Let the finger pointing begin

[morganlefay]

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/te...campaign=enews

Williams, who has filed a multi-million dollar federal lawsuit against Transocean, also said that five weeks before the April 20 explosion, he had been called to check a computer system that monitored and controlled drilling.

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.

Well in my everso humble experience....when a critical machine regularly starts misbehaving in this manner....there is a serious issue that needs to be addressed asap...and the machine should be repaired\replaced\reinstalled.

Obviously a bad driver...or failing piece of hardware....

To blame MS on this is just wrong....

"A poor workman blames his tools"

MLF

[HYBR|D]

Hmmm i seem to be getting an error when clicking the link. Anyone else getting it also?

[morganlefay]

http://www.google.ca/search?q=+%27bl...ient=firefox-a

[The-Spec]

The town I grew up in was a pretty industrialised area up intil the last ten or so years.

The way these places operate safety wise is your given a helmet, a flashlight, and a set of locks. And the things that get locked up aren't gates so much as electrical boxes and the machines themselves. It's to prevent people from turning things back on when your working on (or inside them).

People can generally tell how things are running based purely on the look and sound of the machines they're working on. The people in little comfortable booths with computers are generally lead-men which well... lets put it this way, some are actually out there helping while others are in their booths.

[IKnowNot]

Hmmm i seem to be getting an error when clicking the link. Anyone else getting it also?

An XML Parsing Error ...

Funny, from what I could tell started after posting a story about
" ... has won another legal battle against Microsoft Corp. in an ongoing war over XML patents."

Guess their IT people are as good as the guy testifying that he was supposed to fix the computer, then is suing them for it not working????

Or is it me?

[morganlefay]

No its not just you......

I would have lost my job after 5 weeks of a critical machine blue screening......

Maybe his hands were tied by some management type..that didnt think it was 'important.

Personally I would have backed it up and either reinstalled or replaced depending on the age of the hardware ....etc


MLF

[nihil]

The original link works just fine for me????

Well in my everso humble experience....when a critical machine regularly starts misbehaving in this manner....there is a serious issue that needs to be addressed asap...and the machine should be repaired\replaced\reinstalled.

I agree, but am rather surprised..............given the amounts of money involved in oil exploration, I would have thought it would be standard procedure to replace a misbehaving machine with a known good one and then try to fix it?

If you get the same problem with the replacement machine, then it is time to check the sensors, as they must be causing the problem.

The guy must have some sort of legal death wish...........if he was called in to fix it and didn't, then I would say that was "reckless indifference" at a minimum?

To blame MS on this is just wrong....

Exactly! all the OS is doing is telling you it has a problem.............all other things being equal, I would suspect a hardware issue. They must have tested the thing when it was installed............so it must have worked then?

I had a machine in the other day that was crashing and giving critical error messages...........nothing in the logs really made sense............turned out the guy had added a strip of incompatible memory

Some hardware problems can be very obscure.

[morganlefay]

I totally agree nihil....the event logs and the BSOD error will point to the general cause of the failure...could be the sensor application and the hardware interface it was using causing the problem. Testing the whole thing on another machine would narrow down if it was hardware or application problem.

To just ignore and let it crash\seize up is just bad practice.....

Me ...i am relentless and will fight with it until I know what the issue\cause is...then I take steps to fix it.....

I wonder how many other oil rigs have the same issue or if it was one off....that in itself would point to hardware or third party app IMHO

MLF

[westin]

Meh. Gates can afford it.

It seems like Windows used to ship with a disclaimer stating that it wasn't for use with missile defense systems, life support, autopilot, etc. I looked for it, but can't seem to find it online. I think I have it in a book at home.

[nihil]

It seems like Windows used to ship with a disclaimer stating that it wasn't for use with missile defense systems, life support, autopilot, etc.

I remember that, but I think it was "air traffic control" rather than autopilot

I wonder how many other oil rigs have the same issue or if it was one off....that in itself would point to hardware or third party app IMHO

I hear that turning off safety equipment when it hinders operations is quite common. The operators just pay the fine

Transocean certainly turned off the main alarm on all their rigs at night before this happened, so I guess false alarms are fairly common? There are at least two guys in the drilling deck control room who are monitoring the sensors and can activate the Blow-Out Prevention mechanism and set off the alarms.

Basically the BOP unit failed, even though there is a failsafe device and a dead man's switch as well as hydraulic and electrical activators.

I don't think that the drilling control computer would have anything to do with that.

BP were having problems with the BOP months before, and were aware of 390 important maintenance tasks that were outstanding on the rig.

Worst of all, there are two tests you do before pumping out the drilling mud from the shaft, to test the integrity of the concrete plug. It failed one of those tests, and the only person who could authorise them to continue operations would be a BP manager. I understand that the FEDs are interested in two of them.

To just ignore and let it crash\seize up is just bad practice.....

It doesn't make much commercial sense either.........if the drilling control computer is playing up then that must be slowing your operations down. That rig was costing BP $1,000,000 a day, and they were 42 days behind schedule?

EDIT:

More information can be found here, also check out the DrillingAhead and NakedCapitalism links

http://learningfromdogs.com/2010/05/...water-horizon/