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Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX
Freshly Exhumed writes: Ford's in-car infotainment system known as Sync will soon evolve to add a capacitive touch screen, better integration with smartphone apps and, eventually, support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in version 3, thanks to a switch of operating systems. After years of teaming with Microsoft, the automobile giant has switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real time operating system renowned for stability.
The sole reason i skipped on a ford this round buying my new truck. ... couldn't or wouldn't play my tunes.
Put my USB stick in
Every other brand of truck I tried had no issues.
And if the they make it Android/iOS agnostic, with proper support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, its even better news.
Of course, both windows phone users must be feeling let down by now...
It's a car, not a fucking tablet.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
We have owned two Ford's in the last few years. An older Fusion and a newer Fiesta. Sync in both have been problematic and were never supported post purchase. Ford had released updates but only for the higher end touch screen versions.
The in car app support was terrible too.
I'm glad to see they are moving on.
QNX has been the choice for realtime OSs for a long time. Blackberry has little to do with that but they certainly are trying to cash in on it.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
And it crashes and has problems? Who woulda thought?
When did a "car infotainment system" become mandatory? Im a millenial, and I get that in order to sell us cars you need to make them as popular as the other thing we love, phones, but it feels like a car in and of itself is becoming a massive, distractive, pain in the ass in the 21st century. I rented a full sized ford sedan over the thanksgiving holiday and was rewarded with 'climate management' instead of heat and AC which was buried several menus into the infotorture system. changing a radio station felt confusing and annoying. Worse yet, the damned thing was relentlessly trying to pair with my phone and my laptop. So heres a suggestion or two.
Pair with Bose, or Bang, or Jensen, or some other audio company and make a damn good stereo. give me back my buttons and knobs, and for the love of god put XM/Sirius out of its wheezing gasping misery (its shit quality anymore and nothing but ads.) ditch the navigation, my phone does that better than you ever will. Keep the cool rear view camera. No one under 70 listens to AM radio so pair it down to 5 presets instead of 30.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And if it were still a standalone company, I'd find no surprises here. But I'm not sure I'd want to go after *anything* that's under the umbrella of Blackberry right now. In Ford's shoes, I'd've probably just gone with some embedded Linux and called it a day. Unless, of course, they were able to get Blackberry to give them one of those, "You go under, we get the source code" clauses.
Completely agree. We're throwing tech into these cars for the sake of tech.. not functionality.
This is certainly welcome news. My sync has had issues from day one. A few examples (some fairly humorous)
1) I tell it to call someone. It responds "The requested contact is currently unavailable." No clue what that means. I assume it is having trouble figuring out the number since it hasn't synced phone numbers or something. It usually happens if I try to call shortly after dialing.
2) I tell it to call someone. It responds "No bluetooth device is available right now, I will try to connect one." Then it sits in silence. It eventually does connect, usually after a second or two, but never calls. I have to send the command again.
3) I tell it to call someone. It sits in silence for a while. My current record is about 5 minutes, and then it decides it's going to call. That's kind of awkward sometimes.
4) My time is wrong. I tried to correct my time. It goes back to 12:00 after doing so. Now the clock advances very slowly (like, 1 minute for every few hours.) Still don't know what's going on.
5) I switch to bluetooth audio, it says it is on bluetooth audio, my phone is playing audio to somewhere, but no sound comes out. I remove the pairing, then pair my phone again, and it works.
6) Occasionally, it will never understand what I say until I use the steering wheel buttons to cancel my command and start over.
7) Sometimes the physical buttons don't work and it will stop responding while my music is playing. Then suddenly it will catch up and all the times I hit forward or back on the track suddenly occur.
That's been my experience. I was told my clock can be fixed by having the dealership reinstall the OS. That would take about 6 hrs they say, which I can't really be without my work vehicle for that long so I've just lived with it. They've told me the other issues are fairly common and that they can't help me with it. Oh well. It is a nice idea and things will eventually improve with these sorts of things I'm sure.
Ditto. I don't want a car media interface. I want dedicated physical buttons & knobs for the climate, radio volume & input selection.
And a place on the dash to mount my own phone/tablet with a nearby USB plug.
I have never seen an electronic car interface that was any good at all, and that includes every navigation system I've ever seen. My phone has better navigation (Waze rocks), better audio, and a better interface than anything a can manufacturer could ever try to copy.
I only upgrade my car every 10+ years - an even then it might not be a new car. Hey Detroit - stop trying. Give up. Let Apple/Android/[new startup] give me the tech I want. If you want to get fancy, give the phone a read-only API to the car's status.
"I'm sorry Dave, I've BSOD'd... my mind... I can feel it going... I... I'm afraid I... qw30@#$%*(@#$... You seem to be trying to drive a car... How can I help?"
So never mind the whole debate about "should cars have touchscreens at all" for a sec, given most manufacturers are going that way for better or worse. The Ford version was just horribly bad when I tried it, compared to certain other makes. It was laggy, unresponsive, ignored your touch about a third of the time, and not intuitive to use.
As long as this touchscreen-in-cars fad is going to persist, they might as well pick a better vendor to go with.
Love seeing M$ lose another one.
I hope to see M$ finally no longer exist as a company, in my lifetime *fingers crossed*.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.
Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.
So why'd you buy it then?
QNX may not be everywhere, but it was a mature product when Linux was just a kernel and people were grafting Minix functionality into the user space.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
In embedded development, I'd probably use Linux for most items (because it has a wide variety of tools available), however if it is any way connected to something that can kill or seriously injure, like a component on a car's CANbus, I'd go QNX because it is going on 30 years and a very mature product. Realtime OS functionality isn't needed everywhere, but when it is needed, nothing else will do.
As for Ford's use, is it better than SYNC? This is more of an opinion question than anything else. I have had good luck with SYNC across a number of devices (Android and iOS), but others have had horror stories. Time will tell if end users prefer the QNX based audio head over previous ones.
It is about freaking time.
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
For some reason auto manufactures think we all want nifty touch screens - and consumers now don't have a choice.
I do want a car media interface....with physical buttons! And relatively tech agnostic, supporting MTP and Apple and Bluetooth.
No, and No.
I don't care what stereo you put in the car. The fact of the matter is, cars last 10 to 20 years. Stereo/entertainment technology lasts less than 5. There was likely a 5yr development cycle for the car so the stereos going to be out of date before it even hits the lot. For example, my 2009 ford escape has the "MS Sync!" system and it had your typical black and white LCD numerical display similar to a 1980s calculator.
So, at some point, I'm going to want to ditch your crappy stereo and install something modern. At that point I'll pull the plug on your stereo and what will happen to my car? In fords (and most modern cars) it kills the entire dash!!! I pulled the stereo out of that 2009 escape and the entire dash died. I doubt it was even drivable. I had to order a computer, to plug into the ford plug to do what the old stereo had been doing on the bus system, just to install a standard Dinn stereo. It cost me $200 just for the stupid translation computer!
I do not want this nonsense. Fault in the radio in my car should not disable the friggen car. That's just stupid. Unfortunately, I keep seeing cars headed down this path, and there's absolutely no reason for it. There's an industry wide DINN standard they could follow. Even with Double and Quadruple DINN specs for huge touch screens, etc... industry standard plugs so you could swap stereos in and out. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from making car electronics as simple to replace as batteries in your TV remote. But they WANT the radio to be out of date so idiots will come into to buy a new car just to get a new radio. GAHHHH!!!
Also if this article is to be believed, Microsoft's system was slow and unintuitive. It appears that MS in all their wisdom used hidden corner touches for functions (like they do in Metro/Modern).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I sold my Ford stock a few years ago when I saw they were teaming up with M$ for their in-dash info and music system. What were they thinking?
By your own admission, the real problem is a terrible UI and a lack of hardware buttons - not the actual functionality.
I don't, and in fact I see this as good news. I was afraid blackberry buying QNX would effectively mean the end of a good OS. Apparently this isn't quite so.
From what I've seen of it (I have a QNX 4 cd lying around, played with it for a while) it's pretty good software. Except for the proprietaryness and lack of source, better than linux by quite a large margin. Its lack of uptake I attribute to its pricetag, which used to be a bit much, eyewateringly so. Maybe that has changed, too.
I have a million dollar idea - if it doesn't' exist already. A radio head-unit upgrade to a real dream car system: physical knobs & buttons, and a USB & headphone input jack. That's it. Maybe even with no LCD display at all - just a power on/off LED.
Man, I'd buy one of those, and I bet a lot of other folks would too....
As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former. The main problems are:
- The user interface for navigating features isn't very intuitive
- It relies too much on a voice recognition system that doesn't really work well. Either make that work well (a hard problem) or don't rely on it so much (an easy problem).
Oh, and regarding the problem playing from a USB stick mentioned above, the basic trick is that you have to format your USB with FAT32. Well, obviously.
Um, no. Blackberry bought QNX to upgrade up their phone OS after QNX had a history of being a solid, reliable realtime OS. I think they were just way too late to answer Apple/Android and that their first efforts to do so were really buggy which drove away any last loyal customers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That is an OS?
You must listen to the wrong 4 stations. The remaining line up is commercial free.
Well Ford's "Sync" is just the name of their infotainment system not Google's Sync. Confusing, yes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You're an idiot, aren't you?
I remember back in 1995/1996 or so ... a 1.44MB floppy with a bootable image of QNX. It booted onto pretty much any machine we could find, identified all of the devices, found the ethernet, and had a web browser.
It was faster and more robust than Windows 95 was by a bloody long shot.
Blackberry bought QNX because it has had a reputation as being pretty bomb proof for a long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Actually, yes, I have. The Volvo V70 is pretty nice and has physical buttons (along with a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff), so does the Mazda 3, even a Dodge Charger rental I drove a few years ago was like that, having a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff and physical buttons for the commonly-used stuff. It's a good balance; the touchscreen gives you the ability to have a lot of functionality for when you need it, but putting all the commonly-used stuff on physical buttons avoids the UI nightmare of having to fiddle with a touchscreen while driving just to turn the fan speed down.
Or, better yet, Auto Industry, come up with a "standard" that we can "upgrade" our systems quickly and easily. Nothing worse than driving a ten year old car with outdated technology, because Auto companies want some sort of lock in for their "customers". (quotes added because I know the auto industry is incapable of getting their heads out of their asses long enough care about their customers).
1) Your customers are the first people that buy a car, not everyone that ever owns that car afterwards. Most cars have multiple owners and pissing on them with proprietary components for the sake of proprietary lock in is stupid. First company that comes up with and uses a Standard will have a cult following.
2) You are saying, via lock in, that you really don't care what your ten year old branded car's technology is. Nothing like saying "You have a tape player, that is what you have, that is what you get, you can't upgrade" to everyone that owns you branded vehicle simply because you all couldn't figure out how to build a deck slot for car radios.
3) I have a number of very easy ideas on how to provide upgradable technology slots that would simply make your branded vehicles much more enticing 5 years down the road. You do expect your cars to last that long and represent your brand that long ... right?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
quite a few cisco routers (not the junk plastic home routers) run qnx, too, btw.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It'll be a Carblet
Hmm. OK, that's interesting. I don't really want any of that. I want to be able to just TELL my car. "Car, it is too fucking cold - raise the temp 3 degrees". "Car, I hate this song, skip". "Car, volume down 10%". "Car, use my phone's Google Maps and navigate me to [place]". I don't want to plug things in, I don't want buttons, and why do I need a touch interface? I mean I could use it since I don't live somewhere that you need gloves this time of year, but still - I would just prefer to use voice. If we can't do that inside of 5 years, then they have failed.
Because despite the touch screen, i really like the car. Overall it is really a pretty minor gripe -- I just don't like the direction the auto industry is headed in the entertainment department.
I am glad to see this and hope that QNX is able to generate enough sales and revenue for Dan Dodge, et al. to keep QNX afloat -- and maybe enough to take it independent again once RIM likely goes the way of the DoDo. They have always had a very good, very stable product with very good support.
I think I still have my "Just Dodge it!" T-shirt around here somewhere....
I have a 2013 Ram 1500 with the QNX based 8.4 head unit. It is awesome, and fast, very fast.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/02/25/0256235/ford-dumping-windows-for-qnx-in-new-vehicles
I'm with you buddy. In the center console of my lifetime car purchases (4) all have had a radio, with a power/src button, volume/tuner knobs, 6 saved stations, and below that 3 knobs for temp/fan/direction. One time i got all fancy with cd player! That adds an "eject" button and left/right seeks.. I was a bit overwhelmed, so I sold that car.
That's it, and that's all I'll ever be interested in. Take note, car manufacturers.
I had a rental a couple years back with a touchscreen for the stereo, I ended up having to pull over off the road just to change the damn radio station without endangering us and everyone around us!
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Actually, yes, I have. The Volvo V70 is pretty nice and has physical buttons (along with a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff), so does the Mazda 3, even a Dodge Charger rental I drove a few years ago was like that, having a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff and physical buttons for the commonly-used stuff. It's a good balance; the touchscreen gives you the ability to have a lot of functionality for when you need it, but putting all the commonly-used stuff on physical buttons avoids the UI nightmare of having to fiddle with a touchscreen while driving just to turn the fan speed down.
We have a new Honda Civic that uses buttons still, as does my parent's new Accord. Plus all of the Lexus loaners I had lately use a knob and buttons arrangement near the shift lever for navigation rather than a touchscreen.
Soon enough, you won't have to watch the road and suddenly having your smartphone integrated with your vehicle will be a good thing.
a friend hasn't figured out how to pair her phone to her focus yet, so i'd say sync's unintuitive...
this is good news 4 ford...i may now consider buying one;-)
Have you seen the other brands versions of the same thing? Functionally the same
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My old Ford had Sync and it it was slow, froze occasionally and would reboot (for maintenance) every couple hundred hours of operation. Connecting a phone to it wasn't difficult, but it's auto-sync of music was frustrating - you had to wait for several minutes before the system could play. It always felt like it was in continual beta mode. The first versions were so bad Ford sent everyone a free USB dongle to upgrade it rather than just make it available to download like other updates.
i got one of the first generation sync systems and never had a thumb stick it wouldn't play, but this goes back to the root of the problem: sync is inconsistent
What are you listening to on XM that is 'nothing but ads'? I have been listening to XM for over a decade in both cars and at home (mostly rock/jazz/classical) and I have yet to hear an ad.
Microsoft actually had very little to do with the MyTouch system which was the second generation Sync system. Microsoft helped make the original Sync system which for 2007 was actually quite reasonable. For the second generation released in 2010 that was the one that Ford essentially had to rewrite internally to fix, that was done by BSquare -- admittedly that company was made of former Microsoft people and ran on Microsoft's Auto Platform.
The point is however blaming Microsoft for the interface they didn't have anything to do with is like blaming kernel maintainers for Gnome doing something stupid in their interface.
QNX is a great choice of an OS for a fairly fixed ecosystem of hardware where reliability is paramount, but just because the OS is good doesn't mean the interface will be.
You are hilarious, you do realize microsoft is currently making the most money its ever made in its entire history?
That's what I like about my 2010 Fusion. It has acrtual buttons and knobs for all the important stuff, in addition to the GUI.
Why would a big, burly man such as yourself, no doubt driving over rough terrain and hauling heavy loads, be listening to the Backstreet Boys while in your truck?
.
Geesh, so many posts where people are talking about Ford selling more cars because of this or even stating they might consider buying one themselves.
Remember when we chose our vehicles because of their qualities as a vehicle?
Remember when every dashboard had standard sized holes for the radio and stock radios where crap that almost everyone replaced?
I'd rather buy a vehicle that drives well and has a nice double-din hole where I can mount a head unit of my choice. I want to buy the car (or truck) based solely on it's abilities as a car or truck and the stereo (more like computer these days) totaly separate based on it's qualities as such.
Today's proprietary BS really sucks!
You're joking, right?
I'm sorry, but as cool of an idea it is, it's completely laughable.
They view these things as differentiating features and competitive advantages. They also make huge amounts of money on the upgrades and the bells and whistles.
Not gonna happen, as much as we'd like to see it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
i can't understand how the feds allow this kind of driver distraction, let alone the ridiculous level of integration into the basic functionality of the ca:-\
the wife's given up pairing her phone to her honda:-\
physical knobs should be mandated for basic functions as a safety issue! where the FUCK is NHTSA???
What I find puzzling is that (unless somebody needs to be fired yesterday, and hard) the 'Ford Sync' component isn't really something that a good realtime OS would be an obvious choice for. It's the infotainment/navigation/non-essential cabin control widget; and had better not be scribbling all over the ECU over CAN.
That doesn't make QNX wrong, you can put a GUI on top of it just fine; but it makes it a lot less obvious why MS got the boot. WinCE is kind of old and nasty; but the NT kernel is respectable enough, and all reports are that (thanks to the fact that your phone is now more powerful than the workstations it ran on in 1993) it actually delivers fairly peppy performance on the distinctly midrange hardware that most WP8 devices ship with.
Apparently MS and Ford had some sort of togetherness problem, and one or both of them screwed up such that the resulting product isn't good enough; but I'm guessing that the problem wasn't "We need a better real time OS". This 'Ford Sync' is a consumer electronics UI problem.
...& raise u a philco predicta in the basement;-)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
If anything, we've gotten worse on standardization over time.
Back in ye olden days, it was actually reasonably likely that the entertainment system was a DIN-mount box with some obnoxious-but-more-or-less-functional bundle of wiring harness that connected it to to the vehicle. Less so today, and(even when that's still physically the case) more likely that it isn't just power and analog audio; but a whole bunch of actively hostile and undocumented CAN chatter that disables a bunch of random cabin systems if you aren't using a suitably blessed device.
Nothing but ads? I never hear ads on Sirius.
Best Slashdot Co
BlackBerry 10 is the only mobile OS which never was rooted or hacked.
So it is just a logical to use it where hack can make a real damage.
"They also make huge amounts of money on the upgrades and the bells and whistles."
I would love to see actual evidence of this, beyond marketing's interpretation of the data. I sold cars, and for the most part, people who wanted to upgrade the audio system didn't do it at the dealership. Further, most people took whatever the audio system was that was in the car that they wanted, even it it wasn't what they really would have chosen.
IMHO, making it difficult to upgrade audio with the whole "integrated dash systems" is NOT a selling point, but is often quite the opposite.
I equate this to the shopping centers that have convoluted parking lots that are nearly impossible to get into or out of because some design team once thought "hey, if we make it convoluted, people will stay longer and shop more!". I know plenty of people who simply avoid such places for that reason alone.
Or, as my dad used to claim, "It looked good on paper!"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yep, I've tried out Audis with knobs and buttons for the navigation, but those suck actually. They're much clumsier to use than a touchscreen, since you have to fumble around with a big knob just to select each letter for the name of your destination; it's completely stupid. Knobs for HVAC and radio controls (the often-used ones, like volume, etc.) are very sensible; knobs to type in letters is asinine.
However, ALL car navigation systems are idiotic, because they're all 5 years behind the times by the time they make it to market; smartphone navigation apps are far more advanced, and always will be. It's even more idiotic that the carmakers actually expect people to pay for map updates, instead of just updating the maps continuously for free like Google Maps. They should just give up on putting navigation in cars altogether, and instead make it so my phone can work with the car's screen. Then I can use whatever navigation app I want, and not be stuck with some old piece of crap software that was only current when the car was under development.
Good move Ford. I've experienced QNX stability. QNX is the OS that runs the Post Office letter sorting machines. If there was any problem with the machines it was mechanical, not software. It was rock solid.
No, I haven't seen anything of the sort. I've only seen the all-touchscreen idiocy from Ford (and its other monikers Lincoln and Mercury); the other carmakers seem to have somewhat-intelligent people working for them who move the most-used functions to actual buttons and knobs, even if there is a touchscreen there.
Actually, I believe Hyundai might have some models with the all-touchscreen idiocy, but still, 2 carmakers does not equal "all".
Only reason I can guess is politics. QNX makes sense from a legal standpoint because if something does happen that is caused by the audio head, Ford could attest that they used a "known realtime hardened OS", with FIPS, Common Criteria, and other certifications.
With function creep, even though it is abhorrent, the audio head is becoming more and more a part of the CAN, where if it glitches and shits the bus, there goes the ECM and TCM. While something like Linux can work well, I'm guessing Ford wants some CYA documentation and having anything that touches the CAN be a realtime OS might be important for the legal eagles signing off on vehicle models.
In an ideal world, the audio head (especially with remote app functionality) should not be let near the core CAN, and if it has to have some functions (like climate control), that goes through a controller that has sanity checks and the ability to ignore requests if they don't make sense or would cause damage. That way, if the audio head's BlueTooth stack glitches or someone's cat picture uploaded as a background is malformed and crashes the graphics rendering part, the vehicle will still function normally.
The focus I rented with sync was horrible.
To use ad2p audio, I had to connect the phone, and would get a message "to play music through Bluetooth, go to audio settings". There we're two audio settings headings, one two levels deep, the other three levels deep, and I could never remember which one to go to, or what the path to it was.
It would forget this setting every time I restarted the car.
The setting forgetting, the two menu items with same name, and the message telling me where to go leaving out the path to get there are all thing's I would consider terrible ui design.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I think the term is "Mission Critical." We always heard Windows was not suitable for mission critical applications. Remember when the USS Yorktown became disabled for two hours? It was running Windows, and some operator screwed up and asked the machine to divide by zero. The OS puked and shut down the ship.
I have to say it is a nice operating system to use. It has its quirks though. We had issues getting it to run on somewhat recent hardware - it wouldn't even complete its bootup. That said, if you are able to get it to run on your hardware, it is rock-solid. Driver development for it was a breeze. I had gone from never writing a driver for it to having a usable one in a day or so. The driver was mature enough after about 2 weeks that I haven't had to touch it since in 6 years. I haven't used the development tools for their UI much so I can't speak to their usability.
I once tried it as a desktop os around the time of suse linux 6/7? (around the year 2000) i think it came on a cdrom from a german linux magazine. Back in the day where i used a dial-up 56k modem to connect to the internet. It actually managed to provide me with a download speed of around 12k per second, never quite figured out how. And i certainly liked it better than OS/2 which i also tested for a time.
Well, let's get to the root of that problem. The turning of cars into tablets is largely caused by the hysterical overreaction by too many people to the notion of anybody having some OTHER kind of device that does those things. OMG, you can't even THINK about a cell phone or your driving ability goes down the same as if you'd had 12 beers! Or some of the usual claptrap like that.
If that was the case, accident totals would have gone up since cell phones became ubiquitous. They have in fact gone down across the board, something that nobody ever reports on. "Oh, but so and so was on a phone and got into an accident". So? No proof that accident wouldn't have happened anyway due to some other cause, or that some other accident wouldn't have happened. The problem isn't phones, it's bad driving and poor risk assessment.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not advocating texting while driving in any area where there's other cars or people around, or any behavior like that. It's just that I could read a newspaper in my car and be charged with a different (and more socially acceptable) thing than if I do the exact same thing with something that has a battery and a screen. It's the being distracted part that's a problem, whether that be from a piece of paper, a handheld device, or some idiot designed in car system. The in car systems pretty much all suck because of poor user interface design plus the whole lawyer inspired rage-inducing lockout crap that makes it impossible to do useful things with them.
Also, searching for a radio station on pretty much any car ever isn't any less distracting than changing tracks on an mp3 player. I'd say that the in car systems are more distracting in a lot of cases (see poor and rage-inducing user design above). The difference is one is illegal in lots of places and the other---well, another thing people don't report on is this exact same kind of hysteria actually happened when car radios were first introduced. They were demonized by the press and the fearful then too. Eventually people grew up and learned to deal with it because as usual it turned out not to be the society ending disaster that it was made out to be.
Seriously, it's time to grow up and address the problem instead of doing what we're doing which obviously doesn't work. Some people are lousy at risk assessment and need to be taught. The risk that needs assessing here is the appropriate level of distraction that is tolerable for a given situation. Nobody ever gets taught that, especially people who really really need it. Of course, that requires thinking and judgment and in this 'we must be perfect at all costs' society we have that is just abhorrent to so many it isn't even funny.
It's time to return cars to being cars and stop trying to make them imperfectly interface with devices that work perfectly fine by themselves. Aux in jacks? Great. Bluetooth audio? Better. In dash nav? Useful if we can keep the lawyers away from it. Anything else is by nature going to be bad at what it's intended to do, and it's our fault for letting it be that way.
I have a 2013 Ford Fusion with Sync and MyFord Touch. I've honestly not found much issue with it, but that doesn't mean I haven't found any issues. I actually like Sync over what GM and Nissan have for UI but the touchscreen is, admittedly, crap.
The only feature I have but can't use is the speak-to-text feature; I assume that's a Windows Phone only feature. I also don't like how the vehicle reports in maintenance checks. Instead of using my phone's internet capability it makes a phonecall instead.
Other then that, I have no problem with it.
It does sound like an advertising pitch, but this is accurate about QNX. The OS isn't cheap, but it does offer realtime functionality. It also is designed to be quite stable to where a bug or a hang can cause tremendous disasters, be it software with X-ray machine or figuring out what position to move a set of control rods in a reactor. QNX has excellent internal security, and a decent development kit.
The thing is here it's being used for an in-car entertainment system. It doesn't have to be realtime, it doesn't have to require stability beyond what a regular kernel would offer. In fact it shouldn't matter a damn what kernel is powering the system since most of the functionality is going to be sitting in an application layer well above the kernel itself.
I'm not sure what motivated Ford to switch. Maybe QNX uses less memory or is more performant with the chipset they want to use, or is simply cheaper to licence. Or maybe the automotive industry is naturally conservative and comforted by some extra certification QNX offers that Windows doesn't. Whatever the reason, I doubt the end user experience or reliability would be appreciably different whether they had used an NT, Linux, BSD or a QNX kernel - any modern kernel would have served the software well. Whether the application itself is good is an entirely separate matter altogether.
My 2013 Fusion has been in the shop for 3 weeks in this last round of fights over the failed software. My temperature setting went to 'upside down question mark' which turns out to be extreme cold (extra cold in a Michigan winter). Finally, somewhere between 00 degrees and 2^1 degrees I found a the only heat setting... 'magma plastic burn smell hot'. So I took it in, they reloaded the software and I lost all center console controls (physical buttons) and no heat at all... and lost heated seats too. I can't blame the dealership, they connect the car to Ford servers and pray for a perfect connection to a shitty update process they have little control over. Not having my new car for nearly a month over a bad update makes me feel like software warranty should come standard with a new vehicle. This glitch was supposed to cost me $1100. Cost me about $100 in the end after the dealership and Ford ate the majority of it.
What, that car manufacturers have treated upgrades and options as a cash cow for decades? Really? OnStar alone makes GM hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. You don't think getting your infotainment system on a subscription would be lucrative???
As in ... look at all the bloody money we can make from our proprietary infotainment system once this sucker is hooked up to the cell network.
I did not say it was a selling point ... at least not the to buyer.
You don't say to the buyer "hey, you know you want this proprietary system which will be obsolete and you'll never be able to upgrade".
You say "look at this super awesome system we have".
The people who sell this shit think them having a proprietary system is good for them, because it will "effectively monetize the driving and in-car infotainment experience of the driver in a highly profitable manner which allows us to expand outside of our core markets" or some other buzzword-bingo mission statement.
These damned things are part of long-term, multi-billion dollar business strategies.
They simply are not going to make a standardized, easily upgraded or replaced platform which they all share.
From their perspective, that would be idiotic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
Yep. Bought a Honda Insight this year. Unlike the Prius, it has all physical buttons.
Sadly, the Prius dominates that market segment, and the Insight is being discontinued.
Considering what Tesla are doing with their in car systems (i.e. over the air software upgrades), i expect Ford are looking to the future rather than just the present
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Exactly the reason I bought my F250, I did not opt for the upgraded head unit with the Sat Nav system. I can read a map or use my phone for directions, also the two grand to have that "feature" was a no thank you for me. With the cars that only have controls in the touch screen systems, what a pain. One point of failure and you can't do a dang thing and that will cost you 800 to 2000 bucks to get it fixed.
I also agree with rogoshen1, having to look away from the road just to hit the AC or what ever, is bad design. You can't really learn where it is like you can with physical buttons cause there is no physical button or it could be on a different screen.
I've also seen a lot of new cars with buttons everywhere. Take a look at the ford explorer steering wheel Not only that, they have capacitive buttons that are nearly just as bad. Don't get me wrong the Explorer is a nice car and I also like some of the convenience, but wow. How many options do you really need while driving a car, or in a car in general. I think it's option overload if you ask me.
I have '86 f150 that is getting old but I really like because it is simple to operate and simple to fix.
BTW I'm 33 and work in the IT industry, not an old geezer quite yet.
I have an 02 Impala with nice set of basic climate controls, and simple CD/Tape(yes lol)/radio unit. Daytime running lights, and automatic headlights (I have never had to touch the switch for the headlights) Honestly this is all you need. Anything more than that is just a gimmick.
Because Microsoft sucks at everything they attempt.
There is a standard, it's called DIN. Unfortunately, people want these silly swooping dashes and feel like a rectangular radio slot just won't do. Fortunately, you can usually buy a new piece of dash that provides a DIN shaped hole. Pull the old radio out, put the dash piece on, and you're ready to pop in a DIN sized radio.
It's still the standard and it's almost all you can buy in aftermarket radios. Occasionally a company will make an aftermarket radio that isn't DIN for a specific car, but it's rare.
The only non-standard thing are the connections on the back of the radio. Why nobody has come up with a proper standard there, I don't know. Fortunately, for almost every car out there, you can just connect up an adapter and you're mostly good to go after some soldering/crimping wires at home.
One of the reasons you would need a realtime os is Active Noise Control.
I Don't Work Here
Just as an example, all of the comedy channels have regular ads these days. *Long* ones. It's really disappointing.
I have to agree that XM is full of ads. Almost every station has an announcer talking after every second song announcing something or other. It may not be full fledged ads as in traditional radio but I wish that they would just shut up and play music. Someone promoting something is an ad for me.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
My Jeep has a QNX based touchscreen that is very responsive and fast and reliable, plus it had physical knobs, switches and buttons for climate control and radio as a backup. The backup radio controls are on the steering wheel. I can change the station or audio track, adjust the volume and answer or make handsfree calls and use cruise control without taking hands off the steering wheel. Climate control knobs are logical and nicely sized so they can be operated without taking eyes off the road.
The Ford Explorer i rented had miserable controls. Slow confusing touchscreen and the "physical" climate control buttons were capacitive touch points. Ford should be sued for that. I rented that Ford in the winter -20 weather and had to take my gloves off to turn up the heat. Very annoying!
Two reasons i got a Jeep instead of the Ford. The above was one. And second, for my model year the jeep grand cherokee and the jeep patriot had better reliability records than the similarly equipped ford escape and explorer. The in laws bought a ford around the same time and have spent considerably more on repairs and maintenance than i have on my jeep. As a chrysler brand there is a perception of unreliability but specific models are average to very good so they can be a good used choice if you research.
That said, ford has worked hard to improve its reliability, and ditching mytouch sounds promising so i may consider them again some time.
Funny, I wouldn't have given Ford the credit for recognizing the wisdom of such a move. Kudos to them. Wish my IPTV provider would ditch the Cisco/Windows set tops for something based on QNX, as they're seriously horrible. Part of what's smart about this move by Ford is that it avoids their cars being associated with the frequent complaint of how bad MS stuff can be, whether correct or not. There's no such conversation among other than geeks about QNX. It has numerous supporters and very few detractors for any reason other than it's not free. The only downside I see (aside from there being used cars out there with Windows) is that others—GM, Fiat/Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan—are likely to hesitate to move to QNX. There's still quite a bit of NIH syndrome.
Oh come on, Windows 95? The OS that couldn't even sit idle without eventually crashing? That's a real low bar.
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable.
It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished. Linux has many huge companies paying for hundreds of talented developers to work on every part. In many cases, the best algorithms for many of the problems an OS faces, such as task scheduling, storage management, and networking, are complicated and difficult to implement well. It's no accident that there are more than a dozen good file systems for Linux, each with their points. Windows is still plodding along with NTFS and FAT. And QNX? They simply cannot keep up, even if they rip good code straight from Linux. They're going to skimp on features and choices, and what they must have will be the most dead simple method that delivers adequate performance, and spin that as a virtue because the code is smaller and therefore easier to audit and prove correct. If they discover that their design imposes a fundamental limitation, they live with it, while the Linux world can think of going for a redesign, because the resources are there. QNX could never think of doing a massive reworking of the system like the replacement of X with Wayland or Mir, or the development of btrfs.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
We XP embedded in a (duh) embedded application. It's OK for the most part, but there are two problems. First, since the system is not patched after manufacture, viruses are a problem. Yes, it's partially bad design - but viruses won't be a problem with QNX. Security through obscurity means fewer support calls. The other problem is that it decides to take a little break every once in a while. It's probably just cleaning up memory or something, and it only lasts a few hundred milliseconds - but it is enough that we have to make allowances for that in the real-time part of our system (which runs mostly on vxWorks and on DSPs). Coincidentally, we used to run QNX (pre acquisition by Blackberry) for this application, but had to switch because an important library was unsupported. Also, at the time USB thumbdrive support was not good in QNX (and utterly atrocious in vxWorks). If Ford is doing anything that cannot tolerate a little 100ms timeout once in a while, then they conceivably would need to switch to a real-time OS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The confusion stems from thinking of QNX as the radio (infotainment system) instead of the vehicle control system. Past generations of automobiles separated the two but on modern cars they are integrated. QNX is used to control the entire electronic system including all the sensors on the engine and transmission, the cruise control, the intrusion detection system, as well as the cabin A/C. They all work in concert. That is why Android auto and CarPlay both run atop of QNX. Something Apple and Google downplay. QNX is sold a la cart. OEM's can purchase just the kernel or a whole host of off the shelf plugins that provide a very robust drop in ecosystem. Ford's MySync system runs atop Windows CE (Windows Embedded Compact) and the complaints from customers was it was just too slow. After years of trying to get the responsiveness they wanted they have finally admitted Windows Embedded Compact just isn't the ideal platform for their cars.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Fiesta owner here.
The touch screen is nice when you're parked. For everything else... Well, uh, everything else is voice activated, and more accurate than Siri or Android.
My accent has been described as anything from Canadian to New Zealand to what the hell is that accent. I admit that if you have a Hindi drawl, I can't vouch for accuracy, but I've had no problems with voice recognition from Sync. Ever.
Will they upgrade my current sync? I hope so because it sucks donkey balls.
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs.
Well that settles it then! QNX is total crap.
That's why over 50% of the cars rolling off the assembly line today come with it installed.
I prefer the philosophy of right tool for the job. And QNX for now is the best choice for auto makers. I use Linux where it makes sense and when AGL matures it might become the best tool for the job. But don't expect auto makers to jump on it if they can't control it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
This is why I tend to prefer buying former rental cars. One owner who at least changed the oil and a weird set of options that includes things like power windows but generally excludes everything else and has cloth seats. Simpler, very little to go wrong. They don't always offer that combination of options to the general public.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, QNX has been around for a long time.
\What most people don't get is what a realtime OS is, and why it matters. Other multitasking OSes are generally "best-effort" OSes, but in a realtime OS, the whole scheduling system is based on giving guarantees, making sure that things happen within a certain time frame or a certain order.
The overhead is huge, which is why you don't se RT on any normal desktops or servers, but in something like a car, airplane or hospital device, you would rather know that 100% of the requests get served in 100 ms, than having an average time of 10 ms, but a worst case time of 1000+ ms.
If you know the worst case, you can program your systems to operate within them.
Linux does have a RT version, in part supported by Ingo Molnar and Theodore Ts'o, but it does not see heavy use. In part, this has been because for a realtime OS to be successful, all the parts have to play ball, not just some. And in part it is because a realtime OS is quite a bit slower on average, and most regular users would rather have improved average speeds than improved worst-case.
But for a car? Give me a realtime OS any day. I don't want traction control to cut in a tenth of a second too late because the kernel was busy doing garbage collection, time synchronization, and handling an urgent warning that the oil temperature was too high.
I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable. It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished
I've worked on QNX. It was the most polished embedded system I've worked with. Also, your post sounds a lot like a troll.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But itz teh internet of thingz!
I've heard from people who work with * that it has plenty of bugs.
Generalized that for you.
well, there is one component that is pretty standard and easilly upgradable, the stereo. I just purchased a used car (2008 miata). The stereo came with a 30 pin ipod connector tucked in the glovebox. Ive outfitted it with the required lighting adapter to work with my phone, but i wouldn't mind having a modern stereo that can do bluetooth. The upgrade might be painless, but there's one big issue: THIEVES. The big selling point of the kind of crummy factory stereo is it's good enough and nobody is going to want to steal it.
Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.
For some reason auto manufactures think we all want nifty touch screens - and consumers now don't have a choice.
there are plenty of used cars with physical knobs in need of good homes. http://www.carmax.com/
buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
However, ALL car navigation systems are idiotic, because they're all 5 years behind the times by the time they make it to market; smartphone navigation apps are far more advanced, and always will be. It's even more idiotic that the carmakers actually expect people to pay for map updates, instead of just updating the maps continuously for free like Google Maps
My Audi has Google Maps for it's navigation system already, it works great.
Tape decks are good! Cassette line-in adapters work much better than those damn radio transmitter ones you have to use if your head unit only accepts CDs.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When did a "car infotainment system" become mandatory?
May 1, 2018
That's the date that backup cameras become mandatory on (almost) all US vehicles. Once the manufacturer has to reserve the console space for a reasonably-sized display, it makes sense to let it do double duty as an infotainment system without much more marginal cost (but lots of marginal revenue).
That must be a recent development; the Audis I was looking at about 3 years ago had some horrible, clunky nav system.
Nothing like saying "You have a tape player, that is what you have, that is what you get, you can't upgrade"
Actually, I got that when I bought my current car, new, from the dealer. I got the version with the 4 cyl engine and the "comfort option package". When I asked to upgrade the CD-only radio to one with both CD and tape, I was told that that was only available for versions with the 6 cyl engine. I then said "Well, you have replacement units for service, why not just "service" my radio by replacing it with the better unit?" They said the OEM does not allow them to do that.
Admittedly, it would have cost more than buying an FM adapter (which I did) to use with a portable tape player, but would have been a lot less hassle.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I have a 2010 Ford with the non-touch screen Sync, because I didn't want the touch screen. Most of the time Sync works fine - once in a while it becomes unresponsive for a few minutes.
On my flagship every-bell-and-whistle edition I have been frustrated many times. When I bought the newest one, it was to replace a car with an 8 year old Toyota system. Before I bought it, I saw that it wasn't as polished and easy to use as my old one (partly since I was familiar with it, I'm sure). The Navigation, in particular, was pretty uneven: a couple of things better (able to do limited route setup while underway, for example), and some worse (reoute preferences hard to use, too many menus deep to do many things).
Knowing that, I felt confident buying anyway, because this is 2014: software can be UPDATED. I was sure it would be fixed eventually. I have gotten an update. It changed nothing that I have found so far (good luck finding a list of issues addressed) aside from requiring that I pair my BT devices again and download phone books.
Now the ultimate insult. Ford acknowledges that their system was... poor. They announce a much-better version (they hope). And it is NOT AVAILABLE to those of us who have put up with the one they had.
Come on. QNX runs on nearly anything. Are they seriously unable to upgrade the existing hardware? Really?
And then they will eventually go bankrupt anyways because instead of making good cars, with options people actually want, the spend stupid amounts of money on installing services (like OnStar) into every vehicle "standard", which most people don't want to pay $17.95 - 70.00 month. Hey, guess what, OnStar is now mostly useless for all but emergency cases (automatic activation upon accident) because we have these things called smartphones.
And for all the profitability of OnStar, it didn't help GM from being bailed out by the USA government.
These damned things are part of long-term, multi-billion dollar business strategies.
Yup, and yet they still failed. Good Job guys! How about going back to building cars and not trying to monetize the after purchase experience to death.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That mirrors my experience also -- albeit we're talking about the versions that were around up to about 2003. It was one super-cool, very elegant and lightweight OS that just worked and worked (as most RTOSes are required to).
It's a shame that its lack of applications (outside the realm of process-control and bespoke code) so restricted its market.
And the company that wrote it was pretty cool too. I recall that they used to include a bag of choc-chip cookies in the boxed editions that I bought -- a nice touch!
Put in a tube amp.
> Well that settles it then! QNX is total crap.
> That's why over 50% of the cars rolling off the assembly line today come with it installed.
Enh.... I'm on your side, really, but I have to point out that this is not a strong argument. Over 50% of cars rolling off the assembly line also have airbags that explode and imbed shrapnel in your face. So, usage is not necessarily a good test of quality.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
If true, this sounds like the most important reason why buttons are better than touch-screens in dashboards. Don't you hate it when you try to raise the volume and accidentally activate the passenger seat ejector instead?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Here I thought I'd have to hang onto my 2003 Ford for the rest of my life, rather than buy a vehicle controlled by Microsoft products. What a relief.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
DIN is a physical format standard. This does nothing for the octopus connector, which is not a standard.
And unlike DIN, current in dash SYNC style displays do not have a standard. And now that Sync is no longer going to be supported, in 5 years, all those nifty consoles may just be worthless. They are barely cute toys today, and compared to the Android / iDevice options that are currently out there they suck.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's a shame that its lack of applications (outside the realm of process-control and bespoke code) so restricted its market.
Yeah. I had a little bit of hope when BB based their devices on it, but that didn't go anywhere.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ironically, the only station which I have heard traditional ads on is Kids Place Live, the station dedicated to children. Nowhere near the frequency of the ads on traditional radio however.
LOL, I'm not disagreeing with you.
But, seriously, companies are now expected to keep growing quarterly, or they're seen as stagnating by the stock market.
In order to keep executive compensation at all time highs, they need to implement the full set of MBA approved gibberish, so that the analysts tout how awesome their stock is.
The stock market doesn't reward a car company which makes good cars year over year and has a steady revenue stream. It rewards a car company which has figured out how to monetize its customers and have a growing revenue stream.
Business is no longer operated on solid fundamentals and steady performance. It's operated on perception, and how the next quarter or two will look, and trying to maintain quarter-over-quarter growth which is unsustainable.
As far as I'm concerned, the stock market has been stuck as an unsustainable Ponzi scheme since at least the beginning of the .com era. Nowadays, it seems like most companies are thinking stupid in the long-term in order to maximize the short term -- because that's the current compensation cycle.
Because when R&D and the like gets cut to improve profits now, it might take you a few years to realize just how badly you've shot yourself in the foot.
And the way companies are ran these days, it might be a different executive team, so you need to get your stack before you get your giant severance package.
I'm betting most employees of large corporations find themselves thinking "is our company really being ran by short sighted idiots who don't understand our core business?". And in quite a few cases, the answer is probably "yes, yes it is".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Huh? I'd say THE choice for realtime embedded operating systems is probably vxWorks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This, absolutely this. There was a narrow window of opportunity between traditional dial-and-knob consoles with tactile interfaces, and ever bigger lcd touch displays. The happy medium was a small display with plenty of knobs and buttons left for the controls. Now the screen has almost completely taken over and you're left to fumble around with controls that you *have* to look at in order to use them on the display. It's dumb. It's like they've forgotten decades of car interface lessons because they think everyone wants the biggest screen possible. Either that or it's somehow cheaper to implement than a proper console.
Handjob? No. More likely they got a RIM job.
Broadcast radio is 'full of ads'. As in, a LARGE percentage of the time is spent trying to get you to purchase some product or other, often in the most obnoxious way possible.
XM does have some announcments. Nowhere nearly as frequent as 'every other song', usually I'll hear one or two announcements during my 1/2 hour commute, and those announcements generally are less than 5 seconds long. XMs announcements tend to be 'if you want to hear more of that artist, switch to channel x'. I guess if you are desperate to call something an ad that would count.
" Nothing worse than driving a ten year old car with outdated technology,"
Correction.. Nothing worse than driving a ten year old car with outdated technology, that started out with crap technology.
10 year old BMW X3 base model... The tech in this thing is still 3 years ahead of anything in a 2015 ford/gm/chrysler.
At 10 years plus they start to need vital parts replaced and being foreign they're fucking expensive/hard to source. So no, l a luxury/hi Q foreign auto is a bad plan when its more than 6 years old.
Also many nuclear power plants use QNX.
Blackberry and Ford - both going down so it makes sense.
But, seriously, companies are now expected to keep growing quarterly, or they're seen as stagnating by the stock market.
In mature markets, growth slows. This is normal. It is unreasonable to have unreasonable expectations of fast growth in markets that are mature. And companies chasing after unreasonable growth tend end up failing.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm dating myself, but...
Windows [3.1] Airline ~ The airport terminal is nice and brashly colorful with friendly stewards, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff ... then the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.
Fly NT ~ Everyone marches out onto the runway, says the password in unison, and forms the outline of an airplane. Then they all sit down and make a whooshing sound like they're flying.
Windows Airline 95 ~ Windows Airline customers are bused to a new terminal at the far end of the airport. The plane shows up late, but everyone can watch a commercial while they wait where a sales man tells them that Windows Airline 95 is "just as good as a Mac Airways." When it arrives, most of the luggage has to be left behind, because it doesn't fit in the cargo bays. The pilot walks down the aisle, collecting an additional fee to buy fuel for the jet. Many of the passengers give up and walk back to the Windows Airline window.
DOS Airlines ~ Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then push again, jump on again, and so on.
Mac Airways ~ All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don't need to know, and everything will be done for you without you having to know, so just shut up
Air OS/2 ~ To board the plane, you have your ticket stamped ten different times by standing in ten different lines. Then you fill out a form showing where you want to sit and whether the plane should look and feel like an ocean liner, a passenger train, or a bus. If you succeed in getting on board the plane and the plane succeeds in getting off the ground, you have a wonderful trip ... except for the times when the rudder and flaps get frozen in position, in which case you have time to say your prayers and get in crash position.
Unix Airline ~ Everyone brings one piece of the plane with them when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they're building.
Mach Express ~ There is no airplane. The passengers gather and shout for an airplane, then wait and wait and wait and wait. A bunch of people come, each carrying one piece of the plane with them. These people all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing about which pieces really belong together. The plane finally takes off, leaving the passengers on the ground waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. After the plane lands, the pilot telephones the passengers at the departing airport to inform that they have arrived.
Amiga Air ~ A small private airline with lots of in-flight movies, snacks, and other luxuries to keep the passengers happy. Unfortunately, after takeoff, the plane has nowhere to go and keeps flying in circles until it runs out of fuel and crashes. The few surviving passengers, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, ardently vow to keep flying the same plane once it's put back together.
Microsoft employee much?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A quick google and you might have found this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
it says QNX has been around since the 1980's confirming the posters comment that "QNX has been the choice for realtime OSs for a long time."
Instead you opt for the "anti-blackberry" comment which was very helpful.
If Ford isn't going to let me upgrade my soon to be outdated version of Sync which of you guys knows the uber-nerd whose got Ubuntu working on his 2014 Ford Mustang GT?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Coming from a known Linux zealot, that's rich!
So why'd you buy it then?
No, he meant operating by touch without taking your eyes off the road; he knows/remembers where volume or tuning knobs are and just reaches out to them almost instinctively.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I think you're misunderstanding. His car does not have any volume or tuning knobs, it's just a touchscreen. That's how all Ford cars with "MyFordTouch" systems are now. He was complaining about this, because his old car had regular knobs which as you point out can be operated almost instinctively without looking at them. So I was asking him why he bought the car when it has such a horrible mis-feature.
Personally, I will not buy a Ford, or any other car, which is like this. I don't care how good the rest of the car is, this makes it completely unusable and downright dangerous to operate in fact. I think they should even be banned as road hazards.
...Linux does have a RT version, in part supported by Ingo Molnar and Theodore Ts'o, but it does not see heavy use. In part, this has been because for a realtime OS to be successful, all the parts have to play ball, not just some...
Not really, the actual requirement is that nothing can block a real time process, which I believe the linux real time patches do in fact achieve quite reliably. It isn't important whether Firefox hangs up for a while, to anybody except the Firefox user. Perhaps realtime Linux has maximum latency higher than QNX (nobody has posted benmarks so far...) but certainly well within the range required for real time control of noncritical systems.
The real reason that the realtime patch set is not wildly popular is that a lot of devs and users tend to labor under the misaprehension that real time response isn't needed, because after all, their computer works pretty well without it. Actually, it doesn't as anybody involved with professional quality audio can attest, and if said users and devs would quit eding away the the evidence of their own eyes, they would notice frequent instances of nasty, unacceptable interactive latency. Amazing how selective memory works, isn't it?
For critical systems like engine and braking control, it is obvious that a "pure" realtime control system is needed, and be running on its own dedicated processor. For that, even QNX is arguably too complex, and too difficult to analyze to the extent required. But such critical systems have now become just a small part of what is going on in a modern car, with all the nav, infortainment, climate control, etc. For all this big bloaty stuff, realtime Linux is perfectly appropriate and would probably be a better choice overall than QNX due to the far greater range of hardware supported, more networking protocols, more nifty accelerators for applications, etc etc. Regards of whether Linux is the best choice (it is) QNX is still a damn good choice. Light years beyond anything Microsoft has had their fat hands in.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
vxWorks is more popular. It's also a horrible platform. I think vxWorks is more popular because its seemingly more low-level, whereas even if you're not using the POSIX API the QNX platform is more highly structured and sane--message passing rather than callback spaghetti. But many embedded developers are turned off by intelligent design. If they're not debugging race conditions all day they assume they're not doing their job. vxWorks supports more high-level application models, but it's not their selling point.
BTW, Microsoft minions are pretty much the only ones who bandy about the term "Linux zealot". Minion.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
... switched to BlackBerry's QNX, a real operating system
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Not really, the actual requirement is that nothing can block a real time process, which I believe the linux real time patches do in fact achieve quite reliably.
And there is where "play ball" comes in.
For example, xfs is, as far as I can tell, the only file system for Linux that supports realtime, and even that took about a decade to be ported from SGI to Linux. If you need to have your commit done within a certain time span, it doesn't help much if the OS can't fulfill that because it has to do a callout to a device that isn't rt capable.
Similar for IO devices - Serial and Firewire can play ball, but USB cannot. Most HDDs with a fixed rotational speed can, and while SSDs theoretically can, in practice they do not (an infrequent shuffling of blocks and re-initializing a sector can take a second or more, so even though the average speed is immensely faster than a HDD, most of them are unusable for rt unless placed behind a battery backed disk controller.)
Yeah, I would like to see more effort going in to LinuxRT. For now, I think QNX is probably the best bet, but I hope LinuxRT would gain more traction. What we do not need is even more non-predictable behavior (pulseaudio, anyone?), but consistency. Let Moore's law and good programming take care of speed, not tweaks that increases the average speed at the cost of even less predictable worst case.
If quality was the primary determinant in operating system choice, we'd be running OS/2 version 9 right now. Sometimes OSs have momentum, and vxWorks has a helluva lot of developers.
I'm not bashing QNX, but the fact is that the Blackberry faithful seem to have some sort of idea that QNX is some sort of dominant RTOS that dwarfs all others. It feeds into their bizarre religious need to have everyone believe that BB is going to make a comeback any day now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
yeah this is a real problem with the wife's plug-in hybrid Ford c-max -which we love otherwise.
with real buttons for preset radio stations you can change stations without taking your eyes off the road.
The cmax touchscreen has about 20 different menus/controls/indicators on most of the top level screens and it take too much time with eyes off the road to find the menu button you need and go down another level or two to change stations, scan, etc
not to mention that the tochscreen is centered and rather low on the front dashboard, so you have to look down and lean over to really be able to see it properly....
-I'm just sayin'
buttons are expensive and can't be reconfigured on the fly.
Someone better tell BMW that, then.
Mine has a row of buttons 1-6 that can be reassigned to whatever is on the screen by holding it in for a couple of seconds. So for me, 1 means "Take me home" and 3 means "NIght view on/off". Handy, and especially so because they're physical buttons, right next to my fingertips on the gear shift.
Operating a touch screen, on the other hand, requires you actually looking and stretching. Not good.
QNX had, if not has, been the basis of Cisco's iOS long before Blackberry bought it. Like the GP, I thought that Blackberry's acquisition would make QNX live and die by that phone, but luckily, it hasn't happened. It's been around for a while, like the GP says, and probably due to its microkernel, is remarkably stable. With the automotive sector adapting it, looks like not only will it live, but it will save Blackberry with it, even if the latter goes nowhere w/ its phones
My navigation system in my Subaru is great, and it's all touchscreen only, no buttons except outside the screen. The navigation works great, the bluetooth-phone connection works great - I can talk w/o taking my hands off the wheel, and as for Sirius, you have to specifically order it to get it. It's not like it comes standard.
If you're talking about more than a stereo, as in one of those stupid stereos (which SYNC is one of them) where it is also an HVAC controller, amongst other crap, there's even a standard for that: CAN bus.
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/CAN_bus
Sure, the wiring connector isn't the same, but as mentioned, they make adapters for that and they're not really the biggest pain in the ass.
I have no idea if Ford decided not to use CAN bus for SYNC. If they didn't, sucks for those who ended up with non-standard cars.
What you're looking for is DIN + CAN bus. Those are the actual standards, they exist, and they're real. As for a standard to connect the wiring up, sure, would be nice if it was there, but it's a few dollars connector. It should be the least of anyone's worries.
I agree. I have XM, and hardly any ads. There are 3 rock stations and 2 broadcast channels that I listen to, and while the latter does have ad breaks, the only ad breaks that the former has is about a certain band, or of another XM channel, and that too just lasts a few seconds. I'd take that anyday over what we have in AM or FM
AC, for obvious reasons.
I'm a former contractor for the last iteration of Sync. The reason why it felt like it was always in beta is because it always WAS in beta.
That's why when you go in for a tune up or an oil change they take a USB drive and flash new firmware into your car. It's a Microsoft product. OF COURSE it's going to be patches forever. Hell, it's worse than that even. It's Microsoft CE 6 Automotive pack running Adobe flash for the UI. Betcha you didn't know that! The whole design is - to my way of thinking - completely bonkers. I worked support for a bunch of web guys designing the UI. They couldn't read C/C++ and had to have me read it for them. "I need a function that returns the current time adjusted by time zone." And I'd have to go plowing through the source and nearly nonexistent documentation to find it for someone.
You'll note that if you take your Toyota in for an oil change they just change the oil, not give you the latest patches to their unfinished infotainment device in your dashboard every time. You can buy map updates if you like because the DVD doesn't know about new construction (obviously) but that's about it for Toyota. Know why? Because the thing is actually finished. That's how it's done.
Good lord, you should have seen the results from the focus team when we showed them a pre-delivery beta. It had about a 10% approval rating. People HATED it. Nothing worked.
Sync wasn't finished on the delivery date, it's not finished now, it's never gonna be finished.
We're throwing tech into these cars for the sake of tech.. not functionality.
They are throwing tech into these care for the sake of profit margins... not functionality.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Hey Detroit - stop trying. Give up. Let Apple/Android/[new startup] give me the tech I want. If you want to get fancy, give the phone a read-only API to the car's status.
You're right that the interface is probably better left to Apple and Google. Cars used to have standard din and "double-din" spots for radios. Thing is, Detroit isn't the only one dong a horrible job. The third party junk from the usual suspects (Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, etc.) is even worse. Last year we bought a new Pioneer AVIC-X930BT for a 2004 truck. The online reviews on it were generally favorable but I'm blown away by how terrible it is compared to say, the basic system in a Chevy Cruze rent-a-car.
1) The device takes about 30 seconds to boot up when you start the truck. It's apparently based on Windows CE.
2) Once it boots, it then takes another 30 seconds or so for it to initialize bluetooth.
3) Once bluetooth is initialized and connected, it goes through another "connecting" process to connect to bluetooth audio, but it will not automatically start playing music. You have to manually press the play button after it "un-grays out". If you're driving on a short trip you're probably halfway to your destination now.
4) It supports USB sticks too. After the boot process it always re-scans the entire memory stick. If you have a lot of songs it takes about a minute before the music starts playing.
Seriously, does Pioneer not do any usability testing?
It has all kinds of other gimmickry, including "AppRadio" that's supposed to let you use your phone's interface as an app but it's so clunky we'd never, ever use it.
well, there is one component that is pretty standard and easilly upgradable, the stereo. I just purchased a used car (2008 miata). The stereo came with a 30 pin ipod connector tucked in the glovebox. Ive outfitted it with the required lighting adapter to work with my phone, but i wouldn't mind having a modern stereo that can do bluetooth. The upgrade might be painless, but there's one big issue: THIEVES. The big selling point of the kind of crummy factory stereo is it's good enough and nobody is going to want to steal it.
There's an app, I mean, a product for that!
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/al...
And yes, you raise a great point about thieves. When I used to use aftermarket radios I was always stressed about them being stolen. These days I just use aftermarket speakers / amps with the factory head units.
I rented a car a couple of months ago that had Ford Sync. I was very surprised that it had the Siri voice. I tried talking to it like it was Siri but it only had options related to the car radio, and BT pairing. I would have thought that Apple would have trademarked the voice.
None of the details you mentioned prevent you from writing a realtime application. To avoid indeterminate swap-in time, you mlock your application (which mlocks any linked libraries as well, so keep your library usage tight). Any IO the application needs should be offloaded to non-realtime threads. You can do it, it just requires competence. Just as programming in a "proper" realtime operating system does.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'll go one better, and not have my infotainment system hooked up to anything in the motortrain. That's just scary.
Ford has their own engine control computer, They're up to EEC-VII now, and they've ben running on PowerPC since the first 40x series came out in the mid 90's.
Totally. I booted that floppy. In my HPUX, Solaris, AIX group we used to worship the amazing QNX!
No they don't, in fact they are easy to repair even 15 years later and parts are brain dead easy to find if you can operate a computer.
Do you even know anything about them or are you just spewing made up BS?
You are very correct re. the difference between a RT operating system and not RT. That has nothing to do with Sync specifically or infotainment in general.
Sync does not have any control over engine management, traction control or any other safety critical system (and neither does any other infotainment system). Not sure about Sync, but typically you cannot even update safety critical systems from the infotainment system. An infotainment system may have read-only access to report "interesting" data, but that's all.
There is no need for your infotainment system beyond responding to the UI and performing the tasks you need, just like your phone, etc.
The NT kernel seems to leak resources uncontrollably but intermittently enough that someone might think it is not too bad. The issue that I have seen the object manager will leak objects intermittently. It isn't just stuff like handles to a device for one vendor but things like events and mutexes. I am sure NT would misbehave more and it has historically had awful latency issues. That doesn't mean the it still does (I haven't checked it), but it took them up to Windows Vista just to get a scheduler that isn't 1970s technology.
I rented a car with Sync and it then wanted to tie the phone into 911; I declined. But then every time I started the car this grating woman's voice would come on and tell me that the emergency connection wasn't active. That plus a general late 90s interface told me two things. Microsoft is just coasting and that Ford is run by morons. After sticking with Sync for all these years yet finally dumping it Ford must have at least one halfway witted human there but it also tells me that Microsoft is becoming less relevant than ever.
Adobe switched to a subscription model and is making a fortune. Microsoft is switching to a subscription model and is about to find out that people used Windows because they couldn't bother to find anything better. With a subscription model trying to reach into everyone's pockets MS is about to find out that by giving people an incentive to dump Windows that windows will be dumped in record numbers.
What I love are the grand statements that MS puts out with every new product. I recall MS asskissing commentators breathlessly saying that the new Windows phones were going to have 30% market share by the end of 2015. Let me see, what is the MS mobile market share right now after all those billions in marketing..... oh look it is 2.5 percent after having dropped 20% year on year.
As for Ford being morons, lets see they jumped from a sinking ship with 2% market share to one with 0%. Good job, everyone's a winner.
Yay! Ford ditches Microsoft for Unix! (Well, Unix-like.... kinda like Linux is, although not it isn't open source, nor free) (OK, well, I would be much more happy if it were a switch to Linux or BSD... maybe even Android Linux).
QNX has been landing airplanes since 1988.
exec("/bin/sh", 0, CLONE_PERM)
Oops, I just hacked your car.
source: http://www.juliandunn.net/2006...
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
That is why Android auto and CarPlay both run atop of QNX. Something Apple and Google downplay.
I was under the impression CarPlay was something like an X server for your iPhone. As in it runs on whatever your infotainment system happens to be.
Why is it notable what that system is? The whole point of these is to offload infotainment functions to your mobile devices, and turn the car hardware into a dumb terminal.
Heh, I bet most _remote_ X servers run on Windows... but who gives a crap, we don't think about it that way, we think about the apps.
And there you have it. The business world is being run by too big to fail idiots who got a lucky spin of the wheel once and now fancy themselves to be financial geniuses. Meanwhile, large old and once well respected solid companies are splitting apart, getting bought out, or just plain failing left and right.
Are mostly thermoplastic.
And unlike the cheap american brands they and mercedes started using them on a lot of cars in the mid to late 90s, whereas the Americans were too lazy to get off their asses until at least the early '00s.
The reason I bring this up? Because between 50-150k miles you WILL have a thermoplastic part crack, leak, shatter, or otherwise fail. With the potential to take out your entire engine, since the majority of them are not in visually inspectable locations and may not fail during your daily inspections. Even worse, they tend to cost as much or more than metal equivalents.
Consider this a public service announcement, and make sure if you have a car in that 50-150k range that you make sure all of those parts have been inspected or replaced. The metal parts of the engines may last for 400k, but the plastic parts sure as hell don't.
Fusion owner here
Fusion 2012 owner here. This was the last year they had models with traditional knobs/controls. I intentionally purchased a model which did NOT have a touchscreen. Sync still works well for me. Car manufacturers are not stupid. Tactile feedback has proven itself over the years. Give them feedback the touchscreen is a bad idea, they'll reconsider.
So the AV interface is where QNX makes sense? I'm with you for something that has hard realtime constraints and safety critical responsibilities, but a pretty GUI that directs which MP3 to play, or adjusts audio inputs? It seems like a mismatch to me. Pick something with lots of cheap developers, or pick something with a metric shit ton of development tools, or...
Where I work, we use both Linux and QNX in hardened industrial touchscreen arm devices. Unsurprisingly, QNX is lighter, but being proprietary causes us grief.
As for speed, sorry, but overwhelmingly the applications execution determines that, and since both use the same instruction set, there isn't much difference.
What QNX does offer, and some people really like, is less choice. It's stripped down, has few frills, and is realtime by default. QNX generally runs in a smaller footprint, but given current RAM sizes these days, who cares.
Our Linux application UI is HTML/JS, using a custom rolled buildroot-based OS that uses Websockets communicating with a WebGL-enabled luakit browser. This was a bit of work to setup initially, but very straightforward as many other have already worn that wagon rut for us. It is interesting to note however that the kernel is tiny compared to the rest of the OS (1/2 of our 4 hour build time is one packages: WebKit).
For QNX, we are not developing the primary application (the customer is) . However, based on our experiences building free software for QNX, the thought of trying to deliver the above software stack in QNX is truly sobering.
Linux just has a massively larger talent pool from which to draw upon when trying to solve problems. And there are just some things you will never be able to do under QNX as you don't have kernel source. Plus, some of us have been around long enough to have witnessed first hand the vendor lock-in horror show.
So the point is, the decision to use QNX over Linux is based mostly on marketing. if Linux gives the same results, for similar resource inputs, why would you willingly submit to vendor lock-in? The part that is not marketing, as far as I can tell, is less choice. Which in the hands of the less adept, can mean less risk.
I'm the AC from just above, "I used to work on SYNC".
I agree with your your entire post. Microsoft had very little to do with any of it. They provided source code to CE and that was about it. And I have no idea where the flash programmers came from. I never met any of them, I'd just get phone calls.
But I do have just a quick point to clear up. Bsquare is not composed of former Microsoft people. We were a Microsoft gold level partner, but that's about it. And as for working on the SYNC software we had to partner with MS to do so, since they had the source code. So since this was obviously very important IP, every Bsquare person that worked on the project had to be vetted through MS human resources and go through the interview process. Essentially they faux-hired us as contractors on a person-by-person basis. So depending on your point of view we are all former Microsoft employees since we had to be vetted as contractors, if that counts. We're all former MS contractors now, but we weren't heading in to the project.
On the plus side I did get a smart card with my picture on it and 6 months access to MS internal servers. It's a nice souvenir. I show it to other software geeks from time to time and they go "oooooooh." :)
I've been a diehard supporter of QNX for 14 years, and I'm sure it goes back twice as far, again. Until a few years ago I was always getting updates, but they stopped and I can't log in anymore either. Maybe Blackberry did something, dunno for sure . since I can't remember the email I had back then or my pass I could be at fault. Even so, it's just a rock solid, ultra stable system. I thought it was the best move BB could ever do , aquiring QNX.. And now Ford is using it. Good move... Bank ATMs should have switched to it too, why they went from OS/2 to Windows flummoxed me..
As far as features go, I don't think think niche OSs need the breadth of features, or even hardware support that linux has. When you have something like QNX, you probably don't even write driver support until a customer needs it, It also probably runs on a lot less CPUs than linux. When you don't have a general purpose kernel, there isn't as much need for support, and with that, complexity. I will agree Linux is the best general purpose kernel, but at many niche tasks its beaten.
QNX has been the choice of OS for onboard computing for cars. Mabey there is a reason for that, and its that QNX has a niche.
You're confusing the kernel with the windows manager. QNX runs the car. It links the engine and transmission to the cabin A/C and anything electronic. Without QNX the car will have a hard time starting/running. The Auto maker works with QNX and other third parties to develop a proprietary UX which is why you never knew the Audi, Volvo, BMW, Chrysler, etc. you were driving was running QNX. Apple is partnered with QNX on CarPlay. So it makes sense that Ford wants the added compatibility QNX will bring.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You are correct. However Apple developed the CarPlay spec with QNX's assistance. Basically Apple copied the MirrorLink API and made their own version but they had to make sure QNX had a CarPlay plugin since the majority of cars today run on QNX. So to dismiss the QNX base is to deny that without QNX's help CarPlay would still be a concept instead of a shipping product. While the phone is handling the interface QNX is still coordinating the connection. Ford is likely switching to QNX at least partly to get CarPlay into their cars.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"something that can kill or seriously injure" Funny that, since many military ships, vehicles, aircraft, missiles, satellites and whatnot run on Linux.
I have no trouble running a Windows 7 desktop for months without a reboot. Typically I'll work all day and sleep it at night. That's a desktop which is hammering resources for most of the day. Some poxy media system is not going to trouble a kernel even assuming the kernel leaked (which I doubt any modern kernel does).
I suspect part of the reason for the choice of QNX has nothing to do with technical merit or niches. It's out of a religious belief in capitalism, and doubts that a "communist" effort like Linux can really be sustained. Or in other words, FUD. Microsoft has exploited this belief very well. What does Ford use internally on the desktop? Large companies as a rule are conservative, and Ford is a bit more conservative than average for a large company and an automaker. Expect it's mostly Windows. That they recently were partnered with MS practically guarantees it.
As to the niche QNX occupies, yes, Linux doesn't fit well, but there are free choices. There are other microkernel based OSes that have the advantage of being open source and free. Minix 3, for instance. Better to put resources towards making Minix 3 into a quality, realtime OS, and formally prove its correctness, than accept never being allowed to examine the QNX source code. I should think part of Ford's deal with QNX is access to the source code.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Linux, and the even more explicitly socialist GNU is widely accepted as the de-facto server operating system by commerical outfits large and small. Partners in the Linux foundation are far more powerful, influential, and even conservative companies than Ford.(thus helping prove that mutualism is indeed a viable buisness model, delighting me to no end.)
Even samsung is releasing Tizen, an GNU/Linux based in vehicle infotainment system.
While intresting, Long before linux rose to promenence, QNX has be the automotive operating system. I would like them to use FOSS, but at the same time I am not going to resort of conspiracy, and I understand why they went with QNX
Using an operating system created by a company that actually made itself irrelevant and is on it's last dying breath... that has got to be better than anything else... seems legit... way to go Ford... one question... who was the asshat who decided that one?