The soft dictatorship works very well, Hungary will go even more down in the future. I'll probably leave Hungary before Hungary leaves EU/NATO and gets into a war.
So Hungarians residing in Netherlands could have been able to vote at Hungarian embassies/consulates in Netherlands (if they made it to the embassy).
edit: It was a joke. :/
Other systems that might normally provide safety critical redundancy could be providing the sole measure of safety, with no other redundancy available in case one of those fails.
“Unsafe” is always defined based on context.
There was an incident a few years ago where a LIRR track crew member stepped in front of a train going 78mph and died.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
The employee that died had been on duty for 38 of the 50 hours leading up to the fatality. One of the NTSB's recommendations is to implement software that avoids worker fatigue:
"The FRA encourages the use of certified biomathematical models, such as the Fatigue Audit InterDyne Model and the Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (FAST) by railroads to help them develop work schedules for safety-sensitive employees that align with healthy work-rest scheduling practices; however, these safety measures do not apply to roadway workers. 14 The work schedules developed through biomathematical models avoid many pitfalls causing worker fatigue that arise from excessively long work hours, highly variable work shift times that disrupt human circadian rhythms, and infringement on sleep opportunity times."
TL;DR: it's not about the trains crashing into each other. It's about sleepy people making bad decisions that gets them or their colleagues killed.
Conspiracy theories are so fun.
If it is true that Netherland's and Italy's transport infrastructure were also down I wonder if Russian supported hackers are to blame.
It's been Russian hackers so many times last few years (Hunter Biden's laptop, Trump elections, etc...), it's a sure bet this time it's the same.
/s
Nobody ever got fired for blaming Russians.
See also : assassinations - maybe the death of the top polish government & military and Total's CEO in plane crashes were just freak accidents, but a nagging suspicion that Russia was involved will always remain...
I'm not from the NL, but I have travelled there by train. My feeling is that they have very dense traffic, but in a relatively small country most trains don't travel more than 2 hours. That means each driver and each conductor needs to make 4 different trips a day. And because they need breaks they proably switch trains during a working day. If all this planning has been computerized for many years it just means that nobody knows what to do next if the computer screen remains blank. Probably they don't get a printout in the morning like it was some decades ago. No idea how adaptively the system would react during the day dependening on delays and disruptions.
Just guessing, maybe some insider knows more.
See https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondje_om_de_kerk (in Dutch, use Google Translate to translate to a language of your choice).
We’re of course all too familiar with this process from several consequential court cases deliberating its efficacy and merit in generational memory. Whether it’s sensible has been argued with elections on the line.
Edit: and to be clear, we're not talking about holding down a resetable circuit breaker to avoid being late, we're talking about the rail network of an entire nation being inoperable for a day.
You can never know if the primary safety system is functioning perfectly, so you need other systems to be there to step in when the primary fails unexpectedly.
If you detect the primary system has failed, isn’t it reasonable that you should stop operation as quickly and safely as possible, and be thankful nothing bad happened while you lacked redundancy? Any SPoF could be fatal for hundreds of people.
This isn't some consumer appliance where you have to stupid proof every inch of it. These systems are bespoke and their architecture is mostly a matter of business decisions and not at all a matter of the internet peanut gallery trying to figure out how safe they can make it.
I dare you to watch 5 minutes of news on the government media channel (the only channels that can be accessed in the free TV tear, that poor people are able to watch) and say that it's not rigged.
4 year ago the joke party used that 5 minutes for being a chicken to show the absurdity of the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcpuwIl-610&t=28s
If Napoleon, who ruled hundreds of years ago is the best example you know, there must be something in not allowing any person to stay for 16 years in power (especially because he just had 9 years)
I know that you're probably refering to US, but I don't make any comment about it, because I don't live there, so I don't know what really happened in US.
In Romania some people found partially burned ballots with only opposition votes next to a garbage bin before the elections ended. The proofs of voter fraud couldn't have been clearer. It's supposed to be a scandal, but nothing will happen about it.
https://hungarytoday.hu/discarded-burnt-postal-ballots-scand...
You're applying US culture-war stuff to another country and culture.
Calling me a ”clipboard warrior” isn’t furthering your argument, though.
This comment provides an excellent example along the lines I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30902016
This is not true. While most of the channels are government media, you also get RTL, which is very much opposition media. Source: https://mindigtv.hu/muszaki-segitseg-1/csatornak/csatornakio...
Maybe I should have said "fully rigged." Real opposition candidates do get to run, they just have almost no shot of victory. And it's possible that if they did have a shot, the elections would be outright rigged.
Napoleon was my example of a popular dictator, I didn't want to use other examples as people will debate whether they're dictators. I never said that's a good thing, Napoleon was horrible despite remaining popular in France.
Though since there's no election for a while and they don't apparently get elected based on promises delivered, just promised made, they haven't shied away from breaking the pensioner-bait promises anyway for this year and removing the triple lock (pensions rise at least as fast as the largest of inflation, earnings or 2.5%).
Non-election year actions, while unironically promising that they are going to give away money in the upcoming election year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signalling#History_of_...
The worst will have been avoided, but at least one of the train will have to back down to the nearest junction, and depending on how packed it is they might have to back down a few more train as well. I’d assume in reality it would deadlock from there.
Some local routes with few trains a day, where there is no longer any track-side staff, operate in a simplified rules (there is a whole code for that). There, the train will arrive to a station and depending on a symbol in the timetable, it will either continue to the next station without any signals or permissions needed or will wait for crossing train in oposite direction (the train driver must also unlock the station office and call the dispatcher on phone in some cases). Switches are either operated by train crew or they are self-returning (one direction always go to track 1 in station, the other direction goes to track 2, and the switches can be travelled through in the oposite direction without setting them first (this is an accident on standard switches) and they return back.
So, the problem was that the crossing was there on some days and wasn't on some other days, driver forgot or misread the day and the train left into oncoming train...
Was a big discussion after that to do anything, even an uncertified mobile app to shout "train coming" at the driver... Otherwise Czech rep. has a very modern European rail infra, just some local branch routes run like this saving them from being cancelled completely, but the rules were simified maybe too much.
What is more interesting is how they get away with this when PTC is now mandatory (a lot of special operating rules/restrictions).
Lets say there is a north-south train line that is shared.
The schedule can create a number of north slots and south slots into which a train of a given speed and length can fit. A variety of different trains could fit into the same slot.
If a train is late, that train is moved into a later slot. That leaves a free slot where the train was going to go. Perhaps every later train is then delayed into a later slot also. Lets call this a rippling delay.
You would probably schedule some spare slots to prevent delays rippling through the entire day's schedule. Some slots might be long enough to permit several trains going in the same direction to travel (it's more efficient if 10 north trains go then 10 south trains rather than 10 north/south interleaved).
Sure stopping all trains must be burning a crazy amount of money, but the above scenario would be burning the same amount of money (I assume they have refund policies or they'd be operating with no ticketing), employee sanity, and urgent care for anything that could happen during that time.
I have faith in Dutch people's kindness, the same happening in Paris would be riots and physical danger for the staff if they kept the trains running.
He said that when he had recently graduated and just moved from Norway to Sweden his first job here was as a technician for the local railway. One of his first assignments was a call where the computer controlling all the track switches had stopped working. Luckily there was a backup, but they needed him to fix it immediately.
He arrived, took a look at the computer and its backup running next to it. He started out by measuring voltages on both, comparing to see what the difference was. After a while some men in suits came in and asked how things were going. He said it was all good, they said it wasn't because now all trains had stopped. Apparently, he had short circuited the backup.
"And that's when I decided to go for a theoretical career!" My teacher happily concluded. The classroom was left in a stunned silence.
I absolutely loved his classes. I bumped into him a few years ago when I was holding a recruitment thing for Ghost Games and it happened to be just after his lecture. I told him how much I enjoyed his courses.
-George Bernard Shaw
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach work here."
'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, teach teachers.'
I used to be so impressed at European train stations that they had a single sheet that would give the entire day's arrivals and departures, down to which track. I assume that behind that were schedules that weren't so far from being hand-calculated with equivalent sheets that told people and equipment where to be at what times.
I think we lose something when we jump so far forward that you cannot fall back gracefully without a system completely breaking down.
I would appreciate one of those post-outage "what happened" reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don't think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.
This was, however, not due to a computer glitch, but problems in SBB's electrical grid, which lead to overload of some of the lines and then to a complete shutdown of the entire grid.
Warnings were displayed on control consoles, but were drowned in 1000s of other meaningless warnings (there's a lesson for an UI designer here).
I was in the ICE from Basel to Zurich at the time and after fuming for a few minutes I figured: "What can you do?" and moved to the bar wagon. There we had something of an impromptu party until there was no more power for the cash register and they stopped sales.
In the end it was a (relatively) funny adventure for most and a huge embarrassment for SBB. I don't think they like to be reminded of that faithful day.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-train-network-shuts-down/...
Funny how the entire system has ground to a halt and the bartender is still worried that their cash register receipts and inventory won’t reconcile and shuts that part down too.
It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.
Not a native English speaker. So it's easy for me to confuse the terms. You're right, of course.
Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural differences between the Netherlands and the USA- no joke.
How would "We are trully sorry for this incident" make it any better ?
I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination. That's 100% unacceptable.
About the only thing they could maybe have done was to fall back on back-and-forth shuttle trains between major node stations. But that would only provide a very basic service, with incorrect train materiel being used for the normally expected number of passengers. It would be just enough to get passengers and personnel home. I would like to see something like a pen-and-paper schedule that they can fall back on, but they don't have it. (They did something like that at the first corona lockdowns, although with more planning involved.)
Also probably worth noting is that trains here are used fairly frequently, however unfortunately this isn't the first time trains are stopping - for example snow is a common reason for delayed/reduced service. (Snow isn't very common here in the NLs)
That’s ludicrous, I wish people helping other people this way was more common.
Better to force the operators to fix the boom arm / whatever other cause of power glitches with fault codes like this. Even if they false-trip when there are grid level outages.
Being unable to accelerate or unable to use regenerative braking is not in any way a safety problem. Either situation can happen at any time. (Electric trains have banks of resistors used to dump the unwanted kinetic energy when it's not possible to return it to the power supply, and this was the normal method for decades before regenerative braking became common.)
For instance, running high speed rail without computer signalling would be a huge risk there's no sense in taking ( due to the speeds involved, by the time you see anything of issue like a train or damage in the tracks in front, it's too late to stop).
Scale creates problems that are partially solved via software systems, which only handle a subset of the existing variety and new variety introduced by scaling. This makes the systems leaky with regards to unhandled variety and incredibly rigid (i.e., not robust) against exceptions, exceptions that could often be readily be handled by humans. By software being a snapshot of some small group of humans' knowledge of a system, it is completely unable to respond to live operational exceptions. Stafford Beer's work is interesting background on this type of thing.
> A much more efficient automation.
There are many, many examples where that is both not true and true. For the not true cases, just see literally any customer service interaction with a large company in the past half decade. I suppose this could be arguable though if one asks the question "efficient for who?".
The usage of certain lines at a certain time is calculated in periods of 6 seconds!
We're waaay beyond normal human coordination capacity.
It's now Monday morning here and the trains are back to normal in time for rush hour. So it's not really a big deal.
> The IT failure occurred at the end of the morning. It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. This system is important for safe and scheduled operations: if there is an incident somewhere, the system adjusts itself accordingly. This was not possible due to the failure.
If I had to guess, it probably was an issue with scheduling/timetable software rather than anything to do with the trains, rails, etc. Nothing exceedingly seriously or difficult to correct.
"Due to the enormous impact of the failure in the IT system, it is unfortunately not possible to run any trains today." // => "Due to the enormous impact of the failure in the IT system, NS cannot run trains today."
"Although the cause of the failure has now been resolved, the impact is considerable. To be able to start up reliably, systems must be updated and trains must be brought to the right place. That takes time. For our passengers, this is extremely unpleasant news." // => "Although we have fixed the cause of the failure, the failure impacted most of our customers. To fix this failure so that trains would start reliably, we needed to return all trains to a central depot, which took nearly 12 hours. We apologize for the extremely unpleasant interruption."
"The expectation is that tomorrow morning the normal timetable can largely be resumed. The night trains can still run." // => We expect to resume minor operation with night trains first and then major operations tomorrow morning.
"The IT failure occurred at the end of the morning. It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. This system is important for safe and scheduled operations: if there is an incident somewhere, the system adjusts itself accordingly. This was not possible due to the failure." // => The IT failure occured at 11am in the scheduling system, a major requirement for safe operation; if train operations are interrupted at one location, the system normally reroutes other trains to prevent collisions. This system failed.
"The international trains are not affected by this failure. For information about the timetables of other transporters, passengers can consult the websites of these transporters." // => The failure did not affect international trains. If you have an inquiry about other transportation services, please consult those services.
"The journey planner is updated." // => We updated the journey planner accordingly to account for the interruptions.
// Generally the use of "passive voice" indicates poorly-taught grammar, however the use could also indicate desire to avoid responsibility.
My guess is that the failure is related to signalling or some other knowledge that exists “between” the trains (and brains). Having systems that can negotiate right of way is necessary to increase the number of trains and the speed of each individual train beyond their pre-computer-era limits.
Having all trains stop for one day is probably a judgment call to lower the overall duration: Having all trains stop for a day is a pain in the neck, but you know when you’re done. If you could not wait, you could probably have (quite) a few trains run without problems. However, you would have to work for a very long time to get all the trains back to where they were to resume the regular time table. This would be the preferable option during a time of crisis.
There was a lot of extra impact because this system also feeds the passenger information so their app, website and information screens at the stations were not working either leaving passengers in the dark.
Do not forget that there might several companies running on the same track, cargoa and passenger trains etc.
Managing a busy track is hell.
But if they don't work you don't take off, it's simply not worth the risk.
A crew is stranded in space, because of a computer malfunction and no one on board remembers how they used to be programmed.
It’s more than that: The trains are negotiated at political levels! The “8:18 to Marseilles” (fictitious example) could be a headline in the news if the region refuses to fund it, and the worker’s union may have striked to keep it, while inhabitants’ HOA has negociated with the city to keep it under 12€: They are the object of a convergence of fixed interests. They run for generations: the train I took as a kid is still arriving on the same track today (and in one stop, it stops at track E; tracks A-D were dismantled but never renumbered due to this legacy).
The good thing with rails is that they aren’t going away, and trains can be negotiated for decades, they’re far from being scheduled on-the-fly.
As another poster mentioned, they are many, many independent variables in a railway system. In the old days, people recovered from problems by gut feel and experience was OK although there is usually no "right" answer. The newer systems apply some statistical anlysis and try and make the best decision usually with humans doing the last part.
I'm not sure about "because safety" though since signalling systems protect trains from each other and they only have automation in the sense of first train that arrives gets it route sets, the system cannot make trains crash unless there is a critical bug.
That said, train systems themselves usually maintain a ton of active operational procedures that remain part of staff training which would theoretically allow them to be more resilient and these procedures are kept current and you will often see them used in emergencies. I.E. on automated systems, trackway signaling often exists in the “not lit” off state and if the automated train control system failures, is often capable of lighting up for human controlled movement (usually required to be done at reduced speeds) of the trains during irregular operations like bringing stuck trains to the end of their lines and letting the people in them out at the next station. And any trains that still have a human conductor in a cab (or a cab for a human conductor at all) have procedures for that human to operate the train directly, even on segments of track where automated train control otherwise control all train movements.
We could try and run these systems in these degraded states under these emergency procedures, but most modern systems have safety analysis and engineering which focus on bringing the system to a safe halt state while fixing the underlying issue and returning to full operational state rather than messing around with rolling along in degraded states with unknown but assumed to be increased potential for catastrophic engineering failures with outcomes including loss of life.
(In the US it is generally illegal for a human being to operate a train unaided by some form of train control above 79mph. Most other systems have similar rules. We no longer trust humans themselves to operate these vehicles just because so many human lives can be at stake when they fail.)
Source: I did a stint working on system security and a little bit of electromagnetic compatibility safety engineering for rail systems. It was enlightening to see how the capital E engineers I was working alongside handle these concepts and design risk out of modern systems. The bulk of my work was in the US but the parts that weren’t were on systems that spanned multiple continents and/or train cars which were distributed worldwide. (To my knowledge none of my work has ever related to system discussed here.)
> It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff.
...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole.
I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew scheduling system.
> A typical workday at NS includes approximately 15,000 trips for drivers and 18,000 for conductors. The resulting number of duties is approximately 1,000 for drivers and 1,300 for conductors. This leads to extremely difficult crew scheduling instances. Nevertheless, because of the highly sophisticated applied algorithms, TURNI solves these cases in 24hours of computing time on a personal computer. Therefore, we can construct all crew schedules for all days of the week within just a few days.
Then I found more detail about TURNI's implementation in this[2] paper about optimizing crew scheduling for timetables.
> In the railway industry the sizes of the crew scheduling instances are, in general, a magnitude larger than in the airline industry. Moreover, crew can be relieved during the drive of a train resulting in much more trips per duty than typical in airlines. In other words, the combinatorial explosion is much higher. The latter has made the application of these models in the railway industry prohibitive until recently.
Cool stuff.
Finally, gleaning from ns.nl's careers page[3] everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I'd say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.
[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~lex/files/Interfaces.pdf
[2] https://repub.eur.nl/pub/11701/ei200803.pdf
[3] https://werkenbijns.nl/werkgebieden/it/sap-specialist-bij-ns...
sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.
Those are pretty standard terms here in .NL. 36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers, including government and semi-government. Pension is offered almost everywhere and at least 4 weeks vacation is the legal minimum.
Maybe except for the _unlimited_ train travel but most employers do offer free train travel between home and work.
This also means that if an IT system goes down on a Sunday, a lot of employees won’t even pick up the phone until Monday 9 AM.
I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf "enterprise" software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to customize and integrate than it would to fully replace. An army of developers trying to keep a business running with the world's largest Swiss Army knife.
My gut tells me that big names like SAP and Sales Force are easier to sell to executives, and it makes a company seem like it knows what it's doing. And maybe feeling pressure to choose a "respected" brand leads to fewer alternatives? Or maybe all the alternatives are quickly bought out by the behemoths. I really don't know. Maybe someone can enlighten me. It just seems like an enormous turd of inefficiency to me.
[1]: https://blogs.sap.com/2022/03/11/what-you-may-not-know-of-pr...
1 hour more than the standard French contract, and there are also far more holidays here..
> free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.
.. okay that's actually a great perk. IIRC the French national railway company, SNCF, provide only a limited number of tickets per employee (like 10 per year? someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Their UX is also atrocious though (websites are just shit at workflows, apps are weird and break easily, ticket machines are OK but with really bad touch screens, and train announcement screens are each running Windows XP(with literally hundreds, if not thousands of them on big train stations), while from what i recall NS was acceptable.
For example, The Salvation Army is one of the biggest jokes in all of charitable history.
I wont go into details here, but I would NEVER give a dime to the Salvation "army" (of free slave labor under the guise of "salvation" (its a tax and money fraud to its core (I went through a SHIT ton of financial documents to see what their true operatin is disguised as. AVOID)
TL;DR: TSA uses its place as a church-like service to get special tax incentives, even the buildings in SF were donated to them. They run a for-profit-grey-market of boutiques they supply with "donations" they have running trades with China-Town in SF. They take subsidies, donations and other benefits. They require all that they "help" sign up for state benefits, sign the benefits over to their org, take the benefits, then feed donated & expired processed fod to their labor force.
They only take in able bodied. Force them to go to church each sunday. and make them use external addiction help, such as AA and make it clear they are not a treatment organiztion.
They maintain a very small amount of actual employees, and play on the egos of those in their "program" using military style rankings to appease the egos of the ignorant...
They then profit like mad, corruption is rampant and they feed all their "good" donatins to their side hustle of boutiques and other grey market.
Its a fn racket.
=---
The point being that if you DD a company/org, you can often find out a lot from financial public info, comments from even just a few employees etc..
And we can assume that a position in the IT department just opened up...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailme...
Thanks!
The other part of my guess is that they have a SQL db which is stored on /likely/ a windows server instance. I’d even surmise that this instance may be hosted on Azure but that’s speculation, not a good guess.
On Sunday there is also not as much pressure to get things running as there would be on Monday. Or perhaps this is the incentive to pay now and get things fixed on time for the work week? In that case Friday night would again have made more sense unless the attackers have some very specific insight into how much slower restoring without paying is.
My alternative theory is an expired certificate that makes some core systems just not talk to each other anymore. The announcements on the stations, for example, were also out, and they lost control of the mobile apps (couldn't make the apps show that trains didn't run, the in-app scheduler showed all was A-OK), and that sounds quite dissimilar from the core train operation service, making me think it's more of an infrastructure than a specific system's problem. On the other hand, once the app could be controlled again (assuming this singular underlying cause), you'd think they could then also start putting train service back in place and that didn't happen for hours still.
I can't really make the pieces fit together for any theory, so then presumably something multi-faceted (one thing tripping one or two other things so it escalated from restarting one component to not being able to restart the trains anymore the whole day).
Well, as long as you're clearly stating _this_ part of your otherwise validated and highly likely pre-post-mortem is speculation... </s>
That especially. I wonder how expensive that thing is going to cost.
Is there any reason to assume that this is a fact? Usually in these situations, NS is pretty good about paying people back.
/s
"Who are we? NS is active in the public transportation sector. We encourage the use of public transportation and keep the Netherlands moving. Our travellers are our 1st, 2nd and 3rd priority in all of our activities, and we do our utmost to make their trip as pleasant and sustainable as possible from door to door."
This is also fascinating. I would expect to find "NS (Netherlands Service) provides rail services for the entire country". Instead they choose vague grammar, more the idea of NS rather than what NS actually is.
"I am a programmer" => "I encourage the use of computers to provide solutions for common business problems". Just a strange use of grammar.
Another example I love, that is even less ambiguous, is restaurants (traditional, not fast food) that require waiters to take orders on touchscreen PoS systems, instead of taking the orders on a notepad and inputting them later. The touch screens are incredibly slower on a bigger party ordering appetizers, a main course, drinks and desert - it takes forever to navigate back and forth and find the right item, and usually has to be done again and again for each diner. By comparison, a notepad allows the waiter to write down exactly what they hear, often just making small extra notes to indicate duplicate items.
Of course, this particular one could be improved by arranging the menus more naturally for someone taking orders, and several other conveniences (such as always keeping the current order on screen, to easily tap to add "oh, and another beer for me", "I'll have the same desert as her" etc).
(He wrote The Kite Runner (among others), which is a heartbreaking novel).
On AC-electrified railways (especially those with their own independent power supply network like Germany/Austria/Switzerland), resistors are actually rather uncommon on stock capable of regenerative braking, because the OHLE not being able to accept regenerated power is a relatively rare occurrence. Though of course in that case the conventional friction brakes are of course fully rated to bring the train to halt, only with a bit more wear and tear.
DC-electrified railways are a different matter – transmission losses are higher, power supply sections are smaller and substations often not capable of returning any surplus power back into higher network layers of the power supply systems, so the OHLE/third rail not being able to accept the power generated by regenerative braking happens much more frequently and so trains continue carrying braking resistors as a fallback system.
Learned a lot about db best practices to make these systems resilient and reportable but the whole “the database is the system” angle was very much a “every problem is a nail to this hammer” situation.
people seem to believe that running trains is some simple thing. it is the exact opposite of a simple thing, even for small systems with only a few dozen trains
What lead you to look into this? How did you originally suspect them of being fraudulent? What clues did you see in their financial documents?
For example, I tend to look at Charity Navigator and for Salvation Army, they mostly get dinged by not having an independent board (which to be fair is a clear red flag) but not much more, so as someone who does want any contribution I make to charities to go toward their cause, I'm very interested in any methodology around researching a charity.
I knew someone who worked briefly at the Salvation Army. They said it was shockingly efficient and effective at its charitable mission.
Before you can get the actual service up and running, you need to get trains and personnel to the right locations. So I don't think this discredits your theory as much as you think.
The computer could generate a schedule and post it publicly so people knew when they could hop on.
I live in Malmö so you have to understand I'm obliged to make a "well no wonder given the Danish counting system" joke here
> Fifty is halvtreds, which stands for halvtredje-sinds-tyve, meaning “third half times twenty”, or “two scores plus half of the third score” [2½ 20]*
https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-danish/e...
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/92657/count-to-...
What is remarkable here is that usually there are a lot of answers in dedicated golfing languages that can solve seemingly very complex tasks in just a few tens of bytes, here there is only one such answer, and it takes 115 bytes. So perhaps one could say it's even hard for computers?
There is no UX: it's just a small sheet of paper.
I agree struggling for basic survival as a public servant is not ideal, but be careful not to turn education into a lucrative opportunity where people come for money not passion.
Money is certainly not the only way to attract talent (though teachers still need to pay their bills) and in most schools i've attended the talented teachers were just ridiculously hindered by the bureaucrats defining their program and agenda. David Graeber's talk "Manageurial feudalism and the revolt of the caring classes" comes to mind.
What exactly are the downsides of an increase in intelligent people competing for teaching positions?
Your other comment efficiently expresses my intuition on the topic.
The signaling system is totally fail safe. Even if that system totally went out, drivers are required to know where all the signals are, and to treat an unlit signal as a red.
(Mixed metaphors always make me smile.)
When it became insincere or boarderline fradulent.
"We deeply regret this one incident" - you regret getting caught and it has happened many times before and will happen many times again.
"We are sorry, we have learnt the lessons and it will never happen again" - no you havent and yes it will.
"Thank you so much this is delicious" - umm try tasting the food before lavishing your praise.
5* uber ratings for everything - need I say anymore?
Actions are more important than words, otherwise it's just political fluff.
Again they should have refunded people, not care about their language, they didn't so that's a big no-no.
Every company is saying 'sorry', every politician is saying 'sorry' but there are no actual follow ups and ways of fixing it.
"The study was conducted on a group of 3,399 individuals, all from London and aged between 35 and 55. The personality traits that were observed included cynicism, suspicion, resentment and distrust. After the study period was completed, it was found that the majority of individuals who expressed these particular personality traits that were monitored at the start of the study had developed depression during the 19 year-period."
https://www.bphope.com/blog/how-cynicism-is-linked-to-depres...
Check and check.
> cynicism, suspicion, resentment and distrust
Its london - if you are not suspicious and distrusting your phone will be removed from your possession as a you walk down the street. Resentment - from the council estates to mayfair.
Cynical, I would say I am 100%, however, as per your article Being cynical essentially means you are unable to trust the intensions of those around you. I trust their intentions, I dont trust what they say their intentions are.
The intention of the politician (or child) who gets caught lying is not to appologise and make amends, its to get out of trouble. The intention of the diner who says this is delicious before tasting a dish is to ingratiate themselves to the host or appear the "polite one" at the dinner party - otherwise they would find out how the food actually tasted before claiming it is the finest they have ever tasted.
As for the 5* uber rating - The bottom line is if you give your driver less than 5 stars, you have screwed him over. So, unless they fuck up, give 5 stars.
Take care not to slide so far to the other side where there is another trait - toxic positivity ... With toxic positivity, negative emotions are seen as inherently bad. Instead, positivity and happiness are compulsively pushed, and authentic human emotional experiences are denied, minimized, or invalidated.
You want the train company to keep 2x-3x personnel on hand just for days like this? Not to mentioned transition time.
[0] Extremely rough off-the-cuff estimate. They were obviously automating as they went along during the years.
"Did it get a bit late last night? Can't keep your eyes open?"
Again, the student agreed. Rolf flashed a huge smile and in a singsong voice said "then I have something for you!". He walked over to his bag, pulled out a stuffed animal and a tiny embroidered pillow. (I have a grainy photo of them somewhere).
Rolf tiptoed up to the student, put the pillow in front of him, and as the student rested his head on the pillow Rolf gave him a pat on the head.
After this Rolf went back, said that if you're that tired it's better to sleep in your own bed. He resumed the lecture, picking up in the middle of the sentence where he'd stopped. No one slept in his class for the rest of the course.
He always wore the same striped sweater. At one point, he took a break to drink some water and remove his sweater. But beneath the sweater was another identical sweater!
I assume everything he did was very well-planned and part of his pedagogic system and routine, but it was often hard to tell if he was acting, or if he was actually being serious but eccentric.
And I'm also sure they have a significant on-call setup of the IT teams for any out of office hours issues, just like every other large 24x7 kind of organization.
It is a great place to work. A nice atmosphere, good coffee and they embraced change (in this case Scaled Agile) better than most places I have seen. They are often listed as top-5 best places to work and I can see why.
How standard is that in the private sector or non former state owned enterprises? I haven't looked at the NL market in a while but most tech jobs I saw back then were 40h/week.
Only 3% of the people in the Netherlands work 41 hours per week or more. The average Dutchman works 31 hours per week. (source https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/08/meer-dan-de-helft-we...)
Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You're Not Using It Correctly.
Also, using an OTS package means less development risk (not every IT dept has 10x developers coming out the wazoo) and it also means that you have a huge reservoir of skilled labour if you need it. Not just for development but also on the business side.
Finally, if you're a big, publicly owned company, you likely have many financial / reporting constraints. The scope of your non-negotiable requirements may be bigger than you imagine.
I've seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It's possible. It's still expensive and clunky though :-)
Never worked with SAP, but still coming off my burn-out hangover from $OLD_JOB - worked to migrate the nexus of the firm's accounting systems from COBOL to MS Dynamics. Unto itself, I don't really have a problem with Dynamics - I do have a problem with MS and their piss-poor available materials on the topic. While I understand their business sells training and certifications, this does ass all for folks pulled in as a pinch hitter during a death march. Can scarcely fly out to Las Vegas for a week long vacation while I'm working 16 hour days to beat the clock on our last true COBOL coder's retirement date.
The greater issue I have in enterprise systems - often the consultant / contractor firms[0] involved in the process. The classic fly-out of classy sales-engineers replaced with low-rent off-shore coders for the actual work. Slick-as-shit documentation that does not match reality in even the simplest of cases. Counter-Party contacts that neither care nor hide their lack of caring for the outcome of the project. Pressing for aggressive timelines that do not meet reality
I would assume there is some correlation, however, between buying $ENTERPRISE_TOOL and an unwillingness to hold consultants feet to the fire on their own failings, structuring a contract that keeps them honest.
[0] - Not to state `ArnoVW is one, only stating a pattern I've run into all too often.
In fact my line of work was managing 'complicated IT projects', generally involving formalizing things and chasing said suppliers (ie they outsourced the outsourcing)
SAP lets you stop kicking that can down the road by wasting your time and money today.
In addition, a common occurrence seems to be businesses paying for extensive custom developments (such as an integration with a third party system), and footing the entire development cost - despite their “custom” development being 100% identical to that deployed at other businesses. They’re then trapped in a world where changing the URI for an API endpoint costs €150k.
Honestly, I see it as just being a big corrupt hole fuelled by interpersonal relationships rather than any actual rationale.
That whole situation convinced me pretty thoroughly that "enterprise" software is indeed a form of large-scale snake oil. I think most businesses can go a long way with just spreadsheets and email.
You do not modify SAP to fit your company, you modify your company to fit the SAP model.
You can try it the other way, but the project will always cost millions and it will eventually fail. It always has and it always will.
I think the "Excel+" category should receive a lot more attention than it does now. I can easily see "no-code" tools like Coda taking over Salesforce and effectively filling the niche you describe.
[0]: https://coda.io
[1]: https://coda.io/@simpladocs/cycling-specific-template / https://coda.io/@simpladocs/crm-interaction-tracker
The bottom line is that the system is messed up, isn’t it? Same with performance reviews at big co. Why have reviews at all if it’s only useful as a weapon.
You might see this is an ironic comment, but it is as much that, and as much a technical statement of fact. Sometimes the trains arrive at the correct time ( +/- 10 min) so they correlate to what you are seeing on the screen.
But unless it's a delay of 1 hour or more, neither trains or tracks will be updated on the screens. It's just happen they sometimes coincide, so they might correlate, but only by coincidence. Trains schedule and train reporting on the train station are, I was told..."Run by different companies!"
-> Source: Conversation with platform manager at Amsterdam Central Station a few years ago. ( not that many years...)
It might be that what you heard only applied to international trains, those have generally lagged behind technology-wise (though nowadays there's certainly also real-time schedule information for them).
Let me tell more about what prompted the conversation with the platform manager. I was staying at a hotel in Amsterdam while doing an IT project in the north of the country. One of the days took the wrong train. At that time, I just attributed it to not really carefully reading the platform indicator. The next day had to take the same train, at the same time, carefully checked the platform monitor, but as I had been burned the previous day....Decided to also ask the train ticket controller at the train door. He laughed and pointed me to another different indicator some trains have, and that happened to show a different destination for that specific train.
The cognitive dissonance that I experienced was so strong, I decided right there to also be late that day, look for the train station manager, for a polite but frustrated conversation on my part, and it was then he clarified this.
Also any Internet search will show others with similar experiences.
Edit: Looking at this example from 6 months ago...Continues to happen:-)
https://community.ns.nl/dienstregeling-59/geen-sprinter-maar...
Safety could be related to duty times, or making sure the rolling stock is fit for a certain trajectory (maximum platform length, weight restrictions etc.)
Part of train history in the Netherlands is the train disaster at Harmelen in 1962 where 93 people died. It spurred the installation of these systems. Every time there is even a minor accident with a train, the national governement is asking questions, up to the highest level. For contrast, every time a child dies in traffic, only the local government (gemeente) asks questions. It is considered completely unacceptable for a train accident to involve more than 2 deaths, it seems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmelen_train_disaster
ProRail the infra manager has all the systems related to safety and long term planning. Think air traffic control to keep it simple.
NS has all the systems for communication with passengers and personnel and train movement (planning). Think airliner.
Card imprinters did exist in Europe (Italy) just fine, but they are not used since (at least) thirty years.
Most cards that are presented to the cash now have no embossed numbers (most people have the national payment circuit called Bancomat/Pagobancomat, sometimes coupled - on the same not-embossed card - with a Visa or Mastercard debit).
So in 99% of cases there is no way to "extract" money from cards without using the card reader and if electricity or landline/internet connection are down, it is a problem, though there are a number of battery powered and GSM/cellular connected POS/terminals that may give a few hours of autonomy.
Since several years sales to the public MUST be recorded on an electronic cash register[1], there is something like a "special emergency exception" where you can annotate manually on a paper registry sales, but as often happens the exact procedure is not largely known and I believe most people would not risk a (hefty) fine should they do any mistake in these cases and prefer to close the shop.
[1] which is BTW connected via internet to the Agenzia delle Entrate, the governement agency that deals with taxes, and data from the cash register is transmitted daily to them automatically, though there is a few days time tolerance in case of connection issues
Originally they were the main means of taking card payments in the UK, though.
The card has the customer's IBAN, which you can use along with their ID and have them sign a contract to allow you to deduct the purchase via direct debit, the system is routinely used for point of sale, but is mostly known for regular recurring billing.
It's too much of a hassle and deviation from standard business practices for shops to use it in practice, so they just wait until the network is up.
But it's not because there's "no way", embossed cards were a hassle too. We've just gotten used to less manual paperwork.
No, not really, most cards have an "own" number, not connected to the IBAN (though a few do have it), it depends on the bank or organization issuing the card and on the specific type of card, I would say (without any proof of it) that the ratio is maybe 80% without IBAN and 20% with IBAN.
And pre-paid cards are also very common, without a connection you have no way to know if the money is there.
The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a backup in place in an increasingly interconnected world where a glitch can take out any nationwide system.
I'm concerned about the phasing out of cash too as a separate issue, I just don't think the cashless options should have to be subject to artificial limitations like requiring electricity or a network connection to be able to be used. I guess online transactions with chip and pin are much more secure and should be the default, but retailers could keep a log of outages that they are required to submit along with the imprinted slips. They could be corroborated with the logs of the utility companies as well as other businesses in the area, and if something doesn't make sense it could trigger an audit.
But of course the imprinting system is ancient and extremely prone to fraud. As is the magstripe. I wish we had a choice not to have the latter anymore. I'd gladly give up the ability to pay in places where magstripes are still used in return for more security against skimming. Here in Europe the magstripe is just not used anymore except for supporting foreign cards.
Imprinters don't exist in Europe to my knowledge - the first time I saw one was on a visit to NYC a few years ago and I thought they were pranking me.
Almost....
Its been a while since I have been involved in POS payments, but IIRC there is a clear protocol which goes something like this:
1. If the card machine is online and working, use that
2. If the card machine is not working *AND* the business is willing to take on the risk, record an offline transaction for later reconciliation
3. If the card machine is not working *AND* the business *IS NOT* willing to take on the risk, call bank $phone_number for manual transaction validation and record the validation code provided at the end of the call.The usual fraud risks don't really apply in this case. Other than that, it must be over 20 years since I saw my parents pay using one, and that was unusual enough that I remember it.
However, that was probably 20+ years ago. :)
We had one at work as well 15 years ago as part of a contingency strategy in case of a power outage, but don't remember it ever being used. I left retail so no idea if they still have it.
I have no idea how it works, but apparently it does.. sometimes…
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252435884/Chances-of-suc...
i think this is under-emphasized for people unfamiliar with them.
I think SAP and related modules are "solidified business processes", and their consultants and sales persuade your CxO level people that switching business processes will improve overall efficiency (and somewhat hint at standardization, so that the CxO will have experience at that domain when switching jobs!).
But of course, it's not really true - best practice business processes are an illusion imho, and it will turn out that the subtle differences have to be implemented individually.
They're absolutely colossal in size
My ex-girlfiend's father is an engineer there in Baden-Wurttemberg - I'd characterise them as closer to something like Oracle rather than Salesforce
They feel more like IBM, but more crusty, more conservative and more corporate.
Working for a railway on anything touching SAP sounds like an absolute nightmare of wasting decades threading water with nothing to show for it.
(I saw a bit of SAP inside DB… nope nope nope)
Edit: no offence intended to anyone at SAP, IBM or Oracle - I do think each company has a legitimate role to play for rather different markets
Most ERPs can be quite flexible too, there's a ton of customisation possible. And a whole cottage industry of addons and integrations for every imaginable integration or business model. But the problem is you really screw yourself with added complexity when it's time to update. Then you're really condemning yourself to spending millions on consultants at a time when you might not have the resources. And postponement leads to technical debt.
Hence the idea of adapting the business to the system. Making sense too if you think about it this way: you're not really just buying a system but a methodology.
And another thing is that it makes integration with other companies easier. Makes the company more easy to sell or too acquire other companies and integrate them.
It was developed a very long time ago, it has a huge adoption in large companies and a few years ago when they migrated from R3 to Hana one of their own people told us in an architecture review meeting that they have over 300,000 built in reports to migrate.
In many cases companies are adopting SAP because "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". Anecdotical, the company where my brother works is implementing SAP and changed all existing networking gear with Cisco because "this is what big companies do". They threw away brand new equipment and spent several millions on the SAP implementation that is still not working, forecasting they will pay even more millions to make it work then millions per year to use it.
(and bloat, and McKinsey infiltration into many a large F100+)
--
They are old school, entrenched, but yu would jump off a cliff supporting any of this legacy stuff. It will persist as the inertia on huge systems is heavy.
But yeah - I wonder if they are signing any NEW business... aside from military bunker grade stuff (which will cost as much as the bunker to implement) I dont see a reason to implement (not because I am bashing, but because I dont know the modern business case reqs that would call for SAP)
What is McKinsey infiltration?
Basically: You have a problem; Oracle/SAP says they'll solve it for you. Now you have a second problem; they say McKinsey'll solve it for you. Now you have …
God I love etymology:
"-Stasize"
**To stand on a hilltop once. To be, this time, on advance. To reach the highest clouds. To touch the limits of space. To out-grow skyscrapers. And make them look at my face.**
So FB is becoming a meta-stacious being..
That which wishes to control from a vantage, or t corrupt from within the minds... The light house.
They decided to modify a number of core functions to work the same way as their old terminal system instead of the default ERP process. Now our job for the next couple years is decoupling the custom add-ons so we can safely update to a modern ERP system.
But when I lived in the Netherlands I had to get a credit card to do stuff like book flights or order on foreign sites.
Now, it may not be the fully formatted ISO IBAN number, but some shorter variant you need to prefix with e.g. the country's IBAN prefix. E.g. in The Netherlands all Debit cards have the full number, but Iceland uses a suffixed system, those are just two systems I'm personally familiar with.
I quickly searched for what Italy's largest bank is, and found pictures of their debit cards, which seem to have 4x4 numeric digit on the front. This page then seems to explain how to convert it to IBAN: https://help.finecobank.com/it/il-conto-fineco/conto-corrent...
In any case, I was just using IBAN as a shorthand for "a unique account number suitable for a direct debit contract".
If Italy really uses proprietary bank account numbering system it's probably still true that people there can pay e.g. their electricity via direct debit, which will eventually lead back to a contract where they said such-and-such can withdraw money from such-and-such account.
The store would then print out that contract template to have on hand.
Except that they wouldn't, because you're not going to train your point-of-sale people for the 10 minutes per year the phone system is fully down, or have accounting deal with the mountain of resulting paperwork and manual one-off payment processing.
But that doesn't mean that offline payments are literally impossible if you have neither card nor credit card, it's just become so exceptional that people have forgotten how, even to the point of claiming it can't be done :)
Some Bancomat/Pagobancomat ones (but again not all of them) are connected to the IBAN (amd they sport both the IBAN and the name of the holder).
Many Bancomat/Pagobancomat are connected to Mastercard or Visa (or Maestro) debit cards and they have "their own" number, unrelated to the IBAN (and they don't even have the name of the holder).
Some have the name of the holder, but not the IBAN.
As said it depends on the issuer, I have an account at a bank that issues the Bancomat card with the IBAN number (and my name on it and you have to wait for the card by mail for replacement), have another two accounts in two different banks where you can go to the teller, and he/she fishes a new card from a drawer and "couples" it to your account, the card is "blank", no name, nor IBAN, just the card number.
Fineco is I believe third or fourth bank in size, the two largest ones should be Unicredit (which casually is the one from which I have the IBAN connected card) and Intesa san Paolo (which is one of the two I have the "unconnected" card from).
My current experience is with some 30 payments daily, or 200 per week.
I would say that (from memory and very roughly) what happens here:
American Express or other "real" credit card: 2-10
Other embossed numbers credit or debit cards: 25-30
Bancomat/PagoBancomat (some with IBAN, many without): 90-100
Not embossed number Visa/Mastercard (as said sometimes they are the same as the Bancomat ones): 40-50
Prepaid or similar (not embossed numbers): 20-50
Not true in general. The screens do actually get updated based on the actual schedule when there are track changes and/or delays. They don't stubbornly stick to the pre-planned schedule. I've seen that happen countless times. That said, occasionally I've seen the screens lag behind reality a bit, usually during and around big disturbances.
> Edit: Looking at this example from 6 months ago...Continues to happen:-)
> https://community.ns.nl/dienstregeling-59/geen-sprinter-maar...
This example doesn't support your argument: there's not even a claim there that the screens weren't correct.
"...Ik zeg “als het goed was” want soms gebeurt het bij vertragingen wel eens dat de schermen een verkeerde trein aangeven..."
"...I say “if it was good” because sometimes it happens with delays that the screens indicate the wrong train..."