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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.
A Blue Screen of Death by a computer yields a Black Screen of Death on an ocean. Interesting. Kill all humans, anyone?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
What color did it turn when the rig exploded?
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.
There are faulty engineering and management decisions every step of the way when producing this well. This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life. 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?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
Yes; steaks cost massive amounts of money, but what does that have to do with what's at stake?
life and limb [...] at steak
Hannibal, is that you?
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+
I don't know about that, steak from a used up dairy cow can be had for fairly cheap, though at that point the quality is at stake.
Dateline -- Louisana. Several millions of barrels of saliva from FS/OSS zealots on Slashdot fouled the gulf today when they thought maybe, just Mayyybe, Microsoft might have somehow, have tenuously been connected to the previous oil spill. A foul stench of stale beer and tacos was reported along miles of beaches in Alabama, and was headed for Florida this evening.
In other words, sheesh! How speculative and sensationalist can a headline get?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not only that, but buried somewhere deep in the multi page EULA that nobody reads is the clause, "company shall not be held in indemnity for losses to person or environmental damage from deepwater oilwells bursting into flame due to defects in software, other than the cost of replacing defective media".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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?
Safety control systems, especially those where life and limb, as well as massive amounts of money, are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
Yes, that's why the nextgen ATC system for the US is being written in C++ (secure if you know how to herd cats effectively) (http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/202907.asp), instead of Ada (secure unless you ask a bunch of C++ programmers to write in Ada), whilst the UK is writing theirs using Ada (http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/199905389;jsessionid=QQKCSEKZREME5QE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN) . One of those two is well proven in safety-critical systems. The other is used to write Windows. I wonder which was used for the Deepwater Horizon?
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
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
I was watching the testimony and he stated that it was a Windows NT system and was constantly giving a BSOD. They had replaced and reimaged the HDD over and over but it still kept happening. There were new servers, workstations, etc standing by and waiting to be installed, but another problem creeped in. They were waiting for another ship to figure out a way to run the old software on the new machines. Once that other ship could get it working and document it, they would then do the replacement on their end. I'm guessing it was a Windows NT 4 workstation.
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.
If it turns out these crashes are Windows blue screens, the media will jump all over Microsoft
Well, before all the Microsoft Haters pile on, according to this the Control System in place was something called Cameron Multiplex Control System, which I've also seen referred to as Cameron MUX and CAMITROL. I am not pretending to be an expert in these things, just thought I'd share what little Googling turned up.
In short, it looks pretty unlikely that there's going to be a red hot poker headed toward Redmond over this.
On that note, I really gotta check up with newegg.ca on my brand new Pentium III. I should've paid for fast shipping =(
You've obviously never worked at a Fortune 500 company. The simplest things take weeks, if not months, to requisition. Then add submitting a labor request to have it installed. Add in a helicopter trip to get the tech and the equipment to the rig and you've got massive delays. Seems like they need expedited procedures for life-critical safety systems. (Sorry that was obvious wasn't it).
but you've already agreed that regulatory regimes don't work, and don't prevent any of the problems you've mentioned.
Do you think Chernobyl was caused by greed and profit, and insufficient government oversight? (PS: It happened in _the Soviet Union_, land of small government and evil capitalists, right?)
Everything _does_ have a price. Everything.
Regarding Haiti: no, Haiti is nothing like what libertarians want. Haiti has an oppressive government with rampant corruption at every level, all the way down to the traffic cop. Authority invites corruption. Libertarians want fewer authorities. The result should be less corruption.
People, even basically good people, will behave predictably in the face of incentives. You've not addressed how you will change the incentives for corner cutting, non-compliance, and incompetence in regulatory regimes, so arguing that these regulatory regimes should be kept, strengthened, or expanded, isn't a reflection of a solution, but of an ideology.
That you are also unwilling to discuss things without resorting to insults does nothing to solidify your position.
I've read many of your posts; you're very angry, and very dismissive, but very short on arguments. It's fine to be angry and dismissive from time to time, but please show your work.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.
I call bullshit, a real windows admin would have enough servers that he would see blue screens from bad ram every so often.
In most multi million dollar operations some kind of redundancy is built in.
I am thinking there was a laptop or other desktop in a non critical role
that could have stepped into the role.
I think bad management plus ppl making excuses to not fix the problem
are often at the root of the issue.
We have a "not my problem" cutlure that spends more time looking for
excuses to deflect something than just fixing it and moving on.
I have been doing this for over 25 years so I can speak with some experience.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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
I've worked on the computer systems that many of these rigs run and they are generally done using one of the following Operating Systems:
Solaris 9/10 SPARC
Windows 2003
None of them, at least none of the ones made by Seimens, Honeywell, Invensys, or Emerson run on Linux, BSD, or any other OS. The Solaris versions are being phased out in favor of Windows derivatives because developers for them and support/training personnel are cheaper to come by than those who can write code for or comprehend the workings of *NIX systems.
It is, in all honesty, a bit scary to think there are a growing number of both Power Plants (Gas, Coal, Oil, Hydro, and Wind) and Offshore Oil Rigs that run entire solutions based around Microsoft Windows platforms. While these companies state in their marketing that they offer full redundancy, options to run 2 or more "backup" stations, and even 5 x 9's SLA, both design control automation and system controls solutions are quite flawed.
The main issue here is that many of these companies offer products that have nearly no competition from others in the market. Each company has their strengths and weaknesses that a majority of the customers know about, so it's not a matter of bidding against competition so much as it is about "How quickly can you get it done and can you do it for this price?"
I hope that something good comes out of this for that Industry, they have been needing a shot in the foot for quite some time over it.