Pretty much every industry worldwide is like this. Auditors check that various reviews and things have been done. The reviews etc. are done by the manufacturers. Take a look at the auto industry and the emissions issues the last few years. The government seldom does the testing, etc. They just set the standards and the manufacturers claim they meet them. Same with the drug manufacturers (see the recent worldwide recall of the blood pressure medicine irbesartan). There isn't enough government expertise or manpower to check everything.
Another thought is that the system needs to have a sense of time as well when working with real sensors. There should be some time smoothing (exponential is simple to implement and usually pretty good at reducing noise in the signal) as well as some tracking of rate of change of the readings as a reality check.
One in 100,000 what? Seconds, minutes, hours, lifetimes?
It is stupid to make something that can kill people rely on a single input sensor. I programmed experimental tests in nuclear reactors and we always had multiple inputs (thermocouples, flow sensors, etc.) and had sanity checks on the values to identify failed equipment.
Seems like Boeing's software could have taken more things into consideration than just the angle of attack? What about speed, altitude, rate of climb/descent, etc.
They are old, but all of the books that Brian Kernighan was involved with: Software Tools, The Elements of Programming Style, etc. The writing and editing in these books is excellent. Too bad there isn't a new generation of them.
It also implies that a rogue employee could have done this at any time.
I ran a large credit union IS department for years and made sure that no one person, even me, could have pulled this off. Various on-line (but in-house at local and remote site) backups done minute to minute in most cases and off-line backups done daily. Various permissions required to access electronic data stores, and different people with physical access. Tapes taken offsite every day AND MOUNTED AND READ AND VERIFIED at the remote site then stored in the custody of yet other employees. No single point of human or electronic failure.
The flaw in your reasoning is that although your statements are correct for the average man or woman, they might be quite wrong for individual men or women. I grew up in a farm community also, and did a lot of manual labor. Some of the ladies were more than capable of moving hay bales and some of the men were not. Everyone is different.
Actually where I used to work, we got lots of misdirected medical faxes. Our phone number was just 1 digit off from one of the local clinics and our fax machine would receive medical reports it wasn't supposed to. We'd call them and let them know then feed it to the shredder. So faxes may or may not be "the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA" but it is far from foolproof.
Actually the world has built way fewer than even one thousand reactors.
And don't confuse commercial power nukes with the Hanford stuff. That was WW II and cold war production and they made a mess. Cleaning it up is a difficult technical challenge.
The commercial nuclear stuff is a much smaller problem, mostly financial. The actual physical volume of used fuel rods in the world isn't that great compared to many other pollution problems.
The waste isn't "anything". It is reasonably well characterized, and there are plenty of records. It's just that there is no cheap way to deal with it.
I was in a similar situation. I spent some time over a period of a couple of years making sure that every possible process was documented. When the time came for me to leave, I gave them a few weeks notice and it all turned out fine. I did get two phone calls in the weeks after I left, but that was it.
Make sure you actually can restore. Do it regularly. Restore to different hardware. If using tape, restore using different tape drives. Make testing restores a routine thing. When I was a boss, we did daily backups onto tape and same day read the tapes at the offsite recovery site (about 30 miles away).
During my career, I've seen two restore failures where they'd been backing up for years but the backups were no good and they had no idea.
I'm in my 60s, still programming for a living. This is my fourth job, with a small instrument manufacturing company. I previously worked for a national lab, an engineering firm, and a large credit union. I've programmed in a variety of languages, OSes, databases,... over the years, and just keep learning new things.
The guys I work with now are 29, 34, 36, 38 and 41 years old. It's all good though, and we get along great. I'm actually the new guy here (3 yrs), but had no problems settling in.
We actually have one remote, part-time programmer (about 10 hrs a week) who is about 75. My long term goal is to be like him.:-)
We were in the 95% zone, but my youngest son and I chose to make the drive. About a five hour round trip. We took relatively back roads into central Oregon and had a great time. We saw just a little over one minute of totality. Even though I have an old, not great camera, it is still more capable than I am.:-) I did get two really good pictures though, one of the crescent moon and one during the totality. Lots of fun and good memories.
Cyber computers by CDC. Designed by Seymour Cray. He then left and start Cray Corp because his opinion on the future machines differed from other senior managment.
The Cyber supercomputers by Cray did everything in octal. 6-bit characters packed ten to a 60-bit word. Double precision FORTRAN was 120 bits. All the core dumps, etc. were in octal. I had to learn hex after spending a few years in the octal world first. It didn't seem temporary at the time!:-)
"I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor. Funny."
Wrong. There were NEVER any reviews of that product. The review button was never enabled so there were no low or otherwise reviews to "disappear".
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Pretty much every industry worldwide is like this. Auditors check that various reviews and things have been done. The reviews etc. are done by the manufacturers. Take a look at the auto industry and the emissions issues the last few years. The government seldom does the testing, etc. They just set the standards and the manufacturers claim they meet them. Same with the drug manufacturers (see the recent worldwide recall of the blood pressure medicine irbesartan). There isn't enough government expertise or manpower to check everything.
Another thought is that the system needs to have a sense of time as well when working with real sensors. There should be some time smoothing (exponential is simple to implement and usually pretty good at reducing noise in the signal) as well as some tracking of rate of change of the readings as a reality check.
One in 100,000 what? Seconds, minutes, hours, lifetimes?
It is stupid to make something that can kill people rely on a single input sensor. I programmed experimental tests in nuclear reactors and we always had multiple inputs (thermocouples, flow sensors, etc.) and had sanity checks on the values to identify failed equipment.
Seems like Boeing's software could have taken more things into consideration than just the angle of attack? What about speed, altitude, rate of climb/descent, etc.
Great book. When I taught, it was my textbook.
They are old, but all of the books that Brian Kernighan was involved with: Software Tools, The Elements of Programming Style, etc. The writing and editing in these books is excellent. Too bad there isn't a new generation of them.
It also implies that a rogue employee could have done this at any time.
I ran a large credit union IS department for years and made sure that no one person, even me, could have pulled this off. Various on-line (but in-house at local and remote site) backups done minute to minute in most cases and off-line backups done daily. Various permissions required to access electronic data stores, and different people with physical access. Tapes taken offsite every day AND MOUNTED AND READ AND VERIFIED at the remote site then stored in the custody of yet other employees. No single point of human or electronic failure.
The flaw in your reasoning is that although your statements are correct for the average man or woman, they might be quite wrong for individual men or women. I grew up in a farm community also, and did a lot of manual labor. Some of the ladies were more than capable of moving hay bales and some of the men were not. Everyone is different.
Actually where I used to work, we got lots of misdirected medical faxes. Our phone number was just 1 digit off from one of the local clinics and our fax machine would receive medical reports it wasn't supposed to. We'd call them and let them know then feed it to the shredder. So faxes may or may not be "the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA" but it is far from foolproof.
I want wide. I also want tall. I'll take 4:3 over any of the wider choices.
When I'm watching video, wide is fine. When I'm programming (or any other kind of creative writing) I want lots of lines visible, so tall is better.
"thousands of reactors worldwide"
Actually the world has built way fewer than even one thousand reactors.
And don't confuse commercial power nukes with the Hanford stuff. That was WW II and cold war production and they made a mess. Cleaning it up is a difficult technical challenge.
The commercial nuclear stuff is a much smaller problem, mostly financial. The actual physical volume of used fuel rods in the world isn't that great compared to many other pollution problems.
The tanks are old. They are actually still in service past their design life.
"platinum production"
We wish! :-) Actually, plutonium production.
The waste isn't "anything". It is reasonably well characterized, and there are plenty of records. It's just that there is no cheap way to deal with it.
Only one reactor (N) produced electricity (in addition to its primary isotope mission). The other dozen or so reactors were isotope production only.
I was in a similar situation. I spent some time over a period of a couple of years making sure that every possible process was documented. When the time came for me to leave, I gave them a few weeks notice and it all turned out fine. I did get two phone calls in the weeks after I left, but that was it.
Make sure you actually can restore. Do it regularly. Restore to different hardware. If using tape, restore using different tape drives. Make testing restores a routine thing. When I was a boss, we did daily backups onto tape and same day read the tapes at the offsite recovery site (about 30 miles away).
During my career, I've seen two restore failures where they'd been backing up for years but the backups were no good and they had no idea.
Yes it updated. Yes it works fine. For most users, it doesn't matter. Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari are all ok.
I'm in my 60s, still programming for a living. This is my fourth job, with a small instrument manufacturing company. I previously worked for a national lab, an engineering firm, and a large credit union. I've programmed in a variety of languages, OSes, databases, ... over the years, and just keep learning new things.
The guys I work with now are 29, 34, 36, 38 and 41 years old. It's all good though, and we get along great. I'm actually the new guy here (3 yrs), but had no problems settling in.
We actually have one remote, part-time programmer (about 10 hrs a week) who is about 75. My long term goal is to be like him. :-)
We were in the 95% zone, but my youngest son and I chose to make the drive. About a five hour round trip. We took relatively back roads into central Oregon and had a great time. We saw just a little over one minute of totality. Even though I have an old, not great camera, it is still more capable than I am. :-) I did get two really good pictures though, one of the crescent moon and one during the totality. Lots of fun and good memories.
Who doesn't make a backup in three months? Sorry dude, not much sympathy here.
Excellent book.
Also, Guns Germs and Steel is very good.
I'd pay $1 a month, even if that only got me access to a dozen articles a month. That's about all I ever clicked through to anyway.
I get a local (electronic subscription) newspaper that meets most of my needs.
I'd sign up for WaPo, NY Times, maybe LA Times as well for $1 a month gets me a dozen.
This is about the financial derivative blowup in the 90s.
Cyber computers by CDC. Designed by Seymour Cray. He then left and start Cray Corp because his opinion on the future machines differed from other senior managment.
The Cyber supercomputers by Cray did everything in octal. 6-bit characters packed ten to a 60-bit word. Double precision FORTRAN was 120 bits. All the core dumps, etc. were in octal. I had to learn hex after spending a few years in the octal world first. It didn't seem temporary at the time! :-)
"I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor. Funny."
Wrong. There were NEVER any reviews of that product. The review button was never enabled so there were no low or otherwise reviews to "disappear".