The very concept of Microsoft doing software for automotive applications frightens me. Software will always have bugs, the problem with Microsoft is they have too many bugs. I've heard of programmer in big name companies who would have bugs in their code segments, so to fix the problem they would put in dummy print statements so the bug went away from the address space they were working with and became someone else's problem.

 

silly conspiracy theories.. :reechy:

 

Eek. :eek4: They're literally sweeping the mess under the rug. Amazing they can get away with it.

Imagine the legal battle if faulty code lead to overboosting and engine failure for hundreds of rigs. Or worse yet, a system failure ending in death. :eek3:
When you're controlling a 80,000lb rig, the stakes are damned high.

 

Actually its true, right now I have a object oriented design class that is geared towards guys already in the software development field. The average student in the class has a 8-5 job as a software developer and our teacher himself works full time as a software developer. They share stories of what they did to avoid fixing code because the client wanted it asap and they just didn't have enough time to fix it.

 

Look at the NASA probe... someone did it in feet and someone did it in meters. You would think a multi million dollar project wouldn't have a simple mistake like that. Sad truth is you sometimes have to sweep it under the rug, its not worth spending extra time and money getting more robust software when the client may never encounter that problem.

 

The NASA bungle was horrible...inexcusable IMO.

The statement " the client may never encounter the problem" is cause for concern. h: I know it's impossible to catch every last bug, but it seems to me like some firms are deliberately being cavalier - maybe even reckless. :dunno:

It sure isn't comforting.

 

Its not comforting, but you can never have perfect software. The question is what level of perfection is good enough so that the majority of the population can use it without any problems.

 

shit happens. I'm still amazed any computers even work considering the amount of problems it encounters just during the boot up sequence

 

NAS COMPUTING RESOURCES - COLUMBIA SUPERCOMPUTER
The Columbia supercomputer is making it possible for NASA to achieve breakthroughs in science and engineering for the agency's missions and Vision for Space Exploration. Columbia's highly advanced architecture will also be made available to a broader national science and engineering community.

Columbia System Facts

Based on SGI® NUMAflex™ architecture
20 SGI® Altix™ 3700 superclusters, each with 512 processors
Global shared memory across 512 processors

10,240 Intel Itanium® 2 processors
Current processor speed: 1.5 gigahertz
Current cache: 6 megabytes

1 terabyte of memory per 512 processors, with 20 terabytes total memory

Operating Environment
Linux® based operating system
PBS Pro™ job scheduler
Intel® Fortran/C/C++ compiler
SGI® ProPack™ 3.2 software

Interconnect
SGI® NUMAlink™
InfiniBand network
10 gigabit Ethernet
1 gigabit Ethernet

Storage
Online: 440 terabytes of Fibre Channel RAID storage
Archive storage capacity: 10 petabytes

 

True story. h: Nature of the buisness, I guess.