I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid.
In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.
The root cause tree on page 452 gives a good overview of how complex the behavior can be.
The good news is that the grid operators have a good idea of what the problem was/is and it's well understood how to fix it. The downside is that it will require quite a bit of both time and money to reinforce the grid infrastructure.
Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.
If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.
So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.
Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!
That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.
Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.
We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.
I want to like RustFS, but it feels like there's so much marketing attached to the software it turns me off a little. Even a little rocket emoji and benchmark in the Github about page. Sometimes less is more. Look at the ty Github home page - 1 benchmark on the main page, the description is just "An extremely fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust.".
Haha, +1. I really like RustFS as a product, but the marketing fluff and documentation put me off too. It reads like non-native speakers relying heavily on AI, which explains a lot.
Honestly, they really need to bring in some native English speakers to overhaul the docs. The current vibe just doesn't land well with a US audience.
To be frank this is a service to you. No company you want to work at has a recruiter that doesn't understand the difference (a fully AI recruiter would be better than this experience).
Does anyone use this? I was setting it up a few months ago but it felt very complicated compared to MinIO (or alternatives). Is there a sort of minikube-like tool I could use here?
They're a bit less bad than they used to be. I'm not exactly happy about what this means to incentives (and rewards) for doing research and writing good content, but sometimes I ask a dumb question out of curiosity and Google overview will give it to me (e.g. "what's in flower food?"). I don't need GPT 5.1 Thinking for that.
One summer in middle school our family computer failed. We bought a new motherboard from Microcenter but it didn’t come with a Windows license, so I proposed we just try Ubuntu for a while.
My mom had no trouble adjusting to it. It was all just computer to her in some ways.
Same, my mom ran Linux for years in the Vista days cuz her PC was too slow for Windows. She was fine. She even preferred Libreoffice over the Office ribbon interface.
Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. You're part of the problem this simplified Handbrake UI tries to solve. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
I currently work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company.[0] Most everyone else there installs Ubuntu on laptops (we don't have the license to sell things with Windows), and I started to initially, but an error always appeared on boot. Consider unpacking it and turning it on for the first time, and an error immediately appears: would you wonder if what you just bought is already broken? I eventually settled on Linux Mint with the OEM install option.
For one of my relatives, it also never happened. I installed Linux on their laptop that was having issues and explained how to browse the web and use some apps.
They always answered me "it works well".
But what I found during my next visit is a paper with a telephone number of computer helpers, and the laptop was running a fresh copy of Windows, presumably installed by these helpers.
after my father got an old work notebook without windows preinstalled, i suggested trying ubuntu, his first contact with linux. installation went without problems and a few days later i asked him wheter everything was ok. he answered that everything was great, except for that "edgy desktop background of a skull" (he mentioned something about that being a typical linux hacker thing).
it was the "intrepid ibex" version and the "skull" was actually a stylized ibex.
Try looking at this another way: people who are tech savvy may be more likely to have parents who are also tech savvy when compared to the average person.
If we don’t buy that theory: There are also a lot of people who visit and comment on this site, meaning there are tons of people who have parents who have not successfully switched over to Linux. The ones who have had success are the ones speaking up, which is currently in the single digits - nothing outlandish about that.
This is no different than somebody talking about a 35mm film camera and a bunch of people jumping in with their experience with 35mm film cameras. Are you as critical/skeptical of those conversations as well? You shouldn’t be and I would be surprised if so! So the logic is basically the same.
For the record my parents do not run Linux. I could maybe vaguely see my mom getting a handle on it, but unlikely and definitely not unless she made some big commitment to do it. However, I do have a friend whose mom is a gamer using a Linux laptop. This stuff does happen!
Let it go. He made a frustrated remark in a support thread 14 years ago where the OP escalated into calling him deliberately rude. Even if he hadn't changed at all over the years he has been contributing to open source with a product used by nontechnical people for 2 decades and deserves some grace for that.
In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.
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