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When Appliances Revolt
conaone writes "From the "disconcerting" file, Baseline has a weird story about how the increase in use of embedded operating systems is causing strange things to happen to consumer products. Their example is the use of Windows CE in the BMW 745i, which apparently occasionally goes nuts. The best is the list of video clips showing off the possessed car."
Mind you, if MS makes Windows notoriously reliable I have no problem with it being in cars. I certantly don't use Windows due to its technical inferiority, but if it is reliable it'd be very useful for embedded device manufacturers, as they can then use more programmers (Most programmers need to be somewhat retaught to program Unix/Mac OS X) and programs.
Just my $0.02.
windows wasn't made for things as stupid as a car. linux was made for things as stupid as a car. windows was made with ease of use for stupid people, BUT, it was especially made with people smart enough to not crash their computer.
No that is not true at all, with all the technology in them the reliablity has gone down. Heck, a Mercedes-Benz has a fiber optic network to tell you the seat is down. What is really the point of it, you need it that fast that you car will explode if you don't push the seat up. Not to mention they are over priced and the things that are optional, that are standard in more other more realiable cars today.
It's so obvious. How silly of me to ask the question.
No sig, sorry.
The 16/32 operating systems were ALWAYS a huge trade-off, and it was one that everyone was well aware of. Arguments regarding 3.1, 95, 98 and Me are just silly.
Windows NT 3.5 was an ASTOUNDINGLY stable operating system given that it was an entirely microkernel OS with nothing but a tiny 4KB or so kernel at ring 0. That's a QNX style OS.
Windows NT 4 had some issues with certain hardware/software combinations, but I personally had a heavily loaded system (a system with a wide range of tasks) running for months on end between reboots.
Windows 2000 is a tremendously stable operating system, easily equally most Linux installations. The only downfall is the performance tradeoff for video which basically allows video drivers to take down your machine: Get a reputable video card with WHQL drivers.
Windows XP continues the Windows 2000 tradition but is even more stable and includes better support for dynamic driver swaps (i.e. video driver installation without rebooting). It shares the same video driver tradeoff of Windows 2000, but with good drivers it's a extremely stable OS (I'm a very intensive user...Urban Terror is running multiplayer in the background while I type this, as is a RDBMS database and a slew of services. Total unexpected reboots in the time I've used XP: ZERO).
Why is it that every anti-Microsoftarian believes that their own personal anecdotal evidence, and the evidence of the "converted" with which they almost always consrt, somehow represents the global consensus? While I run FreeBSD on another machine and have with zero issues for years now, everytime I've played with Linux I've been astounded at how amateur, and utterly unstable it has been for me. It could very well be that each of the iterations of machines that I've tried it on are "flakey", yet strangely this sort of conclusion is never reached if XP crashes on someone's obsolete hardware with a motherboard trace crack on it.