That was a simplistic way of describing it, to be sure, but it isn't entirely wrong. I was working in the DRAM industry when mass production shifted from plain SDRAM (PC-100/133) to DDR SDRAM. For some time, the prices of PC-100/133 exceeded the prices of DDR, simply because manufacturers were shifting huge portions of their capacity to DDR. Supply and demand...
FWIW, memory companies that still make EDO and FPM memory can make pretty good money on those, supporting legacy machines (lots of old Sun boxes of that vintage still run fine, for example).
None of this is to defend Best Buy--I don't like shopping there either, and I won't be in one anytime soon.
Better yet is a silicon wafer. I worked for a semiconductor manufacturer and we did something similar with polished wafers. Even better, those wafers are getting bigger, not smaller. Your typical wafer in a mass-production facility is at least 8", and many are moving (or have moved) to 12".
They're very polished and shiny, and make excellent mirrors.
There still is a US DRAM manufacturer. Micron is still alive and kicking (and has been continuously in business since 1978), selling to consumers via the Crucial brand.
There was price-fixing (which Micron doesn't seem to be completely innocent of, either), but one thing to keep in mind is that RDRAM, even if it weren't patented, required approximately 5-7 extra mask steps to create, as compared to DDR DRAM. In the cut-throat world of DRAM manufacturing, where every penny counts, this is a deal-breaker. Samsung was able to make money off RDRAM only because it was so expensive.
Was it illegal for these companies to team up and kick down RDRAM? Yes. Am I sad to see it go? No way.
At the UPS website and the FedEx website you can estimate rates. To ship a 65 kg package from Reading, UK to my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, the cheapest shipping option would cost at least $190; essentially you would be paying as much in shipping as you originally paid for the subwoofer--if the opening bid stood. The expedited shipping options would cost on the order of $400.
This all assumes that the package really is no more than 65 kg (~143 lbs). That's not far under the 150 pound weight limit for all of these options. You would then be forced to use another courier that would in all likelihood be more expensive.
Still, ShyGuy's point stands. Probably someone with more money than sense would buy it and pay for shipping it. I think it's pretty cool, but I'm nowhere near a big enough SW fan to pay 100+ UKP to buy it and 200 USD to ship it.
A: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a zebra? B: I don't know. A: Elephant zebra sin theta.
And the follow-up:
A: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a rock climber? B: Elephant rock climber sin theta? A: No, silly. You can't do that; a rock climber is a scaler!
I'm very much like that. Homework always took me a very long time to finish, but I always completed exams quickly and did well on them--and that trend held from elementary school through graduate school.
I defended my thesis last Friday, and the date was scheduled only one week before it happened, with almost a quarter of it left to write. I got more done in the two days I had left than I had in the previous week.
I amaze myself sometimes, how staggeringly lazy I can be when I don't have a deadline--and how fast I can get things done when I have a short deadline. I've always wondered if I have a mild form of ADD. I'm certain that I would have been drugged up throughout elementary school if I were born ten years later, but I got there before ADD was fashionable.
Uhh...yes, until the fire goes out. It would buy you some time to evacuate people (assuming the mechanical properties of this solid are sufficient), but as soon as it cools, that building is still coming down. It would not have prevented the collapse entirely.
Not to mention that interstitial hydrogen makes most engineering metals very brittle. As the hydrogen diffuses into it (and it will), it makes the metal brittle to the point that ordinary thermal expansion can crack it--and a thick-walled container would likely be worse in this respect than a thinner one.
Polymers are, in general, more permeable than metals and have poorer mechanical properties. It might be feasible to produce a metal-shelled tank with a lining to block H2 diffusion--e.g. a high molecular weight polymer with scattered impermeable phase, plus H-consuming chemical groups.
...And in the past, you would have been correct. The reason privacy advocates get so worked up about such forms of electronic monitoring and automated law enforcement is simply that it "lowers the bar", so to speak. It reduces the required effort for "them" to check up on anything they want to, and the more a governing authority is able to watch, the more it will do so.
Today, you might not worry because you're not a young Arab male. But, the government DOES care what organizations you associate with, how much cold medicine you purchase, and passes laws allowing secret searches of private homes.
Tomorrow, we don't know what might be illegal. What we do know is that when the government knows it cannot pass something frontally, it will attempt to do so incrementally. (PATRIOT II, anyone?) They hope that, like the proverbial frog in the boiler pan, that we won't notice until it is too late. This is why some people are up in arms about seemingly trivial expansion of governmental powers...to stop the slow, incremental erosion of individual liberty.
CDs are typically made from a polycarbonate material. These are recycle code 7, "Other". This presumes that the DVDs in question are made with the same substrate as a normal CD.
Recycle codes, if you're interested: 1 -> PETE (Polyethylene terephtalate) 2 -> HDPE (high density polyethylene) 3 -> PVC (polyvinyl chloride) 4 -> LDPE (low density polyethylene) 5 -> PP (polypropylene) 6 -> PS (polystyrene) 7 -> Other
Maybe. The tariffs affect chips made in Korea and imported to the US. If they're already mounted on motherboards, graphics boards, or other such devices, there's no tariff. Likewise, the tariff doesn't apply if a US company--Dell, for example, receives them at an offshore location, builds them into a computer, and ships the computer to the US. The tariff also does not apply to Hynix chips manufactured in their Eugene, Oregon plant. There are many ways for Hynix to dodge the tariff, and I suspect they are employing every one of those ways.
Yes. Since there is more than twice as much available area on a 300mm wafer as a 200mm one, you come out ahead if the 300mm wafer is = 2x the price of the 200mm one. That wafer price crossover is near, or has already happened, depending on what sort of deal you get from your wafer suppliers.
The chips made on the wafer don't get bigger--they're the same size or smaller. The advantage is that you get more than twice as many chips on a wafer. Time spent on each machine in the fab is money--if you can pattern more chips at once at photo, etch more chips at once in dry etch, and test more chips at once in probe, you can make chips more quickly and more cheaply than your competitors.
The big downside of 300mm (and the reason most companies put it off so long) is that it requires either extensive refittings of existing equipment or (more commonly) a completely new fab. Since we're talking ~3B USD, very few companies could justify that.
As you might imagine in such an industry, once your competitors begin doing something like that, you better have an answer for it. Infineon's move to build 300mm (first DRAM maker to do it AFAIK) looked like a bad move at the time, as it was an enormous cash sink, but now they've come out of it much more competitive for it.
are because the industry is so cut-throat. In good DRAM times, companies crowd in, adding new production capacity and trying to make a quick buck. They know this is going to kill prices a couple years down the road, but if they don't do it, they'll be left out in the cold as competitors grab their market share. Sure enough, a couple of years later oversupply kicks in. Companies manufacture less DRAM, shift production to more profitable products, etc... And the cycle begins anew. I really don't know what started it, unless it was the 1987 DRAM crash, when all but one US manufacturer dropped the DRAM business due to intense Japanese competition. (And illegal dumping, as it turned out.)
Adding to this now is a fairly major transition from 200-300mm wafers. No matter what the DRAM companies tell you, they're never as good with their process as they claim they are. (I used to work for one of them.) Everyone is struggling to some degree with 0.11 micron compared to 0.13, and everyone (except perhaps Infineon, who started with it about three years ago) is struggling with 300mm wafer technology compared to 200mm.
Add it all up, and it very likely is a legitimate shortage. No price fixing here.
I agree with you on IBM's weight. It managed to fight the feds for the better part of a decade and came out fine. It's extremely successful and I would never underestimate them.
Their big case regards Linux. While "a rising tide affects all boats"--meaning a win for Linux would support FOSS in general--I don't see them picking up lawsuit after lawsuit just so they can win the FOSS Nice Guy of the Year award. They, like any corporation, support free software because it is profitable for them to do so. And if they no longer thought they could benefit, they'd stop supporting FOSS.
I like IBM too--one fewer job offer and I'd likely be working for them--but they aren't supporting Linux out of the kindness of their hearts.
...will be in the courts. We see it with Linux and SCO, and that won't be the last major court battle over free software. Free software (and open source, for those that worry about that distinction) has proven that it's up to snuff technically. And intelligent people can disagree over ease-of-use compared to commercial products.
But the one area where proprietary software really has had free software outclassed is in legal muscle. Of course, some companies (Novell, IBM, HP for a few) have supported free software because they stand to benefit from it. But free software needs as many sharp legal experts as it can get--that will support free software for the sake of free software. It's nice to see that this is happening.
I agree with you on this. Joe Consumer was a generic term for someone who may or may not be a genius, but isn't a technophile. I never meant that they are particularly gullible.
Case in point: some of the professors that I've encountered in undergrad and graduate courses are among the most intelligent people I've ever met--world-renowned experts--but they know little about computers because they choose not to. They don't use computers much, and when they do they aren't tinkering with internals and such. Therefore, DRM wouldn't affect them much and they are not very concerned about it.
Like the parent says and as I alluded to before, all they know about DRM is what the companies that push it tell them. The people that DRM affects most are those of us who like to tinker, like to change things and hack around. The average person, even if they know exactly what it's for, won't care if it doesn't prevent them from doing what they need to do.
The DRM schemes trod all over fair use. The media companies seem perfectly content to completely prohibit copying of media in any format whatsoever. They ignore the fact that not everyone plays their CDs in a CD player (remember the flap about CDs that didn't work in computer CD-ROM drives?) They ignore the fact that people may want to have the files in digital format for transfer to an MP3 player.
For me, it's not about having the "right to steal other peoples IP", it's about being able to make full use of the media that I've paid for the right to use. And DRM is attempting to take away all choice concerning how media are used.
Unfortunately, the companies pushing these schemes tell Joe Consumer that it's going to make their devices "more secure", and Joe Consumer believes them. Even if they know it's there, I don't think there's going to be an outcry about it because most people think it's a good thing. Lots of people hear about the downsides of such technology, and write it off as a paranoid delusion.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't *think hotmail or yahoo would either
n g-gmail-invitations-015942.php7 55,00.html ocking-gmail-invites/
I think MS certainly would...they've been accused of blocking GMail invites before, though they never admitted to doing it:
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/is-hotmail-blocki
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39157
http://google.weblogsinc.com/2004/06/23/hotmail-b
That was a simplistic way of describing it, to be sure, but it isn't entirely wrong. I was working in the DRAM industry when mass production shifted from plain SDRAM (PC-100/133) to DDR SDRAM. For some time, the prices of PC-100/133 exceeded the prices of DDR, simply because manufacturers were shifting huge portions of their capacity to DDR. Supply and demand...
FWIW, memory companies that still make EDO and FPM memory can make pretty good money on those, supporting legacy machines (lots of old Sun boxes of that vintage still run fine, for example).
None of this is to defend Best Buy--I don't like shopping there either, and I won't be in one anytime soon.
Better yet is a silicon wafer. I worked for a semiconductor manufacturer and we did something similar with polished wafers. Even better, those wafers are getting bigger, not smaller. Your typical wafer in a mass-production facility is at least 8", and many are moving (or have moved) to 12".
They're very polished and shiny, and make excellent mirrors.
> No thank you. All my music comes off a hard drive now, and my videos will soon too.
No, thank YOU.
--Your friendly neighborhood Seagate employee.
There still is a US DRAM manufacturer. Micron is still alive and kicking (and has been continuously in business since 1978), selling to consumers via the Crucial brand. There was price-fixing (which Micron doesn't seem to be completely innocent of, either), but one thing to keep in mind is that RDRAM, even if it weren't patented, required approximately 5-7 extra mask steps to create, as compared to DDR DRAM. In the cut-throat world of DRAM manufacturing, where every penny counts, this is a deal-breaker. Samsung was able to make money off RDRAM only because it was so expensive. Was it illegal for these companies to team up and kick down RDRAM? Yes. Am I sad to see it go? No way.
At the UPS website and the FedEx website you can estimate rates. To ship a 65 kg package from Reading, UK to my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, the cheapest shipping option would cost at least $190; essentially you would be paying as much in shipping as you originally paid for the subwoofer--if the opening bid stood. The expedited shipping options would cost on the order of $400.
This all assumes that the package really is no more than 65 kg (~143 lbs). That's not far under the 150 pound weight limit for all of these options. You would then be forced to use another courier that would in all likelihood be more expensive.
Still, ShyGuy's point stands. Probably someone with more money than sense would buy it and pay for shipping it. I think it's pretty cool, but I'm nowhere near a big enough SW fan to pay 100+ UKP to buy it and 200 USD to ship it.
And that reminds me of an even worse one:
A: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a zebra?
B: I don't know.
A: Elephant zebra sin theta.
And the follow-up:
A: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a rock climber?
B: Elephant rock climber sin theta?
A: No, silly. You can't do that; a rock climber is a scaler!
Not directly. It originally appeared in South Park and now appears all the time on ./. You can read about it here
I'm very much like that. Homework always took me a very long time to finish, but I always completed exams quickly and did well on them--and that trend held from elementary school through graduate school.
I defended my thesis last Friday, and the date was scheduled only one week before it happened, with almost a quarter of it left to write. I got more done in the two days I had left than I had in the previous week.
I amaze myself sometimes, how staggeringly lazy I can be when I don't have a deadline--and how fast I can get things done when I have a short deadline. I've always wondered if I have a mild form of ADD. I'm certain that I would have been drugged up throughout elementary school if I were born ten years later, but I got there before ADD was fashionable.
Uhh...yes, until the fire goes out. It would buy you some time to evacuate people (assuming the mechanical properties of this solid are sufficient), but as soon as it cools, that building is still coming down. It would not have prevented the collapse entirely.
Not to mention that interstitial hydrogen makes most engineering metals very brittle. As the hydrogen diffuses into it (and it will), it makes the metal brittle to the point that ordinary thermal expansion can crack it--and a thick-walled container would likely be worse in this respect than a thinner one.
Polymers are, in general, more permeable than metals and have poorer mechanical properties. It might be feasible to produce a metal-shelled tank with a lining to block H2 diffusion--e.g. a high molecular weight polymer with scattered impermeable phase, plus H-consuming chemical groups.
It is not a trivial problem.
...And in the past, you would have been correct. The reason privacy advocates get so worked up about such forms of electronic monitoring and automated law enforcement is simply that it "lowers the bar", so to speak. It reduces the required effort for "them" to check up on anything they want to, and the more a governing authority is able to watch, the more it will do so.
Today, you might not worry because you're not a young Arab male. But, the government DOES care what organizations you associate with, how much cold medicine you purchase, and passes laws allowing secret searches of private homes. Tomorrow, we don't know what might be illegal. What we do know is that when the government knows it cannot pass something frontally, it will attempt to do so incrementally. (PATRIOT II, anyone?) They hope that, like the proverbial frog in the boiler pan, that we won't notice until it is too late. This is why some people are up in arms about seemingly trivial expansion of governmental powers...to stop the slow, incremental erosion of individual liberty.
CDs are typically made from a polycarbonate material. These are recycle code 7, "Other". This presumes that the DVDs in question are made with the same substrate as a normal CD.
Recycle codes, if you're interested:
1 -> PETE (Polyethylene terephtalate)
2 -> HDPE (high density polyethylene)
3 -> PVC (polyvinyl chloride)
4 -> LDPE (low density polyethylene)
5 -> PP (polypropylene)
6 -> PS (polystyrene)
7 -> Other
Maybe. The tariffs affect chips made in Korea and imported to the US. If they're already mounted on motherboards, graphics boards, or other such devices, there's no tariff. Likewise, the tariff doesn't apply if a US company--Dell, for example, receives them at an offshore location, builds them into a computer, and ships the computer to the US. The tariff also does not apply to Hynix chips manufactured in their Eugene, Oregon plant. There are many ways for Hynix to dodge the tariff, and I suspect they are employing every one of those ways.
See this link
Yes. Since there is more than twice as much available area on a 300mm wafer as a 200mm one, you come out ahead if the 300mm wafer is = 2x the price of the 200mm one. That wafer price crossover is near, or has already happened, depending on what sort of deal you get from your wafer suppliers.
The chips made on the wafer don't get bigger--they're the same size or smaller. The advantage is that you get more than twice as many chips on a wafer. Time spent on each machine in the fab is money--if you can pattern more chips at once at photo, etch more chips at once in dry etch, and test more chips at once in probe, you can make chips more quickly and more cheaply than your competitors.
The big downside of 300mm (and the reason most companies put it off so long) is that it requires either extensive refittings of existing equipment or (more commonly) a completely new fab. Since we're talking ~3B USD, very few companies could justify that.
As you might imagine in such an industry, once your competitors begin doing something like that, you better have an answer for it. Infineon's move to build 300mm (first DRAM maker to do it AFAIK) looked like a bad move at the time, as it was an enormous cash sink, but now they've come out of it much more competitive for it.
are because the industry is so cut-throat. In good DRAM times, companies crowd in, adding new production capacity and trying to make a quick buck. They know this is going to kill prices a couple years down the road, but if they don't do it, they'll be left out in the cold as competitors grab their market share. Sure enough, a couple of years later oversupply kicks in. Companies manufacture less DRAM, shift production to more profitable products, etc... And the cycle begins anew. I really don't know what started it, unless it was the 1987 DRAM crash, when all but one US manufacturer dropped the DRAM business due to intense Japanese competition. (And illegal dumping, as it turned out.)
Adding to this now is a fairly major transition from 200-300mm wafers. No matter what the DRAM companies tell you, they're never as good with their process as they claim they are. (I used to work for one of them.) Everyone is struggling to some degree with 0.11 micron compared to 0.13, and everyone (except perhaps Infineon, who started with it about three years ago) is struggling with 300mm wafer technology compared to 200mm.
Add it all up, and it very likely is a legitimate shortage. No price fixing here.
I agree with you on IBM's weight. It managed to fight the feds for the better part of a decade and came out fine. It's extremely successful and I would never underestimate them.
Their big case regards Linux. While "a rising tide affects all boats"--meaning a win for Linux would support FOSS in general--I don't see them picking up lawsuit after lawsuit just so they can win the FOSS Nice Guy of the Year award. They, like any corporation, support free software because it is profitable for them to do so. And if they no longer thought they could benefit, they'd stop supporting FOSS.
I like IBM too--one fewer job offer and I'd likely be working for them--but they aren't supporting Linux out of the kindness of their hearts.
...will be in the courts. We see it with Linux and SCO, and that won't be the last major court battle over free software. Free software (and open source, for those that worry about that distinction) has proven that it's up to snuff technically. And intelligent people can disagree over ease-of-use compared to commercial products.
But the one area where proprietary software really has had free software outclassed is in legal muscle. Of course, some companies (Novell, IBM, HP for a few) have supported free software because they stand to benefit from it. But free software needs as many sharp legal experts as it can get--that will support free software for the sake of free software. It's nice to see that this is happening.
I agree with you on this. Joe Consumer was a generic term for someone who may or may not be a genius, but isn't a technophile. I never meant that they are particularly gullible.
Case in point: some of the professors that I've encountered in undergrad and graduate courses are among the most intelligent people I've ever met--world-renowned experts--but they know little about computers because they choose not to. They don't use computers much, and when they do they aren't tinkering with internals and such. Therefore, DRM wouldn't affect them much and they are not very concerned about it.
Like the parent says and as I alluded to before, all they know about DRM is what the companies that push it tell them. The people that DRM affects most are those of us who like to tinker, like to change things and hack around. The average person, even if they know exactly what it's for, won't care if it doesn't prevent them from doing what they need to do.
The DRM schemes trod all over fair use. The media companies seem perfectly content to completely prohibit copying of media in any format whatsoever. They ignore the fact that not everyone plays their CDs in a CD player (remember the flap about CDs that didn't work in computer CD-ROM drives?) They ignore the fact that people may want to have the files in digital format for transfer to an MP3 player.
For me, it's not about having the "right to steal other peoples IP", it's about being able to make full use of the media that I've paid for the right to use. And DRM is attempting to take away all choice concerning how media are used.
Unfortunately, the companies pushing these schemes tell Joe Consumer that it's going to make their devices "more secure", and Joe Consumer believes them. Even if they know it's there, I don't think there's going to be an outcry about it because most people think it's a good thing. Lots of people hear about the downsides of such technology, and write it off as a paranoid delusion.