Hypothetically, let's say you're a woman contributing anonymously to an open source project and someone else on the project knows you're a woman (it's sometimes a small world, after all) and points it out. Maybe they didn't even intend anything by it, but it just happened to come up one time. Then let's say, after that, a certain group of influential people on the project started treating you differently and started rejecting your pull requests, etc.
If that actually happened, shouldn't you be able to tell your story? Why not speak about it at a conference? You should try to change the culture - it's clearly not optimal for anyone on the project, since otherwise good pull requests are being ignored. You wouldn't be trying to "get attention".
In this particular case I applaud the efforts to bring these injustices to light. Nothing wrong with what these women are doing - it's brave. I was more just expressing a general feeling of helplessness that I feel surrounding this topic. I realize I wasn't very clear on that in my original post.
Even if 10 or 20% of men are the culprits, I can see how that presents a significant barrier to all women wanting to enter the field. However, that's still "some men." When people claim the problem is "men," then I'd rather just tune out. The fact is, I don't behave like that, I'd speak out against that behavior if I saw it, but I just don't see it in the environments I frequent. Somehow I still get lumped in as part of the problem because I'm male. Whatever... I stopped listening when I was supposed to fix a problem I have zero control over.
Really? "Exercise" is a little vague to me. "This is not a drill" is definitely clear. To me, "exercise" means move. The opposite of "This is NOT a drill" is "This is a drill," not "Exercise."
That is the old model before all the data collection requirements arrived. The new model needs data connectivity, so patches are a must, or else you need expensive, complicated and difficult-to-implement things like data diodes.
It's absolutely hypocritical of them to sell a Windows PC-based industrial control system, and instead of maintaining their product and testing it with each new Windows Update, they just put out a blanket statement to turn off Windows Updates and put it behind a firewall, and then sell their product based on the connectivity it provides. I'm OK with delayed patch installation and extra security measures, but every patch needs to be tested by them and certified for installation. They have no mechanism for doing that at all.
We received a notification from Beckhoff to avoid these patches for TwinCAT 3 until they would patch their runtime to be compatible. We update through WSUS so we were able to do that. Beckhoff themselves urge you *not* to install Windows Updates on their control system PCs even though they bill their product as part of the "Internet of Things" and play up the connectivity of everything. They're hypocrites, but Rockwell did the same thing when we used their product. They wouldn't warranty their software if you installed anti-virus on the same server as their historian product.
Exactly. Having them in there and grayed out so you can't select them would be fine too. Then you have to take some action to manually "arm" or "enable" the real ones, and then you can select them. That clearly would have been enough to stop this error.
No, you're wrong. UI design plays a major role in the correct operation of a system. Very few people in my experience are detail-oriented people, and even the ones who are still make predictable mistakes. The system must account for how real people actually behave. To do otherwise is bad system design. Looks like this was just a test of connectivity. I don't know why they didn't automate the test (send a test file once every 8 hours, write in the log that it got sent, and write in the log that a confirmation came back, then have another job that looks for those log entries in the appropriate time range and alerts the operators if it didn't work). Yes, you still need to manually test, but not as often. In a case like this, there should be a prior action required to "arm" any of the "real" messages, so there's two different processes that you won't mix up. A generic "are you sure" query isn't good enough because it's the same message whether you picked a real message or a test message. Muscle memory kicks in and you just click Yes, after all that's what you did the last several hundred times.
I don't think you're counting the tourism increase to New Zealand. My wife and I were mostly unaware of New Zealand as a big tourist destination before the movies (all I knew about New Zealand was it's the land "where the men are men and sheep are nervous"). Now we're specifically making sure to go there and my wife wanted to do the LOTR tour as she's a big fan of the books/movies. The movies showed off the scenery - $50 million for advertising was probably easily worth it.
At a higher level, that just means more people went to those restaurants (more likely than people just eating more... we already eat a lot) so fewer people going to the competitors, which means the competitors that didn't automate either go out of business or lay off workers, or automate.
Your cheap residential service precludes the ability to run servers, generally, but not always. There are lots of alternatives if you want to run a website. Setting up a simple site is under $20 in hosting per month, depending on options. You can rent rack space for your own server from a company, even if that "server" is just a cheap PC. In reality, this has already been solved when Diaspora* was created, and you can run your own pod, or sign up to host your data on someone else's pod.
Every time a new class graduates university, a few of them realize there's problems with the way things are and decide they're smart so they'll fix them. That's great, but of course they fail to do the basic work of coming up to speed on all the reasons why it is the way it is.
The internet was already designed as a decentralized network. It's already fundamentally peer-to-peer at its lowest level. It automatically routes around damage.
The fact that companies built centralized services like Facebook and Google on top of them doesn't mean you need to throw away the whole network. Email is federated (you can run your own email server if you want) and worked just fine until Facebook offered everyone the devil's bargain and they mostly all accepted it.
Building a mesh network can't solve this problem. Why can't you build a Facebook on top of a mesh network? Answer: you can.
Facebook and Google are huge because they offer stuff "for free" in exchange for your personal information, which is worth far more to them than they money it costs to run the service. You can go invent a distributed communication and/or social network where it's not supported by selling your data, but then the users will have to pay, and almost nobody will want to pay the few dollars a month it will cost. If most people won't pay, then there won't be enough people on it to be a viable network.
I work in a manufacturing environment, and changing even a handful of people's behavior is so incredibly difficult and costly ("always pick up one orange nut at a time, then the blue nut, don't grab two at once.") that asking everyone to change the way they drive is just ridiculous. You have to change things so that the desired behavior is the easier behavior. For instance, advanced cruise control that adjusts your distance automatically might be a solution. In our plant, if the process says they should do X before Y, then the only way to ensure it actually happens all the time is to prevent Y from happening until there's proof X happened. People just aren't reliable.
Yes, the company that installed the flywheel installation is Temporal Power. There's more information about the installation in this Globe and Mail article.
I guess to be more complete, I should also add that when generation drops offline, but load is the same, then grid voltage *will* drop in the system, but the amount it drops is complicated. Every point in the system has a different voltage. The voltage drop causes more current to flow from the remaining generators, which is load, which causes them to slow down, hence the frequency drops a bit. The frequency drop is directly related to generator speed, and the generators are speed regulated so the control systems try to speed them back up by dumping in more fuel (if coal or gas). Also, when the voltage drops, that automatically sheds a small amount of load: resistive loads like incandescent lights and heaters draw current proportional to voltage, and some UPS equipment will detect the brown-out and switch to battery. However, there's voltage regulation built into the grid (in the form of variable transformers) so those will attempt to adjust for the lower grid voltage by changing their winding ratio to compensate, so in general the load stays fairly constant. From my understanding you generally model an industrial load (like a factory) as a constant power load in kW, *not* a constant current draw in amps or a constant resistance/impedance, so if the grid voltage falls, from your point of view as a fixed output voltage generator, the grid just consumes more current.
Good question. A simple way to view it is that the grid is powered by generators. The generators are built to run at a fixed speed, and are wound so that the fixed speed outputs (in this case) 50Hz at a fixed voltage. The voltage output of the generator is a sine wave and it will lead (since it's generating) the grid voltage by a small amount (lead means same frequency, slightly ahead of phase). The amount it leads determines the load, and the generator has a limit to how much load it can handle, so if you tried to speed it up by turning it faster, it would start to lead slightly more and the load would increase (more current, but more resistance to the prime mover turning the generator) so the speed stays close to 50 Hz and it only speeds up a very small amount very briefly. When you drop a bunch of generation offline, the rest of the generators see a bunch more load suddenly, which is felt as a physical torque, so the generator gets harder to turn. The prime movers (turbines typically) can't produce more power instantaneously so the generators start to decelerate slightly. That's why you see the grid frequency drop slightly until the turbines increase power to take up the load. That's assuming the remaining generation can handle it. What they're saying here is that the Tesla system, since it uses inverters, can respond faster than the turbines generating power (duh). I'm not sure why it's described as shocking. Near where I live, in Canada, they installed a few MW of magnetic bearing sealed-vacuum flywheel energy storage specifically for frequency regulation due to all the new windmills they installed. The flywheels are spinning at synchronous speed and can absorb and deliver energy to the grid as needed, similar to the Tesla battery system.
I was looking at a cheap Mini PC, labeled an "industrial PC" on newegg, from a Chinese seller, obviously, and the one review said the version of windows pre-installed was pirated, and there was software installed that simulated the license authentication, but as soon as you installed anti-virus it would detect that software and quarantine it, and then your windows copy realizes it's a pirated copy. Caveat emptor.
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Hypothetically, let's say you're a woman contributing anonymously to an open source project and someone else on the project knows you're a woman (it's sometimes a small world, after all) and points it out. Maybe they didn't even intend anything by it, but it just happened to come up one time. Then let's say, after that, a certain group of influential people on the project started treating you differently and started rejecting your pull requests, etc.
If that actually happened, shouldn't you be able to tell your story? Why not speak about it at a conference? You should try to change the culture - it's clearly not optimal for anyone on the project, since otherwise good pull requests are being ignored. You wouldn't be trying to "get attention".
Shut up you cry baby.
That comment is neither helpful, nor appropriate for this discussion.
In this particular case I applaud the efforts to bring these injustices to light. Nothing wrong with what these women are doing - it's brave. I was more just expressing a general feeling of helplessness that I feel surrounding this topic. I realize I wasn't very clear on that in my original post.
Even if 10 or 20% of men are the culprits, I can see how that presents a significant barrier to all women wanting to enter the field. However, that's still "some men." When people claim the problem is "men," then I'd rather just tune out. The fact is, I don't behave like that, I'd speak out against that behavior if I saw it, but I just don't see it in the environments I frequent. Somehow I still get lumped in as part of the problem because I'm male. Whatever... I stopped listening when I was supposed to fix a problem I have zero control over.
Really? "Exercise" is a little vague to me. "This is not a drill" is definitely clear. To me, "exercise" means move. The opposite of "This is NOT a drill" is "This is a drill," not "Exercise."
...and she swallowed the spider to catch the fly... I don't know why she followed the fly.
That is the old model before all the data collection requirements arrived. The new model needs data connectivity, so patches are a must, or else you need expensive, complicated and difficult-to-implement things like data diodes.
It's absolutely hypocritical of them to sell a Windows PC-based industrial control system, and instead of maintaining their product and testing it with each new Windows Update, they just put out a blanket statement to turn off Windows Updates and put it behind a firewall, and then sell their product based on the connectivity it provides. I'm OK with delayed patch installation and extra security measures, but every patch needs to be tested by them and certified for installation. They have no mechanism for doing that at all.
That's what OPC UA is, from my understanding. I never like original OPC due to the performance hit, but I understand that OPC UA is much better.
We received a notification from Beckhoff to avoid these patches for TwinCAT 3 until they would patch their runtime to be compatible. We update through WSUS so we were able to do that. Beckhoff themselves urge you *not* to install Windows Updates on their control system PCs even though they bill their product as part of the "Internet of Things" and play up the connectivity of everything. They're hypocrites, but Rockwell did the same thing when we used their product. They wouldn't warranty their software if you installed anti-virus on the same server as their historian product.
If they're monitoring pacemakers, that's great, but I really hope they use some kind of data diode!
Exactly. Having them in there and grayed out so you can't select them would be fine too. Then you have to take some action to manually "arm" or "enable" the real ones, and then you can select them. That clearly would have been enough to stop this error.
No, you're wrong. UI design plays a major role in the correct operation of a system. Very few people in my experience are detail-oriented people, and even the ones who are still make predictable mistakes. The system must account for how real people actually behave. To do otherwise is bad system design. Looks like this was just a test of connectivity. I don't know why they didn't automate the test (send a test file once every 8 hours, write in the log that it got sent, and write in the log that a confirmation came back, then have another job that looks for those log entries in the appropriate time range and alerts the operators if it didn't work). Yes, you still need to manually test, but not as often. In a case like this, there should be a prior action required to "arm" any of the "real" messages, so there's two different processes that you won't mix up. A generic "are you sure" query isn't good enough because it's the same message whether you picked a real message or a test message. Muscle memory kicks in and you just click Yes, after all that's what you did the last several hundred times.
A product you can crack in two months with available technology still has essentially broken security.
I don't think you're counting the tourism increase to New Zealand. My wife and I were mostly unaware of New Zealand as a big tourist destination before the movies (all I knew about New Zealand was it's the land "where the men are men and sheep are nervous"). Now we're specifically making sure to go there and my wife wanted to do the LOTR tour as she's a big fan of the books/movies. The movies showed off the scenery - $50 million for advertising was probably easily worth it.
At a higher level, that just means more people went to those restaurants (more likely than people just eating more... we already eat a lot) so fewer people going to the competitors, which means the competitors that didn't automate either go out of business or lay off workers, or automate.
Your cheap residential service precludes the ability to run servers, generally, but not always. There are lots of alternatives if you want to run a website. Setting up a simple site is under $20 in hosting per month, depending on options. You can rent rack space for your own server from a company, even if that "server" is just a cheap PC. In reality, this has already been solved when Diaspora* was created, and you can run your own pod, or sign up to host your data on someone else's pod.
If the price of a transaction goes up, that would bring the price of bitcoin down (makes it more expensive to use, and therefore worth less).
Every time a new class graduates university, a few of them realize there's problems with the way things are and decide they're smart so they'll fix them. That's great, but of course they fail to do the basic work of coming up to speed on all the reasons why it is the way it is.
The internet was already designed as a decentralized network. It's already fundamentally peer-to-peer at its lowest level. It automatically routes around damage.
The fact that companies built centralized services like Facebook and Google on top of them doesn't mean you need to throw away the whole network. Email is federated (you can run your own email server if you want) and worked just fine until Facebook offered everyone the devil's bargain and they mostly all accepted it.
Building a mesh network can't solve this problem. Why can't you build a Facebook on top of a mesh network? Answer: you can.
Facebook and Google are huge because they offer stuff "for free" in exchange for your personal information, which is worth far more to them than they money it costs to run the service. You can go invent a distributed communication and/or social network where it's not supported by selling your data, but then the users will have to pay, and almost nobody will want to pay the few dollars a month it will cost. If most people won't pay, then there won't be enough people on it to be a viable network.
Agreed, but I don't think it's as near as many of us hope. I don't see the technology being able to drive in very snowy conditions.
I work in a manufacturing environment, and changing even a handful of people's behavior is so incredibly difficult and costly ("always pick up one orange nut at a time, then the blue nut, don't grab two at once.") that asking everyone to change the way they drive is just ridiculous. You have to change things so that the desired behavior is the easier behavior. For instance, advanced cruise control that adjusts your distance automatically might be a solution. In our plant, if the process says they should do X before Y, then the only way to ensure it actually happens all the time is to prevent Y from happening until there's proof X happened. People just aren't reliable.
Yes, the company that installed the flywheel installation is Temporal Power. There's more information about the installation in this Globe and Mail article.
I guess to be more complete, I should also add that when generation drops offline, but load is the same, then grid voltage *will* drop in the system, but the amount it drops is complicated. Every point in the system has a different voltage. The voltage drop causes more current to flow from the remaining generators, which is load, which causes them to slow down, hence the frequency drops a bit. The frequency drop is directly related to generator speed, and the generators are speed regulated so the control systems try to speed them back up by dumping in more fuel (if coal or gas). Also, when the voltage drops, that automatically sheds a small amount of load: resistive loads like incandescent lights and heaters draw current proportional to voltage, and some UPS equipment will detect the brown-out and switch to battery. However, there's voltage regulation built into the grid (in the form of variable transformers) so those will attempt to adjust for the lower grid voltage by changing their winding ratio to compensate, so in general the load stays fairly constant. From my understanding you generally model an industrial load (like a factory) as a constant power load in kW, *not* a constant current draw in amps or a constant resistance/impedance, so if the grid voltage falls, from your point of view as a fixed output voltage generator, the grid just consumes more current.
Good question. A simple way to view it is that the grid is powered by generators. The generators are built to run at a fixed speed, and are wound so that the fixed speed outputs (in this case) 50Hz at a fixed voltage. The voltage output of the generator is a sine wave and it will lead (since it's generating) the grid voltage by a small amount (lead means same frequency, slightly ahead of phase). The amount it leads determines the load, and the generator has a limit to how much load it can handle, so if you tried to speed it up by turning it faster, it would start to lead slightly more and the load would increase (more current, but more resistance to the prime mover turning the generator) so the speed stays close to 50 Hz and it only speeds up a very small amount very briefly. When you drop a bunch of generation offline, the rest of the generators see a bunch more load suddenly, which is felt as a physical torque, so the generator gets harder to turn. The prime movers (turbines typically) can't produce more power instantaneously so the generators start to decelerate slightly. That's why you see the grid frequency drop slightly until the turbines increase power to take up the load. That's assuming the remaining generation can handle it. What they're saying here is that the Tesla system, since it uses inverters, can respond faster than the turbines generating power (duh). I'm not sure why it's described as shocking. Near where I live, in Canada, they installed a few MW of magnetic bearing sealed-vacuum flywheel energy storage specifically for frequency regulation due to all the new windmills they installed. The flywheels are spinning at synchronous speed and can absorb and deliver energy to the grid as needed, similar to the Tesla battery system.
I was looking at a cheap Mini PC, labeled an "industrial PC" on newegg, from a Chinese seller, obviously, and the one review said the version of windows pre-installed was pirated, and there was software installed that simulated the license authentication, but as soon as you installed anti-virus it would detect that software and quarantine it, and then your windows copy realizes it's a pirated copy. Caveat emptor.