We published a report recently at the NHTSA's Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) conference that surveys many recent electrical/electronics (E/E) problems. Software defects fall into electrical/electronic systems in the ISO 26262 lingo. This includes a statistical analysis of recalls (classifying into those due to E/E problems) and ancedotes of many software defects resulting in recalls, including several examples of unintended braking, unintended acceleration, etc.: A Survey of Electrical and Electronic (E/E) Notifications for Motor Vehicles (PDF warning)
While writing this, we found a nice overview from Dr. Dobbs that's still fun to read: But I Never Did That Before!.
The Dr. Dobbs overview has a related recall from about 2 decades ago, where a car would not let occupants leave the vehicle:
"BMW 535i 1994: The double-lock feature can engage with occupants and the door/ignition key inside the vehicle. The occupants of the vehicle would be unable to exit either from the doors or from the windows of the vehicle. Drive-away protection would prevent the engine from starting. Dealers will replace the general control module with one containing the revised software to permit window opening with the double-lock engaged and key in the ignition."
Was making the exact same post as parent. Many people are thinking about privacy in vehicular networks. For example, most systems for aggregating data from cars for showing traffic speed anonymize the data in various ways to try to protect privacy. Here are some details:
Abstract: "The proliferation of sensors in devices of frequent use, such as mobile phones, offers unprecedented opportunities for forming self-selected communities around shared sensory data pools that enable community specific applications of mutual interest. Such applications have recently been termed participatory sensing. An important category of participatory sensing applications is one that construct maps of different phenomena (e.g., traffic speed, pollution) using vehicular participatory sensing. An example is sharing data from GPS-enabled cell-phones to map traffic or noise patterns. Concerns with data privacy are a key impediment to the proliferation of such applications. This paper presents theoretical foundations, a system implementation, and an experimental evaluation of a perturbation-based mechanism for ensuring privacy of location-tagged participatory sensing data while allowing correct reconstruction of community statistics of interest (computed from shared perturbed data). The system is applied to construct accurate traffic speed maps in a small campus town from shared GPS data of participating vehicles, where the individual vehicles are allowed to “lie” about their actual location and speed at all times. An extensive evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of the approach in concealing multi-dimensional, correlated, time-series data while allowing for accurate reconstruction of spatial statistics."
Abstract: "Traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with GPS receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy over dedicated infrastructure systems. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we describe a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique, followed by another system design in which we relax the privacy requirements to maximize the accuracy of real-time traffic estimation. We introduce virtual trip lines which are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide speed updates. These markers are placed to avoid specific privacy sensitive locations. They also allow aggregating and cloaking several location updates based on trip line identifiers, without knowing the actual geographic locations of these trip lines. Thus, they facilitate the design of a distributed architecture, in which no single entity has a complete knowledge of probe identities and fine-grained location information. We have implemented the system with GPS smartphone clients and conducted a controlled experiment with 100 phone-equipped drivers circling a highway segment, which was later extended into a year-long public deployment."
OJ and Cappuccino...goes well with Java in a Bistro? Who makes these names up? I guess it's better than having Caml with Curry, or waking up with a Brainfuck.
While I find the subject of this article very interesting, especially as it relates to why women are leaving the field of computer science (with a peak in the '80s), this is one of the worst written articles I have ever seen on any topic. The grammatical errors are so bad that they cause the meaning of several points to be lost, making it an extremely frustrating read. Basic things like missing apostrophes, quotations for expert opinions, and inconsistent quotation closure are among the most basic grammatical errors (e.g., "recruiters" versus "recruiter's" in the first sentence, the first sentence is a run-on, "Human-resources" should be "Human resources" in the second paragraph, no quotations for Eileen Trauth's quote, no citation for the rather hard-to-believe 60 percent of the workforce is female quotation).
These two paragraphs say the exact same things about the technical group (the 28/92 is about 30% fyi):
While about 30 percent indicated they valued careers that afforded them opportunities to perfect skills in technical areas, others said they wanted careers with managerial opportunities. In addition, there was little overlap among the women who reported that managers give up technical skills to develop management skills.
Twenty-eight of the women in this study expressed sentiments aligned with the technical competence career anchor. These
women spoke about valuing a career that afforded them opportunities to gain proficiency or to perfect skills in technical areas. This quotation doesn't add anything useful from the study's viewpoint, and tries to play off the reader's emotions:
[Working in IT] is a place where I can get control that a child from a dysfunctional family wants," a 49 year-old IT operations architect, who had a traumatic childhood said. "I can make order. I can put those damn cards in the right order. I can get the syntax perfect. I can run it and have it compile cleanly. There are all of these tidiness control things that are so beautiful about programming and a computer program will not betray you. It does the same damn thing every time Anyway, feel free to mod me troll, this horribly written piece just angered me when I was looking to read something insightful about this important issue.
IE7 Browser Usage and Design Decisions
on
AJAX and IE7?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While this doesn't exactly answer the question posed, the question made me consider the impact IE7 will have on browser usage, and Microsoft's design decisions for IE7.
Given the current market of browser distribution basically mandates that web designers and programmers fix IE6 issues, I am not so sure that IE7 will be considered in such forceful terms, or, that Microsoft will be forced to try harder to make the browser standards compliant and have fewer idiosyncrasies. Should web designers and programmers be forced to make frustrating fixes for so many generations of the same broken browser? From the numerous times I have been pissed at IE6 because it rendered something just slightly off, I know I might advice organizations I program for to tell users to use Firefox or Mozilla or Opera or nearly anything aside from IE6, or in the future, IE7.
For Microsoft's sake, I hope they have considered the possible backlash from the generally non tech savvy users of IE6 when they get an update to IE7 and all the new AJAX applications break. I know that if I were trying to use Gmail or Flickr, and they just stopped working when I moved to IE7, I might just switch to Firefox or Opera if I hadn't tried before.
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
I think the most important part of this statement is the word "today". What he is suggesting is that Linux can and does do innovative things today that Windows could possibly do, but currently does not. There are tons of examples of this, but some of the more obvious ones come in the areas of customization and security--since Linux is open, it is entirely customizable, as well as more secure since you can specify entirely what is running, whereas you cannot necessarily do the same with Windows.
So, Linux may have some innovations that could easily be copied, but it certainly has some implemented that Windows does not. Maybe he should take his own suggestion and start implementing some of the Linux innovations in Windows.
As a college student, my biggest problem with this new "system" is whether it creates a compulsory fee for the students. If the gag effect wasn't in place, I might not be as worried because I would know the details, but if this will be a mandatory fee, I have a serious problem. I feel that I have the right to determine what to spend my money on, especially in such a jaded area as this.
The other part of the program that bugs me is not being able to keep the songs after graduation without "buying" them.
Once their four years at school are over, the students are cut off from Napster and lose all the music they've download. That is unless they pay 99 cents per song or $10 per album to own a permanent download that can be burned onto CDs or MP3 players.
In my mind, if I have already paid a fee to buy as many songs as I wish, why should I be required to purchase the same thing later? Will I have to re-purchase the iBook I just paid for using an academic discount when I graduate as well? I sure hope not.
If they were really interested in the best interests of the school they should have avoided embarrassing the school's administration.
Best interest of the school, or of the students?
Have you ever happened to try reporting security issues to a school? I have--the grades database server at my old high school was insecure (no sa password on the sql server). After I reported the issue to the superintendent, the entire IT department, several teachers, and an assistant principal, it took the IT guys 4 months, just to set a password. A local malicious attacker was unlikely, but a worm or outside attack was surely possible. Sure, my high school isn't Oxford, but an increased time delay for such a simple fix at my school, in comparison to a more complicated for a larger institution like Oxford, could be understandable. If I had perhaps reported it to the school newspaper, the issue would probably have been resolved more timely because students grades were in jeopardy, and a larger community knew it. Groups create more action than a single person creates, just look at how well lobbying works.
Sure, the two students are probably in more trouble now than they would have been, but the issues are now probably being resolved more quickly.
With some 27 percent of the market, Linux is now the second most popular operating system for servers, supplanting the decades-old operating system UNIX; Microsoft holds the top spot. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
I love how they actually outright say that the article was written by M$, I wonder what sort of propaganda they will come out with next.
Slashdot Mirror
We published a report recently at the NHTSA's Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) conference that surveys many recent electrical/electronics (E/E) problems. Software defects fall into electrical/electronic systems in the ISO 26262 lingo. This includes a statistical analysis of recalls (classifying into those due to E/E problems) and ancedotes of many software defects resulting in recalls, including several examples of unintended braking, unintended acceleration, etc.: A Survey of Electrical and Electronic (E/E) Notifications for Motor Vehicles (PDF warning)
While writing this, we found a nice overview from Dr. Dobbs that's still fun to read: But I Never Did That Before!.
The Dr. Dobbs overview has a related recall from about 2 decades ago, where a car would not let occupants leave the vehicle:
"BMW 535i 1994: The double-lock feature can engage with occupants and the door/ignition key inside the vehicle. The occupants of the vehicle would be unable to exit either from the doors or from the windows of the vehicle. Drive-away protection would prevent the engine from starting. Dealers will replace the general control module with one containing the revised software to permit window opening with the double-lock engaged and key in the ignition."
Was making the exact same post as parent. Many people are thinking about privacy in vehicular networks. For example, most systems for aggregating data from cars for showing traffic speed anonymize the data in various ways to try to protect privacy. Here are some details:
A project at the University of Illinois preserves privacy when reconstructing global maps based on data collected from cars: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h545111k4g217374/
Abstract: "The proliferation of sensors in devices of frequent use, such as mobile phones, offers unprecedented opportunities for forming self-selected communities around shared sensory data pools that enable community specific applications of mutual interest. Such applications have recently been termed participatory sensing. An important category of participatory sensing applications is one that construct maps of different phenomena (e.g., traffic speed, pollution) using vehicular participatory sensing. An example is sharing data from GPS-enabled cell-phones to map traffic or noise patterns. Concerns with data privacy are a key impediment to the proliferation of such applications. This paper presents theoretical foundations, a system implementation, and an experimental evaluation of a perturbation-based mechanism for ensuring privacy of location-tagged participatory sensing data while allowing correct reconstruction of community statistics of interest (computed from shared perturbed data). The system is applied to construct accurate traffic speed maps in a small campus town from shared GPS data of participating vehicles, where the individual vehicles are allowed to “lie” about their actual location and speed at all times. An extensive evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of the approach in concealing multi-dimensional, correlated, time-series data while allowing for accurate reconstruction of spatial statistics."
The Mobile Millennium project ( http://traffic.berkeley.edu/ ) from Berkeley uses "virtual trip lines": http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5871633
Abstract: "Traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with GPS receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy over dedicated infrastructure systems. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we describe a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique, followed by another system design in which we relax the privacy requirements to maximize the accuracy of real-time traffic estimation. We introduce virtual trip lines which are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide speed updates. These markers are placed to avoid specific privacy sensitive locations. They also allow aggregating and cloaking several location updates based on trip line identifiers, without knowing the actual geographic locations of these trip lines. Thus, they facilitate the design of a distributed architecture, in which no single entity has a complete knowledge of probe identities and fine-grained location information. We have implemented the system with GPS smartphone clients and conducted a controlled experiment with 100 phone-equipped drivers circling a highway segment, which was later extended into a year-long public deployment."
OJ and Cappuccino...goes well with Java in a Bistro? Who makes these names up? I guess it's better than having Caml with Curry, or waking up with a Brainfuck.
I had the exact same thoughts when I skimmed the article...
While this doesn't exactly answer the question posed, the question made me consider the impact IE7 will have on browser usage, and Microsoft's design decisions for IE7. Given the current market of browser distribution basically mandates that web designers and programmers fix IE6 issues, I am not so sure that IE7 will be considered in such forceful terms, or, that Microsoft will be forced to try harder to make the browser standards compliant and have fewer idiosyncrasies. Should web designers and programmers be forced to make frustrating fixes for so many generations of the same broken browser? From the numerous times I have been pissed at IE6 because it rendered something just slightly off, I know I might advice organizations I program for to tell users to use Firefox or Mozilla or Opera or nearly anything aside from IE6, or in the future, IE7. For Microsoft's sake, I hope they have considered the possible backlash from the generally non tech savvy users of IE6 when they get an update to IE7 and all the new AJAX applications break. I know that if I were trying to use Gmail or Flickr, and they just stopped working when I moved to IE7, I might just switch to Firefox or Opera if I hadn't tried before.
Yea, I thought the same thing when I first read the article...
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
I think the most important part of this statement is the word "today". What he is suggesting is that Linux can and does do innovative things today that Windows could possibly do, but currently does not. There are tons of examples of this, but some of the more obvious ones come in the areas of customization and security--since Linux is open, it is entirely customizable, as well as more secure since you can specify entirely what is running, whereas you cannot necessarily do the same with Windows.
So, Linux may have some innovations that could easily be copied, but it certainly has some implemented that Windows does not. Maybe he should take his own suggestion and start implementing some of the Linux innovations in Windows.
Tom's also has a set of reviews and links available.
1 /index.html/
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050622
As a college student, my biggest problem with this new "system" is whether it creates a compulsory fee for the students. If the gag effect wasn't in place, I might not be as worried because I would know the details, but if this will be a mandatory fee, I have a serious problem. I feel that I have the right to determine what to spend my money on, especially in such a jaded area as this.
The other part of the program that bugs me is not being able to keep the songs after graduation without "buying" them.
Once their four years at school are over, the students are cut off from Napster and lose all the music they've download. That is unless they pay 99 cents per song or $10 per album to own a permanent download that can be burned onto CDs or MP3 players.
In my mind, if I have already paid a fee to buy as many songs as I wish, why should I be required to purchase the same thing later? Will I have to re-purchase the iBook I just paid for using an academic discount when I graduate as well? I sure hope not.
If they were really interested in the best interests of the school they should have avoided embarrassing the school's administration.
Best interest of the school, or of the students?
Have you ever happened to try reporting security issues to a school? I have--the grades database server at my old high school was insecure (no sa password on the sql server). After I reported the issue to the superintendent, the entire IT department, several teachers, and an assistant principal, it took the IT guys 4 months, just to set a password. A local malicious attacker was unlikely, but a worm or outside attack was surely possible. Sure, my high school isn't Oxford, but an increased time delay for such a simple fix at my school, in comparison to a more complicated for a larger institution like Oxford, could be understandable. If I had perhaps reported it to the school newspaper, the issue would probably have been resolved more timely because students grades were in jeopardy, and a larger community knew it. Groups create more action than a single person creates, just look at how well lobbying works.
Sure, the two students are probably in more trouble now than they would have been, but the issues are now probably being resolved more quickly.
With some 27 percent of the market, Linux is now the second most popular operating system for servers, supplanting the decades-old operating system UNIX; Microsoft holds the top spot. (MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)
I love how they actually outright say that the article was written by M$, I wonder what sort of propaganda they will come out with next.