Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
> computer. On the Prius they say to hold down the Start button for 3
> seconds to generate a master reset.
Seriously, your life is flashing before your eyes, all you want to do is
STOP the car, and you're supposed to remember that you need to press the
START button?? Holy Interface Design School, Batman! Who dreamed THAT
one up?
Actually, I expect that one press might well generate some sort of
interrupt and snap the program out of a loop. It is surprising to me
that stamping hard on the brakes does not do this.
A person is as likely to think to press the Start button as turn off
the key in an ordinary car. Which is to say: not likely, I suppose.
Let's not jump to the conclusion this is a software problem, although
given the Prius design it seems likely, as Woz well knows.
(I think it is great that Woz, who has enough money to buy any car on
Earth, drives a Prius. He also teaches primary school full time, last
I heard. That's what he does with his time. He could be doing
anything -- or nothing. He is truly a wonderful person.)
> People have been making fly-by-wire computer controlled machines for a
> long time,
Not car companies!
If Boeing or Airbus designed the car, the situation would be different.
Cars, big iron factory machinery, robots and much else has been
increasingly software based for 20 or 30 years. The techniques are
widely known. That doesn't mean they were followed in this case. The
techniques for making a safe mechanical accelerator pedal have been
widely known since the 1920s but it is possible that someone at
Toyota designed an unsafe one.
I have often read about badly designed products, accidents, and other
technical failures that were caused by people who ignored
widely-known knowledge, or never learned it in the first place. This
may happen in Japan more often than the E.U. or the U.S. because of
the language barrier. This was one of the big problems with the NHE
project, according to McKubre, Mizuno and others. Those people were
reinventing the wheel -- rediscovering textbook electrochemistry.
I recall a long, boring NHK documentary about the first
Japanese-designed fighter jet, from the 1980s, I think it was. A
bunch of young aircraft designers were working long hours for months
to learn things or independently re-discover things that I could have
learned in minutes. For example, there is a large cut-away section on
the tailplane (horizontal stabilizer) of U.S. fighter jets. The
designers spent weeks trying to figure out why it is there. (Or not
there, I guess you would say.) Then the camera showed an airplane
taking off and the voice-over explained that cut-out it is needed to
keep the tailplane from whacking into the deck when the plane takes
off at a steep angle. That was clear from the video. That is why, for
example, the back of a 747 fuselage is cut away, from about 2/3rds
back to the very back: so it doesn't whack into the ground. I did not
know about the tailplane, but if I had been there at a design
meeting, and someone had asked, I would have relayed the question to
an American designer, or pilot, or aircrew member and they would have
told me in 5 seconds flat.
Unfortunately, people often fail to ask. That problem is endemic in
cold fusion. I have sometimes been shocked to discover that I know
more about certain hands-on aspects of experiments than certain
unnamed leading researchers do, and I know why they screwed up.
Unfortunately, people who screw up seldom want anyone to tell them
why, and they sure don't want to hear it from me.
- Jed
