IC Failures Linked to Resin Series? 284
MEW writes "According to this article, 'the semiconductor industry began using red phosphorus as a flame retardant instead of the Br-based compound it had used for years,' due to environmental concerns. By July 2002, 1000 tons of the stuff was used for about a billion chips, when they stopped due to high component failures. In particular Sumitomo Bakelite caused rampant failures in Fujitsu disk drives. There's still a lot of Sumitomo Bakelite out there, and we may see the worst of it soon, as components start to fail prematurely. This was posted by Spaceman on Macintouch who says that the bad material accounts for 'half the world's supply of 'IC Plastics'' and can result in 'sudden or premature end of life.'"
Is this why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn the irony! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intentional or Accidental? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just remember that everything carries a cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Premature component failure in healthcare... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this problem is as pervasive as it seems, exactly WHAT components are effected? I mean, think about this, how many of these plastics have found their way into things like Ventilators, internal defibrillators, external defibrillators like the LifePak series that is so prevalant on ambulances and in hospitals world wide?
What about the machines that control your money in the bank (if you use such a thing as quaint as a bank
Vehicle computers? or even... ACK, my PS2 and GameCube?!?!?!?
Anyway, beyond hard disk controllers, I got the idea that there were a lot of different ICs effected here, which could explain a lot of problems, and could cause some pretty bad problems as well.
Re:Damn the irony! (Score:1, Insightful)
Lovely. (Score:3, Insightful)
So now we not only need to deal with bad components and stupid designs, but even the components of the components are bad.
This really has to say something about society. A lot like the light bulbs in Forward the Foundation. Just how much useless, broken crap does the world need?
propagating the myth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I'm defending the reduction in warranty, of course. I'm mad as hell that I've had many drives go bad in less than two years of service.
Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.
Re:Intentional or Accidental? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conspiracy theories are by nature unassailable. However, according to the article there is a simple reason why it wasn't tested, and that is that it was an unexpected effect, for which there was no test:
Re:Warranties? (Score:2, Insightful)
Environmental Deception? (Score:2, Insightful)
Peeps, I understand that there is a lot of hysteria and piss-poor science out there about the impact we have. For instance, the crying about beer bottles and 'littering' of that sort. Guess what? A bottle is just a funny-shaped rock, to nature.
OTOH, there are impacts we have on the environment that have real dangers attached to them - specifically chemical ones. Everyone yells about the rainforest and connects it to free oxygen - but that's not the truth, is it? 97% of the earth's free oxygen is released by phytoplankton in the top 12 inches of the ocean. This area is also the very base of the food chain.
All it would take is for one coastal factory to dump some complex chemical enzym or catalyst into the ocean and it could be all over but the shouting and bleeding. We could wipe out all life on land and the earth would recover; kill the ocean, and we're done for.
Re:propagating the myth (Score:2, Insightful)
The planet as a ball of rock is safe, for now. We don't have the means to apply enough energy to force a significant portion of its mass out of the local area in one punch.
The planet, as a biological construct, is at risk. I'm not saying we could wipe off every bacterium on Earth, but we could certainly disrupt the biological system enough to make it incapable of sustaining humans. And in the end, that's all that matters, isn't it?
Re:Is this why... (Score:4, Insightful)
With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.
In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?
Motivations (Score:5, Insightful)
If I break it, it's an accident.
If you break it, you're a moron.
If a corporation breaks it, it's a conspiracy.
Re:The hilarious irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Act with knowledge of the consequences of your actions.
Re:Is this why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The hilarious irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Has there ever been a 'politically correct' movement of substantial size? Unlikely.
The expression was appopriated as a lazy and hollow (but effective) smear against anything the right wing don't like.
Want to gain easy points? Accuse your opponent/the thing you dislike of being 'politically incorrect' and for *absolutely no cost* you get to become the heroic figure making a lone stand against the forces of communism, or whatever.
It's clever, because you don't have to debate the specifics of your argument. There's a good bit about this technique here [paulgraham.com] (see 'Viso Sciolto').
However, since it permeated the mainstream so extensively, 'Politically Correct' has tended to be used by people who are lazy and/or stupid, like the celebrity chef who was cooking something with cream, and pointed out that "I know it's politically incorrect, but.. yadda yadda".
No, it's your choice. If you want to guzzle 5 pints of cream a day, and die of obesity or whatever, that's your problem.
Of course, then you can sue the cream makers. Genius! You get to play the "don't tell me what I can and can't do" card for years, and when the consequences of your actions hit, you can whine and blame the food-makers for not protecting you.
Personally, I'd rather see junk-food manufacturers sued for advertising shitty food to kids or making misleading claims.
Re:Environmental Deception? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost (Score:5, Insightful)
As does radical industrialism. Polluting the planet willy-nilly just so someone can make a buck has a huge cost but, unfortunately, that cost is not included in the price of the manufactured goods. The manufacturer has thus found a way to privatize the profits while he socializes the cost. It's one of the ways that our form of capitalism has become distorted from a sustainable form of capitalism. All costs should be included in the price of the product or it's not really capitalism.
Environmental impact isn't the only cost of this. (Score:3, Insightful)
To use the Fujitsu drives for example. Data lost on a failed drive has a value and may be non recoverable. Most places don't do daily backups, but even the changes in data over 24 hours can be significant and add the cost of the employee's salary in time in recreating the data. Replacement of drives known defective and not failed costs in time for data transfer and drive replacement in addition to purchase and validation of new drives. After the drive is replaced if it contains sensitive data it has to be disassembled and destroyed properly. After all that it makes it to the landfill.
Figure it this way:
$30 - 1 hour (failed) attempted data recovery
$60 - cost of replacement drive
$30 - 1 hour installation and reghosting of new drive
$100 - 4 hours recreating lost data
$15 - 30 min manual destruction of old drive
=$235
-$60 assume reimbursement for drive (not guaranteed)
=$175 because it was defective material!
Multiply that by the Fujitsu disaster (one and a half dumpster loads of drives after destruction, as I remember) and the cost gets up there. Remember, you may get the cost of the drive back, eventually, but never the cost of your labor.
Oh yeah, and you're still filling up the landfill.
Re:Damn the irony! (Score:2, Insightful)
Methane does not damage the ozone layer, perhaps you are thinking of global warming? The main damage to the ozone layer is still caused by chlorine. CFCs last for about 50 years in the atmosphere and it is still being emitted from old fridges etc. There will be plenty of CFC floating around in the atmosphere for a long time yet.
Re:Is this why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wal-Mart's practices are there because they need them to retain their low price leadership in an economy that has adapted to WM's first round of low price wars.
You also don't mention the biggest key to WM's forced price lowering
However, even that is not the -cause-. The cause is the willingness of most Americans to sacrifice their community retailers and specialty chains for lower prices and "all under one roof" shopping, even if as a whole the selection of products is lower. That short sighted view in the end causes the community as a whole to lose value (monetarily as well as socially), making Wal-Mart the ONLY long-term winner in that situation.
The answer is as simple as telling an overweight person to diet and exercise
BTW, yes it is true that K-Mart and Target -started- the concepts on a nationwide scale. However they never abuse their position (possibly because they never attained a position as strong as WM) like WM has.
Economics will eventually right the situation, but the damage that will have been done by that point (which won't occur until WM has completely exhausted it's growth capacity AND product development has stagnated due to lack of competition) will be horrendous to everyone's standard of living.
BTW, if you shop at "Sam's", you shop at Wal-Mart. Got a Costco or similar non-Sam's wholesaler? Go there.
Re:Just remember that everything carries a cost (Score:5, Insightful)
* Disclaimer: I used to do this for a living.