BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon 383
ctdownunder passes along this excerpt from a NY Times article about a rig worker's testimony concerning the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon well:
"The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident. ... On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to 'bypass mode.' When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded. ... Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.' 'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.' Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said."
The article doesn't mention whether it was specifically a Windows BSOD, or just an error screen that happened to be blue.
BSOD (Score:5, Funny)
interesting question: (Score:3, Funny)
What color did it turn when the rig exploded?
Re:BSOD (Score:5, Funny)
Re:interesting question: (Score:2, Funny)
Most likely, it turned into fiery pieces ...
Re:Safety List (Score:4, Funny)
Yes; steaks cost massive amounts of money, but what does that have to do with what's at stake?
Re:Safety List (Score:3, Funny)
life and limb [...] at steak
Hannibal, is that you?
Re:Safety List (Score:2, Funny)
I don't know about that, steak from a used up dairy cow can be had for fairly cheap, though at that point the quality is at stake.
Saliva from Slashdot fouls Gulf (Score:2, Funny)
Dateline -- Louisana. Several millions of barrels of saliva from FS/OSS zealots on Slashdot fouled the gulf today when they thought maybe, just Mayyybe, Microsoft might have somehow, have tenuously been connected to the previous oil spill. A foul stench of stale beer and tacos was reported along miles of beaches in Alabama, and was headed for Florida this evening.
In other words, sheesh! How speculative and sensationalist can a headline get?
Re:Don't throw Bill under the bus (Score:3, Funny)
Not only that, but buried somewhere deep in the multi page EULA that nobody reads is the clause, "company shall not be held in indemnity for losses to person or environmental damage from deepwater oilwells bursting into flame due to defects in software, other than the cost of replacing defective media".
Re:Saliva from Slashdot fouls Gulf (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They didn't fix a lot of things (Score:5, Funny)
GOVERNMENT R BAD, CORPORATIONS R GOOD
However:
BP screwed up bad
BP is a corporation
Therefore, the initial statement must be false, even if governments R BAD also.
Proof by Reductio ad absurdum. No fallacy. Thanks for playing, and here's a copy of our home game, 'Logic for Dummies.'
Re:BSOD (Score:2, Funny)
Oblig. XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/748/ [xkcd.com]
Re:They didn't fix a lot of things (Score:2, Funny)
"GOVERNMENT R BAD, CORPORATIONS R GOOD"
I'm confused. Make this simpler for me. Which group has four legs, again?
Re:Why didn't they fix it? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:They didn't fix a lot of things (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, we were discussing industry best practices which the laws are supposed to be based on. The industry is lax and thus the laws shouldn't be based on the industry. Get it?