The beginning of an interesting series has appeared on IBM's DeveloperWorks...

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor has attracted a lot of fashionable attention for applications involving game playing and network data processing. However, there are many other, arguably more entertaining uses for this technology.

In this series of articles I will be using a Cell/B.E. processor -- resident within an off-the-shelf PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) -- to build a Linux-hosted piece of laboratory equipment...

It was late. I was tired. I was, perhaps not surprisingly, a little drunk.

I never really enjoyed Friday nights in the college bar, and this was one I had particularly not enjoyed. But I had a hip flask of brandy to console me, and console me it did as I left early and walked home.

We lived in a flat about a mile out of the centre of Oxford. It was a nice flat, and it had a Booze Cabinet. The Booze Cabinet resulted from our predilection for cocktails, and was well stocked.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said Monday that even if the sale of the Nashville Predators goes through, the franchise "is not going anywhere."

Craig Leipold has signed a letter of intent to sell the Predators to Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie for $220 million after losing $70 million in 10 years of ownership.

The terms of the sale, which must be approved by three-fourths of the NHL's board of governors, call for the deal to be completed by June 30.

Bettman said he met with Balsillie last week and asked whether the co-CEO of Blackberry makers Research in Motion Ltd. had intentions to relocate the franchise.

"He told me that he did not," Bettman said before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals between Ottawa and Anaheim.

"What's clear to me from meeting with Mr. Balsillie is he's passionate about the game, he'd like to own a franchise and certainly has the resources to do it. Beyond that, there have been no promises, there have been no predictions."

The Predators finished third in the league standings this season with a franchise-record 110 points, but averaged 13,815 in paid attendance.

Leipold has until June 19 to exercise a "cure" clause in Nashville's arena lease that would force the city to buy tickets and ensure attendance averages 14,000 next season. Leipold said he has not yet discussed with Balsillie whether to exercise that clause, but will speak to Balsillie.

Balsillie would have to
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sign a consent agreement with the NHL, including a clause that prevents a new owner from relocating the team for seven years. But an arena lease would have to be in effect to force the new owner to follow that league requirement.

Averaging 14,000 paid attendance in 2007-08 would keep the lease in effect.

"If the attendance mark is satisfied, even if it's not, or if the city cures what would then be the default, this team is not going anywhere," Bettman said.

"There is a lease and sports leagues aren't in the practice of letting teams violate their leases. I believe Mr. Balsillie understands that. It's conceivable that this team will be in Nashville as long as its lease."

Leipold has said he hopes Balsillie's business skill can tap into the corporate support he never found to make a profit.

"This team suffering is due to a lack of corporate support," said Bettman, adding that more individuals own season tickets than corporations in Nashville, which he said is unique among NHL cities.

Meanwhile, coverage of this year's finals is being affected by cost-cutting in the U.S. newspaper industry.

Only four of the 24 U.S. NHL markets are being represented by newspapers during Games 1 and 2 in Anaheim. They are: The New York Times, (New York) Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post and Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Bettman said that doesn't represent a decline from last year to this year. "Our numbers this year are about what they were last year," he said.

The commissioner mentioned the challenges facing newspapers in an increasing digital age, including fans' ability to get news from the Internet and hand-held devices.

BLACKSBURG, Va., May 23, 2007 -- The hydrogen economy is not a futuristic concept. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2006 Advance Energy Initiative calls for competitive ethanol from plant sources by 2012 and a good selection of hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles by 2020.

The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

"Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems"
<"Peter G. Neumann"
Tue, 8 May 2007 10:58:28 PDT

This is another example of a system environment in which components that
were supposedly not safety related could compromise safety. The case is of
considerable interest to RISKS.

On 19 Aug 2006, operators manually scrammed Browns Ferry, Unit 3, following
a loss of both the 3A and 3B reactor recirculation pumps, as required after
the loss of recirculation flow -- which placed the plant in a high-power,
low-flow condition where core thermal hydraulic stability problems may exist
at boiling-water reactors (BWRs). Generally, intentional operation is not
permitted under this condition. Although some BWRs are authorized for
single loop operation, sudden loss of even one pump could present the plant
with the same stability problems and could result in the reactor protection
system initiating a shutdown of the plant. [Source: Effects of
Ethernet-based, Non-safety Related Controls on the Safe and Continued
Operation of Nuclear Power Stations, United States Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, Washington, DC 20555-0001,
17 Apr 2007; PGN-ed, although the following text is abridged but unedited.]

The initial investigation into the dual pump trip found that the
recirculation pump variable frequency drive (VFD) controllers were
nonresponsive. The operators cycled the control power off and on, reset the
controllers, and restarted the VFDs. The licensee also determined that the
Unit 3 condensate demineralizer controller had failed simultaneously with
the Unit 3 VFD controllers. The condensate demineralizer primary controller
is a dual redundant programmable logic control (PLC) system connected to the
ethernet-based plant integrated computer system (ICS) network. The VFD
controllers are also connected to this same plant ICS network. Both the VFD
and condensate demineralizer controllers are microprocessor-based utilizing
proprietary software.

The licensee determined that the root cause of the event was the malfunction
of the VFD controller because of excessive traffic on the plant ICS network.
Testing by site personnel performed on the VFD controllers confirmed that
the VFD control system is susceptible to failures induced by excessive
network traffic. The threshold levels for failure of the VFD controllers due
to excessive network traffic, as determined by the on-site testing, can be
achieved on the existing 10-megabit/second network. The NRC staff's review
of industry literature and test reports on network device sensitivity, and
the threshold levels for such failures, confirmed these testing results. The
licensee could not conclusively establish whether the failure of the PLC
caused t... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Browns Ferry 3 nuclear power site scrammed

Water pumps need firewalls too. That's what operators of the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant discovered last August when they were forced to manually shut down one of their plant's two reactors after networking problems caused two water pumps to fail and threatened the stability of the plant itself.

On Aug. 19 2006, operators found themselves in a potentially dangerous "high power, low flow condition," when one of the plant's two operating reactors was not recirculating enough water to properly cool itself, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a note sent to operators last month. Operators were forced to perform a "manual scram," or shutdown of the plant.

Built in 1974 in northern Alabama, Browns Ferry was once the world's largest nuclear reactor.

Although the Browns Ferry incident wasn't anywhere close to a nuclear meltdown, it was a serious situation, said Eric Byres, CEO of Byres Security, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. "They realized that their recirculation system wasn't working and they were in danger of something undesirable happening," said Byres, an expert in industrial systems security who was consulted on the matter.

The cause of the pump's failures? "Excessive traffic" on the closed Ethernet network used by the plant's control systems, the NRC said.

The NRC report said the origin of this excessive traffic was unclear, but Byres suspects that the problem was due to faulty networking code the controllers used by the plant's recirculation pumps. They may have suffered from the same well-documented networking flaw that has taken down similar systems in food processing, steel, and pulp plants in the past, Byres said. "I'm personally aware of at least a dozen incidents at this point that relate to this particular fault," he said.

Although he declined to name the manufacturer of this product, Byres said that it has a known bug that can cause a crash by generating too much networking traffic. "It's like the loud guy at the bar standing at the table," he said. "It kind of cuts down on the ability of everyone else to have a decent conversation."

After the incident, Browns Ferry's operators began developing firewalls for the different controllers on their network as well as a network firewall device to limit the traffic between devices within the plant's internal network, the NRC said.

Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives believe that more should be done, however. Last week Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-Miss.), and James Langevin, (D-Rhode Island), wrote the chairman of the NRC expressing their concern that the Browns Ferry failure may have been due to an outside attack. "Without a thorough, independent review of the logs and associated data, the assumption that this incident is not an outside attack is unjustifiable," they wrote.

Byres agreed that a more thorough investigation would be useful. "It's unfortunate that they didn't dig in further," he said. "These types of glitches are well known."

Virtually no control systems use firewalls at present, although that is starting to change, Byres said. "The idea is still in its infancy, but -- particularly in the oil and gas industry -- there's starting to be a lot of interest in doing this sort of defense-in-depth," he said.

Water-pump firewalls are coming none too soon, Byres believes.