Archive for the ‘NYT’ tag

How a stolen capacitor formula ended up costing Dell $300m (Guardian)

Though the American company had nothing to do with the industrial espionage in China in 2002 that led to faulty components, it paid the price with millions of faulty PCsIs the green capacitor faulty? Photo by hr.icio on Flickr. Some rights reservedDell sold millions of computers between 2003 and 2005 that had faulty components – specifically, capacitors, according to documents unsealed in a case being heard in the federal court in North Carolina.In an article in the New York Times, Ashlee Vance writes about the problems that Dell faced – and how it tried to prevent them becoming more widely known: Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.The documents do sound fascinating – though so far the only one from the case that that has made it onto the wider web from the case is this one – which is simply a list of documents that are no longer sealed. (The case is being heard at the Federal District Court in North Carolina.)In 2005, Dell announced that it was taking a $300m charge to cover the cost of fixing and/or replacing the faulty machines.The NYT then argues that The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America’s most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers.That may be true – but it’s not the whole story. Dell ran afoul, quite without realising it, of one of the most fascinating pieces of industrial espionage of recent times: the theft of a formula for making the electrolyte to go into capacitors from a Japanese company, which got taken to China, and then onto Taiwan – but somewhere, got messed up.How do I know? Because I wrote about it seven years ago: A scientist steals a secret formula for an electrical product from his Japanese employer and takes it to China. Then it is stolen again and turns up in Taiwan. But something goes wrong – and thousands, perhaps millions, of computers and electrical goods in the West begin to burn out or explode.It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it’s reality. Thousands of computers have failed and nobody is sure how many more products might go wrong because their capacitors – essential components to control the power supply – were made with faulty materials.In 2001, a scientist – name still unknown – left Rubycon Corporation Japan to go and work for the Luminous Town Electric company in China. Both companies made (among other things) electrolytic capacitors, which are usually used in power circuits. At the LTE Company, the scientist made a copy of the electrolyte – the chemical that goes inside the capacitors and enhances its capacitative properties.Later that year, the scientist’s staff defected to Taiwan, taking with them a copy of the electrolyte formula so they could set up their own company. Taiwan supplies 30 per cent of the world’s electrolytic capacitors and most of the big PC manufacturers get their machines assembled in Taiwan. But the defectors mis-copied the formula. After a few hours of operation, the electrolyte would leak hydrogen gas, before bursting the metal body of the capacitor. The electrolyte would then leak its brownish filling and could cause a fire.IBM confessed to having a problem – and so too, privately, did Dell at the time. But that was before it began selling millions of machines which had a consistent problem: the capacitors weren’t up to scratch.Because according to the NYT story, the problem that kept cropping up with those machines was, indeed, the capacitors. The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break.Passive Component Industry Magazine (passive components are things like capacitors and resistors) wrote about this in September 2002, though it didn’t know then quite how bad things would get. As Dell’s experience showed, it could get very bad indeed.Back in 2003, Dennis Zogbi, president of Paumanok Publications, an expert on the market for passive components, told me that the problem is that People want Western quality at Chinese prices, he said. Well, you can’t have both.The story continued well after that, though, with sites such as Badcaps staying on the back of manufacturers including Apple which had had the faulty components. Wikipedia refers to the capacitor plague – and though it does seem to have gone into remittance now, Chris Passalacqua, owner of Badcaps, suggests, They didn’t discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. However, it’s been going on way too long to simply blame on an industrial espionage boo-boo in my humble opinion, as this problem is still extremely common, and hasn’t slowed down. Personally, I think it all boils down to shoddy components that are manufactured by shoddy component makers.And that’s where we circle back to Dell’s problems. The NYT said that The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America’s most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers. And that’s certainly true: for years, Dell led because it could undercut rivals, and kept pushing the price down.But price and quality control are always in conflict – and in the end that seems to have done for Dell. While other companies had the capacitor problem too, they didn’t suffer it as long as Dell appears to have. So it was partly something Dell couldn’t have expected to have control over, namely the electrolyte formula in the capacitors in the motherboards and/or power supplies – but also partly something Dell could have acted on, which was the repeated failure of those capacitors. Meanwhile, if anyone does have a Pacer account and wants to repost those court documents, please link them below.DellCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Her name is Alyssa, and she’s not a terrorist

If you believe the US Department of Homeland Security, the world faces a threat from an army of terrorists aged 6 and below. In case you have a young child at home, it’s time to be afraid…be very afraid.

This week, the US homeland security department put a six-year-old Indian origin American girl on the "no fly" list on the grounds of having suspected ties to terrorists. I guess the next time young Alyssa Thomas is at the airport, security personnel will be checking for rocket-propelled grenade launchers in her backpack.

Apparently, sleeper cells of toddlers have been activated all over the world and they are going to unleash mayhem with lethal weapons like dirty diapers and terror tantrums. The next step should be creating a new paramilitary force with an army of babysitters.

The most important action to combat this terrifying army of tiny tots would be pumping in huge sums of US money into Pakistan and of course bribing the Afghan warlords, now known by the new misnomer of the Good Taliban. (Now we have Good Taliban and Bad Taliban. Who’s the Ugly Taliban? ISI? )

Homeland Security’s methods — a mixture of paranoia, government inefficiency and sheer stupidity — are as ridiculous as they get. And this is not the first time they’ve done this. The New York Times published a story in January about an 8-year-old American boy on the US no-fly list. In fact, Mikey Hicks, 8, has been facing flight trouble since he was 2.

NYT quoted Mikey’s mom as saying: “Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal…a terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”

So what does one do in a situation like this? My daughter is 2 years old and on some days she can be quite a terror at home. I guess I need to pack her off to an LeT training camp in PoK soon.

NYT to ‘tweet’ no more!

New York Times standards editor, Phil Corbett has sent out a memo banning the use of the word “tweet.” He noted that the word was used at least 18 times in the newspaper in the past month and should be dropped.

NYT demands Pulse app be pulled from App Store (CNET News)

A day after Steve Jobs demoed the news headline app at WWDC, the newspaper’s parent company says it’s an illegal use of its free RSS feed.

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Toyota Says It Will Recall Prius in Japan Because of Braking Problems

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Toyota Says It Will Recall Prius in Japan Because of Braking Problems

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Dow Industrials Post First Close Below 10,000 Since Nov. 4

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Dow Industrials Post First Close Below 10,000 Since Nov. 4

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Dow Posts First Close Below 10,000 Since Nov. 4

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Dow Posts First Close Below 10,000 Since Nov. 4

nytimes: NYT’s Michael Zimbalist, V.P. of R&D, offers a glimpse into the digital future – http://nyti.ms/dC2ZVZ (via @nytimesbits)

nytimes: NYT’s Michael Zimbalist, V.P. of R&D, offers a glimpse into the digital future – http://nyti.ms/dC2ZVZ (via @nytimesbits)

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Saints Beat Colts in Super Bowl, 31-17

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Saints Beat Colts in Super Bowl, 31-17

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Saints Win Super Bowl Over Colts, 31-17

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: Saints Win Super Bowl Over Colts, 31-17

nytimes: ATTN: SNOWBOARDERS: NYT’S @gabrieldance wants you to get radical, get vertical and get your tricks uploaded here! http://bit.ly/9uHHkw

nytimes: ATTN: SNOWBOARDERS: NYT’S @gabrieldance wants you to get radical, get vertical and get your tricks uploaded here! http://bit.ly/9uHHkw

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: ‘Avatar’ and ‘The Hurt Locker’ Lead Oscar Nominations

nytimes: NYT NEWS ALERT: ‘Avatar’ and ‘The Hurt Locker’ Lead Oscar Nominations

On the iPad – Stupidest Thing to Ever Come out of the NYT?

OK, so I missed on the name – iPad not iTablet, but yes I was excited to see that the new Apple iPad will be running the Navigation Apps that are in the App store. The NYT Blog is asking the question if the iPad – at $800 will be the final nail in the GPS coffin….um, have you checked the weather outside? We’re fresh off a recession with the forecast for a slow recovery. Not too many people are going to be buying these things at that price compared with a $100 GPS that works really well. Engaging headline? Yes. Intelligent assertion? No.

Is the standalone GPS future solid for certain or will mobile smart phones take over? Not really sure, but I am pretty certain that an $800 Apple product isn’t going to kill the GPS market overnight, or even in a few years; there will be other factors at work that will make the GPS market change dramatically without the influence of the iPad.