Looking at your examples, I would agree. But you argue that government intervention was the problem, and then you argue that it was lack of government intervention that caused the problem.
But I would agree that this isn't a free market, and I don't believe that there can ever be a true capitalist market.
Because in a true capitalist market monopolies would be allowed to grow without bounds. Which would create a single monopoly that would rule and we would be back to socialism. In a socialist market there would be one monopoly with little incentive to feed the supply-demand chain.
So we are left with a twisted notion we can have a true capitalist market. And every time there is government intervention we get cries of socialism. Because any socialism is bad, because it leads to communism or fascism.
This would leave us with a pendulum between capitalism and socialism. And the decision whether this legislation is good or bad. I think that in this case congressional and executive meddling in the judicial side of government is harmful. Partly because I have seen other interventions into the judicial branch which have worked out terribly. Such as caps on medical malpractice. Which in our state just moved the money from lawyers to insurance companies. So in the case here (ban on overtime lawsuits) I would guess it will move the money from lawyers to private companies. Which is the same result of the legislation in our state.
So if they really think that dropping overtime is going to increase salaries, I'd say they are delusional or just idiots. Love to be proven wrong, but I doubt that I will be. I think a bigger end result will be a cry for more H1-B visa workers. Since it is a free world market and all.
I'm glad you arrived. I was worried that no one at slashdot was going to be for capitalism anymore, now that the capitalistic structure used in our financial markets appears to have destroyed our financial markets.
All hail capitalism and free markets. (It was just a one time mistake and won't happen again, they promise). I mean it wasn't the head of any financial companies fault, he was just trying to make a profit. And if anything bad were to happen, then it would really be just bad for those who made the poor financial decisions, it wouldn't affect other people. It would just punish those who have made mistakes, and that will be enough to correct the markets.
It might be more useful if someone had connected hospital information together so that a pandemic is caught at it's earliest stages.
A couple of years ago my wife got severely ill nausea and vomiting. I took her in and they treated her and she was fine 24 hours later. But later I learned another hospital had seen 12 cases in the previous 24 hrs. My wife was the second at this particular hospital and one of 4 before we left the ER. But after talking to a friend of a friend who was a doctor I found out that about what was going on and he was unaware that they were seeing it at other hospitals. This was the first time I became concerned that hospitals were not communicating with each other and that if a more serious virus had broken out it would take them days instead of hours to figure out the extent of the problem.
And this wasn't just a run of the mill stomach virus, within about 2 hours she went from fine to totally incompasitated.
It makes me wonder how many of these cases of food poisoning could have been stopped, if hospitals were more communicative of cases they were seeing.
So I'm not really worried about bandwidth issues. By the time it becomes a bandwidth issue it's to late. The problem will kind of solve itself.
Since I taught labs and classes in physics. I can tell you that it makes a world of difference. At the start of the first year teaching, I thought the whole bunch was a group of idiots with the exception of 2 or 3. As the year progressed, I could see that the complexity of problems they were able to handle had tremendously improved.
Going from:
When you drop a ball from 10 meters. What velocity will the ball have 2 meters from the ground?
To:
If you have a barge (dimensions x1,y2,z2) in a lock with dimensions x, y. The lock filled to height z. The water level currently 16 cm from the top of the barge. What will be the water level if 3 casks 100 liters in volume each and weighing 300 kg each are removed from the boat and dropped into the lock.
So I would say that problem solving ability had increased tremendously
I have now seen some of the screenshots and some of the downloads of the logs.
Sarah Palin has some explaining to do.
I don't know if this real or not, I'm beginning to believe that part of this information is real. No w I would like some explanation of what these documents are. But one of these documents seems to be unread, notably the Parole Board message 8/21.
I saw only one sent mail, that was in a snapshot and it didn't look to incriminating. But there may be more info that wasn't posted.
I didn't post everything that was in the log, just the stuff that made me curious.
Nizich, Michael A (GOV)
FW: CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter
Thu, 8/7/08 5KB
Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV)
Attachments
FW: John Harris's response to Lyda Green
Thu, 8/7/08 68KB
Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV)
RE: Request for Information and Documents
Thu, 8/7/08 10KB
Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV)
FW: CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter
Thu, 8/7/08 3KB
Read
But, if they are doing it to intentionally subvert the law, that is a much more serious matter.
In a candidate for VP, that's an even more serious matter
I think this says a lot about society as a whole
on
Plane Simple Truth
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· Score: 1
With a lot of information coming at us from all directions, there are a number of people taking in information at face value.
Case in point, Greenspan couldn't be wrong. He couldn't be leading to a path of bubble collapse. But the minority of naysayers went unheeded. As we plunged into another economy of value without substance. And we can't even blame this on poor history education in schools. The lesson was only 8 years old.
We went into Iraq, lesson there was 35 years old. If you exclude Somalia, and some other incidents.
I have recently seen papers and research presented in political committee meeting without sighting references. When I asked about this practice, they just shrugged and said this was the way it had always been done. I just couldn't believe it.
I recently saw a presentation within my own company where they presented data for optimization of production. I started looking at the data and wondering why certain data was missing. When I asked they just said they hadn't measured it, they only took the data which was non-conforming and projected a wopping 30% increase in yield. Everyone including a bunch of PhD's took this as gospel truth layed before them.
Frankly I don't get it. How people can't discern between a sales pitch and scientific information. And to be honest I'm getting tired of trying to fight a continuous battle with people who want to talk me into something without giving me solid information. I basically have resorted to a tactic which they find quite rude, some say it is very rude, "Don't talk to me until you have some factual information or information with basis.". It has resulted in a number of complaints.
Exactly, If you take predictive modeling as an example. Some of the predictive modeling sites had Sarah Palin as having an 18% chance of being dropped from the campaign by Nov. Within a few hours of this being reported in the news it had dropped to 0%.
Basically this was brought about by having a system which was open to anybody to vote.
I have worked with expert systems also and none of these modeling techniques work with an open system. And I don't think that googles will work if it is left open to the general public for people to vote on.
It would also depend on what kind of system they use. If if it catering strictly to the person who is voting or to the rest of the population who is using it.
I really don't like the idea of a group of people whose sole motivation is censorship being able to abuse a tool that I use. To me it is no different than pulling books from the library.
But then again I don't like the idea of pulling terrorist videos from YouTube. I think it was really stupid.
Yeah, I kind of wondered about that myself. Because , that is all I saw was paper and metasploit module. I didn't read the paper, but the only code I saw was metasploit module. So I was kind of wondering what the big deal was.
As for testing when it comes back online presumably since it is redundant it would come back online and start reporting the same information as the other unit which hadn't been updating
I just wanted to clear a misconception. Since you are the second author that has mentioned reporting. These systems are actually part of the control system. The manufacturing company wrote the control software to run on windows, which interacts with the mini-controller on the system, although if the control software causes a problem they will deny all responsibility. They outsourced the software build to another company. So the other company will say it's the equipment manufacturers problem.
There has been a major failure due to a Windows lockup, before. The mini-controllers went to an emergency off state when it didn't get a response from the controller. Bringing the whole system down, causing six weeks downtime. The rest have caused minor failures, which resulted in lost product.
When patching does occur, it is done by the manufacturer.
#2. Driving license. So what? That would catch up to you after the traffic tickets were entered into their system.
Have you ever heard of identity theft?
All of your reasons come down to "cheaper".
"Cheaper" should not have more weight than "secure".
I'm sorry we can't all live in your world, but in my world, immediate cost savings outweigh spending a never ending wad of cash on security.
Most companies have to be hit with a pile driver to enact costly security or safety measures. So either the problem occurs or the problem occurs to a competitor. Or someone publishes the exploit code.
But I prefer government intervention, but nobody wants to pay for that. Nobody wants government intervention, the businesses can't compete on a global market, if you do that.
I also found it funny when the story/hoax went around that some Chinese manager was shot, for poor quality and producing unsafe products. These same people who would rail against government intervention would say things like "Well the Chinese really know how to handle these issues".
So when the gun is pointed at somebody elses head or they don't know it's actually pointed at their head then it's okay.
(Before we start with a flame war, I just want to say this isn't directed at any previous author.)
In the industrial world, why would you patch a system that is working fine.
If the system is not connecting directly to the internet, why open yourself up to problems.
The original author said that they are using Windows Server 2003. I have seen many places where windows 3.1 and windows 95 are still in use.
Haven't had a patch in well, I don't know how long.
My point is, I wouldn't want to put a patch on anything that was already working.
Unless management is willing to pay for all of this redundancy and the IT people to handle all of this patch work. Oh, yeah. How are we going to test the computers before we bring them back online? Use a redundant power/chemical plant.
So in some of these complex systems it takes a week to six weeks to bring them back online to capacity. I have actually seen simple batch reactors which would take six weeks to bring back online, after a failure. Although it wasn't any OS that caused the glitch (it was actually a chip failure), I sure wouldn't want an OS patched to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
What if the machine is a nuclear reactor?
If an engineer can get eyes on without disrupting operation (talking over the phone), then he might be able to avert a problem.
What if the machine is part of a chemical plant?
Same as above.
As an engineer in both instances, you would probably move more than an hour away.
Since there are usually junior engineers on at night it can be very helpful to have a senior engineer with eyes on. It wasn't until I had 10 years of experience before I realized that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to handle an emergency during my first 5 years.
And the powers that be wouldn't think of paying for someone that had more experience to be there.
So some of the accidents that occur at night which are blamed on people being tired are due to them not having enough experience.
I agree that more money and security are needed.
But very few managers get paid extra for spending more money.
The worst I've seen is where a controller was connected to a phone line. That controller had about 20 chemical reactors tied to it. Another controller also had a phone line and it had 4 reactors tied to it. But before this sounds really dramatic, if someone had hacked in they probably could have done some damage to the reactors, but it would not have caused a danger to humans.
The worst I saw (safety/security) was where someone had installed pipelines carrying caustic chemicals without using a double-walled pipe (Yeah, Electrical Engineers are the same as Chemical Engineers). Yep , sure enough they had a leak. Luckily no one was injured. Some equipment was trashed, but they had insurance. The funniest was when the insurance guys came and wanted it to be turned on to confirm that it wasn't working. The engineer told him that he highly recommended that the equipment not be turned on. He actually showed them the fuzzy crap that was growing on the controller boards. He and another guy went and gathered five fire extinguishers, put those at their feet and told them to pull out the big red button and to press this button to start it up, if they really had to. Then told them they would be waiting outside.
The insurance guy turned popped out the emergency stop button. The robotics went nuts and white flashes could be seen from the vents of the controller panel. Never got to the power on button. Experiment lasted about 3 sec. Insurance agent nearly drove the Emergency off button into the panel.
There were 3 more systems and they decided that they could just look at the fuzzy stuff on the control cards. Didn't need to turn them on after all.
So considering all the trouble we had with keeping safety standards in check, I'd say good luck with handling getting money for proper security costs.
And they finally did double-wall their chemical lines and eventually it became a legal requirement. So from then on there wasn't a problem with getting chemical lines double-walled and properly labeled, not with just the yellow caution tags, but with flags. Flags weren't a legal requirement, but they are cheap.
But the downside is who is going to do the final edit. Should Maxwell's equations be included? Should a whole chapter be devoted to an outlandish thesis on why it is physically impossible for evolution to occur?
The reason I have concern is that in our state, the selection committee for books didn't have a single person with any type of degree in physics. So where are they going to find editors.
I would prefer they used Sears and Zemansky College version, but am afraid that schools couldn't afford it.
I have never looked at Halliday and Resnick Fundamental version, but that may also be good.
Re:I want my computer to compute
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
The linux system may have been 64-bit. I'll have to check.
I want my computer to compute
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
I have run into some applications which were using proprietary data formats. In some cases the analysis was taking a full day to run against the models.
I thought this might be an application that could run better in parrallel. So I got permission to export the data for testing purposes and was given the algorithms for some of the basic models. After I wrote the draft version of the code running on a single processor and transferring the data into postgre. I started the comparison test. Ready to let it run all night.
It ran 30 minutes on the linux system and took 5 hours to run on the XP system.
The program using XP was written in VB and the program on linux was using C++. C++ code was using doubles which weren't being used in the VB version.
Difference in the results, the VB version had a better presentation of the results. The actual numerical results showed that doubles weren't really necessary, but the computing model was still 10 times faster.
The only other possibility was a difference in the MB on the 2 systems.
The results of the test. Customers were told to run their computer models on isolated systems without any other applications installed. The number of customers which were running into 12 hour run times dropped significantly. It was also suggested that they run with higher performance hard drives.
So I'm getting tired of applications which use up my hardware to do non-essential tasks. I also think that there should be a requirement or a standard developed telling people how much of hardware performance capabilities software is going to utilize. This especially goes for AV, spyware, office tools and such. So that consumers have a better understanding of what the cost is on using a Windows system with the required applications.
You might note that I never mentioned the customers who were trying to run this on a Vista system. Strong recommendations were given to customers to get a system with XP. In fact very little attention is given to customers who attempt to run large models on systems using Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at your examples, I would agree. But you argue that government intervention was the problem, and then you argue that it was lack of government intervention that caused the problem.
But I would agree that this isn't a free market, and I don't believe that there can ever be a true capitalist market.
Because in a true capitalist market monopolies would be allowed to grow without bounds. Which would create a single monopoly that would rule and we would be back to socialism. In a socialist market there would be one monopoly with little incentive to feed the supply-demand chain.
So we are left with a twisted notion we can have a true capitalist market. And every time there is government intervention we get cries of socialism. Because any socialism is bad, because it leads to communism or fascism.
This would leave us with a pendulum between capitalism and socialism. And the decision whether this legislation is good or bad. I think that in this case congressional and executive meddling in the judicial side of government is harmful. Partly because I have seen other interventions into the judicial branch which have worked out terribly. Such as caps on medical malpractice. Which in our state just moved the money from lawyers to insurance companies. So in the case here (ban on overtime lawsuits) I would guess it will move the money from lawyers to private companies. Which is the same result of the legislation in our state.
So if they really think that dropping overtime is going to increase salaries, I'd say they are delusional or just idiots. Love to be proven wrong, but I doubt that I will be. I think a bigger end result will be a cry for more H1-B visa workers. Since it is a free world market and all.
Because it is usually implied that someone else is going to take your job or that you will not even get a cost of living increase in pay.
I'm glad you arrived. I was worried that no one at slashdot was going to be for capitalism anymore, now that the capitalistic structure used in our financial markets appears to have destroyed our financial markets.
All hail capitalism and free markets. (It was just a one time mistake and won't happen again, they promise). I mean it wasn't the head of any financial companies fault, he was just trying to make a profit. And if anything bad were to happen, then it would really be just bad for those who made the poor financial decisions, it wouldn't affect other people. It would just punish those who have made mistakes, and that will be enough to correct the markets.
It might be more useful if someone had connected hospital information together so that a pandemic is caught at it's earliest stages.
A couple of years ago my wife got severely ill nausea and vomiting. I took her in and they treated her and she was fine 24 hours later. But later I learned another hospital had seen 12 cases in the previous 24 hrs. My wife was the second at this particular hospital and one of 4 before we left the ER. But after talking to a friend of a friend who was a doctor I found out that about what was going on and he was unaware that they were seeing it at other hospitals. This was the first time I became concerned that hospitals were not communicating with each other and that if a more serious virus had broken out it would take them days instead of hours to figure out the extent of the problem.
And this wasn't just a run of the mill stomach virus, within about 2 hours she went from fine to totally incompasitated.
It makes me wonder how many of these cases of food poisoning could have been stopped, if hospitals were more communicative of cases they were seeing.
So I'm not really worried about bandwidth issues. By the time it becomes a bandwidth issue it's to late. The problem will kind of solve itself.
Since I taught labs and classes in physics. I can tell you that it makes a world of difference. At the start of the first year teaching, I thought the whole bunch was a group of idiots with the exception of 2 or 3. As the year progressed, I could see that the complexity of problems they were able to handle had tremendously improved.
Going from:
When you drop a ball from 10 meters. What velocity will the ball have 2 meters from the ground?
To:
If you have a barge (dimensions x1,y2,z2) in a lock with dimensions x, y. The lock filled to height z. The water level currently 16 cm from the top of the barge. What will be the water level if 3 casks 100 liters in volume each and weighing 300 kg each are removed from the boat and dropped into the lock.
So I would say that problem solving ability had increased tremendously
or did you mean the whole thing.
STATE/FEDERAL business MAY NOT use NON-STATE/NON-FEDERAL Email servers.
I have now seen some of the screenshots and some of the downloads of the logs.
Sarah Palin has some explaining to do.
I don't know if this real or not, I'm beginning to believe that part of this information is real. No w I would like some explanation of what these documents are. But one of these documents seems to be unread, notably the Parole Board message 8/21.
I saw only one sent mail, that was in a snapshot and it didn't look to incriminating. But there may be more info that wasn't posted.
I didn't post everything that was in the log, just the stuff that made me curious.
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) FW: CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter Thu, 8/7/08 5KB Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) Attachments FW: John Harris's response to Lyda Green Thu, 8/7/08 68KB Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) RE: Request for Information and Documents Thu, 8/7/08 10KB Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) FW: CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter Thu, 8/7/08 3KB Read
uaro, Randall P (GOV) FW: DPS Employee Draft Wed, 8/20/08 15KB Read
McAllister, William D (GOV) Re: DPS Personnel and Budget Issues Wed, 8/20/08 12KB Read
Ruaro, Randall P (GOV) FW: DPS Personnel and Budget Issues Tue, 8/19/08 11KB Read
Ruaro, Randall P (GOV) Court of Appeals Nominations Sat, 8/16/08 11KB Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) another records request Fri, 8/15/08 5KB Read
Ruaro, Randall P (GOV) Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger / Container Tax Thu, 8/28/08 12KB Read
Meghan Stapleton Attachments FW: Motor Fuel Tax Suspension Sat, 8/30/08 1169KB Read
Nizich, Michael A (GOV) RE: Using Royalty Oil to Lower the Cost of Fuel for Alaskans Fri, 8/22/08 42KB Read
Ruaro, Randall P (GOV) RE: Please approve Fri, 8/22/08 11KB Read
Ruaro, Randall P (GOV) Court of Appeals / Executive Director Parole Board / Boards and Commissions Thu, 8/21/08 10KB Unread
Those poor bastards. If Streisand is involved, then Rosie O'Donnell will be right there.
They don't make enough money to put up with that.
To all you ladies and gents in the humble employ of our Secret Service. Surrender now, before it's to late.
But, if they are doing it to intentionally subvert the law, that is a much more serious matter.
In a candidate for VP, that's an even more serious matter
With a lot of information coming at us from all directions, there are a number of people taking in information at face value.
Case in point, Greenspan couldn't be wrong. He couldn't be leading to a path of bubble collapse. But the minority of naysayers went unheeded. As we plunged into another economy of value without substance. And we can't even blame this on poor history education in schools. The lesson was only 8 years old.
We went into Iraq, lesson there was 35 years old. If you exclude Somalia, and some other incidents.
I have recently seen papers and research presented in political committee meeting without sighting references. When I asked about this practice, they just shrugged and said this was the way it had always been done. I just couldn't believe it.
I recently saw a presentation within my own company where they presented data for optimization of production. I started looking at the data and wondering why certain data was missing. When I asked they just said they hadn't measured it, they only took the data which was non-conforming and projected a wopping 30% increase in yield. Everyone including a bunch of PhD's took this as gospel truth layed before them.
Frankly I don't get it. How people can't discern between a sales pitch and scientific information. And to be honest I'm getting tired of trying to fight a continuous battle with people who want to talk me into something without giving me solid information. I basically have resorted to a tactic which they find quite rude, some say it is very rude, "Don't talk to me until you have some factual information or information with basis.". It has resulted in a number of complaints.
I did some work on it in the gimp and I think it's a dark object with the dimensions of 1:4:9. It appears to be filled with stars.
Exactly, If you take predictive modeling as an example. Some of the predictive modeling sites had Sarah Palin as having an 18% chance of being dropped from the campaign by Nov. Within a few hours of this being reported in the news it had dropped to 0%.
Basically this was brought about by having a system which was open to anybody to vote.
I have worked with expert systems also and none of these modeling techniques work with an open system. And I don't think that googles will work if it is left open to the general public for people to vote on.
It would also depend on what kind of system they use. If if it catering strictly to the person who is voting or to the rest of the population who is using it.
I really don't like the idea of a group of people whose sole motivation is censorship being able to abuse a tool that I use. To me it is no different than pulling books from the library.
But then again I don't like the idea of pulling terrorist videos from YouTube. I think it was really stupid.
Yeah, I kind of wondered about that myself. Because , that is all I saw was paper and metasploit module. I didn't read the paper, but the only code I saw was metasploit module. So I was kind of wondering what the big deal was.
As for testing when it comes back online presumably since it is redundant it would come back online and start reporting the same information as the other unit which hadn't been updating
I just wanted to clear a misconception. Since you are the second author that has mentioned reporting. These systems are actually part of the control system. The manufacturing company wrote the control software to run on windows, which interacts with the mini-controller on the system, although if the control software causes a problem they will deny all responsibility. They outsourced the software build to another company. So the other company will say it's the equipment manufacturers problem.
There has been a major failure due to a Windows lockup, before. The mini-controllers went to an emergency off state when it didn't get a response from the controller. Bringing the whole system down, causing six weeks downtime. The rest have caused minor failures, which resulted in lost product.
When patching does occur, it is done by the manufacturer.
Until the politicians change the Daylight Saving Time rules on you, and you need to have your reporting system updated.
We found than changing the systems manually during idle time sufficed.
You know, that would've been an extremely high-end workstation just a couple of years ago.
You know 15 years ago, it would've been a supercomputer. So why can't I get my predictive model of earth's weather system to run on it.
What's Warcraft and Diablo?
Yes, that's how it works.
Don't forget to vote Republican. So it can work for you.
#2. Driving license. So what? That would catch up to you after the traffic tickets were entered into their system.
Have you ever heard of identity theft?
All of your reasons come down to "cheaper". "Cheaper" should not have more weight than "secure".
I'm sorry we can't all live in your world, but in my world, immediate cost savings outweigh spending a never ending wad of cash on security.
Most companies have to be hit with a pile driver to enact costly security or safety measures. So either the problem occurs or the problem occurs to a competitor. Or someone publishes the exploit code.
But I prefer government intervention, but nobody wants to pay for that. Nobody wants government intervention, the businesses can't compete on a global market, if you do that.
I also found it funny when the story/hoax went around that some Chinese manager was shot, for poor quality and producing unsafe products. These same people who would rail against government intervention would say things like "Well the Chinese really know how to handle these issues".
So when the gun is pointed at somebody elses head or they don't know it's actually pointed at their head then it's okay.
(Before we start with a flame war, I just want to say this isn't directed at any previous author.) In the industrial world, why would you patch a system that is working fine.
If the system is not connecting directly to the internet, why open yourself up to problems.
The original author said that they are using Windows Server 2003. I have seen many places where windows 3.1 and windows 95 are still in use.
Haven't had a patch in well, I don't know how long.
My point is, I wouldn't want to put a patch on anything that was already working.
Unless management is willing to pay for all of this redundancy and the IT people to handle all of this patch work.
Oh, yeah. How are we going to test the computers before we bring them back online? Use a redundant power/chemical plant.
So in some of these complex systems it takes a week to six weeks to bring them back online to capacity.
I have actually seen simple batch reactors which would take six weeks to bring back online, after a failure. Although it wasn't any OS that caused the glitch (it was actually a chip failure), I sure wouldn't want an OS patched to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
What if the machine is a nuclear reactor?
If an engineer can get eyes on without disrupting operation (talking over the phone), then he might be able to avert a problem.
What if the machine is part of a chemical plant?
Same as above.
As an engineer in both instances, you would probably move more than an hour away.
Since there are usually junior engineers on at night it can be very helpful to have a senior engineer with eyes on. It wasn't until I had 10 years of experience before I realized that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to handle an emergency during my first 5 years.
And the powers that be wouldn't think of paying for someone that had more experience to be there.
So some of the accidents that occur at night which are blamed on people being tired are due to them not having enough experience.
I agree that more money and security are needed.
But very few managers get paid extra for spending more money.
The worst I've seen is where a controller was connected to a phone line. That controller had about 20 chemical reactors tied to it. Another controller also had a phone line and it had 4 reactors tied to it. But before this sounds really dramatic, if someone had hacked in they probably could have done some damage to the reactors, but it would not have caused a danger to humans.
The worst I saw (safety/security) was where someone had installed pipelines carrying caustic chemicals without using a double-walled pipe (Yeah, Electrical Engineers are the same as Chemical Engineers). Yep , sure enough they had a leak. Luckily no one was injured. Some equipment was trashed, but they had insurance.
The funniest was when the insurance guys came and wanted it to be turned on to confirm that it wasn't working. The engineer told him that he highly recommended that the equipment not be turned on. He actually showed them the fuzzy crap that was growing on the controller boards. He and another guy went and gathered five fire extinguishers, put those at their feet and told them to pull out the big red button and to press this button to start it up, if they really had to. Then told them they would be waiting outside. The insurance guy turned popped out the emergency stop button. The robotics went nuts and white flashes could be seen from the vents of the controller panel. Never got to the power on button. Experiment lasted about 3 sec. Insurance agent nearly drove the Emergency off button into the panel.
There were 3 more systems and they decided that they could just look at the fuzzy stuff on the control cards. Didn't need to turn them on after all.
So considering all the trouble we had with keeping safety standards in check, I'd say good luck with handling getting money for proper security costs.
And they finally did double-wall their chemical lines and eventually it became a legal requirement. So from then on there wasn't a problem with getting chemical lines double-walled and properly labeled, not with just the yellow caution tags, but with flags. Flags weren't a legal requirement, but they are cheap.
But the downside is who is going to do the final edit. Should Maxwell's equations be included? Should a whole chapter be devoted to an outlandish thesis on why it is physically impossible for evolution to occur?
The reason I have concern is that in our state, the selection committee for books didn't have a single person with any type of degree in physics. So where are they going to find editors.
I would prefer they used Sears and Zemansky College version, but am afraid that schools couldn't afford it.
I have never looked at Halliday and Resnick Fundamental version, but that may also be good.
The linux system may have been 64-bit. I'll have to check.
I have run into some applications which were using proprietary data formats. In some cases the analysis was taking a full day to run against the models.
I thought this might be an application that could run better in parrallel. So I got permission to export the data for testing purposes and was given the algorithms for some of the basic models.
After I wrote the draft version of the code running on a single processor and transferring the data into postgre. I started the comparison test. Ready to let it run all night.
It ran 30 minutes on the linux system and took 5 hours to run on the XP system.
The program using XP was written in VB and the program on linux was using C++. C++ code was using doubles which weren't being used in the VB version.
Difference in the results, the VB version had a better presentation of the results. The actual numerical results showed that doubles weren't really necessary, but the computing model was still 10 times faster.
The only other possibility was a difference in the MB on the 2 systems.
The results of the test. Customers were told to run their computer models on isolated systems without any other applications installed. The number of customers which were running into 12 hour run times dropped significantly. It was also suggested that they run with higher performance hard drives.
So I'm getting tired of applications which use up my hardware to do non-essential tasks. I also think that there should be a requirement or a standard developed telling people how much of hardware performance capabilities software is going to utilize. This especially goes for AV, spyware, office tools and such. So that consumers have a better understanding of what the cost is on using a Windows system with the required applications.
You might note that I never mentioned the customers who were trying to run this on a Vista system. Strong recommendations were given to customers to get a system with XP. In fact very little attention is given to customers who attempt to run large models on systems using Vista.