We can all sleep more soundly at night knowing that there will be 747 tankers available for those 'challenging homeland security' missions responding to chemical and/or biological attacks. If someone is so foolish as to unleash a chemical nerve gas attack on the town, the wise town leaders can place a quick telephone call to homeland security and order up a 747 tanker to respond and drop a load of 'chemical antidote' on us to ward off the ill effects. Yeppers, that should fix everyone up pretty good.
AMD makes a very nice Athlon64 chip but obviously AMD lacks the production capacity to sustain a 50+ % market share for any length of time. AMD has only one fab making the 64-bit chips, located in Dresden, Germany, while Intel has major fabs located in Oregon, New Mexico, China, and Ireland, and Israel. The Intel Pentium 4 is also a very nice chip and is more than adequate for most current software so people should not all decide all at once to buy AMD.
Yes, the US is losing its scientific dominance, and here are some of the reasons why:
1) Most 'research' funding is not directed towards 'research' but rather, on development of incremental technological improvements in complex weapon systems. Most bright, creative Americans don't find this work very fulfilling.
2) Most scientific research requires access to facilities that are beyond the reach of individuals. Most non-military 'research' at large corporations is narrowly focused on making improvements to existing products. (Look at how much money Microsoft spends on 'research' and how little they have to show for it.) Public universities can theoretically still carry out research based on intellectual curiousity rather than developing an improved method of killing people but are limited by the amount of grant money available, the available facilities, the policies of the particular institution, etc.
3) Most of the best new ideas come from small privately-funded companies who are driven by a creative, visionary leader. In the past, such a company would come out with a revolutionary idea, create an entire new technology, and then proceed to grow and become wildly successful. Beginning in the early '80s, though, the regulatory climate in the US for large corporations began to change such that now, when some large corporation is threatened by a new technology, it either finds some way to run the new company out of business or else buy out the new company and marginalize it as a threat to the status quo. If Thomas Edison were developing his electric light bulb today, there would one large gaslight corporation that would buy him out and then proclaim that the idea of electrical lights wasn't practical because it would require that wires be strung everywhere or something. A modern-day computer example would be the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process that AMD has recently been using to make some of its new processor chips. SOI results in much less power consumption per cycle and offers the potential for a significant cut in worldwide electric power consumption by server farms. Yet, SOI has barely made a dent in the status quo simply because the dominant x86 chipmaker, Intel, has not supported it, and instead focuses all of its energies on driving AMD into bankruptcy.
All the posts here about the deficiencies of the US educational system are just creating a smokescreen around the real problem. By and large, the US public educational system does a pretty good job of providing educational opportunities to bright, motivated kids, regardless of their income or background. The problem is that there is now much less that those bright, hard-working kids can do with their new knowledge than in the past.
"There was nothing before the
universe, because the universe defines the
concept of time. So there wasn't anything to "create" the universe
from."
I don't think the concept of time has any relevance to a God who
creates universes. Time is important only to the dwellers
within. The current Big Bang theory defines a time of
beginning for the universe but says nothing about time, mass, or energy
before that time of beginning. According to the Big Bang theory,
all mass, energy, space and time as we know them today were created at
one instant by the 'Big Bang.'
"Any apprarent randomness you
experience is a property of the universe, not a cause of it."
My reference to randomness is as a method of accounting for the
fact of the existence of our universe, if it was not created by
God. If randomness is but a property of the universe, then it
could not be the source of its creation and the argument for God as the
creator is strenghthened.
Diebold obviously is aware (as we all are) of the security problems with its voting machines but has chosen to stonewall them in a wild rush to get Diebold voting systems installed as widely as possible. The integrity of our entire national election process is at stake here and it is the foundation of our government and its constitution. Diebold is just as dangerous to our country as any group of wild-eyed moslem fanatics and they deserve the same treatment...the sooner the better. I would start by transporting the entire Diebold executive committee to some of those tropical confines at Guantanomo Bay.
The report singles out First Energy with 3 out of the four 'groups' of blackout causes on p18 and lists MISO (NERC Midwest System Operator) for one 'group' of causes but the 46 recommendations in Chapter 10 only address the First Energy problems. First Energy certainly deserves a lot of blame but MISO (the "reliability coordinator") deserves much more because it was their specific function manage the operations of the multi-state system to prevent exactly what happened from ocurring.
The failure of MISO to keep their 'state estimator' computer analysis planning tool in operation for a critical 4-hour period was the single biggest cause of the failure but is somewhat glossed over in the report which tends to focus more on the failures of the heavily-loaded distribution lines on a hot August day than it does on just *why* those distribution lines were loaded so heavily to start with. The report does have recommendation No. 22 which is "Evaluate and adopt better real-time tools..." but the quality of the MISO tools was not the problem but rather 1) the lack of supervisory oversight that allowed the tool operator to switch it off while troubleshooting and then go out to lunch without switching it back on and 2) the poor quality of the data being fed into the models. The report has a lot of nonsense requirements about 'cybersecurity' and such but it needs to add a couple of more requirements that will at least fix the immediate problem that made the lights go out. Here are three suggestions for additions:
47) Adopt procedures that require the presence of two or more analysts and a supervisory analyst for the use of all real-time planning tools at MISO and other reliability coordinators.
48) Immediately notify all system operators when a real-time operational planning tool is not in operation and switch to a fall-back emergency system operational mode until the system operational planning tool is back online.
49) Implement the planning tools with real-time status of *every* major transmission line and power generator source.
Sun's sellout to Microsoft for $1.6 billion will look about the same as that great deal that the Indians got when they sold Manhattan. Microsoft is the only company that recognizes that the software is worth more than a few trinkets because it takes a lot of T-I-M-E to develop software and money cannot buy time. Most of Sun's software initiatives such as Java and Star Office (aka Open Office) will probably wither on the vine, now, for lack of nourishment, just as IBM let OS/2 wither after cutting a similar deal with Microsoft. It's amazing that Microsoft is able to buy off their competitors so cheaply...but then they have gotten a lot of experience doing it over the years.
Based on the report, this is just another Microsoft scheme to cement their control over the desktop and to further lock in their monopoly. Microsoft will define the education, training, 'best practices', the software development process, and the incentives for compliance with their rules. The time may come when the government will issue licenses for software development, desktop computer use, systems administration, etc. Needless to say, the penalties for doing whatever without the license written my Microsoft will be 'severe.'
Microsoft wants the best of all worlds by having sole ownership of a desktop OS containing numerous 'access points' to allow Microsoft, their partners, or the government to do whatever with the target system but they also want to restrict the bad guys from using those very same access points for malicious purposes. More government regulation of the end users is not the answer to Microsoft's 'swiss cheese security' approach to OS design. More government regulation and oversight of the design practices of OS vendors who have major security problems is the answer.
People should study engineering because they like to solve problems wtih technology, because they want to develop better ways of doing things, and because they are interested in why and how things work. They should not study engineering because someone suggests it is a sure path to high wages, responsibility, and prestige. We live during a time when technology and innovation in the US have been stifled by corporate bureaucracy, where economic growth means driving the competition into bankruptcy/merger rather than offering something new or revolutionary, and where financial resources are directed towards marketing, sales, advertising, and hyperbole rather than research, education, new ideas, improved ways of doing things or an expansion of knowledge.
Large american companies rarely ever attempt to provide anything new or different but instead concentrate on undermining their competition (if they even have any), obtaining goverment protection and favors for their market share, and generally securing a steady and growing revenue stream. There is unlikely to be much opportunity for creative, bright technical people in those sorts of enterprises. More importantly, there is a huge surplus of technically-trained people worldwide thanks to foreign educational programs that emphasize technical training over other areas. Meanwhile there is an equally large shortage of intelligent people with an education in something other than technology. There will always be a need for technically-educated people but there are a lot of people who have pursued technical educations who are lacking in any sort of aptitude whatsoever for technical work. A more even balance worldwide between technical and non-technical educations might be better for everyone in the long term.
Universities should require every one of their graduates to complete college-level coursework in math, physics, chemistry, and biology but they should not be graduating significant portions of their student body with coursework devoted almost entirely to those things. Declining engineering and computer science enrollments shows that college students are finally recognizing that their opportunities are more likely to lie elsewhere now.
You could talk to it but it could not talk to you. OS/2 v4 would let you navigate through applications by voice commands. You could access any menu in an app using voice macros that you could record and add to the app in its settings notebook. The design and the implementation of the voice-navigation macros were brilliant and far ahead of their time but the system never worked very well because it was simply too slow on the Pentium cpus available when it was released in 1996. Also, IBM hard-coded some cpu limitations into the implementation such that it still ran at exactly the same speed years later on a 2.0 Ghz cpu as it did on a 133 Mhz cpu. I used to use the voice navigation to do simple things, though, like enter numbers into spreadsheets and it was fine for that. IBM took the voice navigation out of OS/2 beginning with v4.51.
There's a lot of silos for sale right now and it's a buyer's market. The Minuteman silos are much more spacious than the Titan silos and have nicer amenities including nicer lighting and better ventilation systems. The Minuteman III silos are the top-of-the-line in missile silos and are just starting to appear on the market...when they aren't being blown up that is.
Anyone can make a car with a welded hood but people still have to buy it. If you can choose between a welded hood and a 'legacy' hood, which would you choose? I think most people would go for the legacy model.
If this memo is legitimate, it looks like most of SCO's money now is coming from Microsoft. There are probably some other companies that Micrsoft is backing right now as well...all to maintain the Windows monopoly. I hope that Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler read this. Maybe they can find a way to claim a share of that $49 billion pot of money that Micrsoft is hoarding.
SCO's attack looked very weak when they started in against IBM with the $1 billion lawsuit but now they are starting to do some serious damage. The lawsuits against Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler will drag on for years and cast a cloud over thousands of other similar companies contemplating developing a similar sort of Linux-based infrastructure.
SCO reminds me of the star trek episode "Journey to Babel" where the small enemy scout ship was able to launch devastating attacks against the much-more-powerful Enterprise because it used 100% power for suicide attacks leaving none for a return to base. The Enterprise wins, however, by pretending to be mortally wounded thus luring the enemy into close range to be dispatched by an Enterprise photon torpedo.
SCO is obviously on a suicide mission of their own so maybe Autozone and Daimler-Chrsler should lure them into range by entering into negotiations with SCO and then use SCO's negotiating positions to show that SCO is not really seeking legitimate monetary damages to compensate them for the alleged misuse of their IP but is instead seeking to cast a pall of FUD over corporate use of Linux.
Those watermarks will probably mark a trail that leads directly to some person or government group closely tied to President Bush. I predict that hotdogs will fly as soon as the hounds get close and that will be *the end* of the story.
The AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 chips already have the buffer overflow protection in their hardware and the feature is already supported by both Linux and Windows XP 64-bit edition. AMD calls this "Execution Protection" and the basic idea is that the processor will not allow code that arrives to the system via a buffer overflow to be marked as executable. The slashdot story says "will have" for both Intel and AMD when it should read "AMD already has and Intel will have..."
Intel is not doing this out of kindness, nor out of love for Linux. No, Intel is doing this to screw Microsoft by supporting Linux because Microsoft is screwing Intel by supporting AMD64 with their new Windows XP 64-bit version. The former partners in crime are turning on each other and Linux is the beneficiary...at least for the moment. Microsoft and Intel could patch up their differences at any time and then that Intel support for Linux would disappear faster than a snowflake in July.
The link in the message above was to 64-bit Windows Server 2003 but Microsoft is also offering a download for a free 360-day trial of 64-bit Windows XP for desktop systems which can be downloaded here.
I downloaded it and it generally works quite well. I have yet to see any sort of fault or bug, although I haven't pushed it real hard. The main limitation on 64-bit Windows (as well as 64-bit Linux and 64-bit FreeBSD) is the lack of hardware drivers. There are pretty good video drivers for Nvidia but not much else. 64-bit Windows comes with a set of drivers for basic printers, disk drivers, and sound but doesn't have anything for scanners. The 64-bit Windows will run most 32-bit Windows programs seamlessly just as if they were running on 32-bit Windows XP but it will not run any 16-bit DOS programs. It comes with a killer 64-bit version of pinball, though, with amazingly realistic ball bounces and movements that make you want to grab your monitor and shake it when the ball heads for the hole.
After looking at the original
report, it looks more like
the GE XA21 SCADA network failure was not the primary cause of the
cascading failure but more an effect of the failure. The key failure
seems to be a software system callled the "State Estimator" (SE) that
is used by the Midwest System Operator (MISO), a NERC reliability
coordinator, to develop optimal solutions of for the planned operating
level of all of the power generation and transmission equipment in the
MISO area covering about 10 midwest states and 1 million square miles.
It is not described in much detail but the SE seems to be an
optimization tool using a linear programming model that gathers
availability data for all of the major system components and load
demand every five minutes and then calculates the 'optimal' use of
those system components to maintain system reliability at the required
level. The 'solution' of the model is then used to plan the operation
of the overall system by sending the target operating levels to each
facility in the system. So why did it fail? Two reasons. First, the
model depends on having accurate availability information from each
major system component. Status information is sent to MISO in Indiana
by the "ECAR" data netork or by direct links. On the day of the
failure, the direct link to a key transmission line was not working and
the analyst had turned off the estimator to troubleshoot it. After
fixing the problem, he went to lunch and forgot to put the system back
in automatic mode where it would develop updated solutions. This
situation existed for 2 hours from 12:15 to 14:40. When the estimator
was switched back to automatic, it was unable to develop a solution
because another key transmission line had overloaded and tripped and
*its* new non-operational status was unknown to the model, apparently
because the status of that line is assumed to be 'on' until told
otherwise. This problem was not corrected until 16:04. The bottom line
is that a critical major planning tool was not available for 4 hours
for a regional generation and distribution system that absolutely
required it's use to be operated successfully when the system power
supply was very close to the demand.
The
SCADA system itself did not fail, but its alarm function did, which
provides alarms to control room operators about system operational
problems. The problem with the alarm function seems to be a case of too
many alarms for the system to handle as the problems multiplied. The
software bug that they are now reporting was probably related to the
unexpectedly large number of alarms that the system was
experiencing. The
new alarm inputs built up and then overflowed the process input
buffers. The alarm system just stalled while processing an alarm event
and the alarm function stopped. Then, at 14:41 the primary
server
hosting the alarm processing application failed due to some combination
of the stalling of the alarm application and the queueing to the remote
terminals. The hapless backup server then was automatically activated
and everything was was transferred to it, even the functional non-alarm
stuff. The backup server failed after 13 minutes. Basically, the SCADA
alarm system seems to have been massively overloaded (which shouldn't
ever happen, of course) beyond the capability of the system design to
cope with. The bug apparently prevented an indication that the
alarm system was failing but it looks like the cascading failure still
would have occurred even if the software bug had not been present
because the system deterioration had progressed to far to recover by
the time that the bug manifested itself.
The immediate cause of the failure seems to be the
forgetfulness of the analyst who was operating the planning model. The
significant underlying contributory cause seems to be a very poor
regional operational design in which a critical centralized system
planning tool was being used with insufficient backup and oversight. It
looks as though both Unix and Windows escape blame. The SCADA system
probably was doing far more than it's designers intended and probably
performed heroically until it died. 'Aye Captain...I canna do no more.'
Storage cost keeps dropping and capacity is skyrocketing. Potentially, this will mean more data will be local in the future, rather than networked since network capacity is likely to remain a bottleneck. Especially so for bandwidth-hogging data like image and sound.
Slashdot Mirror
We can all sleep more soundly at night knowing that there will be 747 tankers available for those 'challenging homeland security' missions responding to chemical and/or biological attacks. If someone is so foolish as to unleash a chemical nerve gas attack on the town, the wise town leaders can place a quick telephone call to homeland security and order up a 747 tanker to respond and drop a load of 'chemical antidote' on us to ward off the ill effects. Yeppers, that should fix everyone up pretty good.
AMD makes a very nice Athlon64 chip but obviously AMD lacks the production capacity to sustain a 50+ % market share for any length of time. AMD has only one fab making the 64-bit chips, located in Dresden, Germany, while Intel has major fabs located in Oregon, New Mexico, China, and Ireland, and Israel. The Intel Pentium 4 is also a very nice chip and is more than adequate for most current software so people should not all decide all at once to buy AMD.
Yes, the US is losing its scientific dominance, and here are some of the reasons why:
1) Most 'research' funding is not directed towards 'research' but rather, on development of incremental technological improvements in complex weapon systems. Most bright, creative Americans don't find this work very fulfilling.
2) Most scientific research requires access to facilities that are beyond the reach of individuals. Most non-military 'research' at large corporations is narrowly focused on making improvements to existing products. (Look at how much money Microsoft spends on 'research' and how little they have to show for it.) Public universities can theoretically still carry out research based on intellectual curiousity rather than developing an improved method of killing people but are limited by the amount of grant money available, the available facilities, the policies of the particular institution, etc.
3) Most of the best new ideas come from small privately-funded companies who are driven by a creative, visionary leader. In the past, such a company would come out with a revolutionary idea, create an entire new technology, and then proceed to grow and become wildly successful. Beginning in the early '80s, though, the regulatory climate in the US for large corporations began to change such that now, when some large corporation is threatened by a new technology, it either finds some way to run the new company out of business or else buy out the new company and marginalize it as a threat to the status quo. If Thomas Edison were developing his electric light bulb today, there would one large gaslight corporation that would buy him out and then proclaim that the idea of electrical lights wasn't practical because it would require that wires be strung everywhere or something. A modern-day computer example would be the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process that AMD has recently been using to make some of its new processor chips. SOI results in much less power consumption per cycle and offers the potential for a significant cut in worldwide electric power consumption by server farms. Yet, SOI has barely made a dent in the status quo simply because the dominant x86 chipmaker, Intel, has not supported it, and instead focuses all of its energies on driving AMD into bankruptcy.
All the posts here about the deficiencies of the US educational system are just creating a smokescreen around the real problem. By and large, the US public educational system does a pretty good job of providing educational opportunities to bright, motivated kids, regardless of their income or background. The problem is that there is now much less that those bright, hard-working kids can do with their new knowledge than in the past.
How can anyone possibly damage the reputation of a spammer or a spam company?
"There was nothing before the universe, because the universe defines the concept of time. So there wasn't anything to "create" the universe from."
I don't think the concept of time has any relevance to a God who creates universes. Time is important only to the dwellers within. The current Big Bang theory defines a time of beginning for the universe but says nothing about time, mass, or energy before that time of beginning. According to the Big Bang theory, all mass, energy, space and time as we know them today were created at one instant by the 'Big Bang.'
"Any apprarent randomness you experience is a property of the universe, not a cause of it."
My reference to randomness is as a method of accounting for the fact of the existence of our universe, if it was not created by God. If randomness is but a property of the universe, then it could not be the source of its creation and the argument for God as the creator is strenghthened.
A universe with a finite beginning, a finite end, and a finite limit to consciousness seems much more likely to be created by God than by randomness.
Diebold obviously is aware (as we all are) of the security problems with its voting machines but has chosen to stonewall them in a wild rush to get Diebold voting systems installed as widely as possible. The integrity of our entire national election process is at stake here and it is the foundation of our government and its constitution. Diebold is just as dangerous to our country as any group of wild-eyed moslem fanatics and they deserve the same treatment...the sooner the better. I would start by transporting the entire Diebold executive committee to some of those tropical confines at Guantanomo Bay.
The report singles out First Energy with 3 out of the four 'groups' of blackout causes on p18 and lists MISO (NERC Midwest System Operator) for one 'group' of causes but the 46 recommendations in Chapter 10 only address the First Energy problems. First Energy certainly deserves a lot of blame but MISO (the "reliability coordinator") deserves much more because it was their specific function manage the operations of the multi-state system to prevent exactly what happened from ocurring.
The failure of MISO to keep their 'state estimator' computer analysis planning tool in operation for a critical 4-hour period was the single biggest cause of the failure but is somewhat glossed over in the report which tends to focus more on the failures of the heavily-loaded distribution lines on a hot August day than it does on just *why* those distribution lines were loaded so heavily to start with. The report does have recommendation No. 22 which is "Evaluate and adopt better real-time tools..." but the quality of the MISO tools was not the problem but rather 1) the lack of supervisory oversight that allowed the tool operator to switch it off while troubleshooting and then go out to lunch without switching it back on and 2) the poor quality of the data being fed into the models. The report has a lot of nonsense requirements about 'cybersecurity' and such but it needs to add a couple of more requirements that will at least fix the immediate problem that made the lights go out. Here are three suggestions for additions:
47) Adopt procedures that require the presence of two or more analysts and a supervisory analyst for the use of all real-time planning tools at MISO and other reliability coordinators.
48) Immediately notify all system operators when a real-time operational planning tool is not in operation and switch to a fall-back emergency system operational mode until the system operational planning tool is back online.
49) Implement the planning tools with real-time status of *every* major transmission line and power generator source.
Sun's sellout to Microsoft for $1.6 billion will look about the same as that great deal that the Indians got when they sold Manhattan. Microsoft is the only company that recognizes that the software is worth more than a few trinkets because it takes a lot of T-I-M-E to develop software and money cannot buy time. Most of Sun's software initiatives such as Java and Star Office (aka Open Office) will probably wither on the vine, now, for lack of nourishment, just as IBM let OS/2 wither after cutting a similar deal with Microsoft. It's amazing that Microsoft is able to buy off their competitors so cheaply...but then they have gotten a lot of experience doing it over the years.
Based on the report, this is just another Microsoft scheme to cement their control over the desktop and to further lock in their monopoly. Microsoft will define the education, training, 'best practices', the software development process, and the incentives for compliance with their rules. The time may come when the government will issue licenses for software development, desktop computer use, systems administration, etc. Needless to say, the penalties for doing whatever without the license written my Microsoft will be 'severe.'
Microsoft wants the best of all worlds by having sole ownership of a desktop OS containing numerous 'access points' to allow Microsoft, their partners, or the government to do whatever with the target system but they also want to restrict the bad guys from using those very same access points for malicious purposes. More government regulation of the end users is not the answer to Microsoft's 'swiss cheese security' approach to OS design. More government regulation and oversight of the design practices of OS vendors who have major security problems is the answer.
People should study engineering because they like to solve problems wtih technology, because they want to develop better ways of doing things, and because they are interested in why and how things work. They should not study engineering because someone suggests it is a sure path to high wages, responsibility, and prestige. We live during a time when technology and innovation in the US have been stifled by corporate bureaucracy, where economic growth means driving the competition into bankruptcy/merger rather than offering something new or revolutionary, and where financial resources are directed towards marketing, sales, advertising, and hyperbole rather than research, education, new ideas, improved ways of doing things or an expansion of knowledge.
Large american companies rarely ever attempt to provide anything new or different but instead concentrate on undermining their competition (if they even have any), obtaining goverment protection and favors for their market share, and generally securing a steady and growing revenue stream. There is unlikely to be much opportunity for creative, bright technical people in those sorts of enterprises. More importantly, there is a huge surplus of technically-trained people worldwide thanks to foreign educational programs that emphasize technical training over other areas. Meanwhile there is an equally large shortage of intelligent people with an education in something other than technology. There will always be a need for technically-educated people but there are a lot of people who have pursued technical educations who are lacking in any sort of aptitude whatsoever for technical work. A more even balance worldwide between technical and non-technical educations might be better for everyone in the long term.
Universities should require every one of their graduates to complete college-level coursework in math, physics, chemistry, and biology but they should not be graduating significant portions of their student body with coursework devoted almost entirely to those things. Declining engineering and computer science enrollments shows that college students are finally recognizing that their opportunities are more likely to lie elsewhere now.
You could talk to it but it could not talk to you. OS/2 v4 would let you navigate through applications by voice commands. You could access any menu in an app using voice macros that you could record and add to the app in its settings notebook. The design and the implementation of the voice-navigation macros were brilliant and far ahead of their time but the system never worked very well because it was simply too slow on the Pentium cpus available when it was released in 1996. Also, IBM hard-coded some cpu limitations into the implementation such that it still ran at exactly the same speed years later on a 2.0 Ghz cpu as it did on a 133 Mhz cpu. I used to use the voice navigation to do simple things, though, like enter numbers into spreadsheets and it was fine for that. IBM took the voice navigation out of OS/2 beginning with v4.51.
There's a lot of silos for sale right now and it's a buyer's
market. The Minuteman silos are much more spacious than the
Titan silos and have nicer amenities including nicer lighting and
better ventilation systems. The Minuteman III silos are the
top-of-the-line in missile silos and are just starting to appear on the
market...when they aren't being blown up
that is.
Apparently, they didn't find Microsoft enough of a challenge.
Anyone can make a car with a welded hood but people still have to buy it. If you can choose between a welded hood and a 'legacy' hood, which would you choose? I think most people would go for the legacy model.
If this memo is legitimate, it looks like most of SCO's money now is coming from Microsoft. There are probably some other companies that Micrsoft is backing right now as well...all to maintain the Windows monopoly. I hope that Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler read this. Maybe they can find a way to claim a share of that $49 billion pot of money that Micrsoft is hoarding.
SCO's attack looked very weak when they started in against IBM with the $1 billion lawsuit but now they are starting to do some serious damage. The lawsuits against Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler will drag on for years and cast a cloud over thousands of other similar companies contemplating developing a similar sort of Linux-based infrastructure.
SCO reminds me of the star trek episode "Journey to Babel" where the small enemy scout ship was able to launch devastating attacks against the much-more-powerful Enterprise because it used 100% power for suicide attacks leaving none for a return to base. The Enterprise wins, however, by pretending to be mortally wounded thus luring the enemy into close range to be dispatched by an Enterprise photon torpedo.
SCO is obviously on a suicide mission of their own so maybe Autozone and Daimler-Chrsler should lure them into range by entering into negotiations with SCO and then use SCO's negotiating positions to show that SCO is not really seeking legitimate monetary damages to compensate them for the alleged misuse of their IP but is instead seeking to cast a pall of FUD over corporate use of Linux.
Those watermarks will probably mark a trail that leads directly to some person or government group closely tied to President Bush. I predict that hotdogs will fly as soon as the hounds get close and that will be *the end* of the story.
The AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 chips already
have the buffer overflow protection in their hardware and the
feature is already supported by both Linux and Windows XP 64-bit
edition. AMD calls this "Execution Protection" and the
basic idea is that the processor will not allow code that arrives to
the system via a buffer overflow to be marked as
executable. The slashdot story says "will have" for both
Intel and AMD when it should read "AMD already has and Intel will
have..."
Intel is not doing this out of kindness, nor out of love for Linux. No, Intel is doing this to screw Microsoft by supporting Linux because Microsoft is screwing Intel by supporting AMD64 with their new Windows XP 64-bit version. The former partners in crime are turning on each other and Linux is the beneficiary...at least for the moment. Microsoft and Intel could patch up their differences at any time and then that Intel support for Linux would disappear faster than a snowflake in July.
The link in the message above was to 64-bit Windows Server 2003 but
Microsoft is also offering a download for a free 360-day trial of
64-bit Windows XP for desktop systems which can be downloaded here.
I downloaded it and it generally works quite well. I have yet to see any sort of fault or bug, although I haven't pushed it real hard. The main limitation on 64-bit Windows (as well as 64-bit Linux and 64-bit FreeBSD) is the lack of hardware drivers. There are pretty good video drivers for Nvidia but not much else. 64-bit Windows comes with a set of drivers for basic printers, disk drivers, and sound but doesn't have anything for scanners. The 64-bit Windows will run most 32-bit Windows programs seamlessly just as if they were running on 32-bit Windows XP but it will not run any 16-bit DOS programs. It comes with a killer 64-bit version of pinball, though, with amazingly realistic ball bounces and movements that make you want to grab your monitor and shake it when the ball heads for the hole.
The little image is good but the hi-res image will take your breath away. I wonder when the last eruption was...
After looking at the original report, it looks more like the GE XA21 SCADA network failure was not the primary cause of the cascading failure but more an effect of the failure. The key failure seems to be a software system callled the "State Estimator" (SE) that is used by the Midwest System Operator (MISO), a NERC reliability coordinator, to develop optimal solutions of for the planned operating level of all of the power generation and transmission equipment in the MISO area covering about 10 midwest states and 1 million square miles. It is not described in much detail but the SE seems to be an optimization tool using a linear programming model that gathers availability data for all of the major system components and load demand every five minutes and then calculates the 'optimal' use of those system components to maintain system reliability at the required level. The 'solution' of the model is then used to plan the operation of the overall system by sending the target operating levels to each facility in the system. So why did it fail? Two reasons. First, the model depends on having accurate availability information from each major system component. Status information is sent to MISO in Indiana by the "ECAR" data netork or by direct links. On the day of the failure, the direct link to a key transmission line was not working and the analyst had turned off the estimator to troubleshoot it. After fixing the problem, he went to lunch and forgot to put the system back in automatic mode where it would develop updated solutions. This situation existed for 2 hours from 12:15 to 14:40. When the estimator was switched back to automatic, it was unable to develop a solution because another key transmission line had overloaded and tripped and *its* new non-operational status was unknown to the model, apparently because the status of that line is assumed to be 'on' until told otherwise. This problem was not corrected until 16:04. The bottom line is that a critical major planning tool was not available for 4 hours for a regional generation and distribution system that absolutely required it's use to be operated successfully when the system power supply was very close to the demand.
The SCADA system itself did not fail, but its alarm function did, which provides alarms to control room operators about system operational problems. The problem with the alarm function seems to be a case of too many alarms for the system to handle as the problems multiplied. The software bug that they are now reporting was probably related to the unexpectedly large number of alarms that the system was experiencing. The new alarm inputs built up and then overflowed the process input buffers. The alarm system just stalled while processing an alarm event and the alarm function stopped. Then, at 14:41 the primary server hosting the alarm processing application failed due to some combination of the stalling of the alarm application and the queueing to the remote terminals. The hapless backup server then was automatically activated and everything was was transferred to it, even the functional non-alarm stuff. The backup server failed after 13 minutes. Basically, the SCADA alarm system seems to have been massively overloaded (which shouldn't ever happen, of course) beyond the capability of the system design to cope with. The bug apparently prevented an indication that the alarm system was failing but it looks like the cascading failure still would have occurred even if the software bug had not been present because the system deterioration had progressed to far to recover by the time that the bug manifested itself.
The immediate cause of the failure seems to be the forgetfulness of the analyst who was operating the planning model. The significant underlying contributory cause seems to be a very poor regional operational design in which a critical centralized system planning tool was being used with insufficient backup and oversight. It looks as though both Unix and Windows escape blame. The SCADA system probably was doing far more than it's designers intended and probably performed heroically until it died. 'Aye Captain...I canna do no more.'
Storage cost keeps dropping and capacity is skyrocketing. Potentially, this will mean more data will be local in the future, rather than networked since network capacity is likely to remain a bottleneck. Especially so for bandwidth-hogging data like image and sound.