A lot of new cars have "keyless" ignitions. There is no key, there is no switch. There is a push button that activates when you get your key (which has an RFID chip in it) somewhere inside the car. You push the button, the engine starts. Push it again and the engine stops. Except when you're driving down the road, in which case you have to hold the button down for 3 seconds to have the car stop. And how much do you want to bet that the button only sends a "request" to the control computer to turn the engine off? Cars have been changing a lot recently.
Why do you believe that you can do it if the electronics are malfunctioning? There is a big difference between old transmissions that had a mechanical linkage between the shifter and the gears and a fully electronic transmission where all you're doing is moving a switch.
Why do you believe that the switched and connection between the switches and the transmission and the control code in the transmission are perfect?
Or something else to happen under the hood. My '77 Datsun pickup truck (purchased used, ten years old at this time) stuck full throttle coming down the freeway on me - I was giving it the gas going up a hill and when I came over the crest it kept going. Fortunately it didn't have enough power to go over 80 and it was a manual and it didn't have power steering. I shifted into neutral, turned it off and coasted to the side of the road.
What had happened? Well, back in those days, air conditioning sometimes came as a dealer add-on. When the AC is running and the engine is idling, you need to boost the idle level a bit or the engine will stall. The way this was done was with a little linkage that came off the throttle body that got pulled on by a little vacuum powered piston. The linkage broke, for some fool reason it was hinged on the throttle body, and it fell down and got stuck. I pulled it out and removed it (the AC didn't work anyway) and drove off.
Not only is firmware a single point of failure but it's damned hard to look at code and say "that's crap". If you get a look at a bad mechanical design it's usually pretty obvious that it's crap. Code is all packaged up in neat little black boxes.
And what is doing the three second count? How much do you want to bet that it's a subroutine somewhere, not a hard counter? Add in that it's three seconds if the car is moving and just a single press if it's not and I would bet money that it is just a request to the computer to please turn the car off if you feel like it.
I'm still trying to figure out what the point to these keyless ignitions is. I rented a car with one a while back and it was kind of cute that I didn't have to put the key in but didn't really save anything. In fact, I like having keys out of my pockets while driving so I wound up sticking the key in this little niche on the dashboard anyhow.
We used to have the "Diaper of Shame". That started when one of the engineers said "If my code is broken, I will wear a diaper around the office all day tomorrow". Sure enough, it was broken and sure enough, some one went out and got a package of adult diapers.
We let him wear it over his pants and afterwards it would just migrate to your cubicle.
I wonder if we could still do that today....I smell a harassment suit being stirred up somewhere.
Perhaps that ssh password also allows a shell login. Perhaps they use the same password in multiple places. Storing passwords in plaintext is bad. Remember also that developers "boxes" these days often include laptops which have a bad habit of being left in coffee shops and other public places.
The strange thing in this, actually, is that 1st level customer support for cars isn't the NHTSA hotline or the Toyota 1-800 number - it's your mechanic! Woz doesn't say anything about taking the car to the dealer's and having them look at it.
Well, if testing was perfect there would be no bugs out in the field. Hmmmm...
I learned a long time ago that when I say my product "shouldn't" do something that's not the same as it "doesn't" do something. When I have a user come to me and tell me that's it doing something I don't think it "should" be doing, I start by believing that they are seeing the issue they tell me they're seeing. Often it turns out that they are not seeing what they think they're seeing, but some times it turns out that what I think the product should do is not reality.
Here we have someone who claims to have a reproducible test case. That's gold when you're trying to track down a problem. It may turn out to be some manufacturing defect peculiar to his car, it could be that what he thinks is a bug is really a feature, but it's definitely worth looking into, especially when your company (Toyota) is losing millions of dollars ever day because of the possibility of this bug being real.
Unfortunately the Apple mice suck, especially the "Mighty Mouse" with the virtual right click, that damned micro track ball and the side buttons that pop you into Expose every time you lift the mouse off the desk. Fortunately you can use some thing else quite easily.
It's generally well know that you shouldn't let your kids chew on batteries and they're relatively hard to get out of most toys these days. It's not the same as something on the outside of a toy.
In any other language that allows you to declare methods on the top scope (or at least in the scope you are in), you don't need to shepherd everything into a dot-spaghetti - you simply say doSomeShitForMe().
You mean like:
MyDumbClass.doSomeShitForMe()
Static methods work just fine and don't require you to allocate an object.
All that factory, resolver nonsense is somebody who's read one too many patterns books.
It does add up. And some people have scars on their fingers for non-nefarious purposes. The tip of one of my thumbs was cut off in an accident and then sewn back on. I fly in and out of Japan all the time. All I need is more Mickey Mouse at immigration.
The Damned Command Language? I remember when they added that to RSTS/E. I hated it. Overly verbose but you could abbreviate it by just typing the first few characters of the command so it wound up being completely cryptic in practice.
It wasn't sold to work on random hardware. It was sold to work on hardware that Apple sells. No promises were made, express or implied, that it would work on Atom processors.
It is an express case of disabling things so you can't use it in a certain manner. Hello! That's what the whole Free Software thing is about. Don't use the Apple software if you don't like it. No one misled you about this.
If they wanted to limit you to not running any non-Apple software it would be a lot easier to just add that into the EULA and have the OS check the code signatures on everything that runs. If/When Apple believes that it is advantageous to them to do so they will. No need to mess around with goofy legal theories.
Back in the early nineties a college friend came to me with a problem she was having at work. She was working on a digital compass to be installed in the F-16. There was a raster screen and a circle with tick marks was part of the compass display. They were having difficulties drawing the circle rapidly enough and her management was considering installing a floating point co-processor to make things run faster. After a bit of discussion, it turned out that the circle drawing algorithm they were using was based on sin/cos. She was fairly new on the project and while her graphics background was not very deep, she did know that there should be better ways to do things.
We had a bit of a discussion on better circle drawing algorithms as well as the joys of pre-computation, look up tables and not redrawing things that were not really changing. I still shudder to think of what other cruft must have been lurking in that software.
Judges interpret the law. There is no clear law on e-mail privacy so this judge made an interpretation. This is an excellent example of where the Congress needs to be doing its job and TELL the courts what they should be thinking.
Just a quick look, without factoring in any real design details like weight of the ascent stage, propellants, etc.
Apollo LM ascent engine = 15.6kN thrust. VX-200 is expected to have a thrust of 5N. So, about 3000x increase in thrust appears to be needed to get into the ball park of lunar liftoff.
DRM is not a problem if it's not protected by law. There's not a scheme that's been devised yet that cannot be cracked. The problem with DRM is that it is illegal to circumvent it and it has been mandated for some devices. Remove that legal protection and the content providers can add it all they like.
Ummm...a lot of people use other calendars as well. The comment was by an American for Americans.
All of these oh so superior, look how international we are comments from Euro-centrics make me laugh.
For example, I live in Japan. The official calendar here has years numbered by the year of reign of the Japanese Emperor. So, this is currently Heisei 21, or year 21 of the reign of the Heisei Emperor. When I go to the bank, I have to fill in the forms with that date.
Before anyone goes off about ISO dates being an international standard, ISO has traditionally been a Euro-dominated group. I don't believe that Asia has been well represented in the past (this is probably changing now) and each country gets only 1 vote, so the United States has been out numbered.
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A lot of new cars have "keyless" ignitions. There is no key, there is no switch. There is a push button that activates when you get your key (which has an RFID chip in it) somewhere inside the car. You push the button, the engine starts. Push it again and the engine stops. Except when you're driving down the road, in which case you have to hold the button down for 3 seconds to have the car stop. And how much do you want to bet that the button only sends a "request" to the control computer to turn the engine off? Cars have been changing a lot recently.
Why do you believe that you can do it if the electronics are malfunctioning? There is a big difference between old transmissions that had a mechanical linkage between the shifter and the gears and a fully electronic transmission where all you're doing is moving a switch.
Why do you believe that the switched and connection between the switches and the transmission and the control code in the transmission are perfect?
Or something else to happen under the hood. My '77 Datsun pickup truck (purchased used, ten years old at this time) stuck full throttle coming down the freeway on me - I was giving it the gas going up a hill and when I came over the crest it kept going. Fortunately it didn't have enough power to go over 80 and it was a manual and it didn't have power steering. I shifted into neutral, turned it off and coasted to the side of the road.
What had happened? Well, back in those days, air conditioning sometimes came as a dealer add-on. When the AC is running and the engine is idling, you need to boost the idle level a bit or the engine will stall. The way this was done was with a little linkage that came off the throttle body that got pulled on by a little vacuum powered piston. The linkage broke, for some fool reason it was hinged on the throttle body, and it fell down and got stuck. I pulled it out and removed it (the AC didn't work anyway) and drove off.
Not only is firmware a single point of failure but it's damned hard to look at code and say "that's crap". If you get a look at a bad mechanical design it's usually pretty obvious that it's crap. Code is all packaged up in neat little black boxes.
And what is doing the three second count? How much do you want to bet that it's a subroutine somewhere, not a hard counter? Add in that it's three seconds if the car is moving and just a single press if it's not and I would bet money that it is just a request to the computer to please turn the car off if you feel like it.
I'm still trying to figure out what the point to these keyless ignitions is. I rented a car with one a while back and it was kind of cute that I didn't have to put the key in but didn't really save anything. In fact, I like having keys out of my pockets while driving so I wound up sticking the key in this little niche on the dashboard anyhow.
We used to have the "Diaper of Shame". That started when one of the engineers said "If my code is broken, I will wear a diaper around the office all day tomorrow". Sure enough, it was broken and sure enough, some one went out and got a package of adult diapers.
We let him wear it over his pants and afterwards it would just migrate to your cubicle.
I wonder if we could still do that today....I smell a harassment suit being stirred up somewhere.
Perhaps that ssh password also allows a shell login. Perhaps they use the same password in multiple places. Storing passwords in plaintext is bad. Remember also that developers "boxes" these days often include laptops which have a bad habit of being left in coffee shops and other public places.
The strange thing in this, actually, is that 1st level customer support for cars isn't the NHTSA hotline or the Toyota 1-800 number - it's your mechanic! Woz doesn't say anything about taking the car to the dealer's and having them look at it.
Well, if testing was perfect there would be no bugs out in the field. Hmmmm...
I learned a long time ago that when I say my product "shouldn't" do something that's not the same as it "doesn't" do something. When I have a user come to me and tell me that's it doing something I don't think it "should" be doing, I start by believing that they are seeing the issue they tell me they're seeing. Often it turns out that they are not seeing what they think they're seeing, but some times it turns out that what I think the product should do is not reality.
Here we have someone who claims to have a reproducible test case. That's gold when you're trying to track down a problem. It may turn out to be some manufacturing defect peculiar to his car, it could be that what he thinks is a bug is really a feature, but it's definitely worth looking into, especially when your company (Toyota) is losing millions of dollars ever day because of the possibility of this bug being real.
Unfortunately the Apple mice suck, especially the "Mighty Mouse" with the virtual right click, that damned micro track ball and the side buttons that pop you into Expose every time you lift the mouse off the desk. Fortunately you can use some thing else quite easily.
It's generally well know that you shouldn't let your kids chew on batteries and they're relatively hard to get out of most toys these days. It's not the same as something on the outside of a toy.
Seriously - if it's been on the cover of a Popular Mechanics as an "Artist's Rendition" it never gets built.
In any other language that allows you to declare methods on the top scope (or at least in the scope you are in), you don't need to shepherd everything into a dot-spaghetti - you simply say doSomeShitForMe().
You mean like:
MyDumbClass.doSomeShitForMe()
Static methods work just fine and don't require you to allocate an object.
All that factory, resolver nonsense is somebody who's read one too many patterns books.
All the ones I see in the shops are running Windows. I've even tried asking and got a blank look. Rinikusu? Nan desu ka (what's that)?
It does add up. And some people have scars on their fingers for non-nefarious purposes. The tip of one of my thumbs was cut off in an accident and then sewn back on. I fly in and out of Japan all the time. All I need is more Mickey Mouse at immigration.
ATM's in Japan will accept and dispense coins. However, currency in Japan doesn't use decimal points (smallest coin == 1 yen).
The Damned Command Language? I remember when they added that to RSTS/E. I hated it. Overly verbose but you could abbreviate it by just typing the first few characters of the command so it wound up being completely cryptic in practice.
It wasn't sold to work on random hardware. It was sold to work on hardware that Apple sells. No promises were made, express or implied, that it would work on Atom processors.
It is an express case of disabling things so you can't use it in a certain manner. Hello! That's what the whole Free Software thing is about. Don't use the Apple software if you don't like it. No one misled you about this.
If they wanted to limit you to not running any non-Apple software it would be a lot easier to just add that into the EULA and have the OS check the code signatures on everything that runs. If/When Apple believes that it is advantageous to them to do so they will. No need to mess around with goofy legal theories.
Sounds like Psystar should have set up shop in Quebec.
Back in the early nineties a college friend came to me with a problem she was having at work. She was working on a digital compass to be installed in the F-16. There was a raster screen and a circle with tick marks was part of the compass display. They were having difficulties drawing the circle rapidly enough and her management was considering installing a floating point co-processor to make things run faster. After a bit of discussion, it turned out that the circle drawing algorithm they were using was based on sin/cos. She was fairly new on the project and while her graphics background was not very deep, she did know that there should be better ways to do things.
We had a bit of a discussion on better circle drawing algorithms as well as the joys of pre-computation, look up tables and not redrawing things that were not really changing. I still shudder to think of what other cruft must have been lurking in that software.
Judges interpret the law. There is no clear law on e-mail privacy so this judge made an interpretation. This is an excellent example of where the Congress needs to be doing its job and TELL the courts what they should be thinking.
Just a quick look, without factoring in any real design details like weight of the ascent stage, propellants, etc.
Apollo LM ascent engine = 15.6kN thrust. VX-200 is expected to have a thrust of 5N. So, about 3000x increase in thrust appears to be needed to get into the ball park of lunar liftoff.
Sign me up too!
DRM is not a problem if it's not protected by law. There's not a scheme that's been devised yet that cannot be cracked. The problem with DRM is that it is illegal to circumvent it and it has been mandated for some devices. Remove that legal protection and the content providers can add it all they like.
Ummm...a lot of people use other calendars as well. The comment was by an American for Americans.
All of these oh so superior, look how international we are comments from Euro-centrics make me laugh.
For example, I live in Japan. The official calendar here has years numbered by the year of reign of the Japanese Emperor. So, this is currently Heisei 21, or year 21 of the reign of the Heisei Emperor. When I go to the bank, I have to fill in the forms with that date.
Before anyone goes off about ISO dates being an international standard, ISO has traditionally been a Euro-dominated group. I don't believe that Asia has been well represented in the past (this is probably changing now) and each country gets only 1 vote, so the United States has been out numbered.