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A comment on Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking. Parent comment

Re:Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware ha... by TeMPOraL on Friday December 08, 2023 @10:05AM (#38569870)
Here it's more like the software - any software - is a problem. I agree with GP, and my experience confirms that adding software to something that used to work without it almost universally makes it worse in every aspect, understandability and repairability being just two major ones. On top of that, taking anything that run on old-school industrial/embedded firmware and replacing that with software using modern practices and stacks of the software industry, 100% makes the product go to shit.
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Re:Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware ha... by twisteriffic on Friday December 08, 2023 @10:25AM (#38570115)
That again is a problem of leadership and not of software.
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Re:Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware ha... by hulitu on Friday December 08, 2023 @11:29AM (#38570841)
> That again is a problem of leadership and not of software.

SW has an input problem and a testability problem. On one hand, the inputs to the SW are not limited (iMessage happily accepts any image file) and testing is limited to some known inputs. Software vulnerability assesment (worst case analysis) is usually performed outside of the development process at very high costs and limited outcome.

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Re:Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware ha... by Nasrudith on Friday December 08, 2023 @03:38PM (#38573987)
The conversion is pretty much fundamentally corner-cutting of some sort or another. The digital equivalent is usually a micro-controller worth a few cents replacing dollars of bespoke-by-comparison (due to smaller economies of scale) hardware cost. The goal for the exercise is almost always "good enough" instead of trying to best the existing State Of The Art. Power usage I think tends to be one of the few aspects usually improved via digitization.
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