Google Docs was offline for over an hour on Wednesday afternoon, leading many users to express their frustration with Google’s cloud office suite. Google has now offered an explanation of the issue that led to the outage, and it can all be traced back to a memory bug on the server side. A change in the collaboration feature led to higher than expected resource usage and uncovered the bug, which had been lurking in the back end for some time.
You'd probably have a better shot at turning a profit selling ice cubes to Eskimos than churning out DRAM chips at today's prices. That's less of an exaggeration than you might think, and to cope with continually falling prices, some DRAM makers have decided to scale back operations until chip prices bounce back up.
The law of gravity dictates that what goes up must come down, and unfortunately for DRAM chip makers, there's nothing that says what goes down must also go back up. DRAM pricing continues to find new rock bottoms, and according to market research firm IHS iSuppli, things are about to get a whole lot worse.
The gluttonous system building gurus over at AVADirect just added a 48GB DDR3 RAM option to a handful of non-ECC setups, including two gaming machines, a recently launched silent PC, and a workstation system. Who in their right mind could possibly justify such a superfluous amount of system memory? The answer is not many, though it's nice to have the option, isn't it?
DRAM chip makers can quit singing the summertime blues, but only because autumn is right around the corner and not because prices and profits are up. There was a point when making memory chips was almost like printing money, at least before the market got turned on its head. Now things are at an all time low.
Go big or go home, right? Well if that's the case, tell Samsung's going to be late for dinner, because the memory chip maker isn't going home anytime soon. Samsung decided to instead go big by announcing the development of 32GB DDR3 registered dual inline memory modules (RDIMMs) built using 3D TSV (through silicon via) package technology.
Spending time with Firefox is a lot like spending time with your lovable young nieces; usually, everything goes swell and you walk away feeling good, a content smile plastered across your face. But sometimes, they do something so overwhelmingly stupid that you can't help but shake your head and wonder about their future. You may not be able to convince your niece that shoving crap inside electrical sockets is a dumb idea, but Mozilla's tackling its horrifyingly bad memory issues head-on with the MemShrink initiative – and one developer's already reporting outstanding results.
A bucket full of RAM is still nearly as cheap as a bucket full of filtered water, and that means the DRAM market is still in shambles. It's a tough business to make money in, unless you're Samsung, in which case you're so far ahead of the pack you can hardly hear the others complaining about how bad it is while reminiscing about the days when making memory chips was like printing money.
OCZ left the system memory market to focus on solid state drives in part because it grew tired of razer thin profits in the struggling DRAM sector. Memory makers choosing to weather the profit drought would probably like it if more vendors packed their bags and left. Too bad for them, AMD has decided to crash the memory party, bringing the weight of its own brand name to the already highly competitive DDR3 memory market.
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