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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:48 PM EDT |
;) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: albert on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 12:56 PM EDT |
There's beauty in simplicity. There's safety in a system that can be wholly
understood by a group of individuals.
You can't trust one person with the entire program. It's also dangerous to give
individuals sole responsibility for parts of the program. Then there's the
issue of the OS, the hardware, redundancy, and operator training, which is most
critical in nuclear plants.
See the Therac fiasco (which resulted in several deaths)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
A very simple machine, compared to a nuclear plant, but things went horribly
wrong. The Therac-25 used a PDP-11. BTW, earlier Therac models, IIRC, never had
these problems.
I'm wondering why they're messing with the code in these systems, which have
been running for decades.
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Authored by: Kilz on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 01:44 PM EDT |
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Authored by: tiger99 on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 01:58 PM EDT |
But only two or three of the nuclear stations. At least one other is running
OS/2 on obsolete hardware, which is failing. Guess what is going to replace that
shortly? (And no, it is not Windoze!) This stuff is quite important but is
only monitoring and logging systems that helps the operators to sort things out
when they get a plant trip, and there is definitely no software in any primary
trip system in any UK reactor. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 20 2013 @ 06:47 PM EDT |
They're for fuel loading robots in Canadian designed nuclear reactors. The
Canadian CANDU reactor (used in a number of countries) is refuelled while
running, rather than having to be shut down to be refuelled like most other
types.
By continuing to use the same computers, they don't have to re-certify and
re-qualify the fuelling system at existing power plants.
GE Canada is a subcontractor for some of the reactor components. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: complex_number on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 08:56 AM EDT |
There are a good number of us still around.
012703
000101
012702
000001
060302
And the answer is?
I can even remember the PDP-11/70 Hardware Bootstrap sequence (after a few pints
of 6X that is)
One big selling point of the PDP-11 (for the RTC industry) was the pretty well
guaranteed interrupt latency. Other Hardware platforms couldn't give you the
same consistency.
Lovely bits of kit. Simple to interface to and simple to program. X86 was IMHO a
huge step backwards into the stone age.
---
Ubuntu & 'apt-get' are not the answer to Life, The Universe & Everything which
is of course, "42" or is it 1.618?
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