Recipe for Disaster
Recipe for Disaster
With the announcement of another export quota, maddog laments the unreadiness of nations who allow themselves to fall prey to national monopolies.
Today in the newspaper I read that China was considering limiting the amount of rare earth it exports to other countries. Since China produces about 97 percent of all the rare earth metals used in electronics, such as integrated circuits, LCD TVs, and other high-tech components, this limit would do two things: raise prices on all these components and force companies to build more electronics factories in China to skirt the limit on raw materials.
Although these rare earth elements exist in other countries, for a long time it has been cheaper to get them from China, so potential rare earth supplies in other countries were not developed. Because rare earths are used in relatively small quantities to build relatively high-value goods, their shipping costs were negligible. Now that the prices of these rare earth materials are rising, other sources outside China are being developed, but they will not be ready until 2015.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
News
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Released
The latest release is focused on hybrid cloud.
-
Microsoft Releases a Linux-Based OS
The company is building a new IoT environment powered by Linux.
-
Solomon Hykes Leaves Docker
In a surprise move, Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker has left the company.
-
Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal
The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects
-
Gnome 3.28 Released
The latest GNOME rolls out with better contact management and new features for handling virtual machines.
-
Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux
Mozilla has picked the Snap package system to deliver its application to Linux users.
-
OpenStack Queens Released
The new release comes with new features for mission critical workloads.
-
Kali Linux Comes to Windows
The Kali Linux developers even managed to run full blown XFCE desktop via WSL.
-
Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04
It will be an ‘opt-out’ feature.
-
CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a paper describing their model for a serverless ecosystem.