johnnym24 - Slashdot User

Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents 773

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 09, 2008 @10:55AM from the lotta-finger-pointing dept.

musther writes "An Australian airline Qantas Airbus A330-300, suffered 'a sudden change of altitude' on Tuesday. "The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin." Now it seems Qantas is seeking to blame interference from passenger electronics, and it's not the first time; 'In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course.' Is there any precedent for wireless electronics interfering with aircraft systems? Interfering with navigation instruments is one thing, but causing changes in the 'elevator control system' — I would be quite worried if I thought the aircraft could be flown with a bluetooth mouse."

Reducing Boot Time On a General Linux Distro 354

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @11:34AM from the replace-the-disembarculator dept.

Linzer writes "In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."

Comment Vapourware (Score 1) 159

by johnnym24 on Friday January 26, 2007 @06:58AM (#17766294) Attached to: Via Debuts Smallest PC Mobo Format Yet

This is quite clearly vapourware. I would be very surprised to see a board for sale within the next 2 years. With their previous generation, VIA announced NANO boards a good few years before you could actually buy one. Don't hold your breath.

HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'? 629

Posted by Zonk on Sunday May 14, 2006 @09:10PM from the i-like-the-internet-breathing dept.

richdun writes "Yahoo! is carrying an AP story explaining how ISPs are worried large streaming videos could 'choke the Internet.' This is used as a yet another reason for tiered pricing for access to content providers." From the article: "Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example."

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