Hard Drive Prices Slide As Thai Flood Aftermath Subsides 155
New submitter yeszomgpony writes "For the first time since the Thailand flooding, hard drive prices are finally starting to decrease. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week. From the article: 'Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data. "For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said. IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.'"
Prices and Warranty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prices and Warranty (Score:4, Insightful)
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While most likely true, the problem is that "warranty going back up" is going to be an issue in current dupoly.
Also the fact that hard drives being actually unreliable will likely impact economy, as many people now rely on their work computer and laptop for some very important data while being very lax with backups. It was sorta workable before provided you switched to a new computer quickly enough, but if your statement about quality is true, it may not be enough any more. And the issue may actually be big
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Well then they will learn. Lots of us are moving to having mixed vendor mix lot raid arrays at home for just this reason.
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I don't know, but I wonder if they were locked into lower prices for certain models because of pre-existing contracts with big OEMs? If so, this would definitely hurt their revenue and make them want to raise prices wherever possible to make up for it.
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Both are sliding
If warranties are sliding, costs are *rising*.
Be on the lookout for quality issues. (Score:5, Informative)
This often happens when a process goes off line for a time. It also normally works itself out after a few months.
I'll be waiting a few months myself.
just in time (Score:2, Insightful)
hmmn seems conveniently timed to be more expensive while people are buying Christmas presents and they go back to regular pricing after the Xmas shopping rush, no there is no taking advantage disaster at all here to price gouge the consumer
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Weather control is a bitch.
What is surprising is that prices have come down this quickly. My only guess is that people were hording. Or WD actually was hording back inventory and understating it because they didn't know how long it would take to get their factories running again and they had to be sure they could cover their contracted orders.
Also was an opportunity for WD to buy back some of their stock.
But they did lost money. On the other hand we can look forward to cheaper prices and greater capacities
Genghis Khaaaa aaa a a aan (Score:4, Interesting)
Riding round on horses terrorizing people?
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Where did you get that definition?
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http://www.yourdictionary.com/hording [yourdictionary.com]
First hit in google?
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Doesn't say anything about horses. Google wasn't so good to me. I wonder if other things I've (or people from my ip address as it shifts around) have searched for have tainted my results. I didn't get anything resembling a definition when I searched.
Which sucked, because I wanted to make a joke about farding while hording. I couldn't think of one, though, so I guess it's just as well.
Also, autocorrect sucks. I just want to context click like we used to when a word was misspelt
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Huh? they're making huge profits, they didn't 'lost money'
and no one has re-tooled anything yet, they've cleared some factories of water and gotten some equipment that wasn't to damaged working again.
Quality Control? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quality Control? (Score:4, Insightful)
Propaganda slides as inventories float (Score:2)
I want hard drives (Score:2)
The WD20EARS seem to be back around $100.
And I'm sure that others physiologically have the same urge I do.
I've been putting off upgrading my ZFS pool long enough.
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I just did a quick google, prices on that drive are all over the map, $94 to almost $200.
Where else do our parts come from? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone should do a article or investigation into all the obscure places our hardware comes from, especially concentrations where most of one type comes from a small area.
We only ever seem to hear about these places when something goes wrong.
Remember that time in the '90s when a Taiwanese RAM factory caught fire, and it turned out to be a big chunk of world RAM output? Sent prices spiking for a while.
Conversely, it's surprising how little the Japanese tsunami affected the tech world. I guess their industries were concentrated further south.
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Conversely, it's surprising how little the Japanese tsunami affected the tech world. I guess their industries were concentrated further south.
Actually, the tsunami appears to have had a significant impact on both Nikon's and Canon's release schedules - outside of point-and-shoots anyway.
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Only Nikon's higher end equipment is manufactured in Japan, the rest is in Thailand. This crops up quite frequently in the Nikon vs Canon flamewars as if it actually matters.
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Only Nikon's higher end equipment is manufactured in Japan, the rest is in Thailand. This crops up quite frequently in the Nikon vs Canon flamewars as if it actually matters.
True - and Nikon's upcoming dSLRs (the D700 and D3s/x replacements), which initially were universally expected to be released this summer and/or fall, are now likely shipping next spring because of tsunami-related delays.
Re:Where else do our parts come from? (Score:5, Informative)
The camera world, OTOH, was hit pretty heavily by the tsunami. All of the big manufacturers lost significant chunks of their production capacity, and the effects are still being felt in terms of shortages, delays in introducing new models, etc...
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The SonyEricsson Xperia Pro phone was seriously delayed by the tsunami. Demoed at CES in January, release was planned for mid-April originally, but it hit the shelves worldwide in October!
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Re:Where else do our parts come from? (Score:4, Informative)
Conversely, it's surprising how little the Japanese tsunami affected the tech world. I guess their industries were concentrated further south.
I seem to recall Japanese auto makers had a tough time dealing with the earthquake/tsunami. Not only were their latest ready-to-ship inventory flooded out, substantial portions of their supply chain for parts and equipment were similarly impacted by quake/flood damage. Given how much electronics are in automobiles these days, it kind of counts doesn't it? Granted, a lot of the tech that goes into cars are not exclusive to the auto industry.
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Yeah I never really understood why all these sensitive factories are built in earthquake and flood zones.
Why don't they build them over here in the UK, where the worst we get is a bit of bad snow every 30 years, a bit of wind that sometimes knocks a few leaves of the trees, or if you're really stupid, a wet carpet because you bought a has that was built on a flood plane.
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But does the cost of natural disasters really not outweigh the extra hassle of having to adhere to some degree of social standard?
Or do they just write it off with their insurers? Surely the cost of insuring such factories in such places must be getting prohibitive though?
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Normally insurances do NOT cover force majeure such as forces of the nature. But i guess they could get one with a huge premium on it.
Still, insurances are gambling weighted on favor of the insurer, so you are pretty much guaranteed to make a loss on long run.
All insurances are a gamble, you are gambling that something bad happens, and insurance co is betting against, larger the pool of insured for the same thing, the bigger the pool of prizes is vs. the cost of gambling.
As an average odds are badly against
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Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good... and that makes for a crappy business environment where people actually have rights and pay taxes and expect decent treatment etc etc.
Don't worry, I'm sure our current government will do away with all that soon enough.
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Yay! Vote Gordon Brown - he knows how to spend your money better than you do! (Jobs for the boys is the answer -Mugabe told him so).
then fine move the facilities to North Korea where (Score:2)
then fine move the facilities to North Korea where there are no works rights at all and they can be build just for the shipping + parts costs.
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Because in the UK they have LAWS that are enforced by professional stewards of the public good.....
Japan is exactly the same way: high cost of living, strong government, strong rights for workers, etc. Of course, Thailand isn't, but the earthquake/tsunami hit Japan. The simple fact here is that the Japanese are very strong in engineering, and the British simply aren't. The British haven't been very big on engineering since the early 20th Century; after WWII, it was all straight downhill for them. Before
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Because people read The Daily Mail? Yeah, I guess that is a bit of a problem.
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> Remember that time in the '90s when a Taiwanese RAM
> factory caught fire, and it turned out to be a big chunk of
> world RAM output? Sent prices spiking for a while.
IIRC, that was more or less a cover for price fixing.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/04/22/1850250/ram-manufacturers-fined-for-price-fixing [slashdot.org]
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/10/5429.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing [wikipedia.org]
Many more links available if you search for 'ram price fixing'
Keep your comments short! (Score:5, Funny)
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use smaller fonts.
luddites can ditch uppercase
Redundancy (Score:2, Insightful)
This news reveals an important piece: The is no real redundancy in the suppliers when in comes to important parts of todays' devices. I often see* that the hard disk array suppliers keep buying them from a couple of asian outfits thinking they will be safe hands. But the asian hardware vendors themselves buy/order from the same manufacturer of platters/board/NAND creating a single point of failure scenario.
There should be a clear visibility of the supply chain of not just the end/whole product but also th
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The markets seem to create such bottlenecks. Hell, regional specialization in certain types of production is one of the supposed benefits of global free-trade.
This effect is behind one of the arguments for using government to create less "efficient" but safer, more distributed production for certain things, especially food and products vital to national defense; e.g. the market may dictate that 100% of your farmland would be better used for mining, housing, factories, basically anything but farmland, but i
Seagate (Score:2)
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Because they could?
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Re:Seagate (Score:4, Informative)
Simple:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/seagate-samsung-acquisition/ [nytimes.com]
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/western-digital-drops-4-3-billion-to-acquire-hitachi-gst-enter/ [engadget.com]
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/188100939/seagate-wraps-up-maxtor-acquisition.htm [crn.com]
When/if the Hitachi acquisition closes, you only have two vendors in the spinning magnetic disk market. Last time there was a large industry shift to shorter warranties, one or two companies did not and after a few months the rest of the industry moved back. With only two companies in play, it's far less likely someone will retain long warranty as a competitive advantage. Same reason why the flood was so devastating, one company consolidates so much in one location and a natural disaster wipes out half the manufacturing capacity of that industry.
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Hm, I guess that sea gate was a good idea after all.
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SSD Demand (Score:3)
From the article:
Data from DRAMeXchange also showed that rush orders for SSDs increased after the Thailand flooding disrupted hard disk drive supplies.
According to DRAMeXchange, a research division of TrendForce, rush orders for SSDs rose even as shipments of end-market products, including PCs, smartphones and tablet PCs, remained slugish because of slow economic conditions.
Despite SSDs not being an exact replacement for spinning rust, it looks like the HD shortage is indeed having the predicted effects on the SSD market.
Right as always (Score:2)
What can I say, market is a price discovery mechanism [slashdot.org] and this truth still holds [slashdot.org], even though so many in those previous stories disagreed because they completely miss the understanding of most basic economic principles.
Price discovery and profit are market principles that send signals to manufacturers to increase or decrease production, and the profit is the engine of progress - goods is what people want and are willing to trade their time (money) for them, thus the more profit one is making by supplying pe
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", the absence of government regulations prevents possibility of a monopoly"
that is incorrect. I suggest you look at history. Robber Barons and EITC might be a good place to start.
It is the natural position of a corporation to use it's power to stop all competition at any cost.
"thus the distribution becomes more and more efficient with prices falling and quality increasing."
also False.
Why do you say that? all evidence throughout history disagrees with those statements.
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From your past comments I recognize that you don't understand any of basics, so it would be a fool's errand to get into real details before you understood them, I suggest a good primer on basic stuff first. [youtube.com]
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" New competitor enters rinse and repeat."
NO. You miss the point. You use your 100% monopoly to not allow competition. Like the HEIC did until they were stopped by the government.
Was Hitachi affected by the floods? (Score:2)
I know that WD announced the acquisition of Hitachi's HDD business back in March of this year. Has this been completed yet? Is Hitachi still using their own factories? Were those factories also in Thailand? The reason I'm wondering is because I'm concerned about quality on the new drives made from reclaimed flooded equipment – and the fact that both WD and Seagate are slashing warranties is definitely not a good sign. Hitachi has a reasonably good reputation and I've been using one of their 2TB drives
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure seems like there's a shortage... I asked around whether anyone needed a few of my old ass hard drives on one of the local (German) hardware forums, and received a trade of a slightly castrated Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs of RAM and an ASUS mainboard for just a 500gig 3.5" SATA drive and an 80gigger notebook drive... both well used, of course. A few weeks ago, this wouldn't have been possible, with the hard drives worth pennies and the other hardware worth 40-50€.
Glad to hear the shortage is coming to an end though... I really need to upgrade my NAS. Last time I did that, 1TB drives were in the sweet spot... getting a bit full.
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Event...
Inflate fears based on event...
????
Profit
Holy shit... I could make billions! Quick, someone turn off a pipeline somewhere....
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OK, fine - I'll call it a price hike instead of a shortage and we're good again ;)
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
So in other words, the free market will function in exactly the way it's supposed to
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Ideally there would be no boom or bust. Those are caused because perfectly rational actors exist only in economic theory. Same for perfect information.
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Ideally nothing. To suggest that the free market has an ideal or purpose or positive outcome short or long term is as foolish as to suggest that intelligent design underlies evolution and guides it benevolently.
The free market, for whatever necessarily restricted implementation of free market exists today, is a game which you win if you play well. Other people may benefit, or they may be unaffected, or they may have their enjoyment of life severely damaged. The only thing we can guarantee is that the winner
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Game theory does have ideal outcomes when the actors play perfectly.
Of course, in the case of economy and statecraft, the ideal solution is to actually make an economy that serves the people, or if unable to do so (it may be we just don't know enough to do such a thing), at least admit that we don't know rather than trying to back justify the current non-solution.
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Even perfectly rational actors cannot predict the future.
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They can when the future is obvious to anyone with more than one functioning brain cell. People used to get burned as witches for this sort of thing. Now you just get dirty looks from your neighbors.
Jacked up prices castrate demand on a luxury good. Any group of Econ 101 students could have predicted that.
Elastic demand is elastic.
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If a bad choice of words.
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's what it did. Initially, the demand curve didn't shift, but the supply took a huge hit. The price increase allowed the market to adjust, and eventually (quite quickly, apparently) subsided as capacity has been (partially at least) recovered (perhaps using existing capacity with reduced QC, as evidenced by the warranty cut...) and substitute products have been sought (some products may be forgoing HDs in favor of much smaller but still adequate SSDs, for instance).
This is exactly how the market is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be constantly at some steady-state "ideal" price. That's how planned economies work, and results in either or both of shortages and waste.
The only evidence of anything like market failure is the warranty cut, that cut across all manufacturers. One would've expected someone to hold out and become the "quality" producer. But even that is a stretch as the warranties were not cut across all product lines for all manufacturers.
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
So - How can you stop boom and bust - the simplest way is to flood the market, and not let anyone know! Good luck with that strategy.
Alternatively, you can try lying a lot, and hoping no one notices (its called communism). Doesn't work very well in practice.
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A million lemmings can't be wrong.
But they can be flat!
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
With the current trend of a few large companies controlling the market it is getting harder and harder to find markets where the free market model still applies.
This isn't a current trend, it's always been the trend: in any market, as the market matures, the number of suppliers shrinks through attrition and mergers, until there's only a handful of really big companies controlling the whole market. Just look at the automotive market for example: in the USA alone, there used to be dozens of car makers in the early 20th Century, but by 1970 it had shrunk down to 4 main players; it only opened up again when more foreign makers entered the market, namely the Japanese.
Appliances: there's only 3 or so American appliance makers (Whirlpool, GE, Maytag), although recently we've gotten more foreign brands (Samsung, LG, Bosch).
This is just the natural order of things: as a market matures, the players buy each other out or go out of business, until you're left with a few large competitors. Sometimes a monopoly results (or close, with one player being the dominant competitor with a large majority of the marketshare). This is why government regulation is necessary at this stage, to "keep the playing field level" and prevent entrenched players from keeping newer, smaller competitors out of the market the way they did with Tucker cars.
Allowing a free market with little or no regulation is great when a market is immature and there's lots of players and competition (and there's few or no health or safety issues to worry about, like with food); but after a while it becomes necessary or else you get a situation like Microsoft circa 2000, bullying everyone and stifling innovation.
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Great. We should get the government to control prices. I can't see how that could go wrong.
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Government should almost never control prices, except in the case of utility monopolies for instance. However, government's responsibility is to provide regulation such that, in most markets (utilities being an obvious exception), no monopoly ever develops, and a healthy number of competitors always exists. The government can do this by preventing mergers. The more competitors there are in a market, the freer that market is, and the better off consumers are (within reason of course, there's a law of dimi
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
But only for the oooh shiny crowd. I simply held off buying any hard drives. Would I have liked to expand capacity? yes. Would I have liked to buy 12 new machines? yes.
Did I kill people or lose money because I did not? no.
Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
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Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Or you know, smart people who knew they had a need for certain drives for their home or business use through the next 6-8 months and realized they should fulfill their needs before retailers used the flood to hike prices.
Kinda like what happened in that (Taiwan I believe) earthquake in the 90s when RAM prices went through the roof.
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Yup, or OEMs (Dell, HP, IBM, Acer, etc) who wanted to keep selling PCs for the same price through the months it would take to recover the supply side. They did this to avoid getting "left behind" and lose out on sales to each other due to having to increase their overall system cost due to drive prices. The truth is that home-built PCs are a tiny tiny fraction of the overall market and they are the ones who got left behind because they have no representative supply chain manager thinking about these kinds
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Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Sure, because the "shortage" is just a con made by wall street. Are you part of the occupy movement or something? Of course there is a rush of people overreacting too, but it's not like the floods down in Thailand were imaginary. HDD production is way down and with long term contracts with OEMs taking priority the rest of the market was going to get squeezed badly. Everybody that's looked at a price-quantity curve knows that when supply goes way down like that the prices go up. Yes, people that panic buy to
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I simply held off buying any hard drives.
Same here, even though the drive in my main box has been trying to die for months (just went fully titsup over the weekend). I'll still wait, I have a couple of old, small spares that will do until production and prices are normal again.
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days.
Not days. Restoring the WD factory took about 6 weeks [forbes.com]. It's still a bit spurious, I'll give you that.
Why do you think they reduced the warranties? (Score:2)
Of course not. Which is why they've gone from 5 years to 1 or 2. Let someone else take the hit by buying the first few months production - it's going to be like buying a car manufactured on a Monday - way more defects.
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One would assume that at least some plants were flooded, or their owners would not have gone through the expense of hiring dive teams to recover the equipment...
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This brings up the question, why did they move their operations to a place where flooding is a problem?
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Were the actual plants flooded? Or was it a lack of power(impassable roads, etc.) due to the flooding that caused the shutdown?
Based on the photo in this NYT article [nytimes.com] it certainly looks like the WD buildings themselves were flooded.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, a perspective. Let me explain what that means:
In this huge world with 7 billion people, every 3 minutes, about 600 die. (On average about 3 per second). And our population growth is so fast that the 600 dead had been replaced (sorry for the dry factual choice of words) before the floods even hit the news. ... But the harddrive problem affects the world, albeit in a modest way, for months.
So yeah, it seems the editors really do have a sense of perspective. Maybe you prefer a more emotional perspective... but if you want to mourn every couple of hundred people that die, you'd better empty your agenda. It's a full time job.
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't beat the "what if that was your own family" argument. You win. ;-)
But as a last remark (yes, I want a -1 flamebait).: From your "perspective", do you ever discuss anything other than dead people?
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Of course you can beat that argument.
"If it was my family, that was wiped out like that, I wouldn't be buying new hard drives for their computers. In other words, I wouldn't be having this problem."
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Oh BS. The world will still turn if little johnny can't upgrade his HD to keep more porn on. Any serious business users will have plenty of drives in store anyway.
There you go, doing the exact same thing. What if it was your wife/gf/mother/father's hard drive that needed replacing? You take such a dispassionate viewpoint. It's all well and good when the hard drives that need replacing belong to some faceless corporation, but it's totally different when you bring it closer to home.
total unperspective vortex (Score:2)
From Wikiquote:
Since we're not sure it was spoken, I guess the pendulum swings back to tragedy.
Stalin would surely have continued: "Death of 30 million is prudence." What if it was you and your wife and your gf and your mother and your father? Hint: a day of morning is tragedy, a thousand years is history.
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Informative)
So will you take that dispassionate viewpoint if your wife/gf/mother/father dropped dead suddenly?
No, but I wouldn't expect comments about it to be posted to slashdot without being modded "offtopic". because if my (very aged) parents died, it would be meaningless to anyone who doesn't know them.
Unless you know them personally, the 600 dead isn't news, it's gossip. The price of hard drives affects all of us.
You are, in fact, the one without a sense of perspective. What about the hundreds that die every day from hunger? Yep, they're offtopic, too.
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You try that again, this time in intelligable english?
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You try that again, this time in intelligable english?
Pot... kettle...
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You're not alone. I had to read it through a second time because the connection between Thai food and hard drives wasn't making sense to me.
Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not if people all of a sudden does not want any....the whole point to my post was to show how as consumers we are stupid at letting the oil industry dictate the pricing to such an extreme where all it would take is a few weeks without gassing up to really bring down the price.
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