On 30/10/13 23:31, Chris wrote:
> I know. A lot of people are like that. But who (mis)guides them? The big PR
> campaigns by big companies who talk about "safety" and "precision" and give
> users a false sense of security. Now that I think of it, maybe the fact that
> they don't have a simple mechanical backup is not because of the engineering
> culture. Maybe it is to do with the fact that a product might seem less
> attractive, if the company admits that it can fail by including a backup mechanism.

I'll play devil's advocate here, if nothing else because I'm curious what Walter's response may be ... :-)

One of the things that makes a car different from an aeroplane is that pilots form a relatively small group of highly-trained people.  Car drivers get trained, but not to a very high level.

So, in those circumstances, any control you put in the vehicle needs to be confronted with at least four questions -- "What are the expected benefits if this control needs to be used and is used correctly?"  "What are the expected problems if this control doesn't need to be used, but is used anyway?"  "What's the likelihood of a situation arising where the control needs to be used?" "What's the likelihood that the driver can correctly distinguish when it needs to be used -- what are the expected false positives and false negatives?"

The point being that a manual override in the hands of the average driver could in fact _increase_ the risk of an accident because the most typical outcome is a driver engaging it incorrectly.

On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 12:32:48 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:


> The point being that a manual override in the hands of the average driver could in fact _increase_ the risk of an accident because the most typical outcome is a driver engaging it incorrectly.

I wonder how people could drive 25 years ago!? No software on board. Gosh they must have been geniuses! ;)

On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 12:49:23 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 12:32:48 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>
>
>> The point being that a manual override in the hands of the average driver could in fact _increase_ the risk of an accident because the most typical outcome is a driver engaging it incorrectly.
>
> I wonder how people could drive 25 years ago!? No software on board. Gosh they must have been geniuses! ;)

They crashed into things. Now, with ABS or path correction, they do so less.

On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 03:27:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> Wow. No bug tracker?? That's just insane. How do they keep track of anything??

That describes my day job.  To answer: we kind of...don't. ¬_¬ I'm in legacy maintenance too, so the lack of documentation of even known issues is incredibly frustrating.  I'm trying to change that, but there's a lot of inertia from the people who've been around for 20+ years.

Forget testing; just figuring out the maintainer for a tree is an adventure.

-Wyatt

On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 04:24:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 29, 2013 19:14:50 Walter Bright wrote:
>
> That's a given, and it's sad to see a trained engineer thinking otherwise.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis


I'd begin to question the value of that "training" :)

On 31/10/13 13:49, Chris wrote:
> I wonder how people could drive 25 years ago!? No software on board. Gosh they
> must have been geniuses! ;)

"At greater risk of an accident" != "Incapable of driving" ;-)

On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 13:32:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 31/10/13 13:49, Chris wrote:
>> I wonder how people could drive 25 years ago!? No software on board. Gosh they
>> must have been geniuses! ;)
>
> "At greater risk of an accident" != "Incapable of driving" ;-)

Fair enough. Well, I was once driving the companies BMW and the ABS etc. saved me when I came to a road that was iced over. I had no experience at all with the car. However, if BMW didn't have that stupid rear-wheel drive, I would have been fine anyway. Front-wheel drive is much safer, especially in wet and icy conditions. The danger is that people overestimate the power of these technologies and rely too much on them (which leads to dangerous situations on the road). I'm glad I learned how to drive when cars were still cars and not little space ships.

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 03:26:31PM +0100, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 13:32:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> >On 31/10/13 13:49, Chris wrote:
> >>I wonder how people could drive 25 years ago!? No software on board. Gosh they must have been geniuses! ;)
> >
> >"At greater risk of an accident" != "Incapable of driving" ;-)
> 
> Fair enough. Well, I was once driving the companies BMW and the ABS etc. saved me when I came to a road that was iced over. I had no experience at all with the car. However, if BMW didn't have that stupid rear-wheel drive, I would have been fine anyway. Front-wheel drive is much safer, especially in wet and icy conditions. The danger is that people overestimate the power of these technologies and rely too much on them (which leads to dangerous situations on the road). I'm glad I learned how to drive when cars were still cars and not little space ships.

ABS is certainly a helpful thing, especially in inclement conditions like snow/ice. But it's far from perfect. Once, I was going downhill on an icy road and suddenly started to skid dangerously close to the car in front of me. The ABS kicked in when I slammed the brakes, but it couldn't regain traction on the ice.  At the last moment, I manually pumped the brakes and managed to come to a shaky stop inches before I hit the car in front.

You don't know how thankful I am for having learnt the concept of pumping the brakes, ABS or not. I'm afraid too many driving instructors nowadays just advise slamming the brakes and relying on the ABS to do the job. It doesn't *always* work!


T

-- 
Nobody is perfect.  I am Nobody. -- pepoluan, GKC forum

On 10/29/2013 8:59 PM, Joakim wrote:> Heh, this reminded me of my current ultrabook, the Zenbook Prime UX31A,
> which is an absolutely fantastic machine, the best I've ever owned, but
> whose designers made the unfortunate decision to make the power button
> just another key on the keyboard, as opposed to hard-wiring it directly
> to the battery.  Combine that with the fact that the keyboard connector
> doesn't hold its place well and is actually held in place by masking tape:
>
> http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Unresponsive+Keyboard+Keys/11932
>
> Cut to me late last year, unable to turn my ultrabook on because the
> keyboard connector had completely slipped out, a month after I had
> accidentally dropped it.  I had to find the linked instructions after a
> bunch of googling, go pick up a Torx T5, and fix it myself, as Asus
> support kept insisting to everyone that it was a software issue and that
> they should either reinstall the drivers or the OS!  I followed those
> simple instructions instead and no problems till a week ago, when I had
> to repeat the procedure again. :)

I'm still irritated that laptop manufacturers have gone the cheap route of replacing physical "disconnect the wireless antennas" switch with software-based keyboard combinations.

Actually, much more than that, I'm *really* annoyed at the elimination of physical, hardware-based speaker volume controls in favor of purely-software volume controls that do whatever the hell they want, whenever they feel like it, and don't even work *at all* under many basic circumstances (A hardware volume works *even when the device is off*. Try writing an app to do THAT!): http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/it-takes-a-special-kind-of-stupid-to-screw-up-volume-controls

Another example of the worthlessness of software volumes is the stereo in my mom's 2010 Hyundai Elantra: Every time the car is turned on the radio comes on, and at a factory-determined volume, *regardless* of how you left the volume and on/off state when you last turned the car off. And then if you immediately turn the radio back off, it will *automatically turn it back on AGAIN*. Stupid motherfuckers actually claimed this was a "convenience feature". Idiocy at its finest.

Hardware controls *CAN'T* fuck things up that freaking badly. But software opens the door to all manner of colossally bad design blunders.

By contrast, I *love* my Prizm's stereo. EVerything always does exactly what I tell it. I don't have to turn the car on and let some OS boot before I can turn the volume down. I can *feel* all the buttons and use them without taking my eyes off the road. And unlike the Elantra's stereo, it's never crashed back to a Windows CE desktop.

On 10/29/2013 6:02 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 02:38:38PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 10/29/2013 2:22 PM, qznc wrote:
> [...]
>>> Maybe you should write an article about "Failsafe Design Principles"?
>>> Some quick googleing did not turn up anything useful. Only horror
>>> stories and anti-examples.
>>
>> I wrote one for DDJ a few years back, "Safe Systems from Unreliable
>> Parts". It's probably scrolled off their system.
>
> It's the first google result when searching for the title:
>
> 	http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/safe-systems-from-unreliable-parts/228701716
>

Google has no such thing as a first result for a given search string. Hasn't for a loooong time. Better to use startpage.com