Slashdot Mirror
cURL Author Is Getting Tech Support Emails From Car Owners (daniel.haxx.se)
AmiMoJo writes:
The author of the popular cURL utility has been receiving requests for help from frustrated car owners having difficulty with their infotainment systems... [B]ecause his email address is listed on the "about" screen, as required by the cURL license, some desperate users are reaching out to him in the hopes of finding a solution.
It sounds annoying to receive complaints like "why there delay between audio and video when connect throw Bluetooth and how to fix it." But though he rarely answers them, Stenberg writes that "I actually find these emails interesting, sometimes charming and they help me connect to the reality many people experience out there."
In a post titled "I have toyota corola," Stenberg says "I suspect my email address is just about the only address listed. This occasionally makes desperate users who have tried everything to eventually reach out to me. They can't fix their problem but since my email exists in their car, surely I can!"
It sounds annoying to receive complaints like "why there delay between audio and video when connect throw Bluetooth and how to fix it." But though he rarely answers them, Stenberg writes that "I actually find these emails interesting, sometimes charming and they help me connect to the reality many people experience out there."
In a post titled "I have toyota corola," Stenberg says "I suspect my email address is just about the only address listed. This occasionally makes desperate users who have tried everything to eventually reach out to me. They can't fix their problem but since my email exists in their car, surely I can!"
>why there delay between audio and video when connect throw Bluetooth
My 2014 Honda has this problem, and it's exasperating. You hit "next track" on the steering wheel when listening to music from your phone on Bluetooth, and it takes a full 3 seconds to respond because of the delay.
I have no idea why the car stereo system feels the need to buffer that much audio. Maybe they want to absolutely make sure bluetooth audio doesn't ever skip? Even a one second buffer should be long enough for this, though.
Watching video in a car is generally a bad idea, so it's not a deal breaker, but still.
doesn't even work because of a software problem, you know cars are now too damn complicated.
...that clause that requires keeping the license and email address with derivative software clearly had some surprisingly results.
Why can't we just have a line-in input on a 3.5 mm jack as part of every damned car audio system? (Spare me the iPhone jokes.) My car has one that's in the center console along with a lighter plug, so I can actually power my Bluetooth audio receiver and connect it to the aux input. It's great. But when I rent a car, they all seem to have dropped the aux input. Bluetooth is good, but it's not that good yet.
Many years ago I wrote a simple webmail server. My email address wasn't even on the login screen, just my company name. There have been more than one occasion over the years when some customer of an internet provider that used my webmail server needed technical support, and apparently managed to Google the company name, find my email address, and ask me for a password reset, or something along those lines...
And got into politics. After all, if I had to suffer human stupidity, I might as well be grossly overpaid for it.
This only seems fair because of the abusive EULA that the developer chose to use. Why must open source developers use ridiculous EULAs like this and the GPL?
I think it's neat that he gets to see exactly how his software is being used and evolving. If his email wasn't included would he have ever known it was being used in vehicle entertainment systems? Probably not. Seems like people want to give him crap here for absolutely no reason. Everyone should instead put all the blame solely on the vehicle manufacturer for providing such piss poor support that users are reaching at straws trying to contact the cURL author out of desperation. Perspective.
First!
The only use for the curl utility is to download files from the internet, and I find it frightening that my automobile would need to do this. What files is it downloading? And curl has a steady stream of security vulnerabilities (see https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/curl). Do these security vulnerabilities get patched? How? Are the patches downloaded automatically, or do I need to take the car into the dealer to get it patched?
hi i just found you're website with google searc i got the same issue on my car sterio too. wats the answer? email me bak asap
if we weren't trying to technology the crap out of everything we wouldn't have so many problems.
It's an absolute factual truism, the more complicated you make something the more problems you will have and these "entertainment systems" are living proof.
Apparently in the mind of engineers a simple on/off knob, one which can be easily felt and operated without taking ones eyes off the road is now verboten. Instead, one now has to look at a screen, in the middle of the car, hope they find the correct icon to select, touch some more icons to get closer to what they want, possible go through a menu system and if they're lucky, at that point can finally listen to the radio or play music.
Whatever happened to, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why are the car companies even offering infotainment?
They should stick to making their cars ride smoothly and include a generic multimedia dock for customers to put in their own 3rd-party systems.
The 3rd-party systems could be replaced every few years for people who want the latest and greatest.
This may lead to increased stereo thefts but a lot less future negative image for the car companies.
If a modern youth's first car is a 10-year-old [insert model and make here] with a sucky stereo, he/she is unlikely to buy that make ever again.
That sounds an awful lot like telling him he might as well stick his head in the sand.
Given he isn't experiencing this problem with anything other than the car, it's likely the car, though he might not have any other devices.
While *typically* with major open source projects it's easy to contact the developers, the license certainly doesn't guarantee that. What it DOES guarantee is that you're not up a creek without a paddle when the company goes out of business or drops the product. Any good programmer who knows the domain and language can fix or even customize the software for you.
It is time car companies gave up and do what they do best. That is MAKE CARS!
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he immediately sold the printing division, pippin, and killed the clone market. Why? He said let HP and Xerox do what they do best and have us do what WE do what is best.
Car companies do not know how to make UI's for car stereos or write programming. Going to Indian shops to save money or bringing in h1b1 visas to write the UI for cars do not work either. That is not what they know best.
Let Apple and Google do the stereo part and no I have NEVER HEARD anyone say BOY THAT STEREO DASHBOARD IS WHY I BOUGHT THIS car only X has it! I mean really??
Now I have heard to avoid Ford like the plague. The newer ones are coming with Iplay and Android Auto which is a plus for the suckers who want to loose money on a rapidly depreciating asset but for us who only buy used it will be awhile. WIth Android and IOS you also get audiobooks and other cool features and synchronization with the cloud.
http://saveie6.com/
Having the source is not a panacea. It can take a lot of time to get familiar enough with the code to fix it. Just pay someone else to do that? You then have the hassle of hiring him, time for him to ramp up, and then he costs money. Small custom work like that is rarely cost effective.
Closed software stinks and so does open source. 20 years ago I thought open source could give us much higher quality, but it hasn't. It has -generally- given us free software of junky quality. The immediate cost of software is lower, but the junky quality (missing basic features, no or crap incomplete documentation) is an ongoing cost you never shake. It could've been so much better than this.
I just connect my earphones or onboard speakers to my smartphone and listen to my favorite music from the phone itself. I Just connect or recharge my phone to the smokelighter plug while I am inside the car.
Why does a car need the curl utility to make bluetooth work?
Oh dear. I love that this is now a thing! Back in the days when remote controls worked through long wires, you could pretty much guarantee that when you pressed a button on the remote, whatever was supposed to happen would happen immediately. Sometimes there was an electromechanical switch in the way which could take a while to operate. Over the years the remotes became "wireless". The earlier ones with Infra-red connection were still quick, depending on complexity and implementation. Dedicated control hardware could help. Now we have digital media devices, which are just computers of various types, with Bluetooth connectivity. Low and behold the whole thing has become slower, flaky and very clunky! So what is happening in the car? You press a physical button on the steering wheel. The car's distributed computer system detects somehow, and sends it to the required device over a data bus of some kind. This at the very least, means detecting a physical switch, turning this into a code, putting the code on a data bus (I believe the CAN-BUS system is asynchronous? I don't know.) The control system decodes this off the bus, looks up where it has to send the command, finds that it is a paired Bluetooth device, re-encodes it and send it to the Bluetooth transmitter. The Bluetooth system has to connect, exchange handshakes, send the command. The device decodes the command and executes it. Many stages to go through. They may each be fast, but there will be some latency. So you press the button, and it takes a second or two for a response. this is called control lag. Many years ago (I think over 20) I was at a demo for some remote control gear for professional film cameras. The device was a wireless remote to allow the camera assistant to operate the iris, focus and zoom on the lens without being tied to the camera by a cable. The operators hated it because of the delay. This was a direct, dedicated, radio link over at most about 5 metres (15 feet for those on the wrong side of the water!). I am not a camera operator and I hated it. Recently I tried out some Bluetooth headphones with remote for my music player and gave up after 20 minutes for the same reason. Slow and clunky. Quite frankly I can't see how you could make this any faster without designing dedicated hardware so the whole system was integrated. As far as I have been able to find out, these car entertainment systems us off-the-shelf hardware, and in some cases the processing is being done in more than one device. You could integrate the hardware and have only on software package, but it would still be slower that doing it with a wired control. I can't see a solution that the manufacturers would go for. Cost alone has driven the way things are now. Very sad. Always two steps forward, and one step back.
Best wishes,
Sid
People spend way too much on this kind of crap in automobiles. I made the mistake of buying a LTZ Chevy Cruze used, and that system is totally junk. Auto climate, Bluetooth, Radio, Satellite. It's all junk, and takes up so much dash room, and yet is so worthless. These OEM head units are cash cows for auto makers. Yet they do very little to support them after the sale, and believe me down the road you'll get even less support. My Cruze connects to our iPhones, just fine but going down the road they frequently disconnect and re connect. Of course dealer doesn't care anymore because its out of warranty. Other than saying others have similar problems. Sadly people are paying for a lot and getting trashy and poor quality electronics in these systems.
on a different vein but highly related i was just telling some people about why forks are a pain in the ass to deal with when the core project is still active. people will email the original project asking them to fix problems the fork messed up. its super annoying.
There were times people have to go to the deep-web to hire someone to fix their grades boost their credit score and hack their boss or spouses email. Now there is no need for that anymore, because i just hired ecodatasolution@dr.com and they did a pretty awesome job as a certfied ethical hacker who does email interception, Url removal, credit score boosting and grade change. He is the real deal!