« Computer News from Summer 2005 »

July and August 2005

Ummmm…!
What can I say, come the summer and the kids get off school any pretence I have of being a sane, rational individual (always a shaky premise) goes right out the window. Summer is traditionally quiet anyway in the computer industry and with the state the house is in at present, there is no way I can motivate myself to be productive under siege!



The times they are a changing… but not such a Tiny change this Time!
Certainly quiet enough to hear all the howls of those affected by the closure of Time / Tiny and company. Quietly taking orders up the last moment - knowing months in advance they can't honour them. Tut, tut!

OK, here is my take:
I watched them grow from nothing. I'm hazy on the years, but certainly it was the early 90's by my wife's recollection. Anyway, at the time I used to be friends with one or two of the technician there, back in the days before they used mass production.

No, you have to be taking the ….
Nope, I swear it's an everyday occurrence!.

Now, if you read the trade press and possibly the national press (I don't look at the latter!), you will see numerous comments like, We expected it to happen for ages and We pulled their credit months back and - mirrored shades of Escom - They owe an estimated £50 million; unsecured creditors are unlikely to receive a penny.

Creditors including the 1,500 staff who never got paid for their last months work - while the directors quietly resigned one after another just before the end, THEIR millions safe, themselves (possibly) distanced from the legal ties of a now bankrupt company, free to continue running the various other overseas investments…

As I say, a quiet summer.

I dare say it will all come out in the wash, but think on this: I've known about some of their practices for well over a decade. I, like many consultants, technicians and support personal am well aware of the less than cutting edge nature of the machines they churned out by the million over the years. You hear stories, as they say. I dare say a whole lot more will emerge from the wash from a thousand disgruntled staff, all eager to drop the bosses in the sticky stuff for swanning off with their wages - as in happening already.

Right, Time were losing an estimated million or so a month this year. People talk - You hear stories - so how come it got to this state!? I'm not on about the like of locals MP's ranting*, but those in the trade. I believe MSI are owed a staggering £12 million. Ceratinly HSBC are be owed £19 million. What, they saw the signs and hoped for the best? In this industry!?

*Politicians ranting generally has rather more to do with them seeking public limelight than the plight of those affected, eh!

One of my plans include a trade web site (only a year behind schedule), with a forum to exchange such gossip. The flaw I realised (seconds after the epiphany) was that when the inevitable happened and said gossiped companies go belly up, instead of accepting the blame for their mistakes they would point their greasy lawyers at me and say, Look what he published, we were doing fine until then…

Jaded? Yep! Cynical? Too right! Wrong in my assumption? Hell no!, shout the masses.

Yet, all the little signs like the fact - as we all know - margins are so slim for box shifters you can practically do surgery, never mind shave a few points off. The drop in their once relentless advertising campaigns… The minor point that few if any knowledgeable (or burned) folk ever really bought from them twice, giving them an exponentially smaller market whatever they did. The tales exchanged between past employees and other trade folk…

Home users I can understand losing out, but trade vendors and distributors!? Can desperation for sales truly be so blinding in this current climate?

June 2005

11th
Bullet points for the minute, but I will go back to frequent updates from Monday, and get a bit of the backlog input.

• Seagate finally announce SATA II drives, amongst others. The new SATA Barracuda 7200.9 will have up to 16Mb of cache and be available in sizes of up to 500Gb drives. They will be available in 'autumn' and I'm having myself two of them for my new computer when they come out. My first terabyte* home computer.
  
  
• ATI's 520 'Fudo' will be released on July 26th, apparently, with Nvidia's 24 pipeline GeForce 7800's pipping it to the post a good month earlier. So far I remain inclined towards ATI.
  
  
• Not gone looking for one myself as I was waiting on the (above) Seagates, but AMD formally announced the Athlon 64 X2 'Toledo' at the end of last month
  
  

* Raw photo's, if you are wondering. Given how snap happy I can get, those full photo's can eat up hard drives. When I finally get a Nikon D2X, it will eat it up even faster.