Slashdot Mirror
Sony Recalls 18,000 VAIO Laptops
STFS writes "Reuters has a story about Sony having to recall 18 thousand VAIO laptops because apparently there is some risk of users receiving a small electric shock "if you have connected your PC (laptop) to external power, you have disabled your phone line, (while) simultaneously being connected to a grounded peripheral, and you are touching a metal part of the PC, and your phone rings"!" I can't begin to count the number of times that happens ;)
And yet, they've received "fewer than 10 complaints", not zero, so someone must be doing it, especially since only a minority of affected users probably complain. I wonder what "disabled your phone line" means.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You can get the same effect without a computer. Just hold the end of a phone line with one hand and anything metal and gounded with the other and have somebdy call you. If anything this is a defect with the phone system, not the freaking computer!
This is because the phone company sends a 60-volt (if I remember correctly) pulse down the line to cause a ring...a leftover from the days when it they had to send enough energy to drive the electomechanical bell.
From the article... "There had been no injuries, McEvoy said, and fewer than 10 complaints had been received."
KARMA TAG! You're it.
as a former vaio laptop owner.. I will never buy a Sony product again. Dead after 15 months and extortionist prices from Sony to replace the bad motherboard. Was cheaper not only to buy new, but better laptop as well. Its amazing how much a company can turn you off to their products - not so much because something broke - but by their failure to offer any reasonable resolution. After all, we're not talking $50 calculators. While this recall is a step in the right direction I really wonder if it just caused an *internal* short, instead of perhaps 'shocking' the user, would they even bother.
Mary EcEvoy, a spokeswoman for Sony in the United States, said a user could receive a shock such as that from static electricity
Does it really hurt that much to warrant such a recall? Static electricity is fun to play with, not a violent killer. Go run around a carpet with your socks on and then attack somebody, its great!
Mods please note: The proper moderation for the above post is "Funny", not "Informative". Pay special attention to the address (which is obviously fake), and the Attn: line.
The story is reprinted at CNN here. The description of what you have to do to get shocked alone is worth the read.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Umm. I think they mean that the user disabled the phone line functionality in the Vaio, meaning the computer doesn't respond when someone calls that phone line.
Here's how I interpeted it. Your laptop environment meets the previously outlined criteria. Someone calls your phone, which can be thought of as a small electrical current being sent to your phone. Because the the phone line is disabled on the Vaio and Sony didn't design the system correctly, the electrical current from the phone travels into the laptop hardware, the metal frame I guess. The computer is grounded, and you are touching some metal part of the laptop (read conductor). Therefore, the electrical current is passed into you, resulting into a minor shock.
I am certainly not an EE, but that makes sense to me.
Keep in mind that not everybody returns their item during a recall. The risk of Sony having to replace all VAIOs is zero.
Ed Norton's character is not Jack.
Neither in the book nor in the movie is it made clear what his name actually is. His legal name may be Tyler, or it may not be. He also calls himself Rupert and Cornelius at the groups. Marls knows him as Tyler Durden, and Bob knew him as Cornelius. His actual name is never revealed.
So what about Jack? He never calls himself Jack. Jack is just a kind of joke thing. Norton's character was reading the magazine series with organs speaking in the first person "I am Jack's colon", "I am Jack's medula oblongata." and is greatly amused by these articles, and later when confronting his boss, he says "I am Jack's smirking revenge." He's just alluding to the amusing magazine articles, not saying that he IS Jack.
The laptop affected by the recall is the FR series, or FRV in the United States, a popular model with a large screen and with a price starting around $1,500.
db
Cig:
ôô
Erhm, the whole point that the PC is grounded is that the PC is grounded and not you.
There is a difference beeing grounded by your parents and a PC that is grounded. I am certainly not an EE, but that makes sense to me. In Norway we learn "grounding" (in both of the above meaning of the word) in elementary school.
what a bunch of damn panzies, ive been electrocuted numerous times while working on a nid b/c someone called at that moment and it aint NOTHIN compared to that time i got zapped by a.. i think... actually i cant really remember... what were we talking about again?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Even as obscure as this seems, it could easily kill you if delivered in just the right way.
It takes just MILLIamps to stop your heart. If you had just gotten out of salt water (or were sweaty...) and grabbed the laptop in one hand and a grounded water pipe with the other and your phone rang, it could potentially kill you just like that.
I'd think people with pacemakers would be even more vulnerable, but I don't know enough about them to comment further.
Sounds like Sony grounded the phone line to the laptop chassis, which is then grounded (probably) to the negative DC end of the power supply which is in turn grounded to common and/or ground on the wall socket. If you disconnect the power and hold the laptop and are then grounded in some way via holding a faucet or something you'd be the return path for the ring voltage.
The fix might be to run it through some sort of heavy resistance to reduce the voltage to something negligible in this situation.
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
As if the story were not unlikely enough...
It's my understanding that electricity doesn't work that way. Electricity needs to find ground; it will not shock you if it cannot. You can touch live wires so long as you are, say, wearing rubber boots and not in any way touching the ground. Standing barefoot on a damp basement floor, however...
So if the electricity is going down the chain to the dog (which it likely would not, since that's not the path of least resistance to the ground), the dog could only get shocked if the path was open. While urine would perhaps make this path more conducive (I can't honestly say I've stood in pee and shocked myself), it's higly unlikely any urination would be forced in the first place. Ergo, a path of lesser resistance would probably not be created.
So, in other words, it's humorous to those that know no better, but it sounds impossible to me.
(I am not an electrician, so someone here is perhaps more qualified to comment/correct me on this.)
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
A large electric shock across my hand (ie both contacts on my hand) may cause temporary numbness and some pain, but quite probably no lasting damage.
I've had one of these, both contacts on fingers on one hand. While there was no lasting damage, I wouldn't catagorize the pain as "some pain." More like incredible pain in my whole arm lasting for hours followed by a day of numbness.
I've also caught one of those ring tones through my body. Sharp pain, but it only while the current was flowing. It was a very different type of pain, the large current through my hand didn't hurt while I was being electrocuted, but hurt a lot afterward, the ringtone "shocked" me but didn't hurt afterward at all.
Someone mod this guy back down.
In the book and the movie, there is no indication of Norton's character's name, but in common discussion (scripts, this thread, IMDb.com credits, interviews, DVD commentary by Fincher himself), he IS in fact referred to as Jack, otherwise we'd be talking about Tyler, Marla and the Narrating Character played by Ed Norton In Fight Club. Narrator sounds too dry. Nevertheless, his character is referred to numerous times up and down the DVD commentary by Palahniuk, Uhls, and Fincher, not to mention the cast.
Marls knows him as Tyler DurdenShe knows Jack as Tyler, but she also knows he makes up names, as indicated when she points out the "Rupert" nametag.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right. :)
The key part is that you can get a shock when the phone rings. Very bad. That means the user is exposed to a low impedance connection to the phone line, which is illegal (FCC part 68). Sure, to feel the shock you need to have a return path to earth ground... and the circumstances spelled out make it seem highly improbably.
But consider that those 2 wires from the phone line are supposed to be galvanically isolated, via a transformer, optocoupler, high-voltage low-value capacitors, or some other safe barrier. Consumers are never supposed to be exposed to those bare telephone wires, which run on telephone poles with high voltage power lines overhead.
Sure, the 50 to 100 volt ring signal can give you a bit of a shock. But the real danger is that those telephone lines are not safe if there is a failure like a tree falls onto the lines or they're hit by lightning. That's why all telephones are required by the FCC to isolate those wires from the user.
The FCC also has strict requirements that all telephone equipment fail as an open circuit (equivilant to not taking the phone off the hook), even if the lines are hit with extreemly high voltage such as 12,000 volt power lines coming into contact with the phone line momentarily.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The notebook is never grounded as if you notice your standard ac adapter only has two prongs.
Most peripherals are not grounded either. So about the only thing that will be connected that is grounded is a monitor. (Some laser printers might be grounded but most deskjets won't be).
Apparently when a grounded peripheral is connected some of the ambient charge in the notebook is drawn off and sets up an imbalance when the phone rings. Look at the notebook on Sonystyle, most of it is plastic. Most of the metal is probably the ports in the back. The scenario described is pretty unlikely.
The flaming batteries that other notebook manufactures had problems with last year was more serious.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
If you want the details on this, look up Automatic Line Insulation Testing (ALIT). It's been in use for several decades, all the way back to electromechanical switching. It's a basic part of outside plant maintenance.
lol.. this news is about a week old (at least for me it is).. I work in the computer department at a local retailer and heard this news like the end of last month... I'm not sure if it's already posted but a quick search on this page didn't yield any results... but in any case, if anyone bought a Sony PCG-FRV25 notebook when it first came out about a week or two ago... that's the one they're talking about...