Posted on 07/24/2010 10:30:38 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Testifying at a federal hearing on Friday, the chief electronics technician told of numerous instances of a "Blue Screen of Death" on the computer system responsible for monitoring and controlling drilling. The largest oil spill in American history may be due to a simple computer glitch.
The machine had been locking up for months, Williams said, producing what he and others on the crew called a "blue screen of death." "It would just turn blue. You'd have no data coming through," Williams said today, according to the New York Times' story. With the computer frozen, the driller would not have access to crucial data about what was going on in the well.
(Excerpt) Read more at hardocp.com ...
Sounds like that whole rig was a clusterf$ck. Disabled gas sensor, broken BOP, failing computer systems - the BP admins was INSISTED that the contractors press on with the drilling regardless should be tried for murder.
>>You can’t rely on Windows as a true real-time operating system. Same is true for the Apple OSes.
Of course you can. Wonderware, Intellution, WinCC all run fine under Windows. I run a large SCADA system (1600 RTUs) that controls the utilities in 3 counties and never have a BSOD.
I can speak about Linux and Solaris. When things go utterly, horribly wrong in those operating systems, the error messages generally appear in white or gray text on a black background (in character mode).
The Linux error messages from the kernel are sometimes written in a lighthearted manner starting with the string, ``Oops'' followed by a stack trace showing the low-level details of what actually caused the kernel panic.
In every case I've encountered (rare those have been), it has always been due to a hardware component misbehaving such as a dodgy memory module or an unrecoverable I/O error on a hard drive.
ecsimonson on July 24, 2010 - 2:05am
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From todays Coast Guard hearing testimony it sounds like the "A, B and C chairs all had problems with the BSOD" In other words they ran Microsoft Windows NT and the computers would crash and blue screen.
The last version of Microsoft NT was released in 1996. I work in IT so I see lots of old hardware and software but I can think of much more stable platforms to run such critical systems on. Anyone want to comment about what rigs usually use for OS on the chair computers. Mike Williams testified that if all chairs failed then the only option was abandon ship.
I can think of several OS's that I would trust about 1000X more than NT to run in such a critical job. Yes they would have to port and probably rewrite some software. I have had machines I managed that ran continuously for over 3 years, and got worked hard. Definitely not running NT.
Yes. Windows is the only OS which has an OS level crash often known as the blue screen of death. All NIX OS’s, including OS X for Mac, has process stops which do not crash the entire OS with a blue screen. This is a result of the fact that Windows is a layered OS built upon the original 8086 legacy architecture.
While the modern Windows OSs are deep and wide in their scope, the primary reason they are sometimes called “Bloated” is to retain backwards compatibility, the memory addressing systems just append code for each level of the improved design, each time, each upgrade, layer upon layer, call after call, until the OS cannot even keep track of where what process began or where the return calls need to go... then the whole house of cards comes down.... BSOD!
All NIX code has a very tiny and robust OS kernel that orders all the other apps, processes and devices around. if any of them, misbehave, the kernel closes them and restarts them, assigning them to new memory slots.
Over simplified, but that’s the general difference.
And loss of power doesn't affect a slide rule if you have a flashlight.
I’m no fan of Microsoft Windows (Slackware since ‘96), but this sounds like classic toss the blame around to see what sticks.
Slide rules rule!
Nicely said.
Ha ha ha ha someone used it to watch porn and it got a virus!
I agree with you. The implications for this disaster go much further than most realize.
Good thing computers were invented, or we’d never have been able to drill for oil.
Take a look at the follow two links:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_real-time_operating_systems
Windows CE is a real-time OS, but not any other version of Windows. The foundation of Windows is not good enough for real-time, but it can go a long time without crashing.
You don’t want Windows to run your car’s electronics. Period.
wreak
More than likely it’s something related to the computer itself and not the OS. I’ve done countless installs of Windows for myself and for others and every BSOD I’ve encountered was the fault of a attached piece of hardware, a peripheral or faulty memory stick or the motherboard itself.
They had other problems.
Well said!!
I hate to say it but the only OS I have ever used that was bulletproof (or as close as it gets) was OS/370 (now zOS).
If lives are on the line, that should be the choice.
There are millions of machines out there just chugging along on old outdated software... many of them likely still in mission critical situations. not surprising considering the range of applications that NT has been a platform of choice for years, from banking to journalism, from the military to ‘adult’ stuff.
It don’t get no worse than ‘Hard drive not found’ (a generic paraphrase of a message that makes the tummy go.. unngh)
Abort, Blow it up or ReDrill?
heckuva dialog box
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