Look, I'm no friend of M$, but let's remain logical here. It does the Linux community a disservice to blame M$ for the blackout without sufficient evidence.
I'm not sure of the exact wget args, but grepping through both articles for "microsoft" produced _no_ results. And while I strongly agree with Shannon that M$ is a very bad choice for mission critical systems, but I must respectfully disagree with both Shannon and Will on their evaluations of the evidence. We cannot assume without proof. However, I do think it _very_ curious that there were few technical details about the operating systems of the operator's consoles. That information will come out eventually. I've done contract computer tech support via Northrup Grumman for the Star Enterprise oil refinery in the past, and I know back then that the IS department fought tooth and nail to keep M$ totally separated from mission critical systems. At Star, the critical systems ran on HP-UX and ran very well. I would think (hope) that if M$ really was the problem, the grid operators would replace those systems with something more stable and secure, like OpenBSD. :) The alternative is to imagine that M$ is so large and powerful as to influence the grid operator's decision as to mission critical operating system software. And if that is the case, I will start stockpiling food and ammo today. John the Zealot Hebert -----Original Message----- From: will hill To: [email protected] Sent: 9/13/03 9:10 AM Subject: [brlug-general] M$ did cause the blackout. It's all but official. Microsoft failures left operators blind to problems they could have solved. The New York Times has a nice summary: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/13/national/13POWE.html?hp _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
