Just look at it, Dell customers get to use Linux but still pay their share of MS tax, but now for an OS Microsoft doesn't need to develop or support.
The Novel deal is their first and last dishonest free software score and it's costing them about $120,000,000. GPL3 eliminates patent threats. If M$ want's to play the free software game they will have to play it like IBM and everyone else. They can make money at it, but the monopoly is over.
Everyone should know by now that non free software violates as many or more than free software. M$ will be forced to act and will lose. GPL3 will prevent them from owning free software by patents, so they will have to go free to be competitive or die under their dog food. This game is close to over.
The threat has already "damaged the brand". We all know they put SCO up to it's failed bid and these threats seal the deal for anyone who was on the sidelines. It's pretty obvious to everyone how M$ operates now and all credibility is going down the drain with Vista. They can't compete with free software, no single company can.
How to mitigate it? Unfortunately you don't. Because it is the idea of lawsuit you cannot work around this risk unless you avoid it altogether.
Can't do anything? Hardly! The easiest thing to do is point out that M$'s own sources think non free software violates more patents than free software does. The evidence is in all the lawsuits that M$ keeps losing, like the MP3 case. You don't see many of those for free software do you? The only way to avoid risk is to move as quickly as possible to free software.
Because broadcast spectrum was once a scarce, expensive and regulated resource owned by the public. The rules were made to insure that resource was well used and include the forced licensing terms you mention for the composer. The original goal of copyright law is to distribute culture and advance the state of the art and those rules can be interpreted that way. If the goal had been to support publishers and artists, they would be paid a stipend without further obligation.
In a perfect world, congress should force everyone to pay record companies money, so record companies could distribute the wealth in whatever way they see fit.
Gee, that would be like them collecting money from strangers without any investment or effort. Why not just let them collect money for every song played regardless of ownership or artist intent? That would achieve the same thing because people are always going to want music. Like media taxes for "piracy", the new rules are closer to the nationalization of recorded music than most people realize.
I'd like to see all radio stations play only independent music for one day. See how the RIAA likes that.
Do you really think the MAFIAA and US government would tolerate such disrespect? They want to be able to charge against the will of the artist and publisher and may already have it. Something needs to change.
You won't be able to give your music away in the future. Giving the MAFIAA a new revenue stream only gives them more money to do more harm. The only place to stop them is at the voting booth.
The CERT report you quote is about Yet Another incident where Winblows was fingered, the 2003 Blackout, that has nothing to do with Davis-Besse besides M$.
The fine article is rather clear:
The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant personnel that the network was protected by a firewall, SecurityFocus has learned.
The Slammer worm entered the Davis-Besse plant through a circuitous route. It began by penetrating the unsecured network of an unnamed Davis-Besse contractor, then squirmed through a T1 line bridging that network and Davis-Besse's corporate network. The T1 line, investigators later found, was one of multiple ingresses into Davis-Besse's business network that completely bypassed the plant's firewall, which was programmed to block the port Slammer used to spread.
By 4:00 p.m., power plant workers noticed a slowdown on the plant network. At 4:50 p.m., the congestion created by the worm's scanning crashed the plant's computerized display panel, called the Safety Parameter Display System.
An SPDS monitors the most crucial safety indicators at a plant, like coolant systems, core temperature sensors, and external radiation sensors. Many of those continue to require careful monitoring even while a plant is offline, says one expert. An SPDS outage lasting eight hours or more requires that the NRC be notified.
At 5:13 p.m., another, less critical, monitoring system called the "Plant Process Computer" crashed. Both systems had redundant analog backups that were unaffected by the worm, but, "The unavailability of the SPDS and the PPC was burdensome on the operators," notes the March advisory.
It took four hours and fifty minutes to restore the SPDS, six hours and nine minutes to get the PPC working again.
They go on to mention three other incidents, including the later whitewashed Blackout account.
Just more of the same sad, tired bullshit FUD you're famous for.
Your love of M$ has blinded you again. Why do you feel so much for a big dumb company and their software? How many screw ups does it take to convince you that M$ does not belong everywhere and they have serious issues to resolve before they can be trusted anywhere.
Aero Glass works on a Core Duo Mac Mini, so I'd have to say the answer is "pretty damn slim."
How much of the 220 W that computer uses is the processor and why were you complaining about the 100 W that Power 6 is using at more than twice the clock speed?
The civil disobedience movements in India had a much larger more fundamental purpose. They did not want to be ruled by the British and have they're country pillaged. To compare it to a bunch of shopkeepers from allowing MS to make a little more money is stupid.
No, I've compared it to 350 retail shops who don't want to be shaken down by a foreign company. M$, like the RIAA, does not always get things right and I know at least one shop owner here who's fought them off in court. I like the "screw you, we don't want your software" reaction better.
You are right to think of this action as small, but it's the tip of a very large iceburg. The US government puts up with M$ games because M$ is a US company and, in theory, money M$ rips out of schools, government and other businesses never leaves the US. Indeed, the US sees M$ as a big trade positive that will grow. Other governments should and do look at that coercive monopoly rip off as their country being pillaged. Government and business interests should think very hard before trusting their data to foreign software that can't be inspected. These shopkeepers might not have thought all of that through, but they will. In the mean time, they have rightly concluded that M$ is not worth their effort. Watch their attitude spread and see what M$ can do about it. Worse still for M$, watch how the US government attitude changes when they realize that "developing countries" are not such a good market for software because the cost of enforcement is going to blow any profits that might be made and make the US look like a big dick.
lets not get all jihadi about what MS is doing and see things in a proper perspective.
It's the copyright warriors who are the offenders here. They are pushing their crap on the world but the price of their profits it to deny that world a choice and fine them when they naturally share with each other. In the US, they will take everything you own and put you in jail for longer than people who murder and rape. I don't think they will get away with it elsewhere. The push back is on the way.
These people were not buying "M$" products to begin with, so please explain to us simple people how this "backslash" means "M$" is going to lose?
If you had read the article, you would have seen that M$ thinks the vendors are important. If things work there as they do here, they are right.
M$ is nothing without the support network everyone else provides. These 350 shops are their mainstay, for both their sales volume and their recommendations and fixes. Even here in the US, where people have enough money to buy new systems M$ would sink if it were not for the many local people who keep those virused out boxes running. The rub is that they are not making enough money from their sales to justify the $5,000 fines M$ would like to drop on them. That's not to say M$ was not making money - selling twenty five cent CDs in a plastic box for one or two hundred bucks makes enough to fund their billion dollar a month advert attack and put money in their own pockets.
Compare it to Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi
That's ridiculous and insulting to all Indians, I'm sure.
No, their banding together to fight is admirable and puts US mom and pop shops to shame. M$ has pulled the same kinds of game here in the land of the free and no one has ever stood up to them. Those people, more than Dell, HP and others, are who makes M$ rich.
The Power6 uses "under 100 watts in performance sensitive applications." WAAAY too much for a notebook or a mini.
So how slim can you make a Vista premium ultra ready dual core hamburger grill? Don't those things suck down 300 W at idle before you turn on that clumsy enlightenment knock off GUI? Power has always sucked less power per flop, I'm not sure why this one would be different, except for the screaming clock speed.
Let me see if I get this right. Microsoft tries to prevent them from pirating their software which they are doing based on their idea that they're doing a good deed. Kinda like I could steal your car and give it away to a charity, so there's no victim, right?
That's a useful analogy if cars cab be coppied at the push of a button. At that rate, I'd be happy to give coppies of my car to anyone who wants them. What a wonderful and abundant world that would be. I'm not sure how can compare that to theft and murder on the high seas, aka "piracy".
there's a "backlash" and they're not going to "buy" their products for a whole quarter? A a whole quarter? The same people who were pirating the software to begin with are going "on strike"? And you consider this some sort of victory?
It's not a victory but it brings us closer to one. A victory would be all 350 retailers switching to free software. That kind of victory won't be possible until hardware has been liberated from M$ manipulation. When that happens, everyone will have choices that don't involve risk. Everything that hurts M$ brings us closer to that day and this hurts M$. It clearly demonstrates the problems M$ is going to have trying to extract money from people around the world. The so called developing world is not going to be a growth market for them. It will never be in India or any other country's best interest to actually enforce crazy US "IP" laws.
Who mods this stuff up, anyway?
Your mother. Didn't she teach you that sharing was good?
The crackdown is not nearly as interesting as the vendor reaction: a general strike against M$. They have a guild and 350 shops have boycotted a M$ training session and pledged to purchase nothing from M$ for the next quarter.
350 dealers joined in a statewide bandh (that's a general strike) initiated by Surat-based South Gujarat Information Technologists Association (SITA).... The resellers have also planned boycotts against Microsoft. Those participating in the strike agreed to stop all purchases of Microsoft products for this quarter.
This is a real culture clash and M$ is going to lose. Compare it to Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi and you can see where this is going. If M$'s $3 "education pack" is not good enough and they won't quit making alternate software difficult by vendor and driver manipulation, the people of the world will simply take what they want. M$ can no more stop this than the British Empire could keep people from taking salt from the sea.
I'd rather they discovered free software. It would be better for them and they could more easily implement things like DVD playing and advanced video codecs than people endumbered by dumb laws like the DMCA. Using M$ leaves the user open to M$ violation down, powers the botnet and props up M$'s awefull non free formats.
In the worst of cases you now have a better idea in your head. In the best of cases, you have two ideas in your head. 1 + n > 1, so long as n>0. It is only when people put controls on ideas that value is lost in the transaction. That, or your brain can only hold one idea at a time, which is something you should see the doctor about.
no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind
I agree entirely, there is no good reason to put physical limitations on ideas and doing so degrades them. Good ideas can be immortal, a story is retold, a song is sung, inventions are shared and implemented long after the death of the person who conceived the original. As one candle lights another, ideas flow between people and enrich all. A society that would put unreasonable restrictions on these things will extinguish them. The ultimate reward for any author is recognition and imitation.
Perpetual copyrights will be used to crush people with new stories, songs and ideas. "What is yours next to our collection, which [contains tens of thousands | spans the entire history of recorded music | includes the work of Einstein]?" they can ask before dismissing you. Every day we come closer to losing the right to read.
Chances are, the cause has been written up by the four or five systems engineering people in charge of the plant. They ARE competent, but they are never given the resources they need.
Why wasn't there any failover who knows.
There was a failover - they overrode the broken thing. Had the operators been gassed, the plant would have turned itself off when the water level got too high or low. This is a big deal but ultimately the plant was safely shut down and no one got hurt. It's designed to do that even if you could shear the feed water pipe off and they did not let the new fangled control network mess with that.
Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to think "OMG, Haxxors?" Answer: work at Homeland inSecurity, or be a Congresscritter. They already figured it out. It was a controller for a specific piece of equipment that flooded the network and triggered a bug in the variable-frequency-drive controllers for pumps.
As someone who used to work in system's engineering for a sister BWR, I think the inspection is a good idea. Oh, there's dumb and there's nuclear dumb but this is not a case of either. Nuclear dumb involves putting machine guns nests inside the plant. Finding the root cause of the accident is a good idea.
Handwaving about a PLC device won't do. What ultimately caused the PLC malfunction needs to be answered at a component level. There's going to be something wrong with it and that should be reported and every other device like it needs to be ripped out and trashed. If there is not component failure, there's a software problem which also must be understood.
Yes, it could have been hackers. The "internal control network" might at some point hits a desk that's connected to the wider world. It could be something mundane and unintentional, like an operator's virused up laptop.
An outage like that is something that's going to have both NRC and corporate ass-chewers looking at everything. Corporate might want to paint a nice picture for the NRC, but the poor devil that lies to them goes to jail. In either case, the problem will be identified and eliminated.
You might also have noted in the article that this is not the first plant to go thumbs down over some winblows born virus. In 2003, the slammer worm caused havoc at an offline Ohio plant. Yes, that was hackers. They did not mean to do it, but the plant's systems were open to it and failed. That's not acceptable from any standpoint.
Despite the better advice of the computer people at the plants, Entergy is a big M$ Partner. They take the big dogs out fishing and sell them the works. Ten years ago, M$ had something worth while and interesting. It was used in places it should not have been. Worse, the flaws from ten years ago have not been addressed or fixed. A good clean up is in order.
me - "They can own it, so long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, like IBM and everyone else. "
you - Really? Not two days ago you said "Linux is GPL, so it does not have owners".
OK, free software has owners but the only thing they will do is keep you from screwing the user. GPL 3 will prevent M$ and other big dumb companies from using patents to screw the user too, which is why M$ is in a pickle over this Novel deal. If M$ wants to use free software, they are going to have to give up their patent FUD. The deal is, "cooperate or do it yourself." M$'s ability to do things on their own never was great and they are out of non free companies to bully.
You really should get a grip on software freedom before you rag on it. When and if you ever do, you will expect much more from M$. The only way they can provide that is to finally join the big happy free software family.
If MS are giving away coupons for a version of SUSE, what the hell is stopping them from giving away the disk version from the day they made their coupons?
You mean try to push it as bits in a box like Vista or XP with a five year "cycle" time?
They could do that, but no one will buy them and that will hurt M$. Who wants to pay for a year old version of free software? Sure, it works but you can just download one that works better. The terms of the deal were that Novel would pay a percentage or a minimum of $40 million. Looks like the minimum is going to be what they get, so they will be down about $120 million. That's the cost of FUD, I suppose.
Another BIG problem with your scenerio is that they may have to cut out all software licensed under GPL 2 or later. It's the user or author that gets to decide the GPL version, not the vendor. In that case they will have to just throw the coupons away.
This is a fine ending for M$'s attempt to charge licensing frees for free software like they own it. They can own it, so long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, like IBM and everyone else. It's M$'s steadfast refusal to co-operate that keeps them out of the free software party. They can't just get along and compete like everyone else, they have to own everything and squeeze every nickel out of every user. It's not going to work any more than their in house software can compete in a free market. At the very best, they will get a old, modified and incomplete version while everyone else enjoys the latest and greatest.
Nobody is entitled to someone else's hard work for free.
That deal is about to change, so you might think twice before investing your work. The stuff that needs to be liberated long ago made it's money, the "workers" saw precious little of it and are mostly dead.
The world's three music publishers and movie publishers have been taking a long ride on my tax dollars, just so they can squeeze more out of me at the box office. Just threaten to eliminate perpetual copyright - 25 years sounds about right - when the copyright warriors are around. What's that you say, Mr. Pigopolist? You deserve the "protection" provided by my tax dollars? I don't think so. The deal is that you get limited protection for a limited time to recoup your investment, but only if such protection is required to advance the public domain and state of the art.
The laws are really out of control. People are put in jail longer for sharing music than they are for rape and the fines for the "crime" of sharing are to lose your life savings. Think about that. Are you really more upset when someone shares a song or movie than you are when they rape your neighbor? Is sharing really a crime people should go to jail for? Laws need to follow morals, not the other way around. Copyright law is wrong and needs fixing.
The inaptly named "realty master 101" claims Vista is not a dissapointment:
Where is this mass disappointment? It doesn't exist in the normal world.
It's everywhere people have tried. Go to YouTube and look for the two minute Vista install. There you will find a guy that crams his Vista install disk into a shredder. He's not alone. The CCCC mail lists are full of people swearing at and off Vista. While I was sitting with the ACM at LSU's student fair, a stranger out of nowhere came up and told the group about how miserable his install was. Only one person I know uses Vista and he admits there are serious driver issues and that it's not ready for general consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Just look at it, Dell customers get to use Linux but still pay their share of MS tax, but now for an OS Microsoft doesn't need to develop or support.
The Novel deal is their first and last dishonest free software score and it's costing them about $120,000,000. GPL3 eliminates patent threats. If M$ want's to play the free software game they will have to play it like IBM and everyone else. They can make money at it, but the monopoly is over.
2007 is the Year of Linux.
Everyone should know by now that non free software violates as many or more than free software. M$ will be forced to act and will lose. GPL3 will prevent them from owning free software by patents, so they will have to go free to be competitive or die under their dog food. This game is close to over.
The threat has already "damaged the brand". We all know they put SCO up to it's failed bid and these threats seal the deal for anyone who was on the sidelines. It's pretty obvious to everyone how M$ operates now and all credibility is going down the drain with Vista. They can't compete with free software, no single company can.
How to mitigate it? Unfortunately you don't. Because it is the idea of lawsuit you cannot work around this risk unless you avoid it altogether.
Can't do anything? Hardly! The easiest thing to do is point out that M$'s own sources think non free software violates more patents than free software does. The evidence is in all the lawsuits that M$ keeps losing, like the MP3 case. You don't see many of those for free software do you? The only way to avoid risk is to move as quickly as possible to free software.
You planning on responding to the comment on that entry you keep linking to, or are you hoping people just don't scroll down that far?
I really can't answer that, I can only link to what an artist has to say. He says people are being ripped off and I have to take him at his word.
Why is broadcast getting the special treatment?
Because broadcast spectrum was once a scarce, expensive and regulated resource owned by the public. The rules were made to insure that resource was well used and include the forced licensing terms you mention for the composer. The original goal of copyright law is to distribute culture and advance the state of the art and those rules can be interpreted that way. If the goal had been to support publishers and artists, they would be paid a stipend without further obligation.
The new rules look more like a prop for a dying industry than ever before. They allow the RIAA to collect fees on all music with or without the artist and publisher's consent.
In a perfect world, congress should force everyone to pay record companies money, so record companies could distribute the wealth in whatever way they see fit.
Gee, that would be like them collecting money from strangers without any investment or effort. Why not just let them collect money for every song played regardless of ownership or artist intent? That would achieve the same thing because people are always going to want music. Like media taxes for "piracy", the new rules are closer to the nationalization of recorded music than most people realize.
I'd like to see all radio stations play only independent music for one day. See how the RIAA likes that.
Do you really think the MAFIAA and US government would tolerate such disrespect? They want to be able to charge against the will of the artist and publisher and may already have it. Something needs to change.
You won't be able to give your music away in the future. Giving the MAFIAA a new revenue stream only gives them more money to do more harm. The only place to stop them is at the voting booth.
Honestly, is anyone surprised?
No, but that won't keep M$ from lying about it. The first lie is by omission. That one and more active lies will be easy to confront now.
The CERT report you quote is about Yet Another incident where Winblows was fingered, the 2003 Blackout, that has nothing to do with Davis-Besse besides M$.
The fine article is rather clear:
They go on to mention three other incidents, including the later whitewashed Blackout account.
Just more of the same sad, tired bullshit FUD you're famous for.
Your love of M$ has blinded you again. Why do you feel so much for a big dumb company and their software? How many screw ups does it take to convince you that M$ does not belong everywhere and they have serious issues to resolve before they can be trusted anywhere.
Aero Glass works on a Core Duo Mac Mini, so I'd have to say the answer is "pretty damn slim."
How much of the 220 W that computer uses is the processor and why were you complaining about the 100 W that Power 6 is using at more than twice the clock speed?
The civil disobedience movements in India had a much larger more fundamental purpose. They did not want to be ruled by the British and have they're country pillaged. To compare it to a bunch of shopkeepers from allowing MS to make a little more money is stupid.
No, I've compared it to 350 retail shops who don't want to be shaken down by a foreign company. M$, like the RIAA, does not always get things right and I know at least one shop owner here who's fought them off in court. I like the "screw you, we don't want your software" reaction better.
You are right to think of this action as small, but it's the tip of a very large iceburg. The US government puts up with M$ games because M$ is a US company and, in theory, money M$ rips out of schools, government and other businesses never leaves the US. Indeed, the US sees M$ as a big trade positive that will grow. Other governments should and do look at that coercive monopoly rip off as their country being pillaged. Government and business interests should think very hard before trusting their data to foreign software that can't be inspected. These shopkeepers might not have thought all of that through, but they will. In the mean time, they have rightly concluded that M$ is not worth their effort. Watch their attitude spread and see what M$ can do about it. Worse still for M$, watch how the US government attitude changes when they realize that "developing countries" are not such a good market for software because the cost of enforcement is going to blow any profits that might be made and make the US look like a big dick.
lets not get all jihadi about what MS is doing and see things in a proper perspective.
It's the copyright warriors who are the offenders here. They are pushing their crap on the world but the price of their profits it to deny that world a choice and fine them when they naturally share with each other. In the US, they will take everything you own and put you in jail for longer than people who murder and rape. I don't think they will get away with it elsewhere. The push back is on the way.
These people were not buying "M$" products to begin with, so please explain to us simple people how this "backslash" means "M$" is going to lose?
If you had read the article, you would have seen that M$ thinks the vendors are important. If things work there as they do here, they are right.
M$ is nothing without the support network everyone else provides. These 350 shops are their mainstay, for both their sales volume and their recommendations and fixes. Even here in the US, where people have enough money to buy new systems M$ would sink if it were not for the many local people who keep those virused out boxes running. The rub is that they are not making enough money from their sales to justify the $5,000 fines M$ would like to drop on them. That's not to say M$ was not making money - selling twenty five cent CDs in a plastic box for one or two hundred bucks makes enough to fund their billion dollar a month advert attack and put money in their own pockets.
Compare it to Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi
That's ridiculous and insulting to all Indians, I'm sure.
No, their banding together to fight is admirable and puts US mom and pop shops to shame. M$ has pulled the same kinds of game here in the land of the free and no one has ever stood up to them. Those people, more than Dell, HP and others, are who makes M$ rich.
The Power6 uses "under 100 watts in performance sensitive applications." WAAAY too much for a notebook or a mini.
So how slim can you make a Vista premium ultra ready dual core hamburger grill? Don't those things suck down 300 W at idle before you turn on that clumsy enlightenment knock off GUI? Power has always sucked less power per flop, I'm not sure why this one would be different, except for the screaming clock speed.
Let me see if I get this right. Microsoft tries to prevent them from pirating their software which they are doing based on their idea that they're doing a good deed. Kinda like I could steal your car and give it away to a charity, so there's no victim, right?
That's a useful analogy if cars cab be coppied at the push of a button. At that rate, I'd be happy to give coppies of my car to anyone who wants them. What a wonderful and abundant world that would be. I'm not sure how can compare that to theft and murder on the high seas, aka "piracy".
there's a "backlash" and they're not going to "buy" their products for a whole quarter? A a whole quarter? The same people who were pirating the software to begin with are going "on strike"? And you consider this some sort of victory?
It's not a victory but it brings us closer to one. A victory would be all 350 retailers switching to free software. That kind of victory won't be possible until hardware has been liberated from M$ manipulation. When that happens, everyone will have choices that don't involve risk. Everything that hurts M$ brings us closer to that day and this hurts M$. It clearly demonstrates the problems M$ is going to have trying to extract money from people around the world. The so called developing world is not going to be a growth market for them. It will never be in India or any other country's best interest to actually enforce crazy US "IP" laws.
Who mods this stuff up, anyway?
Your mother. Didn't she teach you that sharing was good?
The crackdown is not nearly as interesting as the vendor reaction: a general strike against M$. They have a guild and 350 shops have boycotted a M$ training session and pledged to purchase nothing from M$ for the next quarter.
This is a real culture clash and M$ is going to lose. Compare it to Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi and you can see where this is going. If M$'s $3 "education pack" is not good enough and they won't quit making alternate software difficult by vendor and driver manipulation, the people of the world will simply take what they want. M$ can no more stop this than the British Empire could keep people from taking salt from the sea.
I'd rather they discovered free software. It would be better for them and they could more easily implement things like DVD playing and advanced video codecs than people endumbered by dumb laws like the DMCA. Using M$ leaves the user open to M$ violation down, powers the botnet and props up M$'s awefull non free formats.
if your idea is better than my idea, I lose.
In the worst of cases you now have a better idea in your head. In the best of cases, you have two ideas in your head. 1 + n > 1, so long as n>0. It is only when people put controls on ideas that value is lost in the transaction. That, or your brain can only hold one idea at a time, which is something you should see the doctor about.
no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind
I agree entirely, there is no good reason to put physical limitations on ideas and doing so degrades them. Good ideas can be immortal, a story is retold, a song is sung, inventions are shared and implemented long after the death of the person who conceived the original. As one candle lights another, ideas flow between people and enrich all. A society that would put unreasonable restrictions on these things will extinguish them. The ultimate reward for any author is recognition and imitation.
Perpetual copyrights will be used to crush people with new stories, songs and ideas. "What is yours next to our collection, which [contains tens of thousands | spans the entire history of recorded music | includes the work of Einstein]?" they can ask before dismissing you. Every day we come closer to losing the right to read.
Firstly I would re-design that entire infrastructure and rid that power plant of incompetent IT people.
You need to find the root cause. You don't know it yet, so you don't really know what to do.
Chances are, the cause has been written up by the four or five systems engineering people in charge of the plant. They ARE competent, but they are never given the resources they need.
Why wasn't there any failover who knows.
There was a failover - they overrode the broken thing. Had the operators been gassed, the plant would have turned itself off when the water level got too high or low. This is a big deal but ultimately the plant was safely shut down and no one got hurt. It's designed to do that even if you could shear the feed water pipe off and they did not let the new fangled control network mess with that.
Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to think "OMG, Haxxors?" Answer: work at Homeland inSecurity, or be a Congresscritter. They already figured it out. It was a controller for a specific piece of equipment that flooded the network and triggered a bug in the variable-frequency-drive controllers for pumps.
As someone who used to work in system's engineering for a sister BWR, I think the inspection is a good idea. Oh, there's dumb and there's nuclear dumb but this is not a case of either. Nuclear dumb involves putting machine guns nests inside the plant. Finding the root cause of the accident is a good idea.
Handwaving about a PLC device won't do. What ultimately caused the PLC malfunction needs to be answered at a component level. There's going to be something wrong with it and that should be reported and every other device like it needs to be ripped out and trashed. If there is not component failure, there's a software problem which also must be understood.
Yes, it could have been hackers. The "internal control network" might at some point hits a desk that's connected to the wider world. It could be something mundane and unintentional, like an operator's virused up laptop.
An outage like that is something that's going to have both NRC and corporate ass-chewers looking at everything. Corporate might want to paint a nice picture for the NRC, but the poor devil that lies to them goes to jail. In either case, the problem will be identified and eliminated.
You might also have noted in the article that this is not the first plant to go thumbs down over some winblows born virus. In 2003, the slammer worm caused havoc at an offline Ohio plant. Yes, that was hackers. They did not mean to do it, but the plant's systems were open to it and failed. That's not acceptable from any standpoint.
Despite the better advice of the computer people at the plants, Entergy is a big M$ Partner. They take the big dogs out fishing and sell them the works. Ten years ago, M$ had something worth while and interesting. It was used in places it should not have been. Worse, the flaws from ten years ago have not been addressed or fixed. A good clean up is in order.
Do investigators also want to know how a "data storm" could have caused a nuclear plant to shut down?
The two questions, where and how, will be answered at the same time.
me - "They can own it, so long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, like IBM and everyone else. "
you - Really? Not two days ago you said "Linux is GPL, so it does not have owners".
OK, free software has owners but the only thing they will do is keep you from screwing the user. GPL 3 will prevent M$ and other big dumb companies from using patents to screw the user too, which is why M$ is in a pickle over this Novel deal. If M$ wants to use free software, they are going to have to give up their patent FUD. The deal is, "cooperate or do it yourself." M$'s ability to do things on their own never was great and they are out of non free companies to bully.
You really should get a grip on software freedom before you rag on it. When and if you ever do, you will expect much more from M$. The only way they can provide that is to finally join the big happy free software family.
If MS are giving away coupons for a version of SUSE, what the hell is stopping them from giving away the disk version from the day they made their coupons?
You mean try to push it as bits in a box like Vista or XP with a five year "cycle" time?
They could do that, but no one will buy them and that will hurt M$. Who wants to pay for a year old version of free software? Sure, it works but you can just download one that works better. The terms of the deal were that Novel would pay a percentage or a minimum of $40 million. Looks like the minimum is going to be what they get, so they will be down about $120 million. That's the cost of FUD, I suppose.
Another BIG problem with your scenerio is that they may have to cut out all software licensed under GPL 2 or later. It's the user or author that gets to decide the GPL version, not the vendor. In that case they will have to just throw the coupons away.
This is a fine ending for M$'s attempt to charge licensing frees for free software like they own it. They can own it, so long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, like IBM and everyone else. It's M$'s steadfast refusal to co-operate that keeps them out of the free software party. They can't just get along and compete like everyone else, they have to own everything and squeeze every nickel out of every user. It's not going to work any more than their in house software can compete in a free market. At the very best, they will get a old, modified and incomplete version while everyone else enjoys the latest and greatest.
Nobody is entitled to someone else's hard work for free.
That deal is about to change, so you might think twice before investing your work. The stuff that needs to be liberated long ago made it's money, the "workers" saw precious little of it and are mostly dead.
The world's three music publishers and movie publishers have been taking a long ride on my tax dollars, just so they can squeeze more out of me at the box office. Just threaten to eliminate perpetual copyright - 25 years sounds about right - when the copyright warriors are around. What's that you say, Mr. Pigopolist? You deserve the "protection" provided by my tax dollars? I don't think so. The deal is that you get limited protection for a limited time to recoup your investment, but only if such protection is required to advance the public domain and state of the art.
The laws are really out of control. People are put in jail longer for sharing music than they are for rape and the fines for the "crime" of sharing are to lose your life savings. Think about that. Are you really more upset when someone shares a song or movie than you are when they rape your neighbor? Is sharing really a crime people should go to jail for? Laws need to follow morals, not the other way around. Copyright law is wrong and needs fixing.
The inaptly named "realty master 101" claims Vista is not a dissapointment:
Where is this mass disappointment? It doesn't exist in the normal world.
It's everywhere people have tried. Go to YouTube and look for the two minute Vista install. There you will find a guy that crams his Vista install disk into a shredder. He's not alone. The CCCC mail lists are full of people swearing at and off Vista. While I was sitting with the ACM at LSU's student fair, a stranger out of nowhere came up and told the group about how miserable his install was. Only one person I know uses Vista and he admits there are serious driver issues and that it's not ready for general consumption.