Laziness, deadlines, and lack of developer experience building things that aren't cloud or web centric. A lot of current developers literally don't know how to build software that runs at the endpoint and can run offline.
Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That statement is also false. I have a Nest thermostat. It works fine without the network. I have a modern car. It works fine without the internet. Several of my friends have Teslas. They work fine offgrid. It's just nonsense. Stop defending it.
Wasn't there recently a story of a Lamborghini which wouldn't start because it didn't have a cell signal (it was in an underground garage)? Some sensor had been tripped, which made the car require network validation before it would start back up. And don't Nest thermostats occasionally have an issue where they default back to somewhere in the 60° range due to a server connectivity issue? https://support.google.com/go…
Old thermostats died from time to time, even when they weren't very old. Same with cars. They just had different problems than the modern ones.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't there recently a story of a Lamborghini which wouldn't start because it didn't have a cell signal (it was in an underground garage)? Some sensor had been tripped, which made the car require network validation before it would start back up. And don't Nest thermostats occasionally have an issue where they default back to somewhere in the 60° range due to a server connectivity issue? https://support.google.com/go…
Old thermostats died from time to time, even when they weren't very old. Same with cars. They just had different problems than the modern ones.
Absolutely! But their failure cases weren't due to the inability to access a network or a server. This is whole new set of failure cases which exists over the top of the old ones.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX has entered the chat
At least they're breaking the things they paid for, not the ones I paid for.
TP-Link has 2 years of warranty, 5 years for their "business" product line. The terms seem clear.
Probably iRobot has similar terms and conditions when they sell their robots, right?
I mean, eventually someone has to pay for R&D. (Sure, I'm not saying this is the best way, but apparently people really don't like paying for R&D - see how the Ubuntu phone, OpenMoko and similar projects basically flopped.) It turns out to really get money (financial capital) for research, the best way is to be in the market.
Just research things tend to move very slowly.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait for a disaster to happen in your area - a time when you'll want your cellphone the most. At which point your cellphone will be... well, a good camera. And personally, as someone who grew up in the 80's, let me offer up a counter-anecdote: I don't ever recall hearing a "fast-busy tone". There was never a time we couldn't use our land line (at least until we had a modem, that is).
Well, that relies on a couple of things. A disaster can take phone lines out as well as electricity. You might not have zero cell phone service if towers are working. Land lines would get clogged at times and simply fail you (I've had this happen). You generally have some charge on your phone, though, and lots of folks have power banks now - or cars they can charge their phones with. Don't forget all the times when d…
In large disasters, cell phone networks have historically become so bogged down that even with fully functional towers and phones, you couldn't use the network. Perhaps sometime we'll have sufficient provisioning of cell phone towers to absorb such large spikes in usage, but we're not there right now.
Crucially, however, there is no profit in getting to the point of being properly provisioned for emergencies, and no regulation pushing for it. Land lines, in contrast, are regulated to push for availability during emergencies.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#86I stopped reading at Try to recall a time back when the Internet didn't exist... Where things like cars and phones functioned on their own in a much more reliable manner. I grew up in the 80s and have owned several cars from that era. They were significantly less reliable than cars of today. Carburetors were still present (though being phased out) and there were always vacuum hoses that, when they leaked, caused your…
Most audio gear was built to last then, my sound system, speakers and amplifier is from the 80's and still sounds so sweet. The only other notable mention was my Nokia 2110 which I had for from 1996 until 2001 and was bulletproof. (but alas not waterproof)
I use my Kenwood kr-3130, which was given as a gift to my mother in the 70s, every single day. Still truckin'
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet didn't fix these things, fuel injection, electronic ignition, and digital signal processing / denser silicon integration did.
Irrespective of why, cars and phones did not function in a more reliable manner back then. The statement is false.
Your argument is a strawman. Car and phone or bad examples to prove your point because car reliability improved because of factors unrelated to the internet, and phone reliability improved because a better reliability of satellites and computer networks. Better examples are things like watches or desktop applications which seem to work fine before they were connected to the internet.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrespective of why, cars and phones did not function in a more reliable manner back then. The statement is false.
They could be fixed using low-tech tools though. Something you're overlooking with your concept of "reliability" is that cars produced before 1980 can be fixed using pretty basic tool. It's conceivable that a car from that era could continue to work well into the 2100s. Because most of what can break on can be remanufactured by a reasonably-skilled machinist. Yeah, cars need to be fixed much less often, and they are…
There's "fixable in theory" and "fixable in practice". As a former gearhead, I'd argue that cars from the late 70s/early 80s are effectively unfixable - it was the era when emissions standards were ratcheting up, but controls were still mostly analog. Engine bays were a giant morass of rubber vacuum hoses that nobody sane wants to deal with anymore.
Mid-70s and earlier cars tend to be simpler, but they would never pass modern emissions tests. We picked clean air and fuel efficiency over simplicity. I don't think this was wrong.
It's really hard to know what to think about the direction cars are heading. Yeah, there's a lot of closed software and electronics. On the other hand, I have at least one friend with a hacked Tesla. And the huge emissions regulatory and inspection regime that prevents you from making changes to engines doesn't apply to electric cars. So it's a mixed bag.
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrespective of why, cars and phones did not function in a more reliable manner back then. The statement is false.
They could be fixed using low-tech tools though. Something you're overlooking with your concept of "reliability" is that cars produced before 1980 can be fixed using pretty basic tool. It's conceivable that a car from that era could continue to work well into the 2100s. Because most of what can break on can be remanufactured by a reasonably-skilled machinist. Yeah, cars need to be fixed much less often, and they are…
I would say that even CIS/K-Jetronic injection (well into the early 90s) will be quite maintainable 50+ years from now. Even L-Jet doesn't require anything particularly sophisticated, but there are likely some already obsolete components in those boxes (though hundreds of thousands or millions of them in junkyards, surely far more than we're consuming).
Re: Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see people buying internet-required devices as the same people who buy the registry cleaners. They don’t know enough about computers themselves, and the advertorials/computer magazines don’t do them any favors. In some cases, you don't have a choice. As far as I know, all current Roomba models have their schedule programmed via an smartphone app. I don't have one, so I don't know if it exactly requires the intern…
Actually I don’t mind things being controlled by a smartphone over the Internet. That’s nice and convenient. What I object to is things being controlled by a company’s internet service, commanded by the user’s smartphone. One just requires my smartphone, the device and an internet connection, the other adds the company as an unnecessary middleman.
> Actually I don’t mind things being controlled by a smartphone over the Internet. That’s nice and convenient. What I object to is things being controlled by a company’s internet service, commanded by the user’s smartphone. One just requires my smartphone, the device and an internet connection, the other adds the company as an unnecessary middleman.
That's not quite right. For all practical purposes, internet control also requires a server sitting on a public IP address somewhere, and that's where things start break down.
1. If you run the server yourself, then you're dealing with patching it and otherwise supporting that infrastructure.
2. If a third party tries to run a server as some kind of service, they're stuck supporting all the protocols and schemas of all kinds of internet connected devices, since AFAIK there are little to no standards. Then there's the problem of funding such a project.
With both of the above situations, the device also needs to support configuring a different server.
3. If a manufacturer runs the server, then you avoid most of the problems of the above options, but then you're at their mercy, and liable to loose functionality at some indeterminate point in the future.
The invisible hand of the market, PBUH, appears to have determined that 3 is the best (most profitable) option.