Hmmm. Are you sure that was a software failure? It sounds to me more like a hydraulic failure in the master cylinder, in which case you should have had at least one warning light and probably a very loud buzzer. The little zizz the pump gives when you 'key on' is a pressure check.
Even if the pump fails you would still have unassisted braking - the pedal would be rock solid.
There is no way the software can disable that mechanical circuit,on thinking about it. Sorry, you had a mechanical or hydraulic issue, not a control system problem.
These are software driven just like vehicle stability systems (in fact VSS is just ABS hardware with a few more sensors).
We don't seem to have a plague of rogue software killing occupants because, guess what, we really try to be careful with this stuff. The FMEA for ABS software is huge, and detailed. How many of you guys ever have to do an FMEA? or even know what one is?
Here's a funny war story (I know everyone involved, this happened).
The wheel speed is picked up via a sensor on a 40 tooth tone wheel. Cars without ABS don't have tone wheels. Someone asked, what will happen if a non-ABS wheel gets onto an ABS car?
Mechanic fits non-ABS wheel to car. Development engineer drives off, hits brakes at 10 kph, no prob.
same at 20, same at 30
same at 40
same at 50
same at 70
Drives up to 80 kph hits the brakes, one wheel locks, the car slews sideways into a bank and rolls up on two wheels.
Engineer needs new undies.
What had happened was that the sensor could pick up the back of the wheelstuds. There are 5. The software assumed that the car was travelling at the speed of the slowest wheel, so the non-ABS wheel was the vehicle speed. Our ABS is disabled below 9 kph to ensure that you can stop the car, on some surfaces it will only inch to a halt unless you lock the wheels.
So, at 80 kph the ABS realised it was supposed to work, activated, saw one wheel almost stopped, released the brakes on that wheel, and locked the other one. Hilarity ensued.
I have two friends who have had laser eye surgery, one, very succesfully so far, the other somewhat less so.
Things they don't tell you
1) Your eye is stll going to change shape with age, so your prescription will change, so you will have to have it redone in 5 years or so (less if you want to keep driving without glasses)
2) If you indulge in any activities involving pressure (eg scuba diving) or lack of (eg mountaineering) then there is a risk that your eye will deform and render you temporarily unfocussed until normal pressure is restored.
3) the scars cause massive internal reflections and this will affect your night vision when driving.
4) you may need to have tune-ups. two in one friend's case.
5) Cross infection risks means that it is wiser to have each eye done at different times.
"The value of human life doesn't factor in. " yes it does, that Pinto page (which was pretty good actually) even had a figure in there, $200k, I think. You may not like it but the current cost of an American life is about 4 million bucks.
Supposing the perceived benefit had been 100 times the cost of the injuries, not 2.5 times? Would that be acceptable?
I think they made a cost/benefit decision (wrong, as it turned out), and they got hammered for it. But their logic was correct.
We don't live in a world of fluffy bunnies and chocolate houses. Safety costs. At some point there is an engineering change to a product that is not worth making, even though it will save a life.
In some respects we have gone to the opposite extreme. Holden in Australia have fitted side airbags. They sold these things for two years, so that is 60000 vehicle years, before one went off in an accident.
Cost to society 80000*600 dollars= 48 million dollars. life saved: 2, possibly.
Even if they carry on crashing at the same rate for ten years it is very hard to believe that they will have been worth fitting.
Incidentally you would be amazed by the number of people who think that airbags are more important than antilock brakes, apparently they still want to have the accident, just not get their nose broken when it happens.
And of course it is very hard to get even slightly het up about safety when the morons won't wear safety belts.
Well strictly speaking I was more annoyed with the banality of his observations than their stupidity. As to your point, yes there is a time and a place for making provocative statements, but if you truly do not know the answer to a question then why pipe up? In engineering (I am an engineer) I usually know how solid the ground is on which I am standing. If I make up some BS explanation for something the chances are that someone will remember it, investigate, and shoot me down.
I see no reason why this would not apply to other technical areas.
1) What on earth makes you think all software will be free? Are you going to write free replacements for ADAMS, Hypermesh, LMS, Fluent and all the other $50k+ engineering programs out there? I mean, it's jolly nice of you to volunteer, but really it isn't going to happen.
2) Microsoft's cash reserves are totally independent of their share price. The reverse is not true.
I don't disagree with your general point, but making bad statements is no real help.
Amend, Jan P. Biogeochemistry T Arvidson, Raymond E. Planetary Geology; Department Chairman T Blank, Carrine E. Molecular Geomicrobiology T Criss, Robert E. Stable Isotopes T Crozaz, Ghislaine Cosmochemistry T Dymek, Robert F. Metamorphic and Igneous Petrology T Fegley, Bruce Planetary Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry T Haskin, Larry A. Planetary Surface Materials T Hofmeister, Anne M. Mineral Physics R Jolliff, Bradley L. Geology, Petrology, and Geochemistry of the Earth, Moon, and Mars R Korotev, Randy L. Lunar Geochemistry R Levin, Harold L. Paleontology T McKinnon, William B. Planetary Geophysics and Dynamics T Morris, Julie D. Isotope Geochemistry, Magmatism and Tectonics R Pasteris, Jill D. Biomineralization and Fluid-Rock Interactions T Phillips, Roger J. Planetary Geophysics and Tectonics T Podosek, Frank A. Isotope Geochemistry T Smith, Jennifer R. Quaternary Geology, Geoarchaeology, and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction T Smith, Joshua B. Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Reconstruction, Sedimentology T Smith, William H. Observational Astronomy, Planetary Physics T Tucker, Robert D. U-Pb Geochronology, Regional Geology, Tectonics T Wiens, Douglas A. Seismology and Geophysics T Wysession, Michael E. Seismology and Geophysics T Zinner, Ernst K. Astrophysics and Space Physics R
So if we start replying to spam, requesting more info, then the spammer makes more money, which is bad in the short term, but since we wouldn't take up the mortgage, the cost per mortgage for the actual business would rise, making spam less attractive to the business.
Your example is so fictitous as to be meaningless.
At work I run a Xeon (whatever that is). At home I have an Atlon 1600 and a K6-2. These are all used 5 days per week, plus, typically 5-8 hours per day.
Typically they run www, spreadsheets and engineering programs, and the fast machine at home runs games and demos.
I don't log downtime or lost productivity, generally, but I know I have lost 4 hours to a RAM failure in the last year. That's it.
As far as software and reboots go the Xeon, running W2k, gets rebooted once per week as a matter of course, and has maybe fallen over once in the year. The K2 runs NT4 and has chucked me out of a few programs, but ha snot 'crashed'. It gets turned off overnight.
The Athlon runs win 98 SE and has a pretty gruesome life running game demos and so on. I have had to re-install windows once. I would guess it falls over in such a way as to lose work in progress perhaps once every couple of months.
That is not 50 minutes of productivity loss per day, more like 1
And of course Macs never crash, do they? I've got a couple of those hanging around, but they don't run often enough for me to get a picture of software reliability. But the sad Mac appears remarkably often, in my experience.
I jumped the first time I came across one of the monsters (upstairs on the left in an early level).
I still grin whenever I fire it up, the music is either good, or just so strongly associated with the excellent game, that just hearing it gives me goosepimples.
Tetris
Banned from my computer. Too many dreams of falling blocks, and too many sessions playing til 4 in the morning.
SS 1
Ever been scared to open a door? Yes. Ever been scared to open ANY door on a level? Oh yes. SS2 was nearly as good, but a bit repetitive, and too long.
Jedi Knight
The only game in which I try to physically twist and jump as I play, and grunt when I catch a ledge. Given how pathetic the 3d engine is, that is one hell of an achievement in gamplay/suspension of disbelief.
"We see laser "beams" slowly travel from the cannon to the target. Sub-light speed light ?"
At the energy density involved for lasers to be an effective weapon then it is vaguely possible that the photon 'bolt' would have enough mass to locally curve space time, and hence affect the observed speed of propagation. Maybe.
"In starwars II (old series) R2D2 solves several times computational problems which are NOT turing computable"
I like this one. What are they? But maybe he just guessed. Or he was reprogammed by the Force and didn't have to calculate anything , it was all received knowledge.
"Most alien creatures breate oxygen." No, it's just all the alien creatures we interact with breath oxygen. Other chemistries are not interested in the same planets since they cannot live there, and may have vastly different rates of consciousness.
"When the Death Star fires, we see 3 laser beams "hitting" each other an send of a 4th one in a different direction."
It worked in Ghostbusters
Hey damn I was going to jump on your sig as well but it doesn't show.
From an engineer's viewpoint there are two sides to this.
WP as such is irrelevant. The documents that we use are say spreadsheets, program writing environments, and CAD/CAE
I suggest that spreadsheets and program writing are not that much better served by the mouse than by cursor keys, but I cannot fathom how to run a decent 3d CAE environment other than via a pointer.
"Slayton:... about knowledge and organizations. If I think about an airplane, the manufacture of an airplane, the first thing that occurs to me is that no one knows how an aircraft gets built. No one. There's no one that knows how to build an airplane anymore because the artifact of the airplane is so complex and involves so many people that that knowledge is dispersed. It doesn't belong to one person and it probably doesn't belong to the group. It belongs to the interactions or the associations between people and between organizations. That's a such a different idea about knowledge as much as it is a phenomena that our culture has found ourselves in more recently because of what we produce. We continue to produce a more complex world..."
Well that's you buddy. Real engineers/do/ know how complex things are built. I can't, this minute, tell you how an engine management computer works (I do suspensions, for now), but you can bet that if I needed to, inside two weeks I would. Knowledge is dispersed inside an organisation, but if the chief engineers don't know what is going on then the whole edifice will do a Saddam.
This whole 'we are ants powerless in the face of the complexity of modern technology' crap gives me the irrits. Just because you are a word mangler who couldn't do a technical degree doesn't mean the rest of us are that stupid.
Minitab - no Mathcad - no MS Project - no? Hard to believe MS Excel - yes Matlab - yes
OK I use Excel more than I use the others, but given that I've left out the special purpose tools (MSC ADAMS) that are my core job which are not available for the Mac, sorry, OSX simply won't do, except as a general office computer (ie pr0n browser and email client).
I'm not anti Mac - I have two useable Macs at home, but for a business it is far more important to run the software you need than to worry about operating systems.
And no, I can't imagine running my numerically intensive tasks in an emulator.
Why not just buy the company out? They've done that a zillion times in the past. Slap a non-compete deal on the employees, and then they can do what they like.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, air in the system is an error state for the hydraulics. Your point is?
Hmmm. Are you sure that was a software failure? It sounds to me more like a hydraulic failure in the master cylinder, in which case you should have had at least one warning light and probably a very loud buzzer. The little zizz the pump gives when you 'key on' is a pressure check.
Even if the pump fails you would still have unassisted braking - the pedal would be rock solid.
There is no way the software can disable that mechanical circuit,on thinking about it. Sorry, you had a mechanical or hydraulic issue, not a control system problem.
guys complaining about black boxes in cars last week?
that's what they are for. Debugging software. Now all we need is a black box to debug the drivers.
or as we call them ABS.
These are software driven just like vehicle stability systems (in fact VSS is just ABS hardware with a few more sensors).
We don't seem to have a plague of rogue software killing occupants because, guess what, we really try to be careful with this stuff. The FMEA for ABS software is huge, and detailed. How many of you guys ever have to do an FMEA? or even know what one is?
Here's a funny war story (I know everyone involved, this happened).
The wheel speed is picked up via a sensor on a 40 tooth tone wheel. Cars without ABS don't have tone wheels. Someone asked, what will happen if a non-ABS wheel gets onto an ABS car?
Mechanic fits non-ABS wheel to car. Development engineer drives off, hits brakes at 10 kph, no prob.
same at 20, same at 30
same at 40
same at 50
same at 70
Drives up to 80 kph hits the brakes, one wheel locks, the car slews sideways into a bank and rolls up on two wheels.
Engineer needs new undies.
What had happened was that the sensor could pick up the back of the wheelstuds. There are 5. The software assumed that the car was travelling at the speed of the slowest wheel, so the non-ABS wheel was the vehicle speed. Our ABS is disabled below 9 kph to ensure that you can stop the car, on some surfaces it will only inch to a halt unless you lock the wheels.
So, at 80 kph the ABS realised it was supposed to work, activated, saw one wheel almost stopped, released the brakes on that wheel, and locked the other one. Hilarity ensued.
I have two friends who have had laser eye surgery, one, very succesfully so far, the other somewhat less so.
Things they don't tell you
1) Your eye is stll going to change shape with age, so your prescription will change, so you will have to have it redone in 5 years or so (less if you want to keep driving without glasses)
2) If you indulge in any activities involving pressure (eg scuba diving) or lack of (eg mountaineering) then there is a risk that your eye will deform and render you temporarily unfocussed until normal pressure is restored.
3) the scars cause massive internal reflections and this will affect your night vision when driving.
4) you may need to have tune-ups. two in one friend's case.
5) Cross infection risks means that it is wiser to have each eye done at different times.
I'm not a big fan.
"The value of human life doesn't factor in. " yes it does, that Pinto page (which was pretty good actually) even had a figure in there, $200k, I think. You may not like it but the current cost of an American life is about 4 million bucks.
Supposing the perceived benefit had been 100 times the cost of the injuries, not 2.5 times? Would that be acceptable?
I think they made a cost/benefit decision (wrong, as it turned out), and they got hammered for it. But their logic was correct.
We don't live in a world of fluffy bunnies and chocolate houses. Safety costs. At some point there is an engineering change to a product that is not worth making, even though it will save a life.
In some respects we have gone to the opposite extreme. Holden in Australia have fitted side airbags. They sold these things for two years, so that is 60000 vehicle years, before one went off in an accident.
Cost to society 80000*600 dollars= 48 million dollars. life saved: 2, possibly.
Even if they carry on crashing at the same rate for ten years it is very hard to believe that they will have been worth fitting.
Incidentally you would be amazed by the number of people who think that airbags are more important than antilock brakes, apparently they still want to have the accident, just not get their nose broken when it happens.
And of course it is very hard to get even slightly het up about safety when the morons won't wear safety belts.
Well strictly speaking I was more annoyed with the banality of his observations than their stupidity. As to your point, yes there is a time and a place for making provocative statements, but if you truly do not know the answer to a question then why pipe up? In engineering (I am an engineer) I usually know how solid the ground is on which I am standing. If I make up some BS explanation for something the chances are that someone will remember it, investigate, and shoot me down.
I see no reason why this would not apply to other technical areas.
in stringing the words together in the right order if the underlying thoughts are so banal. Unless the intention is to advertise that fact.
Better to be quiet and thought a fool, than speaking and confirming it.
Dullest blog I've ever read (not that I read many). Or if you prefer, dullest piece of writing from an author who often used to write very good stuff.
Not that my blog would be any more interesting.
1) What on earth makes you think all software will be free? Are you going to write free replacements for ADAMS, Hypermesh, LMS, Fluent and all the other $50k+ engineering programs out there? I mean, it's jolly nice of you to volunteer, but really it isn't going to happen.
2) Microsoft's cash reserves are totally independent of their share price. The reverse is not true.
I don't disagree with your general point, but making bad statements is no real help.
Amend, Jan P. Biogeochemistry T
Arvidson, Raymond E. Planetary Geology; Department Chairman T
Blank, Carrine E. Molecular Geomicrobiology T
Criss, Robert E. Stable Isotopes T
Crozaz, Ghislaine Cosmochemistry T
Dymek, Robert F. Metamorphic and Igneous Petrology T
Fegley, Bruce Planetary Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry T
Haskin, Larry A. Planetary Surface Materials T
Hofmeister, Anne M. Mineral Physics R
Jolliff, Bradley L. Geology, Petrology, and Geochemistry of the Earth, Moon, and Mars R
Korotev, Randy L. Lunar Geochemistry R
Levin, Harold L. Paleontology T
McKinnon, William B. Planetary Geophysics and Dynamics T
Morris, Julie D. Isotope Geochemistry, Magmatism and Tectonics R
Pasteris, Jill D. Biomineralization and Fluid-Rock Interactions T
Phillips, Roger J. Planetary Geophysics and Tectonics T
Podosek, Frank A. Isotope Geochemistry T
Smith, Jennifer R. Quaternary Geology, Geoarchaeology, and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction T
Smith, Joshua B. Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Reconstruction, Sedimentology T
Smith, William H. Observational Astronomy, Planetary Physics T
Tucker, Robert D. U-Pb Geochronology, Regional Geology, Tectonics T
Wiens, Douglas A. Seismology and Geophysics T
Wysession, Michael E. Seismology and Geophysics T
Zinner, Ernst K. Astrophysics and Space Physics R
Or a liar
So if we start replying to spam, requesting more info, then the spammer makes more money, which is bad in the short term, but since we wouldn't take up the mortgage, the cost per mortgage for the actual business would rise, making spam less attractive to the business.
What have I missed?
Not all of us are running OSX
or 9
or even 8
!
Your example is so fictitous as to be meaningless.
At work I run a Xeon (whatever that is). At home I have an Atlon 1600 and a K6-2. These are all used 5 days per week, plus, typically 5-8 hours per day.
Typically they run www, spreadsheets and engineering programs, and the fast machine at home runs games and demos.
I don't log downtime or lost productivity, generally, but I know I have lost 4 hours to a RAM failure in the last year. That's it.
As far as software and reboots go the Xeon, running W2k, gets rebooted once per week as a matter of course, and has maybe fallen over once in the year. The K2 runs NT4 and has chucked me out of a few programs, but ha snot 'crashed'. It gets turned off overnight.
The Athlon runs win 98 SE and has a pretty gruesome life running game demos and so on. I have had to re-install windows once. I would guess it falls over in such a way as to lose work in progress perhaps once every couple of months.
That is not 50 minutes of productivity loss per day, more like 1
And of course Macs never crash, do they? I've got a couple of those hanging around, but they don't run often enough for me to get a picture of software reliability. But the sad Mac appears remarkably often, in my experience.
Doom I
I jumped the first time I came across one of the monsters (upstairs on the left in an early level).
I still grin whenever I fire it up, the music is either good, or just so strongly associated with the excellent game, that just hearing it gives me goosepimples.
Tetris
Banned from my computer. Too many dreams of falling blocks, and too many sessions playing til 4 in the morning.
SS 1
Ever been scared to open a door? Yes. Ever been scared to open ANY door on a level? Oh yes. SS2 was nearly as good, but a bit repetitive, and too long.
Jedi Knight
The only game in which I try to physically twist and jump as I play, and grunt when I catch a ledge. Given how pathetic the 3d engine is, that is one hell of an achievement in gamplay/suspension of disbelief.
I bought a Mac SE a few years ago just to run Hypercard. I've got 2.2 and still have the floppies. 1993
Never did get around to doing what I planned with it.
i think you need to check your understanding of special relativity.
The source of the light (the head of the bolt) does not have to move at the speed of light in a vacuum (clue).
one expressed amusement.
Many of your points are good but
"We see laser "beams" slowly travel from the cannon to the target. Sub-light speed light ?"
At the energy density involved for lasers to be an effective weapon then it is vaguely possible that the photon 'bolt' would have enough mass to locally curve space time, and hence affect the observed speed of propagation. Maybe.
"In starwars II (old series) R2D2 solves several times computational problems which are NOT turing computable"
I like this one. What are they? But maybe he just guessed. Or he was reprogammed by the Force and didn't have to calculate anything , it was all received knowledge.
"Most alien creatures breate oxygen." No, it's just all the alien creatures we interact with breath oxygen. Other chemistries are not interested in the same planets since they cannot live there, and may have vastly different rates of consciousness.
"When the Death Star fires, we see 3 laser beams "hitting" each other an send of a 4th one in a different direction."
It worked in Ghostbusters
Hey damn I was going to jump on your sig as well but it doesn't show.
Come on then, tell the story. Why is a CS major using Autocad? Are you designing the buildings to house your new supercomputer?
It's one of those programs that is OK when you are used to it, but, if you were to design a CAD system from scratch, now, you wouldn't do it that way.
From an engineer's viewpoint there are two sides to this.
WP as such is irrelevant. The documents that we use are say spreadsheets, program writing environments, and CAD/CAE
I suggest that spreadsheets and program writing are not that much better served by the mouse than by cursor keys, but I cannot fathom how to run a decent 3d CAE environment other than via a pointer.
"Slayton: ... about knowledge and organizations. If I think about an
/do/ know how complex things are built. I can't, this minute, tell you how an engine management computer works (I do suspensions, for now), but you can bet that if I needed to, inside two weeks I would. Knowledge is dispersed inside an organisation, but if the chief engineers don't know what is going on then the whole edifice will do a Saddam.
airplane, the manufacture of an airplane, the first thing that occurs to
me is that no one knows how an aircraft gets built. No one. There's
no one that knows how to build an airplane anymore because the
artifact of the airplane is so complex and involves so many people that
that knowledge is dispersed. It doesn't belong to one person and it
probably doesn't belong to the group. It belongs to the interactions or
the associations between people and between organizations. That's a
such a different idea about knowledge as much as it is a phenomena
that our culture has found ourselves in more recently because of what
we produce. We continue to produce a more complex world..."
Well that's you buddy. Real engineers
This whole 'we are ants powerless in the face of the complexity of modern technology' crap gives me the irrits. Just because you are a word mangler who couldn't do a technical degree doesn't mean the rest of us are that stupid.
Um, except that there was no ad hominem (of the man) attack in the post he's whining about.
He was being criticised for expressing a poorly thought out argument, not being told that he was a whining moron. For instance.
Minitab - no
Mathcad - no
MS Project - no? Hard to believe
MS Excel - yes
Matlab - yes
OK I use Excel more than I use the others, but given that I've left out the special purpose tools (MSC ADAMS) that are my core job which are not available for the Mac, sorry, OSX simply won't do, except as a general office computer (ie pr0n browser and email client).
I'm not anti Mac - I have two useable Macs at home, but for a business it is far more important to run the software you need than to worry about operating systems.
And no, I can't imagine running my numerically intensive tasks in an emulator.
Why not just buy the company out? They've done that a zillion times in the past. Slap a non-compete deal on the employees, and then they can do what they like.
Option 2, license google technology from google.