Ahh, I love the smell of media spin in the morning

[brynndragon]

It smells like bullshit.

I'm talking about the PS2 = conflict diamonds article going around as of late. The blame for the conflict behind a component that can be found in almost any small electronic device (including hearing aids and GPSes, not to mention cell phones and PCs) is being laid at the feet of a single console system. A console system that many gamers own but almost no one goes out to buy anymore since it's last gen, making the point of the article not prevention of conflict continuation through boycott but pure guilt-trip. Unless the Wii is too cute for genocide or something. . . more likely, picking on any other console could induce console corporate ad removal, while Sony wouldn't mind if the PS2 disappeared from the console market so maybe someone somewhere would buy a PS3.

Comments

[tober.livejournal.com]

Uh, wow, that article is special and by special in this case I mean "riding the short bus." I was not aware of this controversy because the closest I get to following gamer-related media is occasionally watching Zero Punctuation. Anyways... as an expert in the design and manufacture of electronics, I feel compelled to comment.

The component that contains tantalum (tantalum has few other uses) is known as a tantalum electrolytic (not "electric" as stated in the article) capacitor. They're pretty common in all manner of electronics. A capacitor is a device that stores energy in the form of electric field and capacitors in general are ubiquitous and necessary in electronics (the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor are the three most fundamental passive circuit elements). In consumer electronics, there are only three really common types of capacitor - multi-layer ceramic, aluminum electrolytic, and tantalum electrolytic (a fourth type, the polymer film capacitor, is seen occasionally in special applications). For reasons that I won't go into here, the tantalum type usually has the highest capacitance (the amount of energy it can store, more or less) per unit physical size of the capacitor. For certain applications it has also traditionally been the most cost-effective type. That tantalum has become quite expensive lately has essentially nothing to do with the PS2 and all to do with the global run-up in essentially all commodity prices (check gold lately?) and the decline of the dollar. Because they're generally no longer cheap and also because some people have ethical concerns about the circumstances under which tantalum is mined and refined, in general, designers are now using tantalum capacitors much less and often not at all... so it's not surprising that newer consoles (and newer other things) have few or no tantalum capacitors... and, as you point out, the PS2 is a bit long in the tooth at this point. When it was designed, the use of tantalum capacitors where appropriate was absolutely standard practice and I'm sure that competing consoles of the same generation used them too. Ok, I think I've said enough :)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Unless the Wii is too cute for genocide or something

You may have the right of it here. It's the cute fuzzy mammal of the console world; it can't possible have done anything wrong, can it? Look at those eyes!

(Same with TiVo, for sure.)

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

the Wii is all about genocide.

Chocolate

[robertdfeinman.livejournal.com]

You may not know the old Smothers Brothers routine about falling in a vat of chocolate. The punch line has to do with him shouting fire!

As he says: "If I had shouted chocolate!, would anyone have come?"

Re: Chocolate

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

That makes no sense - if someone yells Fire! I run the fuck away because being on fire isn't my idea of a good time. If someone yells Chocolate! you bet your ass people would come running towards it. People love chocolate. (I don't so much, but I know I'm an outlier)

[greyhame.livejournal.com]

Actually, as recently as about eighteen months ago (and, I think, probably more recently than that, but that was the first article I found) new PS2s were outselling the other three consoles.