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AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

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Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#111

Post by rootusrootus »

civilized wrote: post #105
ggreg84 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy professional appliances, for restaurants. For some reason, they are often better along many axes: cheaper, easier to clean, more customizable, more powerful, more flexible, etc. I really like the professional induction stoves, with actual physical dials, no touch crap. And the best part, there is a huge used market for professional appliances in really good shape, for even lower price.

Can you recommend any particular sellers? My oven stops working with some nonsensical error message when I try to use it above 350F, so I'm in the market for a new one.

Not OP, and not making any recommendations, but even something mainstream like webstaurantstore.com carries a fair amount of commercial cooking equipment. Enough to give you some ideas, at least.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#112

Post by jaywalk »

adwww wrote: post #51
tpmx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine an attack on the electric grid that works by startíng a large number of high-power appliances (ovens, EVs, ACs/heat pumps, etc) at max power at the exact same time.

This is actually a big potential for a smart grid - turning on or off demand from things like fridges and ovens in response to the grid frequency changing. If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa. By automatically switching off the pump on thousands of fridges for a few seconds, networks would require less generation capacity on standby - saving $$$ and CO2. Of course, lik…

> If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa.

Not to be too pedantic, but it's actually the opposite. Frequency drops as demand goes up, which requires more supply to compensate. This is because the generators physically spin more slowly as they are put under more load.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#114

Post by wpietri »

denton-scratch wrote: post #56

Electrolux are a horrible company. They seem to have borged a whole load of other brands, which all have now descended to Electrolux's abysmal standards. - They don't support their own products; the warranty is served by a third-party - Their products are built to a price-point, and fail just after the warranty is up - Spare parts are expensive - They apparently have neither an email address or phone number The water…

> I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.

I think the short answer is that companies spend many hundreds of billions each year manipulating the market. Instead of going to all the hard work of building a trusted brand, you can just buy one people have a vague familiarity with, spend a bunch on marketing, and ship cheap garbage until the brand value has been reduced to zero.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#115

Post by paulgerhardt »

gpderetta wrote: post #64
paulgerhardt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dozen or more devices that can burn down my house (or kill me in other interesting ways) connected to the internet because I am confident in the precautions taken by the engineers who designed them and mitigating the “hacker” threat model is mostly already addressed by precautions already taken to mitigate failing (“rogue”) controller boards present in their non-internet connected counterparts through 30+ ye…

The issue is that hardware interlocks might at some point be replaced with software interlocks, if they haven't already. See the Therac-25 incident for a concrete example.

Once a hardware interlock safeguard requirement is put in place by a regulatory body it’s rarely removed. See British fused sockets for instance.

My threat model allows me to be completely cavalier with a dishwasher. I would be considerably more serious with safety concerns were I to put a chemo machine in my garage. My suspicion is that people who haven’t shipped home appliances connected to mains are not aware of how much of the engineering effort goes into making these machines safe relatively to how little it does for adjacent categories and are mis-indexing risk over bigger issues like vendor lock in as with the Sonos upgrade fiasco a few years back.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#116

Post by someotherperson »

ChrisRR wrote: post #97
Nextgrid wrote: post #52

Why is there no user-facing firmware update/recovery feature, so that at least tech-savvy users can resolve the issue themselves? Or a reset feature that reverts to the factory firmware located on a separate, read-only chip? Ah yes, it's to prevent people downgrading or running "unauthorized" firmware when they inevitably start adding user-hostile "features".

Or more likely because that costs money to implement "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

That's on a personal level. As far as companies go, it should be "never attribute to stupidity which is adequately explained by malice."

This also goes for assuming good faith -- when companies reach a certain size, the mantra instead becomes "always assume bad faith."

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#117

Post by throw10920 »

ncr100 wrote: post #45
jaywalk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My oven is Internet connected. It can't be turned on remotely unless I press a button on the oven itself, and even then it'll only allow it once. The WiFi functionality is also such total garbage that it'll only stay connected for a few days, and requires physically unplugging and re-plugging the power to the oven to get it to reconnect.

How did software engineering get to the point where this kind of low quality update is shipped "too often" for serious circumstances like a physical oven? Like it's hardly notable news anymore for something like this to happen. It's frequent. I worry that agile is largely responsible, and has mutated into a pipeline for garbage, though I don't have any evidence to confirm that suspicion.

I don't think that the problem is unique to software engineering - manufacturers have been skimping on engineering quality for centuries. I believe that the problem is worse with software because (a) it's harder to judge quality for software than for physical goods and (b) most consumers seem to have been brainwashed into having much lower standards for software than for hardware.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#118

Post by gpvos »

bitwize wrote: post #69
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell. Have you looked at dev wages for appliances? That explains everything in short. Everything has to be done for the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time. Fractions of cents are cut in every directions when possible. So when you're operating dev teams on shoe string budgets under constant crunch, there's no talent nor resources for sane management, dev and…

Makes you wonder why they don't take it to the extreme and remove the computer entirely.

Because implementing the functionality in physical hardware instead of software is much, much more expensive.

Re: AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven

#120

Post by denton-scratch »

gpvos wrote: post #110
denton-scratch wrote: post #56

Electrolux are a horrible company. They seem to have borged a whole load of other brands, which all have now descended to Electrolux's abysmal standards. - They don't support their own products; the warranty is served by a third-party - Their products are built to a price-point, and fail just after the warranty is up - Spare parts are expensive - They apparently have neither an email address or phone number The water…

I only recently became aware that their home appliances branch had been acquired by Electrolux somewhere in the 1990s. Brand awareness can be slow. AEG used to be a high quality brand for things like washing machines.

I know; that's why I bought an AEG dishwasher. I replaced it with a Bosch, which still seems to be a decent brand. I've since downsized my home, and the dishwasher is now me.

  Love has ruined my body,
  Washing has ruined my hands.
~ Country Joe
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