291–300 of 307 posts
I had a Porsche Taycan almost kill me and my entire family due to the absolutely negligent engineering team at porsche. An update was applied which killed the motor due to a stack overflow error — while driving! Porsche set up the error handling to kill the engine immediately with even the slightest error. I testified along with fellow owners to the NHTSA and got all Taycans recalled. The arrogance and denial that Po…
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> do you know how bad German universities are? I am surprised from this quoted comment. Are German unis really bad? Why is there such a perception?
Yea, I am German myself and I really do not get this comment. I‘ve studied abroad and US universities / colleges are laughably easy in comparison. Grade inflation is a real thing and the result of inflated college fees. Most US courses did not count as credit for my masters because they are too easy to get 100% in and they rarely cover even half of the average course load at TUM.
I had a Porsche Taycan almost kill me and my entire family due to the absolutely negligent engineering team at porsche. An update was applied which killed the motor due to a stack overflow error — while driving! Porsche set up the error handling to kill the engine immediately with even the slightest error. I testified along with fellow owners to the NHTSA and got all Taycans recalled. The arrogance and denial that Po…
How did turning off the engine almost cause an accident, were you overtaking?
My other owner friend was in the fast lane in front of a semi, almost was roadkill.
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To a point where Microsoft should consider acquiring Atlassian because they are so similar in this regard
Nice, then how comes everyone and their grandparents are running Jira and MS Office? The latter across FAANG as well (maybe not the G with an in house competitor).
This is how Microsoft drove their phone business off the cliff: they built a product that their customers (corporate IT) loved but the users detested. When the iphone showed up Microsoft famously knew it was dumb because it addressed nothing that their customers cared about. But the workforce demanded change.
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For a long time, there was a meme about "hardware" people not understanding software, and there was enough anecdotal evidence, to make the jokes about it funny. Example: "Never trust a hardware engineer with a keyboard, and never trust a programmer with a screwdriver." I once mentioned this meme (referring to a specific anecdote) in a small group of CS people, and the big-name CS professor in the group immediately ag…
The most complicated projects that humanity has built are software. The tooling and the culture in the software world is decades ahead of fields like engineering or business management. Take ideas like version control - a way to do change management. Open source. Test driven development. Continuous integration. These have existed in a nascent way in other fields, but software engineering has really taken the ideas to…
TBF version control started (SCCS, RCS etc) by modeling how version control was done in mechanical engineering and architecture. Just look at the manual version control in old blueprints. Nowadays CAD systems like solidworks have a VCS for your models too. Absolute shit based on proprietary MS file formats, but it is there and it works.
OTOH there are reasons why you can't do TDD in the physical engineering, much less CI. When you're building a bridge you have to do FEA on your design, but the cost committment of construction doesn't allow much incremental change as you go -- almost all is in response to problems found once you've started building.
Code review is inherited from practices of other engineering disciplines.
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It's interesting you mention electronics... Just this week I called out a mobile mechanic from our state automobile club here in Australia, to replace the battery in my old 911. He was really nice bloke, older guy, and we got chatting about cars. Now he reckoned that he has the most problems with European cars, most of which are considered premium or mid level brands in Australia. Always putting Euro cars on the back…
>Now he reckoned that he has the most problems with European cars, most of which are considered premium or mid level brands in Australia. Was this a surprise to you? Here in the US it's well known that European cars (including the expensive brands) are across the board worst in reliability, Japanese cars are the most reliable, and the US brands are in between.
But interesting that a professional expressed the opinion so readily.
TBH I don’t really tend to hear much about mainstream modern cars in my day to day life!
I do recall the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast (Marco Armant and Friends) complain about BMW reliability.
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Google maps is from Australia
Google Photos is from Australia. I thought Maps was US and Japan but am not up to date on that.
> Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.[9] In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc.[10] where it transformed into the web application Google Maps.
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Any ICE vehicle can blow a belt, take out the power steering and brakes, and leave you struggling to maintain control, at any time. Let’s not get overly nostalgic for the incredible mechanical complexity of ICEs.
There are no cars where the brakes are powered by the drive belt. Not even the very old hydropneumatic Citroëns, with a belt-driven hydraulic pump - because they could go for 20 or 30 miles on the stored pressure in the brake accumulator. If you can't control a car with dead power steering, you can't control a car. Power steering only makes a difference at parking speeds.
In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional control when it happened to me, and I’m a pretty big guy.
In fact, in my case I just stalled it. The twin turbo 4cyl engine had a very steep power curve and it was easy to pull the clutch at just the wrong RPM, before the turbo kicked in. Especially if I had been driving something else. So - there’s a failure mode triggered by simple ergonomics. The combination of an unexpected stall during acceleration also presents a heavy driver workload, as I discovered more than once.
The brakes are also powered by the engine and it requires very significant additional force to stop a large car whose engine has just quit unexpectedly. I’m not sure that everyone who drives such a vehicle could recover if the failure happened, say, at a busy intersection.
All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be nostalgic about ICEs. There are far more failure modes for them, all of which can lead to engine failure and subsequent controllability issues.
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There are no cars where the brakes are powered by the drive belt. Not even the very old hydropneumatic Citroëns, with a belt-driven hydraulic pump - because they could go for 20 or 30 miles on the stored pressure in the brake accumulator. If you can't control a car with dead power steering, you can't control a car. Power steering only makes a difference at parking speeds.
If you blow a belt or one of another thousand things go wrong, and the engine quits, then there’s no power to drive the steering. In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional…
No vehicle has brakes "powered by the engine". I'm not sure if you're maybe not quite explaining what you mean clearly there.
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If you blow a belt or one of another thousand things go wrong, and the engine quits, then there’s no power to drive the steering. In a relatively large vehicle - say, a VW Amarok - power steering provides significant moment on the steering that is immediately and unexpectedly removed when motive power is lost. While the car is arguably controllable, I was shocked at how difficult it was for me to maintain directional…
My car is a second-generation Range Rover that weighs around 2.5 tonnes. Without power steering it's very hard to steer at parking speeds, and absolutely no different at all above about 20mph. No vehicle has brakes "powered by the engine". I'm not sure if you're maybe not quite explaining what you mean clearly there.
When the engine stops, no vacuum. No vacuum, no assist. The brakes in most of the cars I’ve driven become substantially more difficult to use when the engine is off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_servo
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/auto-parts/brakes/brake-types...
https://didyouknowcars.com/the-history-of-power-assisted-bra...