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BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon
ctdownunder passes along this excerpt from a NY Times article about a rig worker's testimony concerning the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon well:
"The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident. ... On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to 'bypass mode.' When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded. ... Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.' 'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.' Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said."
The article doesn't mention whether it was specifically a Windows BSOD, or just an error screen that happened to be blue.
For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death. 'It would just turn blue,' he said.
So they didn't have proper computer administration in place? If my own computer started BSOD'ing often and for months, I would do something about it. I would especially do something about it if it was an important system, irrelevant to if it was Windows, Linux or any other OS.
It's not like it BSOD'd once and caused it. It was BSOD'ing for months.
For example, they KNEW that the BOP (blowout preventer) was not functioning correctly. one of the 2 control systems was out, and they had been bringing up pieces of the rubber seal in the test fluid. They were cutting corners on their cut corners. You'd think this would serve as exhibit A to silence all the "GOVERNMENT R BAD, CORPORATIONS R GOOD" nutcases in the USA today, but unfortunately it does not seem to have had that effect.
I mean, the whole rig's cost is in the hundreds of millions (Wiki says $560 mil but google link said $350 mil). The whole disaster is in the tens of billions, ain't it?
You'd think they would do anything and spare no cost to keep the fucking thing in working order and floating.
Makes the $500,000 a day lease look like pennies.
Cutting corners is the corporate way. I have seen so much "Mickey Mouse" stuff at places I've worked it disgusts me. Untrained workers, electrical boxes in pools of water, large pumps at refineries held in place by 4 bolts rather than the six bolts which were intended to be used etc. But of course, none of these problems are the CEO (or board members) of BP's fault. They only take credit when things go right. Avoiding responsibility is the name of the game.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
BP paid 20 billion dollars to avoid the criminal charges.
The question is why is there not criminal prosecutions for bad engineering that leads to the loss of life? Why is it that only people with guns who kill people get criminal prosecutions?
IMNL but be very, very careful where you are going with this. I submit this as an example: If you built a machine and it happened to be involved in the death of several people a prosecutor could argue that your machine was 'bad engineering' and if they found sufficient evidence that people disagreed with you and were able to convince a jury of this you would end up in jail. Now if you were in a project where everyone was in agreement that it was a good idea then he could potentially still argue collusion. I'd imagine that you would have 'tolerances' but even these could possibly be argued as bad engineering, because why would you unleash upon the people a machine that statistically would kill a certain number of people?
If all we do is prosecute failure then no one would be willing to risk their lives to innovate. The only real loss here is if the industry learns nothing and repeats its mistake.
Nobody is bashing Windows so far, yet it seems to be what the editor look for when he wrote the headline. Has Windows improved enough that nobody try to make fun of it anymore, or slashdotters are already older and more mature?
Got Pike?
Wouldn't that be what a jury of your peers is for? If a prosecutor can convince a jury consisting of engineers that you deliberately cut corners and followed bad engineering practices causing loss of life then I think it's reasonable you should be punished for causing death (I can't remember the proper term for accidental manslaughter right now)
the regulations don't matter in this case. i'm glad you admit we need some regulations, but the real issue here is regulator==regulated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072205133.html?hpid=topnews
the lobbyists, the interior officials, the corporate assholes: all the same people
all the same smoochy same golf hole playing same bar attending backslapping crowd of assholes
that's why we had the disaster in the gulf
you can pass all the regulations you want, it doesn't matter if the ones who are supposed to be policing the industry ARE the industry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A company we hired nearly destroyed the Gulf of Mexico... What's that got to do with us?
One our business partners was rating these bonds as AAA when they were worthless, and we were busy making billions passing the bonds off as good investments... What's that got to do with us?
The company we hired to dispose of this toxic waste is just dumping it in a river... What's that got to do with us?
In effect, modern capitalism is a system of mafia thugs and their hired patsies who operate technically within the law, as long as they hire an agent to do their dirty work to take the fall. Any of the real costs can be passed off to the public, either though bailouts or just ruining the commons.
From what I recall, this rig had been in place since 2000 and hadn't been in dry dock since launch. My guess is that they wanted to run a tried and true OS that was compatible with all their systems / sensors / panels, etc and Win2K had just come out. I remember the place I was working at in 2000 was still running NT4 so it doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't have upgraded. I'd love to know why their IT staff didn't send a modern workstation with VMWare Player and a NT4 image installed to run the system. Would have saved a lot of pain and trouble ...
If the monitoring systems weren't working right, while it didn't produce the penultimate cause, it points to a lot more going wrong- and it most definitely didn't help things any.
I think we're going to find that BP was cutting corners everywhere so they could maximize profits in the short term- just like every other idiot company right at the moment.
Transocean was not an independent contractor. BP directed the Transocean employees on what to do. The Transocean employees sometimes told the BP executives that they were risking a failure of the well, but their concerns were vetoed. Decisions such as the choice of casing, what material to use to plug the well, and whether or not to try to fix the safety equipment were all made by BP and executed by Transocean.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Care to take a guess as to what OS the space shuttles run? Hint: it's more than 12 years old, and considered very mission critical.
Please don't read my sig.
Investigations of most disasters reveal not a single cause, but a combination of factors which lead to the disaster itself. Often, the absence of any one of those root causes may have avoided the disaster, or at least mitigated it to some degree. While I would not minimize the importance of the other factors which have already been acknowledged as key causes, identifying all the possible causes is critical to avoiding future repetition of the problem. If a computer-controlled alarm system was so faulty that its operators shut it down rather than endure its false alarms, we should give it due consideration as a potential contributing factor.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
This doesn't sound like a Windows BSOD at all. I'm not sure what DCS (distributed control system) they were using, but in my experience with Foxboro I/A is that when things turn blue it mean's there's no data coming in. The term I usually hear is "Smurfed" because somebody thought the color (cyan) looked like a Smurf.
This would possibly be due to an analog input signal that fell out of the 4-20mA range, or a loss of communications within the DCS or from an outside controller.
its a libertarian utopia
every abuse by government you decry, does not happen in haiti. instead, those same abuses, and a hundred thousand worse abuses, happen on every street corner, by thugs and mafia instead
fact, whether you realize it or not: make government small, and a power vacuum will exist that will be filled by entities that are not accountable to you. being not accountable to you, there is no recourse when they abuse you. that really is the truth. someday you will wake up and realize and stop working so damn hard to destroy this country
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Investigations of most disasters reveal not a single cause, but a combination of factors which lead to the disaster itself. Often, the absence of any one of those root causes may have avoided the disaster, or at least mitigated it to some degree. While I would not minimize the importance of the other factors which have already been acknowledged as key causes, identifying all the possible causes is critical to avoiding future repetition of the problem. If a computer-controlled alarm system was so faulty that its operators shut it down rather than endure its false alarms, we should give it due consideration as a potential contributing factor.
That makes it even more inexcusable though. There are so many systems and procedures in place to prevent such a disaster that they had to really make a continued effort of disabling safety devices and skipping procedures to blow up the rig.