Slashdot Mirror
Cars that Can't Crash?
johnsee writes "Microsoft is working with Ford Motor Co towards car that can't crash. The future of cars according to Gates will involve high-definition screens, speech recognition technology, cameras, digital calendars and navigation equipment with directions and road conditions." From the article: "Also on Friday, Microsoft unveiled its Performance Peak Initiative -- a line of computer systems to help the auto industry better coordinate supply chains, streamline design, production and sales and fill vehicles with computer gadgets."
For best straight line ever seen on Slashdot:
Microsoft is working with Ford Motor Co towards car that can't crash.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I smell an episode of Fear Factor in the making....
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
... to begin with...
Paul B.
Blue Windshield of Death jokes in 3... 2... 1...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
microsoft...
can't crash...
must... make... joke... before head explodes...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Bill Gates wanted to look good and impress everyone with his success. He decided to measure the accomplishments of Microsoft against General Motors. The comparison went like this:
If automotive technology had kept pace with computer technology over the past few decades, you would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8, and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour. (160,000km/hr)
Or you could have an economy car that weighs 30 pounds (14 kilos) and gets a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case the sticker price of a new car would be less than $50.
In response to all this goading, GM issued a press release stating the following: "If GM had developed technology like Microshaft has, we would be driving cars with the following characteristics:"
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Will I have to pay yearly license fees to drive my car, or will it just one day swerve off the road if I let my licenses lapse? Can they catch a virus from neighboring cars at the parking lot? Will it come with Clippy? "Hello! you seem to be flying off the roadaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh" (car flies off road, rolls, and catches on fire).
Must resist urge to make bluescreenofdeath jokes.....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Microsoft, designing something that can't crash? Is this some sort of new Slashdot super-typo?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
every /. reader in the world is gonna think "car that will never crash from the maker of the OS that will always crash?"
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Gates and Bill Ford Jr., Ford's chairman and chief executive, said high-definition screens, speech recognition technology, cameras, digital calendars and navigation equipment with directions and road conditions will set car companies apart from their competitors.
That's nice and all, but how will these technologies help cars to 'not crash'? It seems like a digital calendar will lead to more crashes.
Driver: "Car! I said DON"T CRASH! DON'T CRASH!"
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The only car that can't crash is one locked in a concrete room with no doors and no internet connection...
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
...everyone.
This is the scariest thing I have ever seen.
Perhaps the Dept of Homeland Security should notify the president that Microsoft and Ford are working on WMDs!
instead of these virtual things, they'd still crash. Trains do.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
This coming from the company that even makes fun of all its BSOD's in their games!
Enjoy the BSOD of Halo 2
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
May I be the first
No.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I have 10 simple, low tech ways to which will guarentee fewer car crashes. Most of these already come with your current car, and the rest are simple and free to implement.
1. Breaks
2. Steering wheel
3. Side mirrors
4. Don't speed
5. Don't drink while drunk or high
6. Use your turn signal
7. Leave enough space between your car and the car in front of you.
8. Check over your shoulder to look in the blind spot before making a lane change.
9. Be considerate of other drivers.
10. Don't drive in LA.
And a bonus 11th point to feed the trolls:
11. Revoke the drivers licenses for anyone with 3 serious tickets in the last 5 years.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
...they can design an unsinkable cruise liner.
Oh wait.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
How many redundant posts will we see in this thread?
Depends on the buffer overflow...
You can't take the sky from me...
Making progress here is long overdue. The government has been studying this for at least 15 years.... I did some research work on this in the early 90's: Collision avoidance systems (radar or laser based) drowsy driver detection, etc.
google IVHS (intelligent vehicle highway system) for starters.
Not the Microsoft would be my first choice to design mass-produced life-threatening embedded systems.
What would stop a car, trying to avoid a potential accident, from steering itself off the side of a cliff?
And what about choices that real people may have to decide. If I lost control of my car and the options were
1) Attempt to crash into brick wall
2) Attempt to crash into side of a hill
3) Do nothing and continue on course to plow into a group of children crossing a street.
What would the car decide? What's the failsafe if the magic computer stops working? What level of control is still in the hands of the driver? These are questions people will want to know the answer to, not a bunch of marketing oral-ejaculation about how this is the greatest thing since seatbelts.
Its the safest vehicle ever.
unfortunately due to a restrictive EULA you will not be permitted to sell it once you've used it, and you can be arrested for opening the hood.
Starsucks
"FORD Owners Recommend Dodge"
Speech recognition in a car - that would work just fine. My wife screams "stop" and "Oh my God" when a bird flies by. I'll be dead in a week. Of course, she might view this as a feature, not a bug.
I can just picture one of these cars disobeying a traffic officer instructing the car to cross over into the oncoming traffic lane.
Yes the story invites the inevtiable, insipid jokes about Microsoft and unstable software. Some are even clever. Some might even be funny.
It is worth pointing out the scale of this proejct for those who can't (or won't) accept it: cars are simpler than general purpose computers. Yes, cars are complicated machines with lots of interworking parts. However, the hardware installation on a car is fixed (within paramters) whereas today's general purpose PCs are not.
The flexibility of modern computer peripherals makes for seemingly endless combinations of hardware and existing software. Microsoft attempts to support quite a few of those combinations, with the mixed results we see today.
But cars are a different beast. I bet it's possible to get good test coverage of this car software through test driving. The scope is that much smaller. Think of your favorite console game; has it crashed recently? Ever? It is possible to create software that passes some reliability metric with a fixed hardware platform. A general purpose OS would be hard pressed to make that guarantee.
Microsoft could get this right technically speaking. It remains to be if they do.
Oh, and is it a good idea? I wouldn't buy one :)
you will find that when you inserted the key into the ignition, you waived all warrantees of suitability for purpose, waived all liability, and in the case that there was liability anyway, limited it to the price of the software . . .
hawk
How many redundant posts will we see in this thread?
That makes me wonder though, how many duplicate posts will we see in this thread?
Posting this story on /. is like posting a story about the joys of a hot dog eating contest in a vegan forum.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
So on top of patrol tax, car tax, MOT, and all the other taxes associated with running a car, all road users now have to find a £300.00 MS tax also... (and it will still crash, as the per the joke).
1. There would be multiple distributors of free cars, though all would be spurned by the commercial auto industry.
2. If you want to change your tires you have to download all the most recent parts and rebuild your engine.
3. Upon building a new car you would find that your new windshield wipers are not yet supported.
4. You could build your own windshield wipers if you really, really wanted to.
5. Sourceforge would release a wrapper to allow you to retrofit Microsoft Windows Wipers (tm) onto your open source car.
6. Sun Motorsystems would make a transmission that was widely accepted and everybody copied, but wouldn't release the original blueprints to the community.
7. The oil, alternator, gas, engine warning lights would be located throughout the car and held on with velcro.
8. People would engage in holy wars over their favorite car distribution, forgetting completely that most people purchase cars and drive them home same-day.
9. We would still be waiting on anyone to finish buiding their gentoo model.
10. We'd all have to make our own gas, which would not be compatible with Microsoft Gas(tm).
11. People would line up to be Linus Torvald's chauffeur.
12. The US government decree that a ciurcular steering controller on any other car violates Microsoft's IP.
13. All components of the open source car would be renamed to begin with "G" or "K".
14. Slashdot posters would imagine Beowulf carpools of anything with wheels.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Milliseconds before impact, the entire windshields and all the windows go blue.
Funny, perhaps, but this might not be the worst safty feature in the world. Tensing up in an accident actually increases injuries and blanking out the windows for the scary parts might help.
It wasn't clear from the atricle if their looking into cars that drive themselves or ones that simply ignore the signals from the driver based on certain rule sets, sort of like ABS for the steering wheel. Of the two, I think crash-avoidence override is scarier to me than complete automation even though that has a much larger window for failure.
I also worry about overall architecture, given how Microsoft has been approaching the PC. Everyone'll be running down to Firestone for some firewall tires and pulling over to install their updates.
Sounds like peril sensitive sunglasses
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
My thoughts exactly. As soon as you move things, there's a chance something will go wrong. Shit happens.
But... You do realize that the (human) driver is one of the failure points? Frankly I'd be happy to get into a car and have the driving done for me. So I could enjoy the landscape, read a book, or have fun with other passengers. Or be able to drive drunk, without risking the lives of other people.
When or how? When the technology has shown to be safer than driving the car yourself. Which won't be anytime soon, especially not when MSFT is involved.
It's like robots doing medical procedures. It will be commonplace one day, and I'll be okay with that. But the technology has to prove itself first. Real-world use over several years would be a bare minimum for me. And no, I'm not volunteering for beta-testing.
I've seen the car of the future in countless sci-fi movies and books already! But, hey, if Gates says it, then for sure it must be right around the corner. Ho hum..
God help us all if these are the things to come. In fact, I prefer my technology to
Even my first-gen iPod still works! I dunno, I'm past the disliking Gates and his empire and now I'm just sick of him telling everyone what the future's gonna be and the fact that Microsoft's gonna get you there.
Hang it up man, hang it up.
Just a few weeks ago my wife and I were leaving a restaurant's parking lot after dinner and the engine was running really rough. I mean really, really rough, and this truck has always run fine before. It coughed and it gasped, and the power was just not there. I stopped and started the engine, but it still continued to run rough. I got maybe a half mile down the road when I realized I wasn't even going to make it home.
I pulled to the shoulder, and was going to phone my son to come pick us up when I said "hey, what happens if I reboot this thing?" So I turned off the engine, let it sit totally dark for about five seconds, then started it up. It started right up and took off, no problems, no choking, no gasping.
A cold reboot fixed my truck.
And now Microsoft wants them to run WINDOWS on this thing? Words fail me.
John
Just create some dummy accounts, and mark the people you don't like as foes of those accounts.
Then make those accounts friends of your main account, and set your "Foes of friends" modifier appropriately.
www.eFax.com are spammers
CLIPPY: Sorry, I don't understand your input, Shell Gas?
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.')"
No problem! Your new MSFord will have a new one built into it!
The Peak Performance Initiative press release also states:
It will also "Drive Efficiency and Innovation Across the Manufacturing Value Chain." When I figure out what a Manufacturing Value Chain is, I'll get back to you.
Yes, but how many redundant posts will be mislabeled "Funny"?
You know what, Microsoft is a perfect fit for an American car company. They've improved their cars a lot recently, and it's about time for a setback, kinda like the early 1980s.
"Microsoft: Drivin' like its 1979."
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
In other news...
Ford stock crashes on fears of new Microsoft car models.
he can't see the need for any car to ever need more than 64hp.
After making a second consecutive right turn, Clippy appears. "It seems like you're turning. Would you like help about this topic?" You say no.
AutoFormat kicks in, causing your car to automatically turn right at every intersection. You manage to get rid of that, but now every time you try to turn left the steering wheel is AutoCorrect'ed to the right.
You finally just let the car drive you wherever while you listen to MSN radio. You don't get where you wanted to go, but at least you didn't crash.
If your ABS came on, you were skidding, and you would not have stopped as fast if you didn't have ABS.
If ABS came on before you lost traction, your ABS sensor is broken.
The computer control stuff is what allows cars to be as good as they are today. If you prefer to not have that, restoring an old car to better than new condition can be done for less money than a new car today.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Sigh, where to begin?
First I'd like to point out to the OP that it was recently MAY first, NOT April first.
Loading...
The unity of Slashdotters above is quite beautiful. I've never seen anything quite like it, where an entire discussion can be moderated redundant once and be completely correct. It is the most amazing thing to have happened since user #1 signed on...to be honest, it brings a tear to my eye.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Just not on regular roads. Retrofitting the existing road network with the required level of instrumentation is actually more expensive than building a new one.
http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/PRT/
Deleted
KITT: It sounds like you're trying to jump over a construction site. Would you like help?
Michael: Yes! Turbo Boost now!
KITT: There's a grammatical error in that --
Michael: You bastard!
*crash*
A few hours later, in the Knight Travelling Truck...
Michael: Bonnie, KITT has something wrong with him. When I asked him to Turbo Boost, he kept asking for confirmation, and then said that I talked funny.
Bonnie: No problem, let me look under the hood. (pulls vainly on hood) KITT, open up.
KITT: No, Bonnie, you are not authorized to look at my internals.
Bonnie: Devon, what is this crap?! What's going on?
Devon: Oh, we signed a contract with Microsoft for them to provide us with software updates. After all, the Knight Foundation can't afford as many programmers as Microsoft can.
Bonnie: But Devon, I'm the only programmer who ever worked on KITT!
Devon: But look, Bonnie, KITT can now play all these MP3's. Watch. KITT, play "Knight Rider TV Theme Song."
KITT: No, Devon. "Knight Rider TV Theme Song" is owned by Universal Studios. You do not have the right to play that song.
Devon: Bloody hell. KITT, play "Knight Rider 2010 Theme Song".
KITT: No, Devon. "Knight Rider 2010" sucked.
Devon: What cheek! You little wanker!
KITT: It sounds like you're trying to view pr0n. Would you like help?
Michael: See? See?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
nah, the question is:
"where do you want to go today"?
Oldie, but goodie ;-)!
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10..... You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
My lame blog.
(Weiner dog.) Ooo ... I'm gonna get shit at home. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Computers are faster than you are.
You can't fly an F-16 without a flight control computer. Seat of the pants doesn't do you any good when the airplane doesn't know which end to keep into the wind.
You might argue that overly intrusive computer controls detract from the driving experience, but I don't agree for a second that computers in cars are categorically bad. If the yaw control in the 911 Turbo keeps you from spinning your car off the Nurburgring, that's Good.
Now, Microsoft operating systems in cars are CERTAINLY in that "categorically bad" category. I'll never understand what possessed BMW to go to Microsoft to get their iDrive user interface.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Here's a fun experiment for #8.
.5s ? 2 seconds ?
Look over your shoulder for as long as it takes you to determine it's safe to make a lane change. Count how long that was. 1 second ?
Remember that value.
Now, driving along in traffic with a speed and following distance you'd normally have, close your eyes for that amount of time.
Can you? Does it feel safe? Why not?
If you need to look over your shoulder, your mirrors are not properly adjusted. I have most of my cars with the mirrors set to just the maximum of their adjustable range, but the upside is that i am not looking over my shoulder.
Most people adjust their mirrors so they have a beautiful view of the side of their car. While your car is very pretty, there's no reason to be looking at it while you drive - you'll know if it falls off or disappears, even without the help of your mirror. So, you can liberate those side mirrors towards something more useful, like having them pointed all the way out so that you can see into the "blind spot" and the other lane.
On all the cars i drive the mirrors are adjusted so that i can see a person either via mirrors, peripheral vision, or line of sight at all times in a circle around me.
Incidentally, you dont see race car drivers looking over their shoulders - they cant, since they're in a harness and wearing a helmet that cuts side visbility. The magic is in the mirrors.
The best thing you can do to not get into accidents is take a proper driving school, where you learn about mirror adjustment, vehicle dynamics, threshhold braking, looking through and ahead of objects properly, and how to relax and concentrate on your driving.
You also forget to mention that your accelerator is also a good accident avoidance tool. In non-optimal road surface conditions (rain, ice, gravel), acceleration is the _least_ decreased of your tires capabilities, with steering being the most. If i was in a traction limited scenario and had to do an evasive manuever that would challenge the level of grip available, i might opt to accelerate as the tires would deliver acceleratino better than braking or steering.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Ford now stands for Fix Or Reboot Daily.
In other news, Bill Gates predicts that in 10 years, cars won't need more than 640K of RAM.
There is reportedly at least one exception: loose gravel. On a gravel road, locking up the wheels will stop the car faster than ABS. One of the earliest cars with ABS (a Mercedes) had an override switch to disable ABS, for this exact reason.
However, there's a trade-off: you lose steering if the front wheels are locked. Depending on the situation, an longer stopping distance on a gravel would be preferable to no directional control.
I have in fact nearly been been killed due to the effect of having two tires sand and two tires on pavement after a snow cleared and the road was dry. The brakes refused to engage because they asumed I was doing something stupid.
There is also an intersection in my town that many cars fail to stop at (it has a stop sign) because surface irregularities combined with the fact that it is on a steep downhill grade causes damn near every new car with ABS to studder but keep rolling until they are 1/2 a cars length past the beginning of the intersection.
I think ABS is an overall good thing (especially at highway speeds during emergency manuvers). But there are situations that I turn it off in my car. I have a switch wired to the fuse that controls the ABS in my car. (I drive on gravel a LOT, and I tend to drive like back when I used to rally as well)
I guess my point is this... You will NEVER have an uncrashable car on todays existing roads. Highways would need to be on a computer controlled Rail System.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
When I press the brake as hard as possible in an ABS car on ice (which unlike with normal brakes, is what you're supposed to do with ABS), I can feel in the brake pedal what the ABS system is doing - I can feel the jitter as it engages and disengages the break repeatedly. And here's what I feel - the brake is only engaged about 50% of the time - the duration of the engaged times and the duration of the pauses between them is the same. But manually, without ABS, I can back off when I feel that slippage and thus end up with effective breaking something like 75 to 80% of the time. It graphs something like this:
p ..catch..slip
h ..........
time--->
brakes: catch..slip..catch..slip..catch..slip..catch..sli
ABS BRAKING
time--->
brake on catch...........slip..catch............slip..catc
DOING IT MYSELF
Maybe the cars I've used just had bad implementations of ABS, but it didn't do a better job overall because it keeps crossing the threshold back and forth and spending 50% of the time on the "slip" side of that threshold.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
1. A robot must be operated with exclusively MS code.
2. A robot must obey orders given by permission of Bill Gates and his minions and no one else.
3. A robot must arrest any person or machine that attempts to force it to break the first or second law.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Maybe the cars I've used just had bad implementations of ABS...
Crappy ABS will allow you to keep steering authority no matter how much you hammer the brake pedal, and that's the main point of it. However, it is reasonable to believe that any given ABS implementation is not going to give you the best possible stopping distance.
I've had the opportunity to drive a wide variety of vehicles, and I have a habit of testing the ABS just for kicks. Some are too quick to release brake pressure, well before you'd lose steering authority due to skidding. Some leave the brake pressure off too much of the time, affecting stopping distance. But there are good ABS implementations.
Most of the better ABS implementations are extremely difficult to outperform. I've had the opportunity to drive several different vehicles with the ABS activated and disabled. The Ford Econoline Van's ABS is a joke as far as stopping distance performance, and I've come to prefer the ABS deactivated in that vehicle even lacking the panic stop safety net. The BMW 3 Series on the other hand has a superb ABS implementation. You can just stand on the brakes in nearly any situation and it yanks you down to zero with little fuss or muss. With the ABS off I may have been able to improve upon it, but not repeatably and certainly not when it might matter most.
And then there are more modern systems which modulate brake pressure to individual wheels. That is, they'll release pressure on ONLY the wheel(s) that slip. That's a trick a human with only one pedal simply can't accomplish. It's not a terribly common feature yet though.
That's my $0.02.
~Lake
(For the ignorant, the NT-based US Navy ship that had to be towed back to port when NT crashed.)
Second new Ford motto: "Quality is Job - er, where's the Task Manager?"
"End Task"
"The program is not responding. Do you want to end the task?"
"Yes - that's why I clicked 'End Task' - you stupid fucking piece of shit...!"
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
which are supposed to be the safest and most fuel efficient ever made.
Then he said the jet's systems were Microsoft-based.
So I sent him an email asking: "What's wrong with this picture?" and referencing the Yorktown.
He replied that he was going to research that part some more, but he got the point.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
And BTW the cars will still crash, its just that thell be adding alt-ctrl-del buttons to the car
...and you'll have to restart every time you change drivers..
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."