
I've found a way of selling it
Easy, just sell the storage as a new way of implementing /dev/null
Production at Kioxia and Western Digital's 3D NAND fabrication facilities in Japan is being disrupted by chemical contamination, with at least 6.5 exabytes of capacity lost. The two companies operate a joint venture which has six fabs at Yokkaichi in Mie province, employing some 8,000 people, and a seventh fab at Kitakami in …
At what point will the price increases come back down to pre-shortage levels? Never, because the manufacturers have seen that the public will pay for the stuff at the higher prices, so there's no incentive to bring them back down.
"Hey Bob, how about you sabotauge your output capability to create a shortage of your stuff, I'll do the same for my stuff, then we both raise our prices as a result? We'll get rich!"
"Hey Bill, I like that idea, but here's a better one. Let's just SAY that there was sabotauge, like a chemical contamination or something, and then use that as the excuse to raise prices? We'll get richer!"
"Bob, you're a genius!"
*Sigh*
I'm getting far too cynical for my own damned good... =-/
In the US at least, we have a few whistleblower laws/avenues that would make that fairly risky to pull off without management being paranoid someone would spill the beans (whistleblowers getting a cut off successful lawsuits and the full protection of the US government).
Unless the politicians in charge of the sector in question are also firmly in the pockets of the corporations being reported, at which point the whistleblower becomes the "terrorist threat actor", "scummy hacker", or "industrial espionage agent" with a price on their head & multiple governments out gunning for their ass.
Optimists see the light at the end of the tunnel & think it's daylight, pessimists think it's a toll booth, & realists know it's the headlight of an oncomming freight train about to turn us into chunky salsa. =-/
I didn't know that the Japanese have basically adopted the phrase "clean room" wholesale as well as "AI". It makes sense to keep the tech term, but it still came a bit as a surprise. Now I want to know what the French made of it. Anyone?
:)
In one of the Tom Peters books there is an anecdote about a chip fabrication problem.
The chip processing was showing dust contamination on the wafers. So they stopped production and upgraded the clean room air filtration system.
The problem still happened. Then someone realised there was a new person working in Goods Inward. Very conscientious - he was opening the received packs of virgin wafers in order to count that they were all there.
Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.
Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.
The device is sampling with potential customers now.
Western Digital has confirmed the board is considering "strategic alternatives" for the storage supplier, including spinning out its flash and hard disk businesses.
This follows calls last month by activist investor Elliott Management, which has amassed a $1 billion investment in WD equating to a six percent share stake, for a "full separation" based on those product lines.
In a statement, CEO David Goeckeler said: "The board is aligned in the belief that maximizing value creation warrants a comprehensive assessment of strategic alternatives focused on structural options for the company's Flash and HDD businesses.
Updated Activist investor Elliott Management is pushing for Western Digital Corporation's board to break the business in two by splitting the hard disk drive and NAND flash divisions into separately traded entities.
In an open letter to the board [PDF], Elliott – which has over time invested roughly $1 billion in WDC, representing about a 6 percent stake – says it is almost six years since WD bought SanDisk for $19 billion, scooping up its NAND memory biz.
At the time, this purchase was "nothing less than transformative", the letter adds, propelling five-decade-old WDC beyond HDDs into one of the biggest players in flash. Synergies, a better strategic position, and enhanced financial profile were among the rationale for the deal, says Elliott.
Samsung has dished up a new variety of SD card that can, it claims, sustain 16 years of continual writes.
The Korean giant's calculations for the longevity of the PRO Endurance Memory Card – for that is the new tech's name – assume their use to record 1920×1080 video content at 26Mbit/sec (3.25MB/sec).
At that rate, the 256GB model is rated to endure 140,160 hours of use. Smaller capacity models won't last as long because they'll be overwritten more often, so the 128GB, 64GB and 32GB each halve their larger sibling's lifetime.
A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.
Tsinghua Unigroup is a vast conglomerate that was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2015 had sufficient muscle to make a $23 billion bid for Micron Technology (which failed). The organization now consists of five units:
Adobe has finally and formally killed Flash.
The Photoshop giant promised Flash would die on January 12, 2021. Thanks to the International Date Line, The Register’s Asia-Pacific bureau, like other parts of the world, are already living in a sweet, sweet post-Flash future, and can report that if you try to access content in Adobe's Flash Player in this cyber-utopia, you’ll see the following:
Microsoft confirmed that it plans to end support for Adobe Flash Player in its three browser variants at the end of the year, but the company intends to allow corporate customers to keep the outdated tech on life support beyond that date.
In a blog post on Friday, Microsoft program manager Suchithra Gopinath said that the company will end support for Flash Player in Edge, Edge Legacy, and Internet Explorer on December 31, 2020, as part of the previously announced multi-vendor plan to end Flash Player distribution.
The decision, she said, follows from "the diminished usage of the technology and the availability of better, more secure options such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly."
IBM says it has managed to coax TLC-class endurance and performance from cheaper QLC flash chips, with customers of the company's FlashSystem 9200 all-flash arrays getting the benefits.
No one else can do this, according to Andy Walls, IBM Fellow and CTO for flash storage products.
Quad-level cell flash is cheaper to make than triple-level cell flash and increases storage density, but at the cost of performance and endurance. QLC stores 4 bits of data using 16 states. This requires 16 voltage levels, which lengthens IO operations, and means it takes longer to read and write data than TLC. This also shortens endurance, expressed as write-erase cycles.
The Internet Archive says it's found a way to preserve content created with Adobe's notoriously insecure Flash tool without risking user safety.
Preservation is needed because Adobe will end support for Flash after 31 December. Browsers only grudgingly allow Flash to run today and enthusiastically stop supporting it not long after Adobe pulls the plug.
It's widely expected that once support ends, bad actors will unleash flaws they've kept quiet to go about their nefarious ways.
The Raspberry Pi OS plunged another knife into the dark heart of Flash this week while adding drivers for Epson printers.
The release notes for the latest version of the diminutive computer's operating system detail the inclusion of Chromium 86.0.4240.197 and, note that "Adobe have end-of-lifed Flash Player", the removal of the swiss-cheese component.
The Raspberry Pi OS is the latest in a long line of platforms to finally turn out the lights. While bringing blessed relief for many, a side effect has been the removal of the Scratch 2 programming language, which "required Flash", according to the release notes.
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