Month: August 2024
With X Blocked, Brazilians Turn to Other Social Media Platforms
The platform went dark across Brazil on Saturday, sending online commentators to new digital town squares.
The platform went dark across Brazil on Saturday, sending online commentators to new digital town squares.
Inside Boeing’s Factory Lapses That Led To the Alaska Air Blowout
Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the “door plug” incident “was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews” in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing’s quality control system “failed to catch the faulty work.”)
But the details tell a larger story. The newspaper bases their conclusion on “transcripts of federal investigators’ interviews of a dozen Boeing workers, synchronized with an internal Boeing document obtained by The Seattle Times,” tracing the whole history of that panel’s production. Within a day of its fuselage arriving at the factory, “a small defect was discovered: Five rivets installed by Spirit on the door frame next to the door plug were damaged.”
That day, the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, repair of those rivets was handed to Spirit, which has contract mechanics on-site in Renton to do any rework on its fuselage. In the meantime, inspectors gave mechanics the OK to install insulation blankets, which covered the door plug. By the following Thursday, a Spirit mechanic had logged an entry in the official Federal Aviation Administration-required record of this aircraft’s assembly — the Common Manufacturing Execution System or CMES, pronounced “sea-mass” by the mechanics — that the rivet repair was complete: “removed and replaced rivets.” But that day, a Boeing inspector responded with a scathing rebuttal, stating that the rivets had not been replaced but just painted over. “Not acceptable,” read the work order. On Sept. 10, records show Spirit was ordered a second time to remove and replace the rivets…
[“Shipside Action Tracker”] entries show that after several days, the still-unfinished work order was elevated to higher-level Boeing managers. On Sept. 15, Boeing cabin interiors manager Phally Meas, who needed the work finished so he could get his crew to install cabin walls and seats, texted on-site Spirit manager Tran Nguyen to ask why the rivet work hadn’t been done, NTSB interview transcripts show. Spirit mechanics couldn’t get to the rivets unless the plug door was opened, Nguyen responded. He sent Meas a photo from his phone showing it was closed, according to the transcripts. It wasn’t Spirit’s job to open the sealed door plug. Boeing’s door team would have to do that, the records show. “He kept asking me how come there wasn’t work yet,” Nguyen told the NTSB. “The door was not open. That’s why there wasn’t work yet.”
By Sept. 17, the door was still closed, the rivets still unrepaired. The job was elevated again, to the next level of managers. On that day, according to the SAT record, senior managers worked with Ken McElhaney, the door crew manager in Renton, “to determine if the door can just merely be opened or if it needs removal….” [On September 18] at 6:48 a.m., a Boeing mechanic identified as a Door Master Lead texted a young Trainee mechanic on his team to come to the Alaska jet and open the door. The NTSB interviewed but did not name the Trainee or the Door Master Lead, who had almost 16 years at Boeing.
Filling in for the veteran mechanic on vacation, the Trainee was perhaps the least equipped to do this atypical job. He’d been at Boeing for about 17 months, his only previous jobs being at KFC and Taco Bell. “He’s just a young kid,” the Door Master Lead said…
More key quotes from the article:
Boeing put both employees on paid administrative leave.
“A company investigator accused one of them of lying. That employee told the NTSB that Boeing has set the pair up as scapegoats.”
“A 35-year veteran on the door team told NTSB investigators that he is ‘the only one that can work on all the doors’ and he was typically the only mechanic who would work on door plugs. That mechanic was on vacation on the two critical days, September 18 and 19 last year, when the door plug on the Alaska MAX 9 had to be opened and closed…”
“No quality inspection of the door plug was conducted, since no record of its opening and closing was ever entered in the system, documents show.”
The FBI ís investigating Boeing “for potential criminal negligence,” according to the article, “and has issued subpoenas using a Seattle grand jury.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the “door plug” incident “was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews” in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing’s quality control system “failed to catch the faulty work.”)
But the details tell a larger story. The newspaper bases their conclusion on “transcripts of federal investigators’ interviews of a dozen Boeing workers, synchronized with an internal Boeing document obtained by The Seattle Times,” tracing the whole history of that panel’s production. Within a day of its fuselage arriving at the factory, “a small defect was discovered: Five rivets installed by Spirit on the door frame next to the door plug were damaged.”
That day, the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, repair of those rivets was handed to Spirit, which has contract mechanics on-site in Renton to do any rework on its fuselage. In the meantime, inspectors gave mechanics the OK to install insulation blankets, which covered the door plug. By the following Thursday, a Spirit mechanic had logged an entry in the official Federal Aviation Administration-required record of this aircraft’s assembly — the Common Manufacturing Execution System or CMES, pronounced “sea-mass” by the mechanics — that the rivet repair was complete: “removed and replaced rivets.” But that day, a Boeing inspector responded with a scathing rebuttal, stating that the rivets had not been replaced but just painted over. “Not acceptable,” read the work order. On Sept. 10, records show Spirit was ordered a second time to remove and replace the rivets…
[“Shipside Action Tracker”] entries show that after several days, the still-unfinished work order was elevated to higher-level Boeing managers. On Sept. 15, Boeing cabin interiors manager Phally Meas, who needed the work finished so he could get his crew to install cabin walls and seats, texted on-site Spirit manager Tran Nguyen to ask why the rivet work hadn’t been done, NTSB interview transcripts show. Spirit mechanics couldn’t get to the rivets unless the plug door was opened, Nguyen responded. He sent Meas a photo from his phone showing it was closed, according to the transcripts. It wasn’t Spirit’s job to open the sealed door plug. Boeing’s door team would have to do that, the records show. “He kept asking me how come there wasn’t work yet,” Nguyen told the NTSB. “The door was not open. That’s why there wasn’t work yet.”
By Sept. 17, the door was still closed, the rivets still unrepaired. The job was elevated again, to the next level of managers. On that day, according to the SAT record, senior managers worked with Ken McElhaney, the door crew manager in Renton, “to determine if the door can just merely be opened or if it needs removal….” [On September 18] at 6:48 a.m., a Boeing mechanic identified as a Door Master Lead texted a young Trainee mechanic on his team to come to the Alaska jet and open the door. The NTSB interviewed but did not name the Trainee or the Door Master Lead, who had almost 16 years at Boeing.
Filling in for the veteran mechanic on vacation, the Trainee was perhaps the least equipped to do this atypical job. He’d been at Boeing for about 17 months, his only previous jobs being at KFC and Taco Bell. “He’s just a young kid,” the Door Master Lead said…
More key quotes from the article:
Boeing put both employees on paid administrative leave.
“A company investigator accused one of them of lying. That employee told the NTSB that Boeing has set the pair up as scapegoats.”
“A 35-year veteran on the door team told NTSB investigators that he is ‘the only one that can work on all the doors’ and he was typically the only mechanic who would work on door plugs. That mechanic was on vacation on the two critical days, September 18 and 19 last year, when the door plug on the Alaska MAX 9 had to be opened and closed…”
“No quality inspection of the door plug was conducted, since no record of its opening and closing was ever entered in the system, documents show.”
The FBI ís investigating Boeing “for potential criminal negligence,” according to the article, “and has issued subpoenas using a Seattle grand jury.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China’s chip capabilities just 3 years behind TSMC, teardown shows
submitted by /u/skididapapa [link] [comments]
submitted by /u/skididapapa
[link] [comments]
How keep your laptop’s battery in good health
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
The rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power most of our laptops may be the most practical battery tech we have right now, but they naturally degrade over time as their ions flow back and forth — it’s an inevitable consequence of the way they’re built and the way they work. Eventually, the batteries can’t hold as much of a charge.
Most modern laptops now come with some kind of smart charging technology built in, to limit the number of full charges that happen. How this is implemented varies between laptops — I’ll talk about this, as well as other ways to ensure the battery on your MacBook or Windows laptop stays as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
General battery health
As with smartphones, because of the chemical reactions happening inside your laptop’s battery, fully charging it or fully discharging it puts more stress on the battery and shortens its life. According to Microsoft, keeping a laptop plugged in at a 100 percent charge isn’t recommended when it comes to long-term battery health, so it suggests that users try and avoid full charges and full discharges as much as possible.
Then there’s temperature: Heat and cold aren’t good for battery health. They affect the chemical reactions inside the battery and increase internal wear and tear, so make sure your laptop is kept out of boiling hot cars or off of freezing cold balconies as much as possible — and if you do let your laptop get too hot or cold, slowly bring it down to a more normal temperature. (This also goes for extended periods of intense use — if your device starts getting too hot, take a break.)
You also need to consider temperature and charging if you’re going to be stowing your laptop away for a while. Make sure it’s kept in a cool and moisture-free space, and charge the battery up to 50 percent before shutting down the laptop, which limits the chances of damage from a full discharge.
Even simple steps like keeping case fans clean and clear can help: the better the air circulation inside your laptop, the cooler the components will run and the less power they’ll draw.
You might also want to reduce the brightness of the screen, too, and make sure all of your software is up to date — newer versions of programs and operating systems are typically more efficient and less demanding.
Battery health advice for Macs
Screenshot: Apple
Modern MacBooks come with an Optimized Battery Charging feature.
Apple MacBooks use a built-in feature called Optimized Battery Charging, which will only charge the battery past 80 percent when it thinks it’s needed. According to Apple, temperatures and previous charging patterns are used to help make this decision.
Macs equipped with Apple Silicon (as opposed to an Intel processor) have Optimized Battery Charging turned on by default. If, for any reason, you want to turn it off:
From the Apple menu, select System Settings…,
On the Battery tab, click the small “i” next to Battery Health.
You’ll see the Optimized Battery Charging on / off toggle.
If you have a Mac with an Intel processor, the feature may still be on by default, depending on your OS. If you want to check that or turn it on / off:
From the Apple menu, select System Preferences > Battery
Go to Battery > Battery Health
Look for Manage battery longevity and turn it on or off.
You can reduce battery strain further in the Battery tab: click Options to set the screen to dim and to stream video at a lower quality (reducing system strain) when you’re on battery power, for example.
There’s also a special Low Power Mode, though Apple doesn’t say much about it, except that it reduces energy usage. Select the Low Power Mode drop-down menu, and you can set it to be on all the time, just when you’re relying on battery power, or just when you’re using a power adapter.
Screenshot: Apple
Apple’s Battery page offers a Low Power Mode and indicators of how your battery’s health is doing.
To reduce energy use even further:
Select the Lock Screen tab in System Settings.
Select when to turn off the display of an inactive laptop by using the Turn display off on battery when inactive drop-down menu.
Something else to think about is reducing the number of apps you’ve got running at any one time: the less power you use running apps you don’t need, the less often you’ll have to charge the battery. Cutting down on the number of programs launching with macOS can help here.
Battery health advice for Windows
Windows offers a feature called Smart charging as an equivalent to the Mac’s Optimized Battery Charging feature, though it’s up to individual laptop manufacturers as to whether or not it’s implemented and how exactly it works. You’ll have to check with your particular systems manufacturer if your laptop has it and if you can turn it on or off.
Screenshot: Microsoft
While some features might vary, depending on the manufacturer, there are several ways to optimize battery use on the “Power & battery” page.
There are other power management settings on your computer that can conserve energy use:
Launch Settings from the Start menu.
Select System > Power & battery.
Click Screen and sleep to set how long the system waits before turning off the screen.
Choose Power mode to tell Windows whether to prioritize performance or battery life.
Click Battery saver to have Windows’ low power mode turn on at a certain battery level, or to keep it on indefinitely.
Battery usage can let you know how well your battery is functioning, and how much power your apps are using.
You may also have a section called Energy recommendations at the top of the Power & battery page; it doesn’t hurt to click on that and check out some of those recommendations.
As on macOS, making sure you’re running only the apps you need to be running will further ease the strain on the battery — it’s a good idea to double-check the programs starting up with Windows to make sure there’s nothing running in the background that you’re not aware of.
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
The rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power most of our laptops may be the most practical battery tech we have right now, but they naturally degrade over time as their ions flow back and forth — it’s an inevitable consequence of the way they’re built and the way they work. Eventually, the batteries can’t hold as much of a charge.
Most modern laptops now come with some kind of smart charging technology built in, to limit the number of full charges that happen. How this is implemented varies between laptops — I’ll talk about this, as well as other ways to ensure the battery on your MacBook or Windows laptop stays as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
General battery health
As with smartphones, because of the chemical reactions happening inside your laptop’s battery, fully charging it or fully discharging it puts more stress on the battery and shortens its life. According to Microsoft, keeping a laptop plugged in at a 100 percent charge isn’t recommended when it comes to long-term battery health, so it suggests that users try and avoid full charges and full discharges as much as possible.
Then there’s temperature: Heat and cold aren’t good for battery health. They affect the chemical reactions inside the battery and increase internal wear and tear, so make sure your laptop is kept out of boiling hot cars or off of freezing cold balconies as much as possible — and if you do let your laptop get too hot or cold, slowly bring it down to a more normal temperature. (This also goes for extended periods of intense use — if your device starts getting too hot, take a break.)
You also need to consider temperature and charging if you’re going to be stowing your laptop away for a while. Make sure it’s kept in a cool and moisture-free space, and charge the battery up to 50 percent before shutting down the laptop, which limits the chances of damage from a full discharge.
Even simple steps like keeping case fans clean and clear can help: the better the air circulation inside your laptop, the cooler the components will run and the less power they’ll draw.
You might also want to reduce the brightness of the screen, too, and make sure all of your software is up to date — newer versions of programs and operating systems are typically more efficient and less demanding.
Battery health advice for Macs
Screenshot: Apple
Modern MacBooks come with an Optimized Battery Charging feature.
Apple MacBooks use a built-in feature called Optimized Battery Charging, which will only charge the battery past 80 percent when it thinks it’s needed. According to Apple, temperatures and previous charging patterns are used to help make this decision.
Macs equipped with Apple Silicon (as opposed to an Intel processor) have Optimized Battery Charging turned on by default. If, for any reason, you want to turn it off:
From the Apple menu, select System Settings…,
On the Battery tab, click the small “i” next to Battery Health.
You’ll see the Optimized Battery Charging on / off toggle.
If you have a Mac with an Intel processor, the feature may still be on by default, depending on your OS. If you want to check that or turn it on / off:
From the Apple menu, select System Preferences > Battery
Go to Battery > Battery Health
Look for Manage battery longevity and turn it on or off.
You can reduce battery strain further in the Battery tab: click Options to set the screen to dim and to stream video at a lower quality (reducing system strain) when you’re on battery power, for example.
There’s also a special Low Power Mode, though Apple doesn’t say much about it, except that it reduces energy usage. Select the Low Power Mode drop-down menu, and you can set it to be on all the time, just when you’re relying on battery power, or just when you’re using a power adapter.
Screenshot: Apple
Apple’s Battery page offers a Low Power Mode and indicators of how your battery’s health is doing.
To reduce energy use even further:
Select the Lock Screen tab in System Settings.
Select when to turn off the display of an inactive laptop by using the Turn display off on battery when inactive drop-down menu.
Something else to think about is reducing the number of apps you’ve got running at any one time: the less power you use running apps you don’t need, the less often you’ll have to charge the battery. Cutting down on the number of programs launching with macOS can help here.
Battery health advice for Windows
Windows offers a feature called Smart charging as an equivalent to the Mac’s Optimized Battery Charging feature, though it’s up to individual laptop manufacturers as to whether or not it’s implemented and how exactly it works. You’ll have to check with your particular systems manufacturer if your laptop has it and if you can turn it on or off.
Screenshot: Microsoft
While some features might vary, depending on the manufacturer, there are several ways to optimize battery use on the “Power & battery” page.
There are other power management settings on your computer that can conserve energy use:
Launch Settings from the Start menu.
Select System > Power & battery.
Click Screen and sleep to set how long the system waits before turning off the screen.
Choose Power mode to tell Windows whether to prioritize performance or battery life.
Click Battery saver to have Windows’ low power mode turn on at a certain battery level, or to keep it on indefinitely.
Battery usage can let you know how well your battery is functioning, and how much power your apps are using.
You may also have a section called Energy recommendations at the top of the Power & battery page; it doesn’t hurt to click on that and check out some of those recommendations.
As on macOS, making sure you’re running only the apps you need to be running will further ease the strain on the battery — it’s a good idea to double-check the programs starting up with Windows to make sure there’s nothing running in the background that you’re not aware of.
How a Group of Teenagers Pranked ‘One Million Checkboxes’
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[link] [comments]
‘Catastrophic’ SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal
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[link] [comments]