Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

media.mbusa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 398 posts

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#251

Post by hnbear »

xp84 wrote: post #162
babypuncher wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever used software provided by an automaker that I would classify as "good". Just varying degrees from "functional, but barebones and clunky" down to "so buggy and useless it's a legitimate safety hazard". As a result, I'm firmly on team "make every infotainment system a dumb terminal for your phone" and refuse to buy any car that doesn't support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

I find myself torn on this: * Traditional Automakers: Mostly as you describe, though honestly I am fond of the UI in my VW. Most others score B-D in responsiveness and anywhere from B-F in my "is this UI closer to ideal, or to a caricature of a baffling UI that no one will ever like to use?" scale. * Apple: "No one needs physical controls for anything, and people HATE seeing any details, so let's try to get as minima…

A colleague with a recent Land Rover Discovery Sport has screens on the buttons/dials. Little mini screens for things like an AC knob.

It’s a Land Rover, so obviously those screen crash/bug out then he gets no HVAC.

He hates that car. It’s beautiful, luxurious and a pleasure to drive. But it’s been in the shop >50% of his lease.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#252

Post by kfk »

nforgerit wrote: post #166

German Software Engineer here. I'd rather chop off my left pinky than working on any software product any German car manufacturer is developing: 1) Their management hierarchies only consist of MBA suits that think short term and treat their engineers like apes in a zoo. This frequently leads to engineers actually behaving like apes in a zoo. 2) German culture is deeply based on thinking in silos. They divide everythi…

I lived 9 years in Germany, now in Poland. For me the fact that in Poland a programmer earns significantly more than a Financial Controller was an initial shock a few years ago. But now I understand the problem is with Germany’s stubborn attitude towards everything IT, IT is just considered easy and not “real engineering” and a thereby a cost to reduce. Financial Controllers pushing numbers in Excel files are adding a lot more value, apparently in ways I still don’t fully understand. Honestly, with those salaries and that culture Mercedes is probably not getting the best talent out there.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#253

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #242
xattt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world. Recently, I drove in a whiteout blizzard with huge flakes without much accumulation on the road. Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. The experience would have been less scary with some sort of augmented display to show the road borders.

> Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. That's a bit contradictory. If you can't see the road markings the road is not drivable.

[deleted]

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#254

Post by lightedman »

xattt wrote: post #191
SoftTalker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow That’s what it should do, honestly. It’s not safe to drive with cruise control in low traction conditions.

This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world. Recently, I drove in a whiteout blizzard with huge flakes without much accumulation on the road. Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. The experience would have been less scary with some sort of augmented display to show the road borders.

"This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world."

Mount Baldy (right next to LA) is expected to see 7+ feet of snow over the next few days.

I'm fairly certain they're aware of the particular fact you mention. We do have (had thanks to this drought) multiple ski resorts across the state that do not rely upon artificially-made snow to operate.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#255

Post by throwawaylinux »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #248
jason_wo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are correct. I am currently having a project, making Linux "as real-time as possible": locking memory with mlockall, isolating cores, preempt kernel patch, .... It is still not real-time because you have no guarantees, but you typically get a max jitter of 0.1 ms, which is good enough for my use case. You could use Linux without a MMU (uClinux), e.g. on a Cortex-M, but is a horribly experience and no standard…

Preempt RT does give guarantees in the sense that unbounded latency is a bug and theoretical maximum latency bounds are known (see [0]). It is neither certifiable nor formally proven, but it's good enough for almost anything that isn't safety-critical. For the things that do require functional safety, you can use AGL and other hypervisor architectures that partition the critical and non-critical tasks with a few more…

Preempt RT doesn't really give that. It might give that when you run a subset of Linux, but that is not Linux like nommu Linux is not Linux. They might say that's a bug, but there are countless algorithms and data structures in Linux that mean the state of the system and other workloads can slow down other parts of the system. Even setting aside the fact that a lower privileged process can take spin locks (not "preempt spinlocks" but real low level spin locks), disable interrupts, etc., they can influence shared data structures such that allocations, lookups, etc can take longer for the higher privileged thread. So you still end up with a "look we tried really hard and if you don't use any kernel facilities including blocking and isolate this CPU entirely, lock everything and don't allocate memory or take page faults after that, you might get something approaching hard-realtime".

People try to paint it as soft-hard-RT or something, but it's not, there already exists a good word for it which is soft-RT. Which is fine, it's highly useful.

There aren't really formally proven hard realtime operating systems of any non-trivial complexity are there? They are either extremely simple executive layers, or some very limited privileged functionality that sits on top of the rest of the kernel.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#256

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

KETpXDDzR wrote: post #199
nforgerit wrote: post #166

German Software Engineer here. I'd rather chop off my left pinky than working on any software product any German car manufacturer is developing: 1) Their management hierarchies only consist of MBA suits that think short term and treat their engineers like apes in a zoo. This frequently leads to engineers actually behaving like apes in a zoo. 2) German culture is deeply based on thinking in silos. They divide everythi…

A friend is working for Mercedes research. He can confirm all your points.

I also worked in the German car SW industry and can confirm what he said. They just don't value SW development. The only way to make decent money there was to become a manager and climb the corporate ladder. Programming was never valued and always under the pressure of off-shoring or throwing the work to talent on a visa from abroad who won't have high expectations. The closer you were to the money, like financial controller as said by the sibling, or upper management, the more you were valued, while the closer you were to "the trenches" the less you were valued.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#257

Post by jobjobjobjob »

jacquesm wrote: post #242
xattt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world. Recently, I drove in a whiteout blizzard with huge flakes without much accumulation on the road. Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. The experience would have been less scary with some sort of augmented display to show the road borders.

> Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. That's a bit contradictory. If you can't see the road markings the road is not drivable.

In Ontario and it's very common to be driving on packed snow for a few days after new snowfall. You get barely any road markings at all. You just use common sense and memory to try and act like the lane dividers, turning lanes, stop lines are still there. It must be the same in many parts of the US as well. With winter tires and the right attitude its perfectly fine!

But yeah if you can't see the road markings due to an active blizzard, flip the hazards on, follow the tail lights ahead of ya, and stay in the middle of were the road should be.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#259

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

orbifold wrote: post #42
ElijahLynn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are not a software company at the core. They need to be to pull this off.

Both Mercedes and Volkswagen have absolutely massive software divisions, easily 10k+ people. They pay really well for German standards and have access to a large talent pool of people that would like to live in Germany.

>Both Mercedes and Volkswagen have absolutely massive software divisions, easily 10k+ people.

That doesn't mean jack. Most large German companies I worked at tended to be super inefficient, being very top heavy and prone to constant turf wars and power struggles between the managers, as that was the only career path that made you any decent money so everyone was focusing on that instead of building great products.

>They pay really well for German standards and have access to a large talent pool of people that would like to live in Germany.

Meh, pay is underwhelming, as they focus more on getting off-shore talent from abroad on a visa who's more interested in getting to Germany at any cost rather than netting a higher market wage or increasing wages to attract local talent.

These companies are good places to coast on average wages, not to make money and innovate making great products.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#260

Post by corbulo »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #177
corbulo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money. Why give that up when the customer is really only going to use bluetooth audio anyway? Anyone who cares enough about navigation is gonna use an app on their phone. Native car navigation is a superficial value-feature not a use feature. The edge that Carplay gets is really minimal. I'm repulsed by the new car market, its many multiples over-connected anyway. When it comes to digital features my gut says only th…

In that case, why even spend money trying? Just deliver cars with room for the customer to add what they want.

Then you don't get to upsell on features and you're less competitive with everyone else.
Post reply on HN