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More Quakes For Taiwan
E-Rock writes " Looks like another couple of quakes hit Taiwan. [The story's from CNN.com.] Just when I thought RAM prices were able to return to reality." There's also the people who work in those factories, who are having a rough time of it right now. I wonder if there's a Taiwan Electronics Industry Workers' Relief Fund or something like that. I'd kick in a few bucks.
Apparently Micron didn't take kindly to foreign competition, so they filed a complaint with the Commerce Dept.
So what justification does Micron have for raising their prices as well?
None whatsoever, other than making fistloads of cash due to a scenario they created.
The last paragraph of the link provided below makes this rather clear when Steve Appleton, Micron's chairman, president, and CEO describes how they plan to get around Taiwan's tariffs in return.
This is pure bullshit on the part of Micron, particularly the way that they're laughing all the way to the bank.
http://www.ebnonline.com/story/OEG1 9991014S0009
In short, it isn't all the quake's fault -- there would have been some price increase anyway. The quake just happened to come along at a time to spike things further.
Just when I thought RAM prices were able to return to reality." There's also the people who work in those factories, who are having a rough time of it right now. I wonder if there's a Taiwan Electronics Industry Workers' Relief Fund or something like that. I'd kick in a few bucks
... people in general, you know what I mean?
/. posting an article saying 'Oh, there goes our software and other cool gadgets.'
I can't believe this. There's more to Taiwan than RAM and the electronics industry or even just people in the electronics industry. Like
If an earthquake hit Silicon Valley (and I'd hate to see that, since I'm living around there now), I can't imagine
Show some sensitivity. Please.
Those people over there better stop getting killed pretty soon, RAM costs too much as it is.
Taiwan: Please stop having earthquakes, it annoys us US computers users. Thank you.
Oh and uh, let us all pray for the people who may be hurt or maimed or crushed or something by falling buildings.
OK, good.
OK people, it's a joke, don't hurt me.
It's not fair to blame /. for focusing on taiwanese quakes because RAM factories are located there.
Every single foreign news story is heavily dependent on the country and its economic profit value to the US. the 2nd important factor is the country's relationship to US citizens.
To give some blatantly obvious examples -
1) More people were killed in East Timor than Kosovo (per day, and in total), but it hardly got any coverage. Why? Europe is important economically to US interests, and the public is easily suckered into believing human tragedy stories fed to them. Secondly, East Timorese aren't white, and genocide against them would be difficult to make the headline news, as opposed to European tragedies (just being blunt).
2) Iraq. Everybody knows it was about oil. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a moron. However, any reporter who covers US atrocities there is commiting career suicide (much like the reporters whose patriotism was questioned when they ran truthful stories about Vietnam). I wouldn't be surprised if this post got moderated down just because I mentioned this point.
3) Earthquake coverage - nations which are friendly to the US get major aid and news coverage, irrespective of how many get killed. Countries like china don't get much attention when this happens. Indeed, the most horrible earthquake of the century was in Tangshan (1976), with 750,000 dead - difficult even to imagine.
4) Rwanda had a genocide with millions dying without any attention, whereas Kosovo got massive exposure with thounsands being killed. If humanitarian compassion is such a major concern, why do people's eyes glaze over in boredom when Rwanda is mentioned? They are human too, but I bet even the people posting about insensitivity towards earthquake victims don't particularly care. It's just rwanda's bad luck that it's located in sub-saharan africa.
In summary, compassion falls victim to the same rule as retail store profit - location, location, location.
Our geek refined superiority complex and machoism has gotten in the way of what is RIGHT and what is WRONG.
Any lives lost is wrong and how most of you can turn this into humor or justify it by hardware price increases is disgusting. You people are morally disgusting. I'm sure none of you would like to see your friends or family with a several ton brick crushing them while they slowly bleed to death when rescue teams classify their situation as secondary to the kid with a steal bar lodged in his chest.
"Oh no! Look mother isn't going to make those spectacular cookies anymore!"
Being 15 years old I'm glad I still have some compassion left inside of me. I can't think of what will happen to me when I turn older.
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Karma: -1,257,423
if you can't beat 'em might as well join 'em
I live in Taiwan and work in the IT industry. Taiwan was hit by another couple of quakes last night, yes, but the damage was minimal to the areas that produce RAM and other IC devices. This should not effect RAM prices. The large US buyers (distributors and resellers) of RAM buy in two week slots (contracts). They place blanket orders for those two weeks at that given price. The SPOT price for RAM in Taiwan, went from 20 $USD per chip last week down to $10 per chip by the end of the week. This means that pricing in the U.S. SHOULD come down soon, but only after distributors and resellers get rid of all their exisiting stock. When the SPOT pricing for chips goes down to $5 per chip, we will be back where we were before the power outages and earthquake rocked the IC industry here. Yes, there are alot of other device prices that were affected, but this is minimal. This is mostly because the largest foundry in the world (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., or TSMC) was up and running 9 days after the earquake, at full capacity. The other main reason is that 95% of these devices are on CONTRACT pricing only, as there is no spot market for non-comoditized ICs. This means that the foundries take the loss and their Taiwan stock price goes down, and they may raise pricing for FUTURE contracts, which will not affect the consumer market for several months, if ever. As for the posts asking about aid to Taiwan, rest assured Taiwan will recover quickly. There were massive funds raised for disaster aid right here on the island. If you REALLY want to do something, write your senator and tell he/she that US - SINO policy is BULLSHIT and that the US should give 100% support to an INDEPENDENT TAIWAN, and not a "ONE CHINA - TWO SYSTEMS" policy. CHINA ACTUALLY REFUSED TO LET THE UN AND ANY OTHER NATIONS PROVIDE AID TO TAIWAN IN THE BEGGINNING, AND ONLY AFTER IMMENSE PRESSURE DID THEY LET "SOME" AID INTO TAIWAN. TAIWAN IS SOVEREIGN, AND PLEASE TELL YOUR SENATOR THAT THE US SHOULD BACK TAIWAN UNDER ANY AND ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. BELEIVE ME, YOU THINK AN EARTHQUAKE IS BAD, JUST WAIT UNTIL CHINA DECIDES TO RAID TAIWAN (WHICH IT WILL DO IF THE US DOES NOT SUPPORT TAIWAN 100%). RAM PRICES, PC'S WOULD ALL SKYROCKET PROBABLY NEVER TO RETURN TO EARTH.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
In a place with a lot of earthquakes, like California or Taiwan, a 5.x quake isn't news. It's not going to interfere with chip production. It probably didn't even get most people out of bed.
Note that the photo accompanying the article was a file photo. It was probably taken last month.
And the brethren went away edified.
I built a dozen machines last year and bought an average of 128MB's of RAM for each machine. I had intended to buy a couple machines for my home network to run Linux and Solaris on this month, but there's no way in a Silicon hell that I'm dishing out $320 for the same RAM I could purchase for $165 in March.
Maybe I'm just being a greedy consumer, but the doubling of the cost of RAM is costing hard-drive vendors, case vendors, motherboard vendors, etc. I'll resort to a type-writer and carbon-copy sheets (can you even buy that stuff any more?) before I'll pay almost 50% of the cost of my computer for a stick of RAM.
A lot of junk comes out of Taiwan and (not to mention cameras, televisions, etc) -- yet the only massive increase in cost to the consumer is in RAM? This seems as suspicious as this past year when oil companies cried huge tears over one or two small refinery fires and squeezed every last cent they could out of the country by claiming that those few small fires nearly destroyed the bedrock of their industry.
I wonder when the politicians are going to lobby congress for RAM regulation like they do with everything else? I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Perhaps when the soccer-moms start whining because they can't afford little Timmy's braces because they had to spend the last thousand bucks to setup a new machine so mom and dad could ignore each other and hot-chat with recluses on IRC and AOL?
Of course, if I'd just built these computers a couple months ago, I'd be shrugging my shoulders and asking what the big deal is. I suppose it's all a matter of where one stands at the moment he or she complains.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
The Red Cross' International Response Fund goes to this sort of thing. Here's an article about what they did to help during Taiwan quake in September.
Back in July/August, I could get a 64 MB DIMM for (canadian prices) $69. From there it went to $79, then $99, and then $130. And then it just skyrocketed to $200+ and then the quake hit (peaked at about $269). Since then it's slowly been going down - about $239 now. This is all for 64 MB of RAM, folks.
There were some theories floating around that distributors were holding back, or that perhaps RIMM (Rambus) production was causing the lower numbers, or any number of things. Personally I think it's probably a combination of greed (christmas season coming up, after all), lower numbers (Rambus, demand) and a little bit of the earthquake - though that might have just been an excuse for RAM distributors to jack the price up.
Anyone else see some corrolaries between RAM prices and gas prices? I just saw gas below 60 cents/litre today for the first time in months. I think both are ripping the consumer off because we've no choice.
It may seem that there have been too many earthquakes of late - Turkey, Taiwan, california, etc.
Is this some kind of weird anamoly, a sign of the apocalypse about to come? Actually, according to seismologists, we have had far FEWER quakes than normal so far this year. It's just a coincidence that they tended to befall heavily populated areas, thus drawing a lot of attention. Apparently, there have been only 10 of the 18 major quakes expected every year, or something like that.
Ok, time to go pick up pizza. Mmmm....pizza.
L.