OT- AVG 7.1 Gone?

[Evan]

It shows just how fragile the electronic infrastructure is. The big quake in Taiwan in '99 killed one major computer company. Packard Bell had just signed contracts with Radio Shack to supply computers for the Christmas season, catalogs were printed with the firm prices. Then the earthquake hit and knocked out 1/2 of the chip making capacity on the planet for up to 2 months. The price of memory chips went up 600% in 3 days. PB was faced with losing maybe $100 or more per unit on at least 1 million units so they pulled the plug.

With China at only 15 percent of comm capacity it is sure to have an impact on inventories in the near future. Most seriously affected will likely be computers and related parts and accessories as these are stocked on a just-in-time basis with most of it air freighted to North America. You can expect some short term price increases and shortages of components such as memory and hard drives especially.

Glad I'm out of the business. This may have some impact on the impending release of Vista from Microsoft too.

[MRL]

This may have some impact on the impending release of Vista from Microsoft too.

That could be a God send. :-)

[mochinist]

This may have some impact on the impending release of Vista from Microsoft too.

That could be a God send. :-)

I have read a little about Vista and the OS doesn't sound good one bit, gonna have to take care of my XP computer and learn Linux or switch to apple.

[Evan]

It isn't well known that just three nukes exploded over North America, one on the east coast, one in the middle and one on the west at an altitude of 300 miles would put us instantly back in the stone age. Virtually all electronics would be destroyed in an instant. Fly by wire aircraft would fall out of the sky. Cars would die on the spot (except my Land Rover). All communications would cease. Power generation would die. These wouldn't be temporary effects but permanent destruction of the infrastructure while not causing any secondary blast damage or radiation effects.

[Rich Carlstedt]

Well we saw that when the Sun Spot last year caused a brown out in New England. All the high tech equipment is not as hardy as a old knife switch when it comes to keeping power on line..
Just think if LA has a major quake and all the server farms and banking shuts down..hope they have backup in Kansas ! I heard that 80 % of all US banking transactions clear through LA.

Rich

[Evan]

Yep. When a sunspot tosses a CME (coronal mass ejection) at the earth it compresses the ionosphere when it hits. This wobbles the earth's magnetic field by up to several degrees with a time scale of about half a minute per wobble. The moving field then induces large currents in long transmission lines that can trip them off and even cause damage.

One of these days I am going to build a simple magnetometer to detect this so I can have warning of possible aurora for picture taking.