I would suggest asking this same question at Control.com rather than here.
If you just want the position of two discrete valves I would suggest finding a used PLC on Ebay. Single box types (like an Allen Bradley SLC 150) that work with discrete IO only can be had for a little bit of nothing. Your biggest concern with costs would be the programming software so I would stick with brands offer it free of charge.
Without knowing what kind of budgetary firgure you are working with to implement this it is hard to get much more specific.
I don't know what Apple pays Steve Jobs but it is probably more than they pay the people who pack MacBooks into MacBook boxes. So, in the interests of the longevity of the Apple Corporation, it is probably best that he spend his time doing whatever it is he does rather than go pack MacBooks into MacBook boxes.
Also I doubt that Steve Job's assistant hands out laptops to every unhappy email that gets past the spam filters, so he was likely involved at some point even if it was only to approve the handing out, Steve being in a good mood that day because the winds buffeted him less violently than usual during the helicopter ride in. He watches out the side like a door gunner.
Anyway, this is as personal as it gets with someone like Jobs.
To summarize, the CoS sent them a DMCA takedown notice for some post that had the text of OT III and they deleted it. Quite proper on their part I thought. It also deliciously illustrated the futility of trying to unring bells because there were several comments in the linked article that had OT III in them and that continued for a while after, just like the posting of this key will continues in this story and will for a while, here and everywhere else.
I haven't dissected it and probably won't but from what I could tell it didn't modify firefox.exe. It just steals its name of the default browser process by looking at the browser memory space. Had he been running IE he would have had a self spawning IE process.
As far as he could tell he had never been actively remoted so his firewall did its job.
I'm not blaming Microsoft here, just making the case that despite UAC and AV software and whatever else this stuff can still happen and we need to stop pitching the next incremental step in software security as being the greatest change to come down the road. The way a lot of software works is going to have to change. Why in the hell CS3 needs my browser to close is one example.
As for people downloading cracks...this guy bought Photoshop CS3. I mean he paid money for it. Bought it from Adobe. If that doesn't speak to his willingness to pay for software he wants I don't know how else to demonstrate it.
But of course he picked Ivy up somewhere. The problem is that there are a lot more people who will download whatever they find at the end of a link and blindly install it than there are who won't. Expecting average to users to know what processes are, or that they need a guard for them, or to train process guarding software, probably isn't going to get anywhere.
It is fun to think this, but Digg and Slashdot and reddit are all web sites run by businesses. The people who man the controls there are concerned about one thing: making money.
Posting this kind of stuff might win a few dollars if that is what your demographic wants, but it isn't anything more than a business decision. If Slashdot gets a takedown notice and the legal gurus say they have to comply, they will comply. They'd be stupid to do otherwise because it would run counter to the interests of the business.
They did it with Scientology and, come to cases, they'll do it here.
Well, the mistake was in putting all the responsibility on the Supreme Court. Any lower court can knock laws down, or change the way they must be interpreted. But in general the system works as described.
While Congress may well have a duty to stay inside particular bounds they often overstep them in practice. The Executive branch does as well, in the event you haven't read any Slashdot articles on anything bad happening at all and noticed that sooner or later someone will blame Bush.
And higher level Federal Court decisions usually have much broader impact than one single law. For instance, if the Supreme Court lends any legal merit to the idea of Defensible Intent all of this debate about the Consititution says this and Amendment X says that will all be a waste of time. Regardless of anyone's interpretation and regardless of whether we repeal any part of it lawmakers, as long as they intend for something good to happen, will be able to do anything they want. More or less.
I certainly hope so. If this is the direction security needs to go it will have to stop being so annoying.
I have a collegue (photographer) who bought a new machine with Vista. Had it about a month and called me because he couldn't get Photoshop CS3 to install. We figured out that the problem was that CS3 wants Firefox.exe to close before it will install, which is annoying in the first place because I can't imagine a really good reason a photo editor needs to make modifications to your web browser.
Anyway, despite shutting down FF and even rebooting CS3 always told him it was running. Turns out he had some variant of a Poison Ivy trojan than resulted in a persistant Firefox.exe process. While he may well have clicked past a UAC prompt in the process of letting this trojan get in Vista still didn't stop it, his AV software didn't detect it, and neither did Windows Defender. While it took a CS3 install to alert him to a problem the very fact that most bits of Windows software all want to modify your registry, play with your browser settings, etc., is why he let it infect him in the first place.
If you can't stop that stuff with 3 layers of software and who knows how many user prompts then something has to change. It isn't going to be the user.
I like metaphors and analogies as well, but they can get quickly out of hand here.
Someone posts a car analogy. Someone replies with what they feel is an even more accurate car analogy. Someone replies to that stating that airplanes provide a yet better example. All of this on the topic of file formats or the like, which anyone calling himself a geek should be able to understand without having to resort to metaphor or analogy.
Safety signage in buildings is usually a matter of code complaince. In the US there are requirements for Exit signs, for instance, that specify the size and shape and typeface and the minimum lumens....etc.
This is so no one needs specific training on how to identify an exit when they are in some unfamiliar 50 story office building getting their eyes checked.
What I thought we were discussing was the automation system used to do various things throughout the building in the event of an emergency. Transient occupants of the building don't need to be trained on it. If the automation is good enough most of the employees, even the security people wouldn't need to know about it. Indeed, most newer large office buildings in the US (and a whole lot of them in Japan) are already heavily automated.
Essentially, if the system sees an output from the fire alarm, light up all the emergency lights. Or something like that. More likely, if the system doesn't see that the fire alarm is sending it an "all OK" signal, light the lights. No employee involvement or training necessary and certainly none for the guy getting his eyes checked.
I have been in dozens and dozens of factories all over the world, I used to work for a fairly large controls house.
10 years or so ago pretty much all of the electrical safety devices were as you describe. Most occupational safety organizations have changed with the times and now approve various integrated systems that are normally controlled with the same tpye of PLC (often the very same one) that runs all of the other field devices.
I've only worked with Allen Bradley stuff, so this would generaly describe these kinds of safety systems as I know them.
They are quite reliable. As for the programmer making a mistake, this stuff generally gets well tested before the equipment is released for production use. With the dual PLC setup I described above I have even seen companies hire two different controls houses to write the logic so that the same tasks are performed differently.
here's absolutely no reason why transferring 100MB of data should cost more than fabricating, packaging, storing, delivering to a shop, displaying and selling a chunk of metal and plastic
And it doesn't.
But once again, much to our collective befuddlement, the buyers don't seem to care much about the costs. They just demand X quantity at Y price and the ever watchful marketeers are happy to sell them X much and collect X*Y in cold hard cash.
Many modern manufacturing control systems use integrated safety systems. Some gigantic machine is being run with a PLC that tells motors to start when buttons are pressed, etc. The same PLC is also watching to see if a safety cord is tripped by some guy who is caught in the machine. This is pretty reliable if properly implemented.
For Exteme Super Safety you add a second PLC looking at the a second set of contacts in the safety cord. If at any time both PLCs don't agree, the machine stops.
This kind of setup is reliable enough for giant stamping presses, I suspect it would be OK for lighting up signage.
This is generally true of big equipment. There aren't a whole lot of economies that can support development of a competitive fighter jet and then build it in quantity, along with all of the other support industries a project like that needs.
For technologies that are closer to commodities the US military doesn't do so well. Currently they seem to be compensating by relaxing the rules on non-issue gear. When I was an active duty Marine (discharged in 1996) you could maybe get away with wearing non-issue clothing, a knife, small stuff like that. I remember my father being amazed when I asked him to send me sunglasses because had he been caught wearing a pair of civilian sunglasses (in the 60s) someone would have made him eat them. But I was recently in Afghanistan with a private defense contractor and I saw a US Army soldier with a TA01NSN sight on his rifle. When I asked him when they started issuing those he told me he ordered it from the states. Had I modified my rifle, even as recently as I was in, I'd have had my ass kicked up into a hat.
Having worked for a couple of different private defense contractors I can tell you that getting miscellaneous stuff you need is a hell of a lot more streamlined than in the military. UPS next day is much faster than procurement.
If by that you mean 'enforce the groupthink' then you are correct.
Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic. Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic and appeals to the target demographic. I am not claiming that this is a bad thing but the system certainly doesn't just run itself, nor does it generate any real discussion of anything.
I am probably less emotionally invested in my online personality that most people but Slashdot has plenty of users who will respond to their own posts complaining about some moderation they have received. I don't see why it matters to anyone. A person could create a new account and quickly build excellent karma by recycling highly rated old comments from previous stories, never even having to think up a post on their own. There are more than enough moderators who just want to see things they agree with rise to the top regardless of whether they are getting their blocks trolled off.
That, lame jokes, and endless learning by metaphor is really what drives the site.
Say I'm flying to Omaha, I'm somewhere over eastern Nevada when some guy wearing a Semtex brand hat that security somehow missed jumps up and says he is going to blow the place to smithereens. Bush is inside a concrete bunker 4 miles below the surface of the earth. He is watching Americas Funniest Home Videos reruns, laughing at a guy getting banged in the crotch by his 5 year old's whiffle ball bat. Cheet-Os crumbs waft from his mouth with every giggle.
I'm sure that Bush will really feel the hot breath of revenge on the back of his neck as my corpse, on fire, plunges to the earth. And as the NTSB sifts through the sand looking for charred bone fragments to put in a UPS mailer to send to my family, pretending they DNA matched to me, Bush will sit in his underground lair, on a throne woven from $100 bills, and sob.
Or maybe not. Maybe he'll be too busy snorting cocaine off some hooker's thigh. When he or his successor get around to reading their daily briefing they'll call a press conference and announce that this great nation will not tolerate such aggression. With a flip of a cell phone a barrage of ordinance will fall from the stratosphere and annihilate masses of people who live in a place most of us had never heard of before the press conference. It might even kill some of the people who knew some of the people who were originally responsible for the terror.
And when all the smoke settles it will all happen again. Some of us will pretend it was this guy's fault, others of us will pretend it was that other guy's fault. Either way, it will happen over and over and over regardless of who gets revenge on whom.
I don't know man, they have a donut chart on there with some pretty serious graphics laid into it. That beats most other articles with their plain Jane donut charts, these ones have upper management written all over them.
Maybe they should email a link to Edward Tufte...amybe he'll be insterested. Data graphic geniuses these folks.
You don't just count the people being sued, you have to also consider the great many Slashdotters who believe that any expectation that you pay anything at all for any media that can be digitized equates to misery.
That they be denied the ability to obtain, free of charge, the latest pop music in a format that not only plays on any conceivable device but was also developed by people who share their particular political and philosophical leanings with regard to software....that is truly misery for them.
Bands make money from touring. DRM is evil. You can make unlimited copies of a song for no marginal cost. I only listen to independent bands anyway. Live music is better. The president of the RIAA has a monocle and stokes a cat all day. Ogg Vorbis is a good name for a file format. Micropayments are the future. Outmoded business model.
I expect it to stay civil, this is the internet after all and we can't have people acting a fool on this thing otherwise some busybody will try to legislate some controls into place.
The presumption you and the original jury duty guy make is that because you know a lot about technology you'll be able to decide rightly about a case involving technology.
While this may be true in some cases it obviously would not have been overwhelmingly so with this one. Reading the replies you find a large number of people who either didn't read or couldn't understand the case as described in the article yet they feel compelled to comment. For many it is just a nice opportunity to take a shot at heavy handed governments, maybe throw in a line that proves you read 1984 just like everyone else did in 8th grade lit class, maybe point out that Europe has more surveillence cameras than Picasso got paint.
I guess this is just an extension of the usual geek mentality that because they can program a computer, and a computer can do rocket science, they can now do rocket science. Unfortunately not everyone else on earth is a moron but you and the rest of the bunch at the LUG meeting. Sometimes people can sit on a jury and not necessarily know how TCP/IP works and still make the right decision. The subject of the article being an excellent point, assuming no geeks were on hand in the deliberation room to explain everything to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you just want the position of two discrete valves I would suggest finding a used PLC on Ebay. Single box types (like an Allen Bradley SLC 150) that work with discrete IO only can be had for a little bit of nothing. Your biggest concern with costs would be the programming software so I would stick with brands offer it free of charge.
Without knowing what kind of budgetary firgure you are working with to implement this it is hard to get much more specific.
Yes, because technical quibbling over terminology is really looked down upon here at Slashdot.
See you later folks, I'm off to go steal music through the tubes.
Recent information indicates that it will be necessary to also ban hammers from sale on Ebay, to avert future criticism along these same lines.
I don't know what Apple pays Steve Jobs but it is probably more than they pay the people who pack MacBooks into MacBook boxes. So, in the interests of the longevity of the Apple Corporation, it is probably best that he spend his time doing whatever it is he does rather than go pack MacBooks into MacBook boxes.
Also I doubt that Steve Job's assistant hands out laptops to every unhappy email that gets past the spam filters, so he was likely involved at some point even if it was only to approve the handing out, Steve being in a good mood that day because the winds buffeted him less violently than usual during the helicopter ride in. He watches out the side like a door gunner.
Anyway, this is as personal as it gets with someone like Jobs.
To summarize, the CoS sent them a DMCA takedown notice for some post that had the text of OT III and they deleted it. Quite proper on their part I thought. It also deliciously illustrated the futility of trying to unring bells because there were several comments in the linked article that had OT III in them and that continued for a while after, just like the posting of this key will continues in this story and will for a while, here and everywhere else.
I haven't dissected it and probably won't but from what I could tell it didn't modify firefox.exe. It just steals its name of the default browser process by looking at the browser memory space. Had he been running IE he would have had a self spawning IE process.
As far as he could tell he had never been actively remoted so his firewall did its job.
I'm not blaming Microsoft here, just making the case that despite UAC and AV software and whatever else this stuff can still happen and we need to stop pitching the next incremental step in software security as being the greatest change to come down the road. The way a lot of software works is going to have to change. Why in the hell CS3 needs my browser to close is one example.
As for people downloading cracks...this guy bought Photoshop CS3. I mean he paid money for it. Bought it from Adobe. If that doesn't speak to his willingness to pay for software he wants I don't know how else to demonstrate it.
But of course he picked Ivy up somewhere. The problem is that there are a lot more people who will download whatever they find at the end of a link and blindly install it than there are who won't. Expecting average to users to know what processes are, or that they need a guard for them, or to train process guarding software, probably isn't going to get anywhere.
Heroin? Just some carbon, oxygen, hydrogen....
It is fun to think this, but Digg and Slashdot and reddit are all web sites run by businesses. The people who man the controls there are concerned about one thing: making money.
Posting this kind of stuff might win a few dollars if that is what your demographic wants, but it isn't anything more than a business decision. If Slashdot gets a takedown notice and the legal gurus say they have to comply, they will comply. They'd be stupid to do otherwise because it would run counter to the interests of the business.
They did it with Scientology and, come to cases, they'll do it here.
Well, the mistake was in putting all the responsibility on the Supreme Court. Any lower court can knock laws down, or change the way they must be interpreted. But in general the system works as described.
While Congress may well have a duty to stay inside particular bounds they often overstep them in practice. The Executive branch does as well, in the event you haven't read any Slashdot articles on anything bad happening at all and noticed that sooner or later someone will blame Bush.
And higher level Federal Court decisions usually have much broader impact than one single law. For instance, if the Supreme Court lends any legal merit to the idea of Defensible Intent all of this debate about the Consititution says this and Amendment X says that will all be a waste of time. Regardless of anyone's interpretation and regardless of whether we repeal any part of it lawmakers, as long as they intend for something good to happen, will be able to do anything they want. More or less.
I certainly hope so. If this is the direction security needs to go it will have to stop being so annoying.
I have a collegue (photographer) who bought a new machine with Vista. Had it about a month and called me because he couldn't get Photoshop CS3 to install. We figured out that the problem was that CS3 wants Firefox.exe to close before it will install, which is annoying in the first place because I can't imagine a really good reason a photo editor needs to make modifications to your web browser.
Anyway, despite shutting down FF and even rebooting CS3 always told him it was running. Turns out he had some variant of a Poison Ivy trojan than resulted in a persistant Firefox.exe process. While he may well have clicked past a UAC prompt in the process of letting this trojan get in Vista still didn't stop it, his AV software didn't detect it, and neither did Windows Defender. While it took a CS3 install to alert him to a problem the very fact that most bits of Windows software all want to modify your registry, play with your browser settings, etc., is why he let it infect him in the first place.
If you can't stop that stuff with 3 layers of software and who knows how many user prompts then something has to change. It isn't going to be the user.
I like metaphors and analogies as well, but they can get quickly out of hand here.
Someone posts a car analogy. Someone replies with what they feel is an even more accurate car analogy. Someone replies to that stating that airplanes provide a yet better example. All of this on the topic of file formats or the like, which anyone calling himself a geek should be able to understand without having to resort to metaphor or analogy.
Safety signage in buildings is usually a matter of code complaince. In the US there are requirements for Exit signs, for instance, that specify the size and shape and typeface and the minimum lumens....etc.
This is so no one needs specific training on how to identify an exit when they are in some unfamiliar 50 story office building getting their eyes checked.
What I thought we were discussing was the automation system used to do various things throughout the building in the event of an emergency. Transient occupants of the building don't need to be trained on it. If the automation is good enough most of the employees, even the security people wouldn't need to know about it. Indeed, most newer large office buildings in the US (and a whole lot of them in Japan) are already heavily automated.
Essentially, if the system sees an output from the fire alarm, light up all the emergency lights. Or something like that. More likely, if the system doesn't see that the fire alarm is sending it an "all OK" signal, light the lights. No employee involvement or training necessary and certainly none for the guy getting his eyes checked.
10 years or so ago pretty much all of the electrical safety devices were as you describe. Most occupational safety organizations have changed with the times and now approve various integrated systems that are normally controlled with the same tpye of PLC (often the very same one) that runs all of the other field devices.
I've only worked with Allen Bradley stuff, so this would generaly describe these kinds of safety systems as I know them.
They are quite reliable. As for the programmer making a mistake, this stuff generally gets well tested before the equipment is released for production use. With the dual PLC setup I described above I have even seen companies hire two different controls houses to write the logic so that the same tasks are performed differently.
And it doesn't.
But once again, much to our collective befuddlement, the buyers don't seem to care much about the costs. They just demand X quantity at Y price and the ever watchful marketeers are happy to sell them X much and collect X*Y in cold hard cash.
Many modern manufacturing control systems use integrated safety systems. Some gigantic machine is being run with a PLC that tells motors to start when buttons are pressed, etc. The same PLC is also watching to see if a safety cord is tripped by some guy who is caught in the machine. This is pretty reliable if properly implemented.
For Exteme Super Safety you add a second PLC looking at the a second set of contacts in the safety cord. If at any time both PLCs don't agree, the machine stops.
This kind of setup is reliable enough for giant stamping presses, I suspect it would be OK for lighting up signage.
This is generally true of big equipment. There aren't a whole lot of economies that can support development of a competitive fighter jet and then build it in quantity, along with all of the other support industries a project like that needs.
For technologies that are closer to commodities the US military doesn't do so well. Currently they seem to be compensating by relaxing the rules on non-issue gear. When I was an active duty Marine (discharged in 1996) you could maybe get away with wearing non-issue clothing, a knife, small stuff like that. I remember my father being amazed when I asked him to send me sunglasses because had he been caught wearing a pair of civilian sunglasses (in the 60s) someone would have made him eat them. But I was recently in Afghanistan with a private defense contractor and I saw a US Army soldier with a TA01NSN sight on his rifle. When I asked him when they started issuing those he told me he ordered it from the states. Had I modified my rifle, even as recently as I was in, I'd have had my ass kicked up into a hat.
Having worked for a couple of different private defense contractors I can tell you that getting miscellaneous stuff you need is a hell of a lot more streamlined than in the military. UPS next day is much faster than procurement.
If by that you mean 'enforce the groupthink' then you are correct.
Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic. Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic and appeals to the target demographic. I am not claiming that this is a bad thing but the system certainly doesn't just run itself, nor does it generate any real discussion of anything.
I am probably less emotionally invested in my online personality that most people but Slashdot has plenty of users who will respond to their own posts complaining about some moderation they have received. I don't see why it matters to anyone. A person could create a new account and quickly build excellent karma by recycling highly rated old comments from previous stories, never even having to think up a post on their own. There are more than enough moderators who just want to see things they agree with rise to the top regardless of whether they are getting their blocks trolled off.
That, lame jokes, and endless learning by metaphor is really what drives the site.
What will their revenge against Bush be?
Say I'm flying to Omaha, I'm somewhere over eastern Nevada when some guy wearing a Semtex brand hat that security somehow missed jumps up and says he is going to blow the place to smithereens. Bush is inside a concrete bunker 4 miles below the surface of the earth. He is watching Americas Funniest Home Videos reruns, laughing at a guy getting banged in the crotch by his 5 year old's whiffle ball bat. Cheet-Os crumbs waft from his mouth with every giggle.
I'm sure that Bush will really feel the hot breath of revenge on the back of his neck as my corpse, on fire, plunges to the earth. And as the NTSB sifts through the sand looking for charred bone fragments to put in a UPS mailer to send to my family, pretending they DNA matched to me, Bush will sit in his underground lair, on a throne woven from $100 bills, and sob.
Or maybe not. Maybe he'll be too busy snorting cocaine off some hooker's thigh. When he or his successor get around to reading their daily briefing they'll call a press conference and announce that this great nation will not tolerate such aggression. With a flip of a cell phone a barrage of ordinance will fall from the stratosphere and annihilate masses of people who live in a place most of us had never heard of before the press conference. It might even kill some of the people who knew some of the people who were originally responsible for the terror.
And when all the smoke settles it will all happen again. Some of us will pretend it was this guy's fault, others of us will pretend it was that other guy's fault. Either way, it will happen over and over and over regardless of who gets revenge on whom.
I don't know man, they have a donut chart on there with some pretty serious graphics laid into it. That beats most other articles with their plain Jane donut charts, these ones have upper management written all over them.
Maybe they should email a link to Edward Tufte...amybe he'll be insterested. Data graphic geniuses these folks.
You don't just count the people being sued, you have to also consider the great many Slashdotters who believe that any expectation that you pay anything at all for any media that can be digitized equates to misery.
That they be denied the ability to obtain, free of charge, the latest pop music in a format that not only plays on any conceivable device but was also developed by people who share their particular political and philosophical leanings with regard to software....that is truly misery for them.
Bands make money from touring. DRM is evil. You can make unlimited copies of a song for no marginal cost. I only listen to independent bands anyway. Live music is better. The president of the RIAA has a monocle and stokes a cat all day. Ogg Vorbis is a good name for a file format. Micropayments are the future. Outmoded business model.
I expect it to stay civil, this is the internet after all and we can't have people acting a fool on this thing otherwise some busybody will try to legislate some controls into place.
The presumption you and the original jury duty guy make is that because you know a lot about technology you'll be able to decide rightly about a case involving technology.
While this may be true in some cases it obviously would not have been overwhelmingly so with this one. Reading the replies you find a large number of people who either didn't read or couldn't understand the case as described in the article yet they feel compelled to comment. For many it is just a nice opportunity to take a shot at heavy handed governments, maybe throw in a line that proves you read 1984 just like everyone else did in 8th grade lit class, maybe point out that Europe has more surveillence cameras than Picasso got paint.
I guess this is just an extension of the usual geek mentality that because they can program a computer, and a computer can do rocket science, they can now do rocket science. Unfortunately not everyone else on earth is a moron but you and the rest of the bunch at the LUG meeting. Sometimes people can sit on a jury and not necessarily know how TCP/IP works and still make the right decision. The subject of the article being an excellent point, assuming no geeks were on hand in the deliberation room to explain everything to everyone.
Best comment ever on Slashdot.
The likelihood of knocking a UAV out of the air with small arms is pretty slim.
It is non-corrosive but it probably uses the same powder as you encountered.