Glass Half Empty

I love it when this sort of thing happens. Shenzhen is a HUGE industrial district in China, home to a large number of electronics manufacturers and fabrication plants. There is a 'blog' of sorts called Hack a Day, who try to act as a showcase of new and interesting hacks that people have created, remixing machinery in their local environment, building a web-server that fits in a matchbox, or whatever. Their quality can be a bit variable, in that some of their 'hacks' are rather obvious or contrived, but I guess we all had to start somewhere. Anyway, Hack a Day have created a few hacks in their own right, one of which is a rather handy little bus analyzer called the Bus Pirate.

Hack a Day made a deal with a company in Shenzhen to make Bus Pirates, and sell them to hobbyists who read Hack a Day. They're currently sold out.

They're currently sold out BECAUSE the Bus Pirate manufacturing line has completely exhausted Shenzhen's stock of PIC24FJ64 chips. There are Bus Pirates sitting around that are complete, save for this small but vital chip. That's ... a non-trivial number of chips.

Yay, Internet, for allowing this kind of thing to happen. Across the world, thousands of hobbyists have decided they wanted a Bus Pirate, and accidentally depleted a world industrial centre of a fairly common part.

The glass: half-full