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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: teevee who wrote (74569)	8/6/2001 11:33:56 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116889

We need all our metals. Copper is with us for a while and has no need of substitution for many roles at present. Gold has little need for substitution for electronics either, as to save a pittance in circuit boards is probably not worth it. The cheapo retail products that use tin for ram sockets and the like are much more prone to failure. All the boards that I have trashed are tin ram sockets, or that and Cyrix chips. As soon as you see people trying to save nickels on high value critical usage machinery you can see that they will introduce failure in what otherwise could be a reliable product to depend on. It turned out for the 70's and 80's that computing electronic equipment had very low failure modes except for storage. This is the weak point. Electronic had been very reliable even in constant use. This is changing as the Korean crap made with tin is having unacceptably high failure on delivery and short life. Storage too is a question mark. Will the high cap hard drives last and will some kind of reliable back up fill the present backup reliability gap? Hard to tell. Right now trusting data to electronic storage and most read right mediums is becoming less and less of a sure thing. Replacing gold in electronics is a false economy, something like owning an F.o.r.d. or an SUV with Firestone tires. EC<:-}