Posted on 07/24/2010 10:30:38 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Testifying at a federal hearing on Friday, the chief electronics technician told of numerous instances of a "Blue Screen of Death" on the computer system responsible for monitoring and controlling drilling. The largest oil spill in American history may be due to a simple computer glitch.
The machine had been locking up for months, Williams said, producing what he and others on the crew called a "blue screen of death." "It would just turn blue. You'd have no data coming through," Williams said today, according to the New York Times' story. With the computer frozen, the driller would not have access to crucial data about what was going on in the well.
(Excerpt) Read more at hardocp.com ...
On needing a more suitable oprating system and saving billions of dollars ...
True. Plus lives, plus damage to the gulf.
Apple paid Xerox several million for a couple of hours looking at the interface and Xerox knew why Apple was looking at the interface and understood that Apple was making a graphical user interface. How exactly is that stealing?
RIM buying QNX to drive Blackberry car integration
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By Ryan Paul | Last updated 3 months ago
Blackberry maker RIM has made a deal to acquire QNX, the company behind the Neutrino real-time operating system (RTOS). The acquisition, which is expected to complete next month, will give RIM a foothold in car computing and open up opportunities for smart appliance integration.
Neutrino is an exceptionally well-engineered operating system built with a modular microkernal, a sophisticated IPC system, and a lightweight user interface layer. It offers some unusual features, such as support for network-transparent distributed processing. It is principally designed for use in embedded devices, but it can also be installed and run like a conventional desktop operating system
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QNX® products are designed for embedded systems running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH and x86 platforms, and a host of boards implemented in virtually every type of embedded environment.
This isn't a government job, so to speak, and while some might have time to surf sites which are more virus intensive than most, most people do not, and doing so is often frowned upon for the risks it can impose on the system. I can't say if some site blocking is used, because I have never tried to surf those sites (I own my computers, and won't subject them to that risk, besides, they are used to prepare final reports at my home, and the grandchildren who live with us occasionally have access--so no porn, ever.) When your living depends to some extent on the survival of your computers and your data, you don't take chances, and you have redundencies onsite.
No one wants to be 'the one' who screwed up the computers, either. A stunt like that would follow you for the rest of your career.
A tragic comedy of errors and getting DC involved will only add to the tragedy.
JBL ships MS-8 digital processor, promises to 'revolutionize' car audio
They have a nice little video audio clip at the link.
So basically we have BP telling DC how NT lead to a BSOD.
Looks pricey.
IT contractor indicted for sabotaging offshore rig management system
Mario Azar, 28 of Upland, Calif., was charged with illegally accessing and compromising a computer system used by Pacific Energy Resources Ltd. (PER) to monitor offshore platforms in California and Anchorage and to detect oil leaks. The indictment papers allege that Azar's actions affected the "integrity and availability" of the system and resulted in it becoming temporarily unavailable. Though no oil spill or environmental hazard occurred while the system was compromised, Azar's actions caused thousands of dollars in damage, the indictment said.
Suggest all the rig operators seek some expert help.
Xerox did try to sue them.
“USS Yorktown dead in water after divide by zero”
“...in September 1997, the Yorktown suffered a systems failure during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, VA., apparently as a result of the failure to
prevent a divide by zero in a Windows NT application. The zero seems to
have been an erroneous data item that was manually entered. Atlantic Fleet
officials said the ship was dead in the water for about 2 hours and 45
minutes. A previous loss of propulsion occurred on 2 May 1997, also due to
software. Other system collapses are also indicated. [Source: Gregory
Slabodkin, Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water,
Government Computer News, 13 Jul 1998, PGN Stark Abstracting from
http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/July13/cov2.htm] “
Damn...
I doubt the oil drilling ship was actually “run” by a Windows computer. The machinery is operated by industrial computers (Usually called PLC’s, but it can be proprietary computers designed for that specific equipment) that interface directly with real-world I/O. The Windows machines act as a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system and HMI (Human-Machine Interface). All the safety and interlock features in the system are in the PLC or even hard-wired into the machinery controls.
If the people that designed and programmed this rig actually use Windows computers to directly operate machinery, then they are fools. But no one does that. It is unheard of in any industry, especially a dangerous one.
This whole “BSOD caused the explosion” story is a red herring.
Nobody in a serious industry uses crap like Productivity 3000 PAC. That’s a product you sell to a small factory in light industry to automate something simple, and then its still usually an Epic Fail! Heavy industry relies on the big name equipment: Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Modicon, GE.
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