I'm at it again. As a public service for those of you who don't get paid to occasionally surf the InterWebs, here are links to a few stories from the process automation world and some other places that you may have missed this week.
First, some serious stuff. Eric Byres over at Tofino Security posted this bit of troubling news about Microsoft updates. Here's the money quote. Even if you've been carefully updating your MS patches "you may still have a number of open vulnerabilities that are happily being missed by the Windows update service. And scariest of all, you can't do much about it." Swell.
And in case you can still sleep at night, take a look at this from the ICS-CERT monthly news bulletin. Meet Shamoon. Another control system virus to worry about.
Meanwhile, Greg McMillan and Hunter Vegas are sharing their control systems wisdom and expertise with their 101 Tips for a Successful Automation Career. Number 18 is an obvious one we tend to forget far too often: Cheap instrumentation is . . . cheap.
And let's give it up for Siemens, which is celebrating its 165th birthday today. It's a big company, so I suppose they have room for a cake big enough to hold all those candles.
Now it's true that nobody likes a Gloomy Gus or the guy who always has objections to whatever plan is on the table, but the folks over at Fast Company are suggesting that instead of banishing them to the mailroom, we promote them to CDO-Chief Dissent Officer. Seems like there is a difference between being defeatist and being a hard-nosed realist.
And what would be the best job in the world-I mean besides process automation professional. Pro ball player? Movie star? Spy? Celebrity chef? According to Forbes magazine, it's . . . wait for it. . . software quality assurance engineer. Here are the results of a Forbes survey. Be sure to check out the slide show. BTW, process engineers and field service techs are tied in 9th place, four below the warehouse manager (?), but ahead of loan officers (No. 16). Well, I should hope so.
