Just a few of the many things I've encountered in 60 years of driving that are going to be a problem for computers.
1. GPS? My wife and I bought a new GPS on sale at a local mall a few years ago. First thing we did when we got in the car was to program the thing to take us home. We hit GO. It thought a while and then told us that home was 2700 odd miles away and that the trip might take a while. Guess what? GPSen don't work in parking garages. It apparently thought it was still in Sunnyvale where last it was turned off, and it was contemplating a trip across the continent.
2. A couple of days ago I was using that same GPS to navigate through a rural area in Vermont. Seeking the shortest route, it put me on a (dirt) road that ran about a half mile, turned a corner, and ended in someone's barn. Care to try your hand at a program to recognize and deal with that situation?
3. Many years ago while traveling up the (dirt) road to an obscure National Monument out West, I came around a corner and found myself in a large herd of sheep. Couldn't see the road. Or the ditches. Or anything but sheep. What now Kit?
Not that cars a few decades from now won't be able to deal with thousands of situations like that. But it'll take a while I think.
if you barf on the back seat, the cab driver might smash your teeth in - something the autonomous car won't do.
I'm confident that with a little work, cars can be programmed to express dissatisfaction with driver behavior. Maybe release the seat belt, run the speed up to 50kph, then stand on the brakes.
Just don't expect all the features to be there in V1.0 of the software.
It is conceivable that at some future time, some code might be produced by folks using a more rigorous and less haphazard process than that used by most programmers today. Maybe that'd qualify as engineering.
But I have some doubts that the code would be any better and I'm pretty sure that writing it would be slow, tedious, expensive, and not much fun.
Ahem... I think maybe you don't fully understand, It's not that kernel security is entirely unimportant. It's that the idea that you can or should fix imaginary security problems in the kernel seems kind of ditzy. It's sort of like protecting New York City from terrorists by hiring more police and assigning them to florist shops. Yes, that would presumably discourage terrorist floral attacks. But since when are those a known or potential problem?
If you want to secure computing, then reduce attack surfaces dramatically. Don't hook everything in sight up to the same internet. Cut way back on the number of protocols in use. Lose idiocy like Javascript. Fix eccentric cookie behavior, etc, etc, etc.
If, after doing that, it turns out there are exploitable holes in the kernel -- say a flaw that allows a carefully crafted IP packet to make arbitrary changes to the system or a way for the janitor to inject a privileged process from a USB stick into people's desktop PC startup while he/she is emptying the wastebaskets -- I doubt there will be any resistance from Torvalds or anyone else to fixing them.
"It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement?...
I'm in complete agreement that manned space missions are not cost effective in finding out about our solar system. Too much of the money goes to keeping the not terribly capable sensors (people) functioning, not to collecting useful data.
OTOH, one billion doesn't get you a lot in space, Especially after one pays to get a payload 170,000,000 km out to Mars and manages to land it on the surface. The Curiousity Mars Rover mission cost around $2.5B. A REALLY complex payload like the Webb space telescope (of which I am not especially a fan) is running somewhere around $8B and the cost overruns may not be over.
"Please build me a website that is 100% secure for eCommerce."
The proper response to that is probably "I can't do that and neither can anyone else. If you could find someone who can do that, the user experience would be so horrible that people will stay away in droves. Now then, what are you willing to settle for?"
"I have never understood . Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff"
(BTW, I tried to blockquote that, but ran afoul of some weird and inconsistent 50 character limit that seems to be applied only in even numbered minutes.)
Perhaps that's because after a decade or two, folks recognize that much, not all, new stuff is garbage that will die a horrible death in two to five years. I'd suggest that perhaps many of them actually will buy into things they think will last but aren't about to waste time on stuff they think is both stupid and probably transient.
A real, bona fide, practicing, reliability engineer explained to me once that military procurement procedures are intentionally biased toward older technologies and minimal upgrading. He said (and I believe him) that the military's nightmare scenario is that they will do something like installing 50000 computer boards in equipment scattered worldwide in poorly accessible equipment only to find that the ROMs they have used lose their memory after three or four years.
Obviously, that's primarily a hardware concern. but it's far from clear that it doesn't have considerable validity for software as well. And it's the way their process is set up.
Personally, I'm far from convinced that the current civilian -- ship now, we'll fix the problems in production -- approach to systems work is going work out well in the long run.
I agree with the initial comment that if what one has works, changing it seems strange. Red-Queen Races have no winners -- only losers. But knowing where one will go if their tool somehow actually won't do what they need done is reasonable.
Point: I'm not wild about markdown, but isn't the whole point of markdown that you don't need a special editor -- just (possibly) software to convert markdown text to a real markup language when you need formatted output.
Editors? There's a zillion of them and most are at least adequate. Personally, I've loathed vi since before many of you were born, and constant updating hasn't really done all that much for it in my opinion. But still, many people seem to like it and it's worth looking at. emacs is perhaps more likeable, but as someone commented, it's slow -- especially on limited machinery. In principle, jed is well-mannered, but it never seemed to attract the developer community it needed to make it work well in diverse environments. etc, etc, etc
IIRC Wikipedia lists about 6 dozen text editors and I'm sure there are hundreds more. Most are probably usable. One of them should suit
Personally, I find that the only time choice is a problem is when all of the options presented to me are inadequate and I need to try to select the least bad. Happens a lot with computer stuff and when voting in general elections, not so much at the grocery store or hardware store.
Besides which, doesn't IBM have a patent on inaccurate computer clocks? Tromp on that and you'll probably find them suing you for your car, home, savings, and first born son.
Let me suggest that within three or four years, the Internet Of Things will be redesignated as The Internet Of Horrors due to the lousy security and the lack of real need for remotely controlled toasters, hair driers, toothbrushes and pencil sharpeners. I'm sure that people putting in 80 hour weeks at SV startups with hopes of paying off their student loans and retiring at the age of 27 will be disappointed by that. But I think in the long run, we will all be better off.
If the article weren't so badly written, poorly organized and incoherent, I'd suspect it to be the product of a machine -- albeit one hampered by a bad software patch. Anyway, if you replace 2020 with 2040 or 2050, some parts might have some merit. It may provide a bit of insight into the nature of the run_before_you_can_walk "thinking" that will likely precede Silicon Valley's next crash.
fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument sounds plausible and I mostly agree with it. But I'd point out that even if the project is a large number of mostly unrelated problems, throwing a bunch of resources at it will probably introduce more than a few dependencies between "solutions" that would not have existed with fewer folks and more time.
Those will have to be sorted out.
Also, no matter how much parallelism, one manages to find, the eventual completion date will be the sum of the times required to complete the longest chain of dependent activities. It's unlikely that it will be obvious which those are... except maybe in retrospect. Most problems tend to look vastly simpler... in retrospect.
Hmmm. Don't drive much on snow and ice do you? When coming down a hill with a stop at the bottom, you really want to come to a complete stop at the bottom. You don't want to smack into whatever traffic may be out on the road you are stopping for. Especially if it is a snow plow. And you'd like to keep the car on it's normal side of the road pointed in the conventional direction. Safer that way. The best way to accomplish that seems to be to be to lock all four wheels and use the steering to control direction while the vehicle slowly slithers to a stop. Except that doesn't work with ABS. Don't believe me? You're welcome to try the hill opposite my driveway come our next big snowstorm -- probably in a few months, but in Northern New England, one never knows.
Maybe it's old primitive ABS that's a problem. Well, the Camry I drive IS 16 years old. But my wife's two year old Hyundai does the same thing.
Not what you've been told? Let me let you in on a secret laddie. Marketing people sometimes misrepresent (i.e. lie about) vehicle capabilities. Since they are rewarded for doing so, I suspect it is unlikely they will change their ways any time soon. (Actually, it's been well known for decades that ABS works well on dry roads and OK on wet ones, not too well on dirt and poorly on ice,snow, gravel)
I suppose that it'll be a net plus since most driving is done on OK roads and not everyone pays as much attention to other vehicles as one might hope.. But I agree with you. The poorer the driving conditions the less well ABS works. In heavy snow, having the wheels lock up more or less at random and not stay locked makes directional control when stopping really difficult. Not that driving more than a few mph on ice or in heavy snow is usually all that great an idea. But it IS annoying to have the car go out of its way to make an already difficult task harder.
I think the issue is when this shit comes with your car it isn't obvious how you uninstall the crap.
Exactly. The problem is what we might call the UI bottleneck. If the vehicle has 48 features and I loathe 45 of them, I still have to fight my way through 48 confusing, often poorly identified, controls in order to use the three functions I like/want/need. If it's not a tool I use all the time I may well give up before I find the control I'm looking for. Or worse, I may turn on some incredibly annoying "feature" whose Off button is hidden behind some improbable sequence of actions identified by more or less incomprehensible icons that look like squashed grasshoppers or overturned ice-cream cones.
Probably the same neolithic types that didn't buy Bob, didn't like Clippy, use ad-blockers, and disable javascript. Self absorbed jerks who impede progress. Long past time to send em off to re-education camps.
I don't think you understand how hard it is to write secure software. It's really, REALLY hard. If it were easy or even moderately difficult surely Windows would be -- after a decade of regular security patches -- be exploit proof.
OTOH, trying to write more secure software, probably won't do any harm and might do some good.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a few of the many things I've encountered in 60 years of driving that are going to be a problem for computers.
1. GPS? My wife and I bought a new GPS on sale at a local mall a few years ago. First thing we did when we got in the car was to program the thing to take us home. We hit GO. It thought a while and then told us that home was 2700 odd miles away and that the trip might take a while. Guess what? GPSen don't work in parking garages. It apparently thought it was still in Sunnyvale where last it was turned off, and it was contemplating a trip across the continent.
2. A couple of days ago I was using that same GPS to navigate through a rural area in Vermont. Seeking the shortest route, it put me on a (dirt) road that ran about a half mile, turned a corner, and ended in someone's barn. Care to try your hand at a program to recognize and deal with that situation?
3. Many years ago while traveling up the (dirt) road to an obscure National Monument out West, I came around a corner and found myself in a large herd of sheep. Couldn't see the road. Or the ditches. Or anything but sheep. What now Kit?
Not that cars a few decades from now won't be able to deal with thousands of situations like that. But it'll take a while I think.
I'm confident that with a little work, cars can be programmed to express dissatisfaction with driver behavior. Maybe release the seat belt, run the speed up to 50kph, then stand on the brakes.
Just don't expect all the features to be there in V1.0 of the software.
"No" is good enough for a short answer.
It is conceivable that at some future time, some code might be produced by folks using a more rigorous and less haphazard process than that used by most programmers today. Maybe that'd qualify as engineering.
But I have some doubts that the code would be any better and I'm pretty sure that writing it would be slow, tedious, expensive, and not much fun.
Ahem ... I think maybe you don't fully understand, It's not that kernel security is entirely unimportant. It's that the idea that you can or should fix imaginary security problems in the kernel seems kind of ditzy. It's sort of like protecting New York City from terrorists by hiring more police and assigning them to florist shops. Yes, that would presumably discourage terrorist floral attacks. But since when are those a known or potential problem?
If you want to secure computing, then reduce attack surfaces dramatically. Don't hook everything in sight up to the same internet. Cut way back on the number of protocols in use. Lose idiocy like Javascript. Fix eccentric cookie behavior, etc, etc, etc.
If, after doing that, it turns out there are exploitable holes in the kernel -- say a flaw that allows a carefully crafted IP packet to make arbitrary changes to the system or a way for the janitor to inject a privileged process from a USB stick into people's desktop PC startup while he/she is emptying the wastebaskets -- I doubt there will be any resistance from Torvalds or anyone else to fixing them.
I'm sure that buried in the terms and conditions is a clause that forbids its use by terrorists.
Jamming device?
I was thinking trained owls
But I suppose a jamming device would work.
It'd be illegal of course. But who is going to serve a warrant on the warden for operating an illegal RF transmitter?
"It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
agreement?...
Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle by R. P. Feynman
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/sh...
I'm in complete agreement that manned space missions are not cost effective in finding out about our solar system. Too much of the money goes to keeping the not terribly capable sensors (people) functioning, not to collecting useful data.
OTOH, one billion doesn't get you a lot in space, Especially after one pays to get a payload 170,000,000 km out to Mars and manages to land it on the surface. The Curiousity Mars Rover mission cost around $2.5B. A REALLY complex payload like the Webb space telescope (of which I am not especially a fan) is running somewhere around $8B and the cost overruns may not be over.
"Okay, I didn't RTFA,"
Didn't miss much. 'Content free drivel' would be a three word summary of the article.
"Please build me a website that is 100% secure for eCommerce."
The proper response to that is probably "I can't do that and neither can anyone else. If you could find someone who can do that, the user experience would be so horrible that people will stay away in droves. Now then, what are you willing to settle for?"
"I have never understood . Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff"
(BTW, I tried to blockquote that, but ran afoul of some weird and inconsistent 50 character limit that seems to be applied only in even numbered minutes.)
Perhaps that's because after a decade or two, folks recognize that much, not all, new stuff is garbage that will die a horrible death in two to five years. I'd suggest that perhaps many of them actually will buy into things they think will last but aren't about to waste time on stuff they think is both stupid and probably transient.
A real, bona fide, practicing, reliability engineer explained to me once that military procurement procedures are intentionally biased toward older technologies and minimal upgrading. He said (and I believe him) that the military's nightmare scenario is that they will do something like installing 50000 computer boards in equipment scattered worldwide in poorly accessible equipment only to find that the ROMs they have used lose their memory after three or four years.
Obviously, that's primarily a hardware concern. but it's far from clear that it doesn't have considerable validity for software as well. And it's the way their process is set up.
Personally, I'm far from convinced that the current civilian -- ship now, we'll fix the problems in production -- approach to systems work is going work out well in the long run.
OMG. The USAF has aircraft? Who knew?
I agree with the initial comment that if what one has works, changing it seems strange. Red-Queen Races have no winners -- only losers. But knowing where one will go if their tool somehow actually won't do what they need done is reasonable.
Point: I'm not wild about markdown, but isn't the whole point of markdown that you don't need a special editor -- just (possibly) software to convert markdown text to a real markup language when you need formatted output.
Editors? There's a zillion of them and most are at least adequate. Personally, I've loathed vi since before many of you were born, and constant updating hasn't really done all that much for it in my opinion. But still, many people seem to like it and it's worth looking at. emacs is perhaps more likeable, but as someone commented, it's slow -- especially on limited machinery. In principle, jed is well-mannered, but it never seemed to attract the developer community it needed to make it work well in diverse environments. etc, etc, etc
IIRC Wikipedia lists about 6 dozen text editors and I'm sure there are hundreds more. Most are probably usable. One of them should suit
Personally, I find that the only time choice is a problem is when all of the options presented to me are inadequate and I need to try to select the least bad. Happens a lot with computer stuff and when voting in general elections, not so much at the grocery store or hardware store.
Besides which, doesn't IBM have a patent on inaccurate computer clocks? Tromp on that and you'll probably find them suing you for your car, home, savings, and first born son.
Let me suggest that within three or four years, the Internet Of Things will be redesignated as The Internet Of Horrors due to the lousy security and the lack of real need for remotely controlled toasters, hair driers, toothbrushes and pencil sharpeners. I'm sure that people putting in 80 hour weeks at SV startups with hopes of paying off their student loans and retiring at the age of 27 will be disappointed by that. But I think in the long run, we will all be better off.
JCL -- described by one early user as the world's first syntax free language. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If the article weren't so badly written, poorly organized and incoherent, I'd suspect it to be the product of a machine -- albeit one hampered by a bad software patch. Anyway, if you replace 2020 with 2040 or 2050, some parts might have some merit. It may provide a bit of insight into the nature of the run_before_you_can_walk "thinking" that will likely precede Silicon Valley's next crash.
fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument sounds plausible and I mostly agree with it. But I'd point out that even if the project is a large number of mostly unrelated problems, throwing a bunch of resources at it will probably introduce more than a few dependencies between "solutions" that would not have existed with fewer folks and more time.
Those will have to be sorted out.
Also, no matter how much parallelism, one manages to find, the eventual completion date will be the sum of the times required to complete the longest chain of dependent activities. It's unlikely that it will be obvious which those are ... except maybe in retrospect. Most problems tend to look vastly simpler ... in retrospect.
Hmmm. Don't drive much on snow and ice do you? When coming down a hill with a stop at the bottom, you really want to come to a complete stop at the bottom. You don't want to smack into whatever traffic may be out on the road you are stopping for. Especially if it is a snow plow. And you'd like to keep the car on it's normal side of the road pointed in the conventional direction. Safer that way. The best way to accomplish that seems to be to be to lock all four wheels and use the steering to control direction while the vehicle slowly slithers to a stop. Except that doesn't work with ABS. Don't believe me? You're welcome to try the hill opposite my driveway come our next big snowstorm -- probably in a few months, but in Northern New England, one never knows.
Maybe it's old primitive ABS that's a problem. Well, the Camry I drive IS 16 years old. But my wife's two year old Hyundai does the same thing.
Not what you've been told? Let me let you in on a secret laddie. Marketing people sometimes misrepresent (i.e. lie about) vehicle capabilities. Since they are rewarded for doing so, I suspect it is unlikely they will change their ways any time soon. (Actually, it's been well known for decades that ABS works well on dry roads and OK on wet ones, not too well on dirt and poorly on ice,snow, gravel)
I suppose that it'll be a net plus since most driving is done on OK roads and not everyone pays as much attention to other vehicles as one might hope.. But I agree with you. The poorer the driving conditions the less well ABS works. In heavy snow, having the wheels lock up more or less at random and not stay locked makes directional control when stopping really difficult. Not that driving more than a few mph on ice or in heavy snow is usually all that great an idea. But it IS annoying to have the car go out of its way to make an already difficult task harder.
Exactly. The problem is what we might call the UI bottleneck. If the vehicle has 48 features and I loathe 45 of them, I still have to fight my way through 48 confusing, often poorly identified, controls in order to use the three functions I like/want/need. If it's not a tool I use all the time I may well give up before I find the control I'm looking for. Or worse, I may turn on some incredibly annoying "feature" whose Off button is hidden behind some improbable sequence of actions identified by more or less incomprehensible icons that look like squashed grasshoppers or overturned ice-cream cones.
Probably the same neolithic types that didn't buy Bob, didn't like Clippy, use ad-blockers, and disable javascript. Self absorbed jerks who impede progress. Long past time to send em off to re-education camps.
I don't think you understand how hard it is to write secure software. It's really, REALLY hard. If it were easy or even moderately difficult surely Windows would be -- after a decade of regular security patches -- be exploit proof.
OTOH, trying to write more secure software, probably won't do any harm and might do some good.