I know a guy who ended up ripping most of the automation out of his car when it failed. There actually was a mixture adjustment and manual choke lever.
If the kid next door re-writes the firmware in his car, I'm fine with that. Since it won't even likely start after that, it should be quite safe.
After the analysis of Toyota's firmware, I'm not sure I feel absolutely safe with the auto makers software on board.
Note, if the car is designed properly, no amount of software changes will make the car unsafe. It may make it blow the engine or shred the transmission, but it will still stop every time. Perhaps the possibility that the kid next door might customize the firmware will remind the designers of that very important rule of design safety.
They could take it a step further and make it in 2 layers like autopilots do. The core of it is developed very carefully and changed rarely. It's job is to keep the plane within safe parameters. The cutting edge stuff goes on top of that. It flys with more finesse. It can economize, avoid making passengers seasick, allow the pilot to set a destination and let it do the rest, etc. If it attempts to fly the plane outside of safe parameters, the other layer shoots it in the head and tells the pilot to take over.
So you change a few of the parameters of your electric car and some of the safety systems stop working right. E.g., you didn't realize that a parameter used for maximum current for acceleration interacted with the regenerative braking. I.e., you go fast but your brakes don't work as well.
You mean the regenerative portion doesn't work and you end up failing to recapture the energy.
Or you change that acceleration parameter and your motors burn up because of the overcurrent.
Bad news for the idiot but I don't see a public interest here.
Or you change some other parameter that's based on a hardware limitation and you break the hardware and expect the dealer to fix it under warrantee. You blame the manufacturer, but it's your fault.
Your firmware doesn't match the factory and they can see you re-flashed. Bye Bye warranty.
Bricked car? Flash back to factory. Bricking is for cheap routers and PCs. Real embedded hardware can be re-flashed even if you completely wipe the firmware and then power cycle. (So can the router, but you have to solder pins on the JTAG pad).
The guy behind you took his car to Bubba's reel cheep breaks. Or was relieved when that annoying squeaky noise when he applied the brakes finally stopped on it's own. Guy behind you is stealth texting.
Or, since he didn't know how to get the brakes into maintenance mode, so he used a tire iron and a hammer to make it go back together...
Given that, I'm not so sure I'm all that worried about the guy somehow managing to go from reading a few things out and sending a few commands to re-flashing his brakes. As risk goes, it's a drop in the bucket.
Now, let's look at reprogrammable devices. How many average Joes reflash with Cyanogen mod? Do you know anyone running Windows with a patched kernel? It's possible to reprogram the ECS now. A few people do, but most do not.
At one time, we used to actually count the cost of each and every machine instruction executed and of each and every byte used. That's how a computer less powerful than your calculator was able to land the Apollo Lunar Module.
Binary to BCD conversion and back wasn't the way you did it. The values were stored in BCD form and the computations were performed in BCD. Processors had a specific mode that did the BCD math in hardware.
Note that many of those same processors had NO hardware divider. The divisions by 10 to convert binary to decimal were very expensive in cycles.
Retail prices drop, but retail value falls as well. Which is better, a $500 mower that'll last ten years or ten $100 mowers that'll last a year each? The latter is often what you get at Walmart.
Of course that doesn't matter much for Happy Meal toys, but lead content might. Interestingly, those cheap plastic toys aren't all that labor intensive...
The companies that offshore are sharing SOME of the savings, but they seem to be keeping a fair bit for themselves as well.
Start with a good programmer. Give him incomplete requirements and demand a time estimate RIGHT NOW. Once you have extracted that, carve it in stone. Finally, sprinkle in a heap of additional requirements from marketing.
The real problem is outsourcing. Big surprise, you grant a project to one of the usual suspects (government contractors) you get the typical overruns.
SpaceX saves a ton of money by keeping the project management in the same house as the actual work.
If NASA is allowed to bring a layer or two in house they can probably start being on time and reasonably within budget too. Especially if they don't have to make concessions to pork.
Blame the victim all you want and look at the bankers with rose colored glasses all you want, but you are in fantasy land.
Don't try blaming the feds either. Would you blame the feds if they don't have a law against sticking your head under a running lawn mower? If they don't specifically say you shouldn't wedge a fire hose into your mouth and turn the hydrant on full?
While we're at it, it's also not the fault of the Easter Bunny, Santa, or Cupid. It's not because their parents didn't buy them a pony.
The English language page is far less informative. I can understand the assumption, but I agree it doesn't seem to hold as often as I would expect.
Alas, the first cite is a 404 page now.
I believe there is some confusion in the figures. That too is understandable since we have a number of strange (to me) corner cases here. For example, a prescription drugs that are nothing more than large doses of fish oil and niacin. (The niacin costs $600). Both of those are sold over the counter as supplements (not categorized as drugs at all) for a tiny fraction of the cost (perhaps 2%), yet the prescription drugs sell.
I'm not sure how they account for drugs where the patent has expired but the name brand is still sold at the inflated price in spite of the fully generic form being much cheaper. That situation is improving somewhat only because the patient is allowed to ask the pharmacist to provide the generic version of a prescribed name brand in many cases.
Where did I call the house flippers evil? They did nothing wrong. It's the loan flippers I have an issue with.
You seem pretty eager to hang a halo on the banker's horns for some reason. They're the ones who talked first time buyers into the bad loans and then sold them off like a hot potato to someone else who sliced and diced it and mashed it back together with other loans, slipped a fiver under the table to get that glop stamped AAA, and finally sold it again to experienced professionals in finance who ACTUALLY should be expected to know better.
All but those first time buyers had every reason to understand that one day the music would stop and that an awful lot of chairs had been removed.
What equity? They were under water. That means negative equity. It means sell the house and you still owe money.
What they lost is a chance to buy a starter home that they would actually build equity in and actually be able to eventually pay off (or trade up).
There were some speculators that did quite well during the bubble, but that wasn't for a first home. They got HUGE loans and flipped the properties near their inflated peak value.
When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.
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In a healthy market they would be forced to turn on the high end features at the base price anyway. It's a good reason to force openness.
I know a guy who ended up ripping most of the automation out of his car when it failed. There actually was a mixture adjustment and manual choke lever.
It ran well that way for years.
If the kid next door re-writes the firmware in his car, I'm fine with that. Since it won't even likely start after that, it should be quite safe.
After the analysis of Toyota's firmware, I'm not sure I feel absolutely safe with the auto makers software on board.
Note, if the car is designed properly, no amount of software changes will make the car unsafe. It may make it blow the engine or shred the transmission, but it will still stop every time. Perhaps the possibility that the kid next door might customize the firmware will remind the designers of that very important rule of design safety.
They could take it a step further and make it in 2 layers like autopilots do. The core of it is developed very carefully and changed rarely. It's job is to keep the plane within safe parameters. The cutting edge stuff goes on top of that. It flys with more finesse. It can economize, avoid making passengers seasick, allow the pilot to set a destination and let it do the rest, etc. If it attempts to fly the plane outside of safe parameters, the other layer shoots it in the head and tells the pilot to take over.
So you change a few of the parameters of your electric car and some of the safety systems stop working right. E.g., you didn't realize that a parameter used for maximum current for acceleration interacted with the regenerative braking. I.e., you go fast but your brakes don't work as well.
You mean the regenerative portion doesn't work and you end up failing to recapture the energy.
Or you change that acceleration parameter and your motors burn up because of the overcurrent.
Bad news for the idiot but I don't see a public interest here.
Or you change some other parameter that's based on a hardware limitation and you break the hardware and expect the dealer to fix it under warrantee. You blame the manufacturer, but it's your fault.
Your firmware doesn't match the factory and they can see you re-flashed. Bye Bye warranty.
Bricked car? Flash back to factory. Bricking is for cheap routers and PCs. Real embedded hardware can be re-flashed even if you completely wipe the firmware and then power cycle. (So can the router, but you have to solder pins on the JTAG pad).
Yeah, the Z80 was more or less a super 8080. After the 6502, all those registers was amazing.
Did you see the video from years ago in Tiananmen square? The student blocking the tank?
While the Party officially didn't bend, unofficially China isn't even actually Communist anymore.
They learned from the USSR that you can only push so far and then it all blows apart.
The guy behind you took his car to Bubba's reel cheep breaks. Or was relieved when that annoying squeaky noise when he applied the brakes finally stopped on it's own. Guy behind you is stealth texting.
Or, since he didn't know how to get the brakes into maintenance mode, so he used a tire iron and a hammer to make it go back together...
Given that, I'm not so sure I'm all that worried about the guy somehow managing to go from reading a few things out and sending a few commands to re-flashing his brakes. As risk goes, it's a drop in the bucket.
Now, let's look at reprogrammable devices. How many average Joes reflash with Cyanogen mod? Do you know anyone running Windows with a patched kernel? It's possible to reprogram the ECS now. A few people do, but most do not.
At one time, we used to actually count the cost of each and every machine instruction executed and of each and every byte used. That's how a computer less powerful than your calculator was able to land the Apollo Lunar Module.
Binary to BCD conversion and back wasn't the way you did it. The values were stored in BCD form and the computations were performed in BCD. Processors had a specific mode that did the BCD math in hardware.
Note that many of those same processors had NO hardware divider. The divisions by 10 to convert binary to decimal were very expensive in cycles.
You may be thinking of the Z-80 that had a half carry flag and a DAA (decimal adjust accumulator) instruction.
Retail prices drop, but retail value falls as well. Which is better, a $500 mower that'll last ten years or ten $100 mowers that'll last a year each? The latter is often what you get at Walmart.
Of course that doesn't matter much for Happy Meal toys, but lead content might. Interestingly, those cheap plastic toys aren't all that labor intensive...
The companies that offshore are sharing SOME of the savings, but they seem to be keeping a fair bit for themselves as well.
At least until healthcare and rioting in the streets eats you alive.
Inmtroducing the Open Open Crypto Audit Project Audit Project.
Start with a good programmer. Give him incomplete requirements and demand a time estimate RIGHT NOW. Once you have extracted that, carve it in stone. Finally, sprinkle in a heap of additional requirements from marketing.
And of course, MongoDB is web scale!
I see what you did there...
Then you should be delighted that "exhibit A" is now on public display. There's a fact for you.
They need to train without them but use them when actually doing their job.
The real problem is outsourcing. Big surprise, you grant a project to one of the usual suspects (government contractors) you get the typical overruns.
SpaceX saves a ton of money by keeping the project management in the same house as the actual work.
If NASA is allowed to bring a layer or two in house they can probably start being on time and reasonably within budget too. Especially if they don't have to make concessions to pork.
Blame the victim all you want and look at the bankers with rose colored glasses all you want, but you are in fantasy land.
Don't try blaming the feds either. Would you blame the feds if they don't have a law against sticking your head under a running lawn mower? If they don't specifically say you shouldn't wedge a fire hose into your mouth and turn the hydrant on full?
While we're at it, it's also not the fault of the Easter Bunny, Santa, or Cupid. It's not because their parents didn't buy them a pony.
The English language page is far less informative. I can understand the assumption, but I agree it doesn't seem to hold as often as I would expect.
Alas, the first cite is a 404 page now.
I believe there is some confusion in the figures. That too is understandable since we have a number of strange (to me) corner cases here. For example, a prescription drugs that are nothing more than large doses of fish oil and niacin. (The niacin costs $600). Both of those are sold over the counter as supplements (not categorized as drugs at all) for a tiny fraction of the cost (perhaps 2%), yet the prescription drugs sell.
I'm not sure how they account for drugs where the patent has expired but the name brand is still sold at the inflated price in spite of the fully generic form being much cheaper. That situation is improving somewhat only because the patient is allowed to ask the pharmacist to provide the generic version of a prescribed name brand in many cases.
Where did I call the house flippers evil? They did nothing wrong. It's the loan flippers I have an issue with.
You seem pretty eager to hang a halo on the banker's horns for some reason. They're the ones who talked first time buyers into the bad loans and then sold them off like a hot potato to someone else who sliced and diced it and mashed it back together with other loans, slipped a fiver under the table to get that glop stamped AAA, and finally sold it again to experienced professionals in finance who ACTUALLY should be expected to know better.
All but those first time buyers had every reason to understand that one day the music would stop and that an awful lot of chairs had been removed.
What equity? They were under water. That means negative equity. It means sell the house and you still owe money.
What they lost is a chance to buy a starter home that they would actually build equity in and actually be able to eventually pay off (or trade up).
There were some speculators that did quite well during the bubble, but that wasn't for a first home. They got HUGE loans and flipped the properties near their inflated peak value.
Again as well, supposed serious grown-ups investing other people's money.
When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.
Which Wikipedia article is that? I'd like to follow the cite since other figures suggest much less generics.