Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Yes yes yes (Score 4, Informative) 405

In the future I expect more and more small businesses and boutiques.

Small businesses fail/close at an extremely high rate.
It's something like 25% after 1 year and 50% after 4 years.
After that, there's a roughly 5% attrition rate per year.

Of course, this varies by industry, but for the most part, it's +/- 5%.
If you want exact numbers, you'd have to dig them up at SBA.gov

Comment England (Score 3, Informative) 54

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives

In two tense meetings last June and July [2013] the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

I would no longer consider England a safe country to use as a backup for documents that the American government wants back.

Comment Re:Define "counterfeit" (Score 1) 35

Most of the accused "counterfeit" chips I've read about aren't "counterfeit" at all.

Please feel free to share what you've been reading.

The general term in the industry is "gray market"... gray because it's not purely black market, and because of the difficulty in distinguishing what the illegality is when a Chinese factory has substituted a working used part for an OEM part.

I'd like to know where you read that Chinese vendors have "substituted a working used part for an OEM part"
Here's where I read that counterfeit chips are a problem:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/1940247/man-pleads-guilty-to-selling-fake-chips-to-us-navy
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/0255231/us-military-trying-to-weed-out-counterfeit-parts
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/29/0038231/gao-sting-finds-more-fake-military-parts-from-china

Comment Re:Faraday Cage / Tempest (Score 4, Informative) 142

Polite language: red herring

Otherwise: I call BullShite

Am I really the only one who looked at the actual FAA Directive?

SUMMARY:
We are adopting a new airworthiness directive (AD) for all The Boeing
Company Model 737-600, -700, -700C, -800, -900, and -900ER series airplanes, and
Model 777 airplanes. This AD was prompted by testing reports on certain Honeywell
phase 3 display units (DUs). These DUs exhibited susceptibility
to radio frequency emissions in WiFi
frequency bands at radiated power levels below the levels that the
displays are required to tolerate for certification of WiFi system installations.

Clarification of Cause of Unsafe Condition
The cause of the unsafe condition stated in the Discussion section of this AD is a
known susceptibility of the Phase 3 DUs to RF transmissions inside and outside of the
airplane. This susceptibility has been verified to exist in a range of RF spectrum (mobile
satellite communications, cell phones, air surveillance and
weather radar, and other systems), and is not limited to WiFi transmissions.

Request to Withdraw the NPRM
(78 FR 58487, September 24, 2013)

[Virgin Australia] VOZ stated that during testing of the WiFi inflight entertainment system on the
VOZ Model 737NG fleet, it noted that the DU blanking occurred only when the WiFi
radiated power source (set-up in the flight deck) was increased to a high level. VOZ also
stated that under normal operating conditions of the WiFi radiated power, there was no
blanking of the DU, but interference was present only at a certain frequency. [...]

Request to Disclose Underlying Data
in Support of the NPRM (78 FR 58487,September 24, 2013)

[...]

The susceptibility of phase 3 DUs to RF transmissions was initially identified
during a WiFi STC installation by an operator and a WiFi vendor and reported to the
FAA. As a result of this discovery, we performed a risk assessment for in-service
airplanes equipped with phase 3 DUs using our established COS process, which
determined that an AD action was warranted for this issue. In addition, Boeing did an
independent safety review and also determined that the DU blanking was a safety issue
using its own risk assessment process.

I only got half way through the 23 page directive.
Feel free to give it a full examination.

Comment Re:Depends on target market (Score 1) 159

You can also use this as an opportunity to educate your customers.
Start including text about 'why we are open' on the website and on the bug tracker.
Maybe push it out with marketing materials.

The best sales pitch I ever got was while traveling overseas: "I'll rip you off, but not too much"
He was honest that tourists don't get the best price and offered not to take too much advantage.

Software has bugs. Being honest about it can be part of the sales pitch.

Comment Re:The pot calling the kettle black (Score 3, Interesting) 261

China is kicking the worlds ass when it comes to clean air generation progress.

China is moving its dirty coal burning plants away from the cities, not getting rid of them

Coal gas boom in China holds climate change risks

This is the first of more than 60 coal-to-gas plants China wants to build, mostly in remote parts of the country where ethnic minorities have farmed and herded for centuries. Fired up in December, the multibillion-dollar plant bombards millions of tons of coal with water and heat to produce methane, which is piped to Beijing to generate electricity.

It's part of a controversial energy revolution China hopes will help it churn out desperately needed natural gas and electricity while cleaning up the toxic skies above the country's eastern cities. However, the plants will also release vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, even as the world struggles to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stave off global warming.

If all of the plants start up, the carbon dioxide they'd release would equal three-quarters of all energy-related carbon emissions in the U.S., according to U.S. government data and energy experts from Duke and Stanford universities. That is far more than now produced in China by burning coal, the country's main source of power.

And the nuclear plants they have under construction will produce more power than the USA's (#1) and France's (#2) nuclear power combined.
Yet they will still need all that dirty coal power to meet their energy demands.

Comment Re:More lucky than careful... (Score 5, Informative) 342

Dude, you didn't even read the article you linked:

However, amid the renewed hype over the easily cracked code, a crucial element has been largely overlooked: Though the physical code preventing an unauthorized missile launch may have been all zeroes, the process of arming the actual nuclear warhead was much more involved, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. This is the seemingly made-for-Hollywood process involving the simultaneous turning of keys, "Emergency War Order" safes and verified launch codes, which presumably were not all zeros.

An unarmed missile is barely a dirty bomb.

Comment Re:"Stakeholders" (Score 2, Insightful) 132

Why do the ISP's want to break net neutrality? It's related to an ongoing fight between Netflix and pretty much every ISP on earth.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the point of Net Neutrality.
It's not just about the Netflix fight.

The biggest ISPs are increasingly turning into content providers and this puts them in direct competition with online service providers.

The idea behind Net Neutrality is to prevent these conglomerates from using their control of the network to either force payments from other companies (extracting rent from Netflix) or to force consumers into using co-branded offerings.

If you look at the wireless world, where the same rules don't apply, carriers are already taking money from other corporations to give you Facebook access (a co-branded offering) with no data charges.

Net Neutrality is fundamentally about preventing monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
Just because a market is "free" does not magically make it competitive.

Slashdot Top Deals

When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Working...