The ISA Houston Section Pipeline Cajun Cook Off & Table Top Show was held on March 5th, 2020, at Sawyer Yards, Houston, Texas.  This annual event is to help raise money for student scholarships that are awarded in June of every year.  This scholarship fundraising show draws in a crowd with over 700 attendees.

The thing I like to talk about at these meetings is distributed control systems.  This is because I used to be an instrument guy.  It is a little unsettling to me that operating companies are demanding that DCS’ run on Windows.  With Microsoft’s reputation for getting hacked, instability, and anti-trust infractions, I wonder how can this be?

Nevertheless, the companies at the show told me that they got it all under control.  They say that the DCS is protected with lots of password verifications, blocked ports, firewalls, and hardened operating systems.  Gosh, I hope that is enough.

There was a day when the DCS companies issued a proprietary operating system for their product.  That is not true anymore.  Personally, I like open source operating systems because I am tired of getting hacked in Windows.  It is not that proprietary operating systems cannot get hacked – the point is that Windows must makes it more easy.

As I said, this event comes around every year.  Please see their website:  http://www.houstonisa.org/event/isa-houston-section-pipeline-cajun-cook-off-table-top-show/