a sad hobby? And you can't face that you got robbed by a guy that looks like he lives in a glory hole?

Re:Come on, geeks!

[RightSaidFred99]

Oh snap! Score one for the little known but very vocal anti-3D Printing crowd!

What hard disk shortage?

[scharkalvin]

I was in my local CompUSA store over the weekend. Microsoft is offering a $20 rebate on Windows Home if you buy it from Tiger Direct or CompUSA by 12/15/2011. Since I'm in the middle of putting together a new computer I went to pick up a copy. You have to buy some hunk of PC hardware at the same time as the OS if you want the rebate, so I looked at their hard drive selection expecting to not see much because of the 'shortage'. Well they had a TON of Seagate and WD drives in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes. Prices were a bit higher than a year ago, but a 1TB was still $149.95 and I walked out with a 320GB for $99 (might have paid a bit more than half that last year). Maybe buying in bulk would be a problem, but if you need a replacement for an existing computer, or are building a new one there is no shortage as far as I can see. Just a ploy to jack up prices maybe (I know the flooding is for real, but there must have been a lot of product in the pipeline).

Fishy? Count Me In!

[tunapez]

You didn't lose $1, you just guessed wrong.

Exactly. I expected to earn a million last year, but I didn't have much work and only managed a mere 3% of my goal. Does that count as operating losses? Perhaps I should also include the $200 million I lost because my lotto ticket didn't hit...

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

With fat chicks.

External HDDs may not be the same as Internal

[Guppy]

There's some rumors that external HDDs may not be the same as internal models, and that they use techniques such as "Shingle Writing" to trade reduced speed for larger storage sizes: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/12/adding_platters/page2.htmlshingle writing

If this is true, you might want to do some testing to make sure your drives perform as expected.

13.7 bn?

[kmoser]

I fail to see how revenues of 13.7 per quarter are a problem.

Re:13.7 bn?

[swalve]

It is if your costs are $14 billion.

What about Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Intel has taken such a big hit, what about Microsoft? As a software maker, MS should be making more dollars per unit than Intel. After all, more PC's have Windows/MS Office installed on them than Intel CPUs, which have viable competition on the low-end market from AMD's offerings.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

So, while there is a large percentage of Windows shipped with new computers, also realize that Windows is shipped on computers with SSD as well which will start to be offered at attractive prices compared to ones install with HDD. Also a large portion of Windows sales is coming from upgrading old computers which should offset some of the loss of new computer sales, people may find it attractive to upgrade an older computer rather then buying something brand new while the prices jump.

While Office may be installed on new computers, the bread and butter of Office profit comes from corporate sales to upgrade existing systems,

Microsoft will get a hit for sure, but may not be as big as Intel as they have more paths to market then Intel.

Oddly enough....

[LostMyBeaver]

I have found that crap movies are still crap on my 46" Sony Bravia in a dark room and great movies are still great on my 110" 720p projector setup which I watch on a wall I painted gray a few years ago which has screw holes in some intrusive places.

Oddly enough, the quality of the content is far more interesting to me than the quality of my setup. But, poor H.264 encoding quality is unacceptable at any resolution. This is 2011, even real-time encoding using Intel QuickSync at 5Mbps is pretty damn good quality for 720p. I will admit that video encoded using a long look-ahead on x264 at 9Mbps with proper settings is far superior... but I don't see any real benefits from that to 1080p48 at 50Mbps on BluRay.

Which reminds me... I am planning on using screen paint on the wall for a Christmas gift to myself... I should order that.

Companies have to start getting real

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

So, all these components are made "overseas" because it is cheap to make. But often these components are made in areas of political or environmental instability.

I think companies have to start understanding that regardless of how "cheap" it is for the labor to produce the component, if something happens that stops production of those components what is the actual cost to the company to recover? Why are billion dollar companies always so short sited and believe nothing bad will happen to them.

What will the actual cost be to the entire semiconductor industry for the few cents per component saved by building them overseas?