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When Appliances Revolt

Posted by michael on from the i'm-goodlife dept.

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."

1 of 531 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by Squidgee · · Score: 2, Troll
    I'm wondering: what was BMW thinking putting one of the notoriously unreliable OSes in a car? They should have considered maybe Palm OS (as opposed to WinCE), Linux, or maybe an embedded Unix-y thing (e.g. QNX). IMHO, the only 99.9% reliable OSes out there (That I have used) are: Palm OS, QNX, Unix sans X11, and Mac OS X. Obviously X11/Mac OS X (Mind you, much of Mac OS X's stability comes from its knowing for sure what hardware it must support, and there there is neither any extra hardware supporting code, or (usually) driver conflicts) can't fit on an embedded device, so Palm OS or QNX should (IMHO) be used for any/all embedded devices which people depend on. This would emcompass basically everything embedded.

    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.