rhodozelia

Thanks for your thoughts. Currently isolated, bored and not getting much satisfaction

Sadly the OT networks are 100% trusting of any device on the network. With Schneider plcs any device on the OT network can write to any addressed memory register over modbus - it’s like direct memory access DMA.

I hope that one day every device on the OT network has a yubikey and all messages are signed so that no unauthenticated access is possible.

It is truly disappointing that even after the diamond princess example in February 2020 that easy airborne transmission wasn’t accepted.

I can’t fathom why after all this time n95 masks were mandatory for health care workers but it was simply accepted that the general population couldn’t have them. If everyone had an n95 mask for a month would it have been pandemic over?

I await the study indicating cloth masks are ineffective against covid size particles. We don’t see people doing asbestos abatement wrapping a t-shirt around their face and saying that should do it!

Check out the forest fires in California and Oregon recently, Fire is a fast way to change a lot of land!

The whole automation industry is a security disaster but it is because security isn’t part of the deliverables for any party. It isn’t in the specs, civil, mechanical, electrical engineers it isn’t their responsibility.

If the owner has an IT department they usually don’t want to be responsible for it either since locking things down leads to weird issues with legacy proprietary SCADA systems.

There is no out of the box secure solution available yet. Rockwell certainly makes an attempt with their factory talk directory but I highly doubt that isn’t easily worked around somehow.

If the management console has a button or controls that would allow the person sitting at the management console to shut down the pipeline, which systems usually do have an emergency stop button in case there is an accident, then all you need is access to the management console to write one bit to the controller that says “operator pressed estop”

No need for firmware vulnerabilities in VxWorks when there are internet connected windows pcs.

The code I write is going to be used for 20-30 years, and then when the platform is replaced I assume someone will read the code to see what they have to do to get the system working on the new platform. I have documentation for end-users and documentation for maintenance / troubleshooters and zoomed out documentation that explains the problems and approaches taken, and sometimes justifying any tradeoffs.

If code is temporary then it might not be worth the effort to document, but my documentation is what everybody except one person 20 years from now sees along with the user interface, so for my application the code doesn’t matter and the documentation matters quite a bit!

Eventually you might master your domain of expertise and solving the same problem again and again for different customers may become boring. Helping more junior coworkers mostly do the projects themselves with your assistance for the cruxes could be rewarding and multiply your output far beyond what you could achieve just working on it yourself.

I would love to known of some alternatives to Rockwell, wonder ware, Schneider to propose to our customers. What startups are building on top of timescale?

Canada used to count Avro and Bombardier in their aerospace industry. We used to have Nortel and blackberry as leaders in telecommunications. We can have our own industry for X and we can be competitive world leaders in it.

Sensor data is the input and can be faked!

Not only are Toyota’s more reliable in the long run, they have fewer defects out of the factory, fewer lemons, and because of this reputation they don’t depreciate as quickly. I am going to get a new Tacoma every 2 years because I can sell the old one for nearly the same price as the new one. No more losing 50% of the value as soon as you drive it off the lot.

Which is pretty much impossible if you let people have the physical cars. They will report their speed to other cars, they will measure their speed from pulses generated by something rotating on the vehicle, replace rotating thing with your function generator and then you can tell other cars you are going any speed you want. Turn up your reported speed and watch all the other cars get out of your way!

Since precipitation that falls as snow is released much later in the spring but precipitation that falls as rain causes additional melting and immediate runoff exactly where the freezing level is can have a dramatic effect on glacial melt And how dry forests get in the summer, with the ensuing forest fires.

Astronomy will only be possible from satellites that are further away from earth than all the LEO satellites.

I’m not convinced the squeeze is worth the juice. Starlink wasn’t necessary, there are/were alternatives. Hopefully it forces the terrestrial providers to step their game up, we all get FTTH, and then starlink can all crash in to the atmosphere before collisions pollute all of earths orbits and render them all unusable for the few valuable services that can only be done from space.

I wonder what parallels can be drawn to the mining industry which is also very boom and bust due to cyclical nature of commodities prices and the lead time in bringing new supply to market

Any source for inverter life span only 7 years ?

Electricians have tools and methods to run wires in walls with insulation without tearing them out. You should call one!

Crap like This is why I don’t apply updates to my own laptop or the power stations I work on. If a system is working properly the last thing I want is changes I can’t audit. Keep them off the internet and it is amazing what works can continue working in the same way.

I would have way more outages, breakage, and features gone missing due to updates than missing out on “security patches” and getting targeted by hackers

None of that says you can’t do a 300 gb backup every day. He’s not sharing with his neighbours or running a warez server.

Maybe it is the same as using a similar plot, but with 0.4% of code lines being the same I think the analogy doesn’t carry through to using a script word for word.

I read the CBC regularly and listen to the radio as well and agree it is not objective and is always pushing a social objective.

If you could remove the inflammatory tone from your posts and just state the facts there might be an interesting discussion to have.

If the CBC is someone’s only source of news it is a handicap to them as there is very little business reporting except from the point of view that some people having some success is bad because others didn’t have any.

At least the old newspapers had a business section that celebrated success and gave one a window in to that world. If all you consume is CBC you aren’t shown a path in to markets but are shown that they exclude you and there is nothing you can do about it. CBC creates victims.

It is to garner or maintain public support for military spending

Imagine how overbuilt and under utilized a communications network would have to be in order for it to work the same way people imagine solar and wind power can be transported across the country.

Networks offer the best return on investment when they are fully utilized not sitting idle.

In British Columbia Canada we are building a 1000 MW hydro plant called site C for 10-12 billion. We have been doing studies on the site for 30+ years and it will be 10 years construction time by the time it is finished.

Nuclear looks pretty good in comparison.

What’s your point other than people generally sell large projects with a low up front number and it ends up being higher. Investors don’t get the 3-4x return they wanted and have to settle for 2x. Or it takes longer to pay itself back.

Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power.

How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?

Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.

It is unfortunate you included the last paragraph in your comment as the rest of the comment seemed legitimate, but the issue in Texas had nothing to do with renewables, they were not scheduled to meet much of the system demand and the cause of the outage was numerous other plants not able to run due to the cold.

Including the last paragraph brings all the other points in to doubt, even though I otherwise agree with those points

I guess not, but when two or three projects come in at the 10 billion cad mark it’s a pretty good sign that’s our cost to build. Not necessarily unique to hydro - we might have high cost to build anything

In British Columbia they are building a 1000 MW hydro plant that is going to cost 10-12 billion. Similar story at muskrat falls in Labrador.

Large projects are just expensive now. Nuclear would be competitive with either of these hydro projects.

Economically uncompetitive compared to solar/wind 500% overbuilt? How many hours storage have to be added to the solar / wind to make a ccs gas plant competitive?