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NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout
will writes "The North American Electric Reliability
Council has released four documents concerning the
August 14th power outage power outage in the North East. The blackout
investigation homepage lists all NERC's documents relating to this
event. Press coverage is at The
Washington Post, CNN,
and CBS
News. The take home message: FirstEnergy
did it. The are, of course, denying
it." The report is also available at reports.energy.gov. Reader stinkydog writes "According to Yahoo News part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."
Can anyone tell me any unix system that can't run X-windows ? I've used a few in my time, and they've all been capable of running X ....
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
With UNIX, you get a long power cut once in a few years. With Windows, you'll have a 5 minute power cut to reboot the servers, every 1 hour. You pick
] This is Chapter 7 of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. The X-Windows Disaster chapter was written by Don Hopkins. [
How to make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.
- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. The idea was to allow a program, called a client, to run on one computer and allow it to display on another computer that was running a special program called a window server. The two computers might be VAXes or Suns, or one of each, as long as the computers were networked together and each implemented the X protocol.
[Footnote: We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relationships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server provides services, such as database service or computational service). For some perverse reason that's better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine "the client." This program displays its windows on the "window server." We're going to follow X terminology when discussing graphical client/servers. So when you see "client" think "the remote machine where the application is running," and when you see "Server" think "the local machine that displays output and accepts user input."]
The Nongraphical GUI
X was designed to run three programs: xterm, xload, and xclock. (The idea of a window manager was added as an afterthought, and it shows.) For the first few years of its development at MIT, these were, in fact, the only programs that ran under the window system. Notice that none of these program have any semblance of a graphical user interface (except xclock), only one of these programs implements anything in the way of cut-and-paste (and then, only a single data type is supported), and none of them requires a particularly sophisticated approach to color management. Is it any wonder, then, that these are all areas in which modern X falls down?
Ten years later, most computers running X run just four programs: xterm, xload, xclock, and a window manager. And most xterm windows run Emacs! X has to be the most expensive way ever of popping up an Emacs window. It sure would have been much cheaper and easier to put terminal handling in the kernel where it belongs, rather than forcing people to purchase expensive bitmapped terminals to run character-based applications. On the other hand, then users wouldn't get all of those ugly fonts. It's a trade-off.
The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want
The real reason the systems crashed was because because they were installing the newest NVIDIA drivers.