Slashdot Mirror
Toyota Acceleration and Embedded System Bugs
An anonymous reader writes "David Cummings, a programmer who worked on the Mars Pathfinder project, has written an interesting editorial in the L.A. Times encouraging Toyota to drop claims of software infallibility in their recent acceleration problems. He argues that embedded systems developers must program more defensively, and that companies should stop relying on software for safety. Quoting: 'If Toyota has indeed tested its software as thoroughly as it says without finding any bugs, my response is simple: Keep trying. Find new ways to instrument the software, and come up with more creative tests. The odds are that there are still bugs in the code, which may or may not be related to unintended acceleration. Until these bugs are identified, how can you be certain they are not related to sudden acceleration?'"
Always going forward.
Niggers: always going backward.**
**Unless high crime rates and high rates of illegitimate children are your idea of "progress".
Wow. Just wow.
I'm loving this conversation here because I've gotten crucified in slashdot before for making simmilar comments to the whole thread here.
I don't wonder why.
I grew up in a family of top managers of Boeing systems engineers. They hated computers. My dad never even learned how to turn one on.
Being a Luddite is nothing to be proud of.
He hired other monkey to use the computers.
Nor is being a snob. Too bad he didn't hired other monkey teach you English.
As A child I was regailed with wonderful stories of every hard lesson in safety my dad had learned over his lifetime.
Explains why you like inflicting drivel on other people.
He loved world war II because they got to use cutting edge designs for balls out performance yet at the same time learned how to make things reliable by disecting the accident.
That 50-70 million people killed was worth it! Or so he tells you. Not to mention those mamed.
He would tell me about the accident that taught them that the engine pumps need to be at full speed but flow stalled on take off so that there's no lag when you hot swap after a pump fails. He told me of the accident where they learned not to route 100% of the control system wiring through any one junction box. etc...Probably because of all these hard won lessons boeing for years insisted on fully mechanical or hydraulic flight surface controls.
Oh, so mechanical systems can have catastrophic failures too? Apparently not a less you cared to learn.
Whereas Airbus and other jumped on the fly-by-wire concept early. My dad would spit after hearing some youg person tout all the advantages of fly by wire. He knew them perfectly well. He was big on accepting new innovations to reduce fuel costs and increas performance. He was not a luddite.
Yes he was. You just finished telling me he never learnt to turn a computer on and called that monkey work.
But he had a safety background that told him these electonic systems were hard as hell to validate and hard as hell to make truly independent from each other.
How the fuck would he know if he refused to use electronic systems?
For example they often used triple redundant computers and if one of them disagreed the other two would vote it off the island and stop listening to it. From what I've read it's now suspected that the latest airbus crash in the pacific had one of it's root problem in the voting nexus where a superior computer over ruled a more primitive safety system.
So mechanical systems can have catastrophic failures and so can electronic ones. You do realise you can have redundant mechanical systems and a mechanical voting "nexus" don't you? Bad design doesn't get any better or worse because you use a computer which is just another kind of machine.
While we all know that computer software validation is hard if not impossible. It's not something we readily admit here on slash dot.
Whereas an infinite number of states in a mechanical system can be validated?
It's because for years people like my dad would throttle the innovations the computer engineeers wanted to implement.
You mean your dad is one of the reasons Boeing is fighting to maintain dominance. You'll notice that now all aircraft are being designed to work with fly by wire, composites and complex computers. Your father's WWII glory days are long gone. No aircraft company's going to come back and compete with pure mechnical designs. Our aircraft today are safer and much more efficient than WWII designs. There's a reason those designs were superceded.
I think as a result there became this culture of computer engineers that present
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer