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New Jaguar XJ Suffers Blue Screen of Death
An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK is reporting that it crashed a £90,000 Jaguar XJ Super Sport — one of the most technologically advanced cars on the planet today. It's not the sort of crash you'd imagine, however — An unforseen glitch somewhere within the car's dozens of separate onboard computers, hundreds of millions of lines of code, or its internal vehicular network, led to the dramatic BSOD, which had to be resolved with the use of a web-connected laptop."
They're not, though. The car didn't BSOD, and TFA makes no mention of them running any Microsoft software. They did, however, mention Linux.
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It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Nobody wanted to buy British junk. That's why all they ended with Indians and the Chinese.
Jaguar is Indian these days. So if they've farmed out the in-car electronics development to Indian programmers that could explain a lot.
I was car shopping last year and I wanted to test drive a Ford Fusion hybrid. Besides the speedometer, all other gauges on the dash are LCD. The salesman was trying to show me some of the features and kept getting lost in the menu system and at one point the dash became completely unresponsive. The salesman looked at me kind of sheepishly and then said occasionally when this happens you just have to turn the car off and let it sit for 10 seconds then turn it back on. At that point I had pretty much made up my mind to NOT buy this car but I kind of felt obligated at that point to finish the test drive so after the "reboot" it worked like he expected it to so he showed me all these neato features. In the car's defense there are some pretty cool display options on that vehicle when it is working correctly. Then he let me get behind the wheel for the driving portion. I went to put the car into reverse to back out of the stall it was in and there was a good sized stainless steel plaque at the base of the shifter on the center console that said "Powered by Microsoft" I just sort of sat there for a second staring at it, and the salesguy asked me if everything was OK. I then just put the car back into park and thanked him for his time and left...true story.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
LOL. I've never seen any good programming come out of India, and there's no way I'd buy a car if I knew they'd outsourced the programming there.
After all, if you were a good Indian programmer you'd be in America on an H1B.
Hmm.. if Indian programmers are sooooo bad and shitty, wonder why you guys are sooooo worried about losing your jobs, Indians getting all the code jobs, and so on?
Because managers get a bonus for 'saving money' by sending work to India, and will have moved on to another job by the time their successor discovers that the code is late, over-budget, unsupportable and full of bugs.
Can you name any good programs that have come out of India? Because every occasion I know of when work has been sent there has been a disaster.
Exactly. A less sensational headline could have been "XJ Power button kinda flakey". ... For people of this level of technical sophisticaiton (Toughbooks, OBD2 interfaces, etc) to do this is shameful.
Sadly, this kind of reportage is absolutely in the mainstream of British journalism, where tabloid mentality is king. A breathless tone, a heavy dependence on gee whizzery, and a less-than-diligent (to say the most) attention to factual detail are all hallmarks of the British style - as is an obligatory serving of snark.
Or, to put it another way, I am shocked ... shocked ... to hear that British journalists engage in sensationalism.
Disclaimer: I am not British ... and I am humbly grateful for that.
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