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If Microsoft Built Cars...
trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd
accept this, restart and drive on -- at least that was the joke a few years ago. ZDNET reports that Microsoft has persuaded a number of carmakers to use its slimmed-down Windows CE operating system to power a variety of in-car electronics, from navigation systems to music players to information devices. BMW, in particular, has gravitated to Microsoft systems, although the company has announced wins with Honda, Volvo and others as well. Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
If Microsoft Built Cars..
An interesting proposition..
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
If Microsoft Built Cars...
Whoa.. stick with QNX, please.
Trolling is a art,
Black Pavement of Death
So... what are the chances of DRM following us to our (future) cars after it's rolled out? More specifically, the playing of mp3 cds.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
So long as they don't use Windows for the car security system, I mean imagine... "Insert any key to begin"
Competing with Microsoft woulbe so hard that other companies would start offering open-engine cars for free!
Will code a sig generator for food
I love it when /. posts jokes.. you are joking right?.. right?.... hello?
moo
BMW's come with what amounts to an EULA. If you look under the hood, you'll notice a little sticker that says you are not to connect any third party electronics to the car, CB, ham radio, etc, or even use a hand-held cell phone within the car, unless you buy a BMW approved carphone. This is under threat of voiding your warantee.
I'm sure in the US there's some protection offered under the same law that forces manufacturers to allow you to use aftermarket parts, but I don't know if that precedent would extend to electronics equipment that isn't really part of the car.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It will just make it that much easier to decide which manufacturers I'd consider the next time I buy a car, since there will a few that will immediately excluded.
Seriously - don't flame me. Win CE is very user friendly out of the box, and that's what one needs in a car interface. Familiarity is also key. Add some flashy, touch screen navigation, and voila. I'd have thought the increased cost of using MS as a reason to use a Linux flavor, but hey, I'm not the one spending money here.
A blog like any other.
I currently have to hard boot my Dell Axim X5 after roughly 2-3 hours depending on the app that locked (RealOne Player, X-Lite (SIP Phone), etc..). I think CE/PPC is still too unstable for possible life threatening experiences in the car.
Reading that story from Singapore puzzles me. Does it strike anyone here as silly to have car locks that are controlled entirely electronically? I mean, power locks are great, don't get me wrong. But since they are by necessity mechanical anyway, so doesn't it make sense to provide a manual, mechanical means to lock and unlock them? Doing otherwise just seems like you're placing unnecessary trust in imperfect electronics.
Security updates for you car will be availible on the internet. Failure to update voids all warrenties.
Before the airbag deploys, it asks you "Are you sure?"
Too bad he wasn't driving a BMW with an iDrive system, but an earlier BMW. It was a catastrophic electrical system failure that locked him in the car.
3 ,3 9130270,00.htm
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/systems/0,3900115
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Quite frankly this concerns me.. all joking aside, Microsoft has yet to prove itself in the reliability stakes. Plain and simple.
Their handheld / 'CE' operating systems are no different, and quite simply I wouldn't knowingly buy a car where the majority of its tricks and gizmo's were Microsoft powered.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
...from navigation systems to music players to information devices...
Personally, I think it's no big deal. Just remember these are all non-critical components.
I'd start to worry if they operated the controllers for engine/fuel/drive-by-wire systems. etc.
Microsoft Technology Hits the Road in BMW 7 Series:
"Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
Did you actually read the article????
It starts with this paragraph
BMW has told CNETAsia that an electronic fault caused the problem, rather than a system crash of the car's Windows-based central computer, as other reports have speculated.
and ends with
But when contacted by CNETAsia, a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand said the car at fault was a 10-year old BMW 520i that had suffered a simple electronic failure.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no rakes. What were they to do?
"I know", said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement, Change Management, Re-Engineering and Service Integration, find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no", said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip
down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well", said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Not trying to troll here, but Microsoft is a company that I simply do not trust. I don't trust them with maintaining my privacy, nor do I trust that they have my best interests in mind. And that's only for computer usage. Why would I trust that their system will always "do the right thing" when I'm in a real-world scenario, driving down the highway at 50 mph? True, I have no idea what role Windows CE (or whatever is used) would actually play while the car is in use, but it's an important question to answer. For myself, you can damn well be sure that I would take some serious convincing before I would entertain the possibility of spending a huge sum of money on a rolling, engine-powered WIndows machine. And even if I'm convinced, who's to say that there aren't serious problems with the design of Windows CE and how it interacts with the rest of the car. Even if it's only used to control the car stereo, I'd rather not have it there. I'll just stick with a nice Toyota or Volkswagen, or frankly any other manufacturer that avoids the use of a Microsoft prodcut as a systems controller.
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air," he added.
I have not yet met the car that was utterly and completley sealed. And there's a lot of air in the passenger space of even a small sports car, and this was a "luxury car". See below for more reasons why, even if it were completley sealed, this is totally stupid. Even if they mean no air conditioning, I can't imagine in the time this occurred it got so hot they couldn't breathe.
To draw attention, the minister and his driver waved frantically at passers-by. The incident ended only after a nearby security guard smashed the car's windows with a sledgehammer.
Even with the heavy-duty tool, Suchart said it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant".
The harrowing experience lasted about 10 minutes, he said.
Let's see "it took a long time.... about 10 minutes". What exactly is wrong with this statement? Certainly 10 minutes is longer than you expect for a sledgehammer to go through glass, but even so, that's NOT really a long time. Certainly not enough time to asphyxiate. Can you say complete panic?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Blue Screen of Your Face Going Through The Windshield.
Stop: 0X0000000A (0X00000000, 0X00000002, 0X00000001, 0X80448BF6)
IRQL_NOT_LESS OR EQUAL
Adress 80448BF6 base at 80400000, DateStamp
3d366b8b - brake.exe
Beginning dump of physical facial bones
It wasn't the car's fault, it was bad drivers.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Seem to be lots of issues with the idrive system. BMW's answer seems to be 'tough, what do you expect from a first generation system'. Of course this is just what I see from TV/newpaper articles, so it must be true;-)
:-)
In other news, try getting a service on an engine management system over 15 years old. Almost impossible. I think I'll go back to carbs
and that decision is to not buy a car made by those companies.
I dont want to die at the hands of Bill Gates.
Windows gets slow after running a few days.
I can see this happening:
I go out to the car one morning, and try to unlock the car... takes 30 seconds to unlock..
takes 30 seconds to start... 30 seconds to brake (CRASH! dead.)
Nice try Bill, But I will stick to a NON-WINDOWS car for now.
Hey, see that link in the article? That's right, the very first one?
Click it, and it leads to...
..wait for it...
That's right! The same old joke you just reposted! Tell him what he's won, Rod!
He's one a 5-day, 4-night stay in beautiful RTFALand! We'll fly him and a guest non stop to a room where he can sit and actually read the articles before posting ancient jokes we've all seen before that are referenced by the article itself!
All's true that is mistrusted
Not that I'm saying it would make sense to do so, but the door lock is not mechanical by pure neccessity. If the handle to the regular door-latch (not lock) were also simply an electronic switch, the "lock" could simply be something which disables the regular latch.
:)
Just trying to be unhelpful here
[hey, it's how I'd build a lock!]
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Three Microsoft employees and three Apple employees are boarding a train to attend a conference. The three MS people walk up and buy their tickets. Then, only one of the Apple employees buys a ticket.
The MS guys say, "Whoa! Wait a minute, how are you all going to ride with only one ticket."
"You'll see," they replied.
Everyone boards the train and the MS employees take their seats while all three Apple employees cram into the bathroom. A while later the ticket taker comes down the isles and takes the tickets from the MS employees. He passes the bathroom, notes that it says "Occupied" and softly knocks on the door. "Ticket please," he says. Slowly, the door cracks open, one hand reaches out and hands him a ticket. A few minutes later, the Apple employees emerge from the bathroom and take seats, much to the amazement of the MS employees.
After the conference, on the way back home, the same employees are reboarding the train. The MS people, having deftly learned a new trick, buy just one ticket. The Apple employees then say, we aren't going to buy a ticket this time. MS peoples' jaws drop, but everyone gets on the train.
The MS people quickly cram into the bathroom, and the Apple employees go into a different bathroom. After a couple of minutes, one of the Apple employees comes out of the bathroom, walks up to the door of the bathroom that the MS employees are hiding in, knocks on it, and says:
"Ticket please"
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
The trouble with such a highly computerized car...I feel, is that once you get electrical demons in there...they are almost impossible to get rid of. Their diagnostic stuff could never catch the problems.
I sold it...got a 1986 Porsche Turbo (half the price...half the monthly note). Yes, things do still break...and expensive to repair, BUT, most everything on the car is mechanical....and if something does go wrong...my mechanic can usually diagnose the problem quickly...and find a quick fix for it.
I'm now up to almost 10 mpg....and it runs like a rocket sled on rails. I'm a definite believe in a more 'mechanical' car....much more dependable and easier to maintain IMHO.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Near Heidelberg/Germany there seems to be a bump in a highway that causes some BMW firmware to crash everytime a BMW runs over it, with the same effect as reported in the second article: the engine stops, the doors and windows are locked and the occupants are trapped. Fortunately people don't need to wait long, because there's usually a local breakdown service waiting to rescue the drivers. Interesting business idea :)
The main reason being you want a real small real time kernel tucked in there for the engine controller, ABS, stability control, traction control, gear box.
All those systems are normally kept on a seperate network for traffic to from any telematics (industry BS word for the nav, steroe, DVD, phone, climate etc...). If they do use the big optical network it is through a gate way that is written to safety critical standards. Of course not every writer of safety critical or safety related software meets what I would consider adequate standards.
I'm not saying that I'd want to have any safety critical systems depending on it, but it's actually getting better (which, after my recent experiences with XP, I'm beginning to think is counter to the trend at that place). The 2002 version of Pocket PC, for example, is a lot more stable than the 2000 version. My Jornada 548 had two total data loss crashes that prevented it from shutting off until the battery ran out. My 568, running the same applications, hasn't managed to pull that trick yet... though it's still got the awful memory management problems that cut the effective usable memory by a factor of 3-4.
I don't think I'd want my car powered by embedded Linux, either. There are a lot of high quality well-designed dedicated real-time operating systems that don't have a legacy "big system" design. Why not stick with them? Going to Microsoft for your embedded systems is like going to Navistar for your family car, or to Halliburton for your swimming pool.
Buffer overruns and a few lines of vb script and you've got a couple million cars emailing each other until they just freeze up. Cool.
Clutch-Brake-Accelerator?
What happens if you have an automatic???
The car was still operational, though, so I drove to a friend's house and eventually got their attention. Two hours later a locksmith finally got me out. In the mean time I had to sit through each passerby feeling compelled to go around the car and try every door, and then signal me to pull up on the lock. As if somehow no one had yet thought of that. It was a bit like waiting for an elevator, where each new arrival feels the need to press the button.
MANUAL OVERRIDE
Isn't it ironic... most cars now have latches to let kids and gangsters out of trunks, yet now you can't get out of the car when its OS freezes? Good grief!
How many times has the Enterprise been saved (or blown up to kill bad guys) through the use of manual overrides? I should be able to get out of my car, even if the battery is drained and the computer is drained. If it's good enough for Jean Luc, it's good enough for me!
I currently have an Acura with a navigation system built in, and I can tell you that there is no need for a familiar windows interface in that car. It's easy to use, and the only complaint I have is that it's kinda slow and adding windows probably won't speed it up. As an added thought the 2004 Acura TL already has blue tooth, plays mp3 CDs, and has speech recognition for a navigation system thats better then mine. What does Honda gain by going with Microsoft?
I've also seen the navigation systems in both BMW's and Benz's, and both of them need to become much more user friendly, so I can see them asking Microsoft for help.
Embedded != Embedded. MS products maybe used in cars, but largely in the "infotainment" sector.
WinCE is much too big for the tiny microcontrollers that control engines, breakes, gear shifts and so on.. As is Java.
If you want to really what going on in car electronics look for example for the OSEK/VDX initiative, a consortium of german and french carmakers.
Someone may have already posted this, but a while back, a retired test engineer had a website with video of his misbehaving 7i series BMW. The errors were many, and the dealership indicated that the car was functioning normally inspite of numerous software problems. The car was running WinCE. Is the site still up?
You had better yell profusely. With temperatures that low, and having that single point-of-failure, your frozen locks could cause you to die of exposure. That model of car should be recalled.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
except that 7-series owners are trading their iDrive-equipped(and hideous-looking) cars in for Mercedes and Audis. They just don't "get" iDrive, and since it's tied into so many goddamn features on the car, if you don't "get" it, you're not "getting" most of the car. WinCE has been a -spectacular- failure in that car. There are videos running around the net showing a guy's 750iL hunting for gears on the highway, closing+opening the trunk incessantly, ejecting the key from the keyslot(making it impossible to start the car!), changing radio stations on its own...
If you want to see the interface done right, check out an Audi A8L with MMC. Similar idea, but instead of putting absolutely everything on the dial and making you push/pull/twist/etc, it's simply an "adjuster"; buttons around the dial are used to actually navigate around the menus. Oh, and it's also not in control of absolutely everything in the bloody car. It's only in charge of suspension settings, the radio, phone, and nav system(actually, it might have climate control too, I forget.)
The running joke in the auto industry is that the only reason Chris Bangle(BMW designer who ruined the 7-series and now the 5-series) has a job is that all his bosses got 7-series cars and can't get them out of the driveway to go into headquarters and fire him.
Please help metamoderate.
Imaging driving down the motorway, at 70pmh, and then the onboard windows systems crash. Whats the betting you will ;-)
Despite liking BMW's, I'd say their choosing MS OS for their cars seems to dovetail with their latest love-hate designs of the new 7 and 5 series. Bangle seems to make very controversial decisions which even to the plainest view, have warts. MS OS seems to fit the Bangle model for feature-ful failed designs. I just hope BMW recovers sooner than later (the board should already have taken action but so it goes).
I hope the government forces car companies to label any car with an MS OS in it. Caveat emptor!
Never forget the Neil Stephenson essay, "In the beginning was the command line"...
Here's a little exerp:
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks onl
Karma: Non-Heinous
True story: In the mid 70's in Egypt, the u.s. ambassador was using a souped-up car that had been confiscated form a drug dealer as his official car. It was perfect for the job: bulletproof, had hidden sirens and lights, plus a megaphone and tear gas for crowd control (and being free was something the government liked, too). One day a critical fuse blew and they were trapped, just like the Thai ministers... it took a lot of energy to break through the bulletproof glass, but they eventually got him out.
Solution to the problem? A fire ax became standard equipment in the back seat of that car.
I never got to see the car, but I always imagined it as totally pimp-rific.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Uhh, you, since the original comment got bitchslapped down redundant, and this guy got +5 funny.
In addition, the moderation system takes time. Of course he will be only at +2 for a while or so after posting since fewer people will have actually seen his comment. Comments like yours stick around, just waiting for people like me to proclaim your ignorance of how things work.
Also, for your information, the +1 doesn't go away when you use it. You still get to keep it unless you constantly post worthless comments. Which, incidentally, is why you will never even get the +1 modifier.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Recycled MBA/Engineer joke?
Or was it engineer/mathematics?
Anyway, the engineer part is important, as it shows the pragmatism of an engineer on most matters in contrast to their humouristic antagonists.
The transposition of the joke on Mac/Win lacks this kind of insight as pragmatism is, IMHO, not the distinguishing attribute of a Mac user.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Had a BMW 850CSi a few years ago. It had those frameless windows which drop a bit when you pull on the door handle so you can open the door. I wasn't amused when the electronics decided to suddenly activate that mechanism INSIDE THE CAR WASH. But that wasn't all. One day, I open the door, sit down on the driver's seat and the moment I turn the key, the car decides to move the driver's seat aaaaallll the way forward and pushes me against the steering wheel. I couldn't get out and had some trouble reaching the controls from that position.
;-)
Anyway, the chicks liked that car.
I'll second it. My bmw (2003 330i) had a sticker on the windshield, and another on the computer (engine compartment, on firewall in front of driver).
;-)
But, go ahead and visit a dealer. That should be pretty hard to fake
The reason for the sticker is that they don't want to be resposible for interference-testing every possible combination. I didn't heed the warning, and I found that when I kept my cell phone stashed away in the compartment under the radio, the radio would randomly turn off about every 45 minutes. Now, I keep it in the cup holder, and the radio is fine.
I also suspect that interference is the reason they moved the computer into the engine area - they used to keep them in the passenger area, where the temperature is controlled (and not searingly hot), but that provides less shielding.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
... You would have no steering wheel, but instead about 17 different levers...
... Your car would cost close to nothing, but you'd have to assemble it yourself...
... It would come with several different chassis, so you could decided which one you wanted most...
... Every time you change the oil, you have to rebuild the engine...
... Everyone will swear they drive one...
... Never crashes, but drives at a constant 12mph...
... It would be easy to lock yourself out...
... You wouldn't be able to lend it to your friends unless they agreed to lend it to THEIR friends...
... You wouldn't be able to make aftermarket parts for it unless you give parts makers the schematics for the ENTIRE car...
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
Those motorcycle crash photos are pretty gross. I'm trying to convince myself they aren't real ...
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I still cary the same bag of tools in the trunk of the Benz, but mostly out of stubborn habit (and the fact that they provided a hidey-hole for them that was exactly the same size as my bag ;-), but I know that there's no way I'll be able to work on my new car with all the electronics.
As it was, I just had it winterized and requested they put a trickle-charger on the battery instead of a blanket heater. They had to disconnect the battery to do this. When I got back into the the car to drive it home all the electronic devices - seats, windows, sunroof, mirrors, etc. refused to work properly until they were "reset" - meaning run through their entire range twice. I paniced and thought the dealership had totally screwed my car up until I realized how to get functionality back.
Take this to the extreme then. What happens when, instead of just windows and seats, we have steer-, accelerate-, and brake-by-wire in our vehicles? If a computer program is controling this instead of some sort of redundant solid-state system, I want it to be bullet proof and open to public review - with the ability to mod it if I feel the need (yes, yes, warrantly, blah, blah) I just don't want a completely closed system where I have to trust the manufacturer (or God forbid, Microsoft) with critical systems in my car. And since it is MY car, I want the freedom to be able to "get under the hood" if I want/need to.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
...Microsoft didn't design the iDrive system, they only provided the underlying OS. That's like blaming Linus for a shitty UI design from KDE or Gnome. As for its stability, stop comparing a desktop based Windows OS to what would be placed in ar computer systems (presumably CE or XP Embedded). I'm always amazed when the OSS community whines about all the FUD put out by companies like Microsoft or SCO yet they turn around and generate the same, if not more, amount of bullshit FUD in return.
Yes, with Auto-DRM, the car industry will be able to regain lost profits from those horrible people sharing cars!
Only YOU will be able to drive your car, and if your friends or family want to drive it, they will have to purchase a seperate licence from the manufacturer!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Consumer Reports had an article recently that mentioned this general topic. Their general suggestion was to avoid buying the new computerized luxury cars for a few years, until they get the UI right. It seems that in general their testers couldn't make much sense out of the menu-based centralized controls, and they considered these controls to be hazardous in the extreme under normal driving conditions.
BMW's newer models were not nearly the only bad examples.
Trying to discover where they've hidden some control in an N-level-deep menu tree is extremely distracting. You don't want this when you're driving.
Of course, if you screw up, the manufacturer will just call it an "operator error".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It'd take forever for a (com)pile up to happen...
Many Thanks,
Luke
Time to start requesting written confirmations there is no M$ product in a car when buying a new one next time.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Slashdot has had a number of articles about the iTron OS that's being used in a lot of Japanese autos these days. That and linux are both good candidates for a stable, reliable onboard OS. Of course, behind the scenes, iTron and linux are busy "stealing" ideas from each other. It'll be interesting to see which will win in the long run, or if they'll slowly merge. Or maybe divide the territory by consciously heading toward different parts of the tradeoff space.
I wonder if anyone is looking at any of the *BSD kernels for this sort of embedded use? They have reliability records comparable to iTron and linux, and also come with all the source code.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
When it becomes obvious that tires are shredding and rolling over, people do. When it becomes obvious that cars are exploding upon a slight rear collision, people do. When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
It's pretty obvious that, for example, when the Windows installer crashes, or a fresh copy of IIS has to be rebooted every 2 weeks despite serving only static HTML, that Windows is somehow at fault. Not only is Windows instability legendary, it is also well documented. Hardware cannot be the issue, because that hardware could be running another OS and have years of uptime. Drivers should not be the issue for the same reason. If the drivers are both put out by the same company, they should have the same level of overall quality.
GM has made an OS... Its cars have been running on microcontrollers for years. They run on the smallest of processors, they can be upgraded for about $100 by replacing a ROM, and they never crash. If you had meant what a horrible mess it would be for GM to attempt to create a desktop operating system, then yes, I agree with you. However, that should extend to any company attempting to do something significant in a field that they don't have experience in.
If Microsoft decided to do this properly by hiring the best kernel developers and experienced automotive programmers, and creating a real-time OS from scratch, people might be persuaded that this was a good idea. But they're not. They're taking an OS made for convincing a printer to communicate with a text processor, and trying to force it into making an antilock braking system communicate with a real-time traction control system.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use an OS specifically designed for reliability if I'm going to spend two hours a day inside something that kills 50,000 people per year.
The ______ Agenda
...then I don't have much to say. I love BMWs, and BMW is not dumb to choose something that would not be up to their standards. Unfortunately the notion so many people have that anything associated with the word Microsoft is bad by default is wrong. It's clear that buidling an OS for the car (mostly for personal use in this case, not to control the car's vital functions) is different than building an OS for the desktop, and equally easy to see why. It's a competitive world and some will use Linux, others will use Windows (slimmed). See, you can actually say now that it is a competitive world. I am happy with that.
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
I can just imagine the look on the dealer's face.
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
Why didn't you have the dealership check for trouble codes?
The trouble with such a highly computerized car...I feel, is that once you get electrical demons in there...they are almost impossible to get rid of. Their diagnostic stuff could never catch the problems.
This is why almost every module stores a diagnostic trouble code (DTC) to help the service tech pinpoint the problem. At exactly the moment that the module detected an "electrical demon", it should store a DTC such as "Front Left Wheel Speed Sensor Airgap". This one, for example, indicates that during the last 14 or so milliseconds, the sensor did not interrupt the processor -- when previously the module calculated a speed of 100 kph based on this sensor's interrupts.
I'm a definite believe in a more 'mechanical' car....much more dependable and easier to maintain IMHO.
IMHO this is not an appropriate post on a technology-based forum. Your '86 Porsche still benefits from fuel injection, which is computer-controlled. And your enthusiasm about 10 mpg amazes me.
The technology under the hood of my 350Z enables it's normally aspirated 3.5L V6 to put out around 290 hp! This technology, namely variable valve timing and direct ignition, would not be possible without a computer orchestrating everything. (And I'm guessing that it will perform as well as your '86 Porsche, while giving me a highway fuel economy of 26 mpg)
Car and Driver Magazine reviewed 6 luxury sedans in their December 2003 issue. They rated the Lexus and the Jaguar 1 and 2. Here is what they said about the BMW iDrive:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Evidently, you either ignorantly or puposely misinterpreted the report, which merely states that 50% of crashes are third-party, and the other 50% are from Windows itself due to bad drivers or other poorly-written OS hooks. Yes, there were other reports about this that stated such.
In other words, half of what Dr. Watson reported was error conditions originating directly from third-party code, while the other half was initiated by Windows code. Hardly a reason to point fingers at "bad" Windows code. The Windows kernel rivals that of Linux in many ways. It's the stuff on top of it that biased people have a problem with.
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/csc/refurb_equipm ent/swlicense.html
9/11 was caused by poor airline security and lax regulation and oversight.
NO. NO NO NO NO!!!!. The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board. The best weapon the terrorists had was deceit. They had the passengers convinced that all that was going to happen was that the plane was going to be forced to land somewhere and then negotiations would begin for hostage release. Under those expectations, the risk of being stabbed with the knives wasn't worth engaging in any heroics. In the one case where the news was already out, and the element of deceit was lost, the passengers did decide to overpower the terrorists' wimpy arsenel of box knifes. The same thing would likely have happened on the other three flights if they too had known what was going to happen if they sat still.
Don't blame airline security. Blame excessive optimism on the part of the passengers.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...once the new, "pop-up billboards" become common.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
So the Seimens Telemetry monitoring system in our cardiac ward is Windows CE based. I finally had a crash of a telemetry monitor recently (which is how I found out it was CE based when the splash screen launched). There was a patient on it, and it simply stopped reading his heart rate/EKG. Luckily a reboot fixed it, but these should never crash...
In modern vehicles, the warning lamps are not hardwired. They are controlled by the embedded software in the instrument panel (IP). If the IP has not received a message from the ABS module within, say, 1 second, it will turn on EVERY brake-related lamp immediately (red "BRAKE" lamp, yellow "ABS" lamp, traction/stability control warning lamp, etc.)
Even in older vehicles that had hard-wired lamps, the lamp was grounded through the ABS controller. In this way, if the ABS micro ever went down, the lamp would illuminate by default.
There is no comparison between desktop computers which have millions of different possible configurations of input/output devices and storage mediums and protocols, and an embedded system such as a driver's seat module or a climate -control module, that performs a pre-determined (and thus EMBEDDED) function, while listening to the exact same sensorics in EVERY VEHICLE.
I can shut down my Windows machine and install a new sound card or completely replace the RAM, and likely it will re-boot and attempt to figure out what I've done. It may or may not re-configure everything correctly. Your car will not be happy with similar changes because all of this code doesn't exist. If a wheel speed sensor doesn't look electrically identical to the sensor that the system was designed for, the ABS module will set a DTC, disable ABS function, and throw a warning lamp.
Linux is remarkably stable because the user is responsible for configuring everything. Don't want support for sound cards other than what's installed in your box? Don't compile or load those modules. Don't need USB support? Re-compile the kernel and don't include it. You can make all the choices.
By the way, the supplier responsible for the module writes their own software.
I am a vehicle development engineer working on automotive embedded systems.
All you do is get into the car, close the door and Windows Car will automatically configure the car to suit the driver. It will adjust the seats, climate control, and select a radio station. Our driver is... (BSOD on dash) ... Uh Oh
uuhh...moving right along...
Bill Gates: So this must be why we're not shipping Windows Car yet.
Absolutely!
$cat
'NEEDS' have nothing to do with it. How many gadgets do you need? Well, not many. How many can you have if you really want? How many fish in the sea man?
I submitted a story about this a while ago (rejected of course because I don't know the secret handshake), in the latest high end models, the cost of the electronics is rapidly approaching 50% of the cost of the car. Yes nearly HALF!
Well, you've got all those things like navigation, tuner, TV, MP3 player, cellphone, rearview camera, electronic windows and mirrors, A/C, let's just put it all in one box baby! And all the bits can talk to each other. So when your airbag goes off, your cellphone can automatically make an emergency call, retrieving your GPS coordinates from the navigation system. Or, when your engine management system predicts failure of some critical component within 100 miles, it navigates you straight to the nearest service centre. You need it *all* man, come on baby you know you want it?
I swear I'm not making this stuff up, I write software for some of these systems! And yes, there's a hell of a lot of it. And like you, it completely doesn't fill me with confidence how much of the car is being taken over by this stuff.
For example from the article:
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air"
and
"it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant"
Now that is scary. What happened to manual backups? On my washing machine, there's an electronic door opener, but there's also a hidden tab you can pull manually in the event of a power cut etc. There's no way in hell it should be impossible to open the doors if the system crashes, that really sucks! There's no way those systems are bulletproof.
Man, I can't wait for electronic brakes!!!
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
I marvel to think that anything with a 17 year old circuit board in it is still moving. Give your 350Z 17yrs of abuse, then come back and see if you wish to give this Gent the same criticism.
For a moment think on that old IBM PC-AT, the 6Mhz one that seemed so fast back then. Then remember it's 17 yrs old, and think to yourself : do you really want your kids playing anywhere near it just in case it blows up? I suppose there are a few of those old PC-AT's out there, but nature has a way of turning silicon into junk - electronics do fail. Statistics catch up with electronics, quickly.
The more complex, failure prone stuff in the blackboxes, the higher the probability it will all fail sooner, rather than later.
With wifi catching on, and with MS software being central in a car's brain, the possibilties are endless.
People will have their cars recalled 3-4 times a year to apply the latest patch.
You might have viruses that spread from car to car.
There'll be the IloveYou kind of virus, or blaster kind of virus, that will shut down traffic and cause millions of accidents within hours of release to the wild.
There's the jerusalem style of virus that will crash all cars on the planet at a predetermined time.
There'll be backdoors and IRC robots, where the script kiddies in stead of trying to shut down a web site in a DDDOS attack, will instead take control over cars, and use real people as objects in a videogame.
Or more innocent viruses that hijacks a car's stereo, and starts blasting Wang Chung at full volume.
Scary. The scariest part is that this is not crazy science fiction. By all signs, I don't see that any of this is avoidable, given MS current dominance, their awful track record on security, and the extremely weak consumer protection laws.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The F22 and B2 aside, there are no aircraft the USAF flies that were designed and build in the time frame that Windows has come into being.
The F22 only just fits the time period; it started its software development process in the days of Windows 3.0.
No aircraft has Windows based Flight Control systems, not even the civil stuff.
Though that is not to say flight qualified software doesn't reset.
Watch for the tsunami of lawsuits to come out of this. Some of the 50,000 highway deaths are bound to be due to software failure. And when a Ford, say, equipped with Windows is involved in a fatality, the case will attract lawyers like some kind of legal black hole. Can you imagine the prospect of picking the deep pockets of Ford and Microsoft?
Software manufacturers have been immune from this before, because everyone "knows" that computers are unreliable and crash. A jury isn't going to care that your desktop burst into flame and lost all your data. That's state of the art in the zeitgeist. But juries drive cars and are more sympathetic to claims against their makers. Do you want to be defending Microsoft when the other side shows the birthday party videos of the little girl who was immolated in the fiery wreck caused by your software?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Let them end!
I'm sorry, I thought I made it clear that this was my point. The systems are very different. The systems in a car have been designed for specific purposes with independence and high fault tolerances. Windows CE was designed for high hardware compability and ease-of-use... neither of which apply in cars.
Of course, Microsoft is saying currently that WinCE is aimed at navigation and media playback, not embedded control. That wasn't always their shtick, however, as when they started this initiative they cited "better safety and security," along with reduced hardware duplication as a reason to use WinCE for all of your machine's needs. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but they truly wanted to be a central controller for the machine.
My mother dated a vehicle development engineer who created system diagnostic software for 5 years.
The ______ Agenda
For one bugg piece of code (inevitable in *nix AND windows, not to mention everyone else) to bring the whole system spiralling down means the OS did not protect one subsystem from another.
Now I'm not saying I haven't hung my Linux Sparc simply by typing "modprobe reiserfs", it happens. I am saying that if something shits itself on any Windows OS, you're likely to see the BSOD, not some message on your console "xyz: shat itself - dropping to console" for example.
Could Microsoft make mission critical software with uptimes measured in years (like QNX or unix)? Yes, I believe they could, but they will not do so until the market stops buying stuff that needs daily rebooting. MS will also have trepidation entering any line of business where liability cannot be avoided by some hokey EULA. I predict they will bail out of the auto market when they start getting nailed by lawsuits over car crashes from use of the computers they want to install in cars. The software in cars is far more stable than the stuff in desktop computers. And far less infested with security defects than Outlook.
Most US carmakers include language in their purchasing contracts that lets them license patents and trade secrets for free (to competitors) if the original supplier cannot (or will not) meet quality or delivery schedules (and prohibits the supplier from sueing over it). Somehow, I predict MS won't be interested in working with such companies.
Not quite. If you read the article, Microsoft's emphasis was on getting networked computers into cars. Whether or not it's 802.11g is irrelevant; viruses were spreading via networks long before 802.11g was even a possibility. So perhaps they would use the existing cell phone infrastructure.
I mean, 15 years ago an email virus was thought impossible - email was plaintext, and everybody knew that plain text couldn't carry viruses. That was until Microsoft's auto-execute-email-attachments made the email virus a reality. The lesson: if there's a way to spread viruses, Microsoft will find it and make it a standard "feature".
I don't mean this to be a troll but Microsoft has repeatedly shown themselves to be extremely naive when it comes to security and reliability. It's not that they couldn't write a secure, bug-free OS for cars. It's that they won't; their emphasis will be on getting streaming video on the dashboard rather than fixing the bugs. They don't understand the degree of security and reliability that the consumers expect of their vehicles. A BSOD is a much bigger problem at 60 mph than when sitting behind a desk.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
That would KICK ASS. But with the way we insist on individual transportation in Canada everybody would have to have their own sled+team and we would end up with dogs outnumbering people 10 to 1.
Pets.com was ahead of its time.
Serve Gonk.
Fuel is used to cool the the fuel pump. This is common to practically all cars made today (even carbureted engines) If you constantly run on low fuel, the fuel pump will overheat.
The Oedo line in Tokyo is fully automated. I think many others here are too.
There is still a driver though, unlike the DLR in London.
The guy sits there to make sure that people are clear of the doors etc before he presses a green button. He also holds another button down to keep the system under computer control like a dead man's handle.
So, basically, the human is there to make sure nothing goes wrong, but otherwise the computer is in control.
Advantages of this system is a wonderfully smooth ride - the computer is programmed to take off and stop in smooth motions rather than the sometimes jerky stopping/starting that humans do.
The other advantage is that if anything DOES go wrong, a human is there watching everything to pull the plug if needs be.
Right way to do things I think. The Japanese have their heads screwed on tight when it comes to public transport...