Posts by The McV

Google robo-car in rear-end smash – but cack-handed human blamed

Maintainance?

The modern car comes with lots of electronic sensors and toys. After a couple of years in the very hostile (to electronics) environment of 'under the bonnet' - they start to irritatingly fail and glitch. Quite a lot seem to go 'tilt' - game over - and leave you stranded at the roadside. Now go to your friendly local garage to get it fixed at an exorbitant price. Will it get fixed properly? Do you really trust the grease monkey with delicate electronics?

So now make the car drive itself....

1 Do you trust that all the lines of code have been adequately tested?

2 Do you trust the error recovery vectors in the code?

3 Do you trust all the wiring, sensors & interconnections?

4 Has it been hacked?

Airlines use fly-by-wire & autoland etc, and that's just fine because the maintenance schedules are such that they get inspected on a regular basis by people who know what they're doing AND you have the flight crew monitoring.

I see us getting railroaded into having the automated cars on the road, but I don't expect them to be safe until sometime next century......

My top three IT SNAFUs - and how I fixed them

Shame that - they only have Crocodiles in the Middle East....

pedants'R'us.....

Press any key to continue......

Yes, it happened to me...

Much hard work during the week - Friday morning install a new test system on the shop floor.

Run a sample unit - fine - had over to production & retire to the pub to celebrate.

One extended lunch time later, we rolled back from the pub to a complete production stop.

Not only the new system was down but all the others (that had been working happily for weeks) were down.

The new operator had come to the 'Press any key to continue' prompt and, you've guessed it, couldn't find the 'ANY' key, so stopped - worried that she might do something wrong. She asked an experienced operator on one of the other systems - who suddenly became afraid that she'd been doing it wrong for the past couple of weeks, and this rippled down the whole line - stopping all the systems.

I took a marker pen and wrote "ANY" on the side of the space bar. Problem solved.

Press any key to continue......

Yes, it happened to me...

Much hard work during the week - Friday morning install a new test system on the shop floor.

Run a sample unit - fine - had over to production & retire to the pub to celebrate.

One extended lunch time later, we rolled back from the pub to a complete production stop.

Not only the new system was down but all the others (that had been working happily for weeks) were down.

The new operator had come to the 'Press any key to continue' prompt and, you've guessed it, couldn't find the 'ANY' key, so stopped - worried that she might do something wrong. She asked an experienced operator on one of the other systems - who suddenly became afraid that she'd been doing it wrong for the past couple of weeks, and this rippled down the whole line - stopping all the systems.

I took a marker pen and wrote "ANY" on the side of the space bar. Problem solved.

Help-desk hell

Re: Help-desk hell

So there was I at the end of a long hard week, another test system completed and delivered to the assembly line and just in time to retire to the pub for a well earned lunchtime pint...

When we returned - in a somewhat cheerful state - I was met with a production line stop - Not only the new system, but ALL the systems were down. After the shouting and finger pointing had calmed down a bit I looked at the screen where it said 'Press any key to continue' - pressed a key and all was fine. It transpired that the lovely old Asian lady who had been assigned to the system saw this prompt, but couldn't find a key with 'ANY' printed on it - not wanting to do anything wrok, she asked her friend on the adjacent machine (who had been running it for weeks) - she couldn't find an 'ANY' key either and the consternation worked its way in down the other ladies on the line and they all stopped.

I solved the problem by writing 'ANY KEY' on the side of the space bar in marker pen.

Ah... Memories of Thorn EMI on Hayes back in 1990!