In September we get invited to visit a Dell manufacturing facility in Limerick, Ireland where we see for ourselves the vast numbers of PCs, servers and notebooks that are manufactured there every working day. Although we officially weren’t allowed to take photos as the Dell management was afraid for corporate espionage we whip out the camera regardless and fill up a few memory cards with detailed pictures of the manufacturing miracle that is Dell. What impressed us most is the fact that the Dell business model enables them to have virtually no stock at the factory but still manage to manufacture and ship 20.000 PCs every day.



Fig 12. Hundreds of carton boxes containing PCs, servers, notebooks, etc. about to be shipped out.
September also marks the start of Computex in Taipei, Taiwan. Computex was officially supposed to start in June, but due to the SARS threat was postponed to September which is much better in my humble opinion as temperatures and humidity are at somewhat acceptable levels now. With over 1200 exhibitors and 2500 booths Computex is a showcase for the manufacturing potential and expertise of Taiwan, which thousands of different products on display. During Computex AMD officially launched their long awaited Athlon 64 processor and the conference itself was indeed littered with dozens of demo systems using the new AMD processor. And as you may have seen already, Computex easily had some of the most beautiful boothbabes we’ve ever had in front of our camera.