It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?
That mentality at Boeing as, literally, costed many lives.
The harm is that nobody knows why there's a memory leak requiring a reboot (or if it's even a memory leak). What happens when that very same issue is combined with a rare case and causes the death of hundreds of people?
"Have you tried to turn it off and on again" may be fine for a $20 Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing bought on alibaba. Not so much when lives are at play.
> This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.
> A simple guess suggests the the problem is a signed 32-bit overflow as 231 is the number of seconds in 248 days multiplied by 100, i.e. a counter in hundredths of of a second.
So design systems that does not exceed those resources.
This seems sane given that the planes don't operate for 51 days constantly (I'm not in aerospace so please correct me, it seems a reboot could occur with refueling without issue)
But equally, they dont do this 24x7 - if only because airport curfews and maintainence schedules won't let them.
Rebooting the computer when doing regular maintenance is no big deal.
Commercial aircraft need continual software updates to operate. They are, in a sense, living, breathing machines. Things like navigation and terrain databases are updated inside of 30 days.
Adding a scheduled reboot is one more item on a checklist that was already being run through.
It's counterintuitive, but performing a reboot as a scheduled maintenance item is far more risk averse than going in and touching code that has been otherwise thoroughly tested and signed off by regulatory authorities.
The chances of introducing a new bug when attempting to repair the former presents additional risk to what amounts to a convenience issue.
Having had to migrate a 12 year old dying server this weekend, yeah, I was 24/7 strongly cursing the idiot who didn't document anything[0]. On the plus side I did get to update a bunch of stuff to more modern practices.
[0] You will not be surprised to learn that idiot was me.[1]
[1] My other servers are much better - anything that hasn't yet been properly service'd has its own `RUNME.sh` which runs whatever it is in the correct way.
Also in case of emergency, eg after a power loss or whatever, you might have to do a reboot anyway. So you might as well make sure that this code path is well exercised.
I'd rather deal with a ground hog day of the system being for the millionth time in its first day of operation, than dealing for the first time with the system being in its millionth day of operation.
> Usually planes are turned around too fast to be waiting for them to fully reboot every time they fuel.
Also, I am starting to grow tired of "anything Boeing does is bad" on HN in the last 6-12 months. The Boeing 787 was a huge hit, both technically and commercially. (I would say the same for the Airbus A350.) I certainly never worked anything as important or cool in my career. The endless booing from the HN peanut gallery adds little new and/or useful information to the discussion. Yes, I expect to be downvoted for this last paragraph.
"Let's build something that we KNOW will catastrophically fail, because we deliberately ignore to take account limited resource availability of that system."
For a critical systems, that's just lazy and unacceptable.
> I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me.
So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.
I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.
Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering.
> So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.
Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals:
All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get.
(And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.)
> I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.
The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.
We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc.
Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.
Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments.
The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.
Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.
So sure those brands are 100 years old, but the underlying companies have been restructured several times with major mergers and spin-offs etc. ExxonMobil even did the baby bell thing of splitting off from a single entity only to merge again and again in the coming decades.
* Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years. It is basically a high tech business at this point. Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry. Again: Huge changes.
* Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf. Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged? I doubt it in highly developed countries.
* Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon. Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago. How/Why? Automation / computers! > it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years.
That said, it certainly includes our ability to use gravity assists when planning a mission.
You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.
It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?
There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!
But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.
https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count...
Ref: https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-communications-arts/...
Dumb phones are still being sold that are 2G only.
Not just that, but “landlines” are still being offered that are really a 2G phone restricted to work only in the vicinity of a home that's not (yet?) covered by actual landlines.
It's also used by emergency services.
It's considered a technology of last resort, and the service provider that wins the concession to provide it, with 100% coverage of a given area, probably finds it useful that it can meet the conditions with such tech.
3G has already shut down.
Things that uses 2G:
- Electricity meters
- Alarm systems
- Cooling and heating systems
- Rat traps (?)
- And an absolute crap-ton of early "IoT" devices.
1G (NMT) and 2G networks have been used in forestry. Very often the machines are far from a mast and need the extra range to communicate.
And in general Finland is a sparsely populated country.
Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.
Take a subscription product that costs $10/mo right now as an example.
Let's say you want a license that lasts your whole life.
Estimate the time you have remaining in your life. Let's call it 50 years.
Now you can use an interest calculator to see how much it would cost to effectively buy a license until the end of your life.
Plug in $10/mo contribution, plus 4% annual interest to cover inflation and price increases, for an investment length of 50 years.
So you can effectively buy an "eternal" license for $18,714.61
I guess technology lasting a long time for specific non-commercial purposes is one thing, keeping up with modern society in general another.
It's not the fault of the phone's hardware that the world has moved on. But this underscores my point: if the hardware lasts longer than the eco-system around it, that's useless, and the company should have probably saved customers a few pennies by going with something less sturdy.
Adobe Creative Cloud (among many others) doesn't have that option.
I worked at a large project management app where we charged per-seat.
We only offered per seat pricing, yet we had at least 3 companies that had flat pricing because they wanted >100k seats.
Deals outside of standard pricing gets cut all the time.
But having an older version can be useful too because some features from previous releases may be missing in current ones, so that's a way to ensure access to the old files. A couple of years ago all the Pantone colours used in Photoshop just became black after an update because Adobe stopped licensing Pantone stuff.
Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.
Let's say I'd pay double of what an appliance with similar technical characteristics would normally cost, which I want to go towards higher quality materials, craftsmanship, and quality assurance. I expect such an appliance to work and and be economically repairable for at least 20 years.
As far as I can tell, this is nearly impossible. Many brands that used to produce higher quality products have downgraded the quality of their materials and craftsmanship in order to juice quarterly profits for investors. Their reputation seems to lag the quality of their products by about 10 years.
Miele is good for household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. Kärcher is good for vacuum cleaners. There's lots of other German (and Swiss and Japanese etc) brands like that.
But in any case, I didn't (and can't) promise that you can get that kind of quality by merely paying double.
Btw, almost all cars these days last a lot longer than they used to, and with fewer repairs. Quality has gone up across the board. Planes also fall out of the sky less often. (And that includes Boeing, despite their recent troubles, their track record would be seen as unachievable good about 20 years ago.)
Would that 'twere so simple. Most previously reliable premium manufacturers have jumped on the enshittification bandwagon. You can get better design and a more exclusive branding if you are willing to pay more, but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years? Preferably one that doesn't come with cloud integration. There are still a very small number of ultra-premium brands that really care about their customers, but apart from being way too expensive for most people, they are increasingly hard to find. One of the side-effects of so many companies trading their reputations for "shareholder value" is that trust is eroded for everyone, including those that still deserve it.
Miele works well for us.
I understand your complaint. I'm also sure it's really hard to get high quality buggy whips these days without paying through the nose, now that everyone has switched to these newfangled horseless carriages.
That's what I would have said as well, until recently. Last year we had to replace ours, and its been an absolute nightmare. Cost us endless hours of wrangling with technicians and customer service to have it installed and configured properly (and already repaired once). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We never had any issue with Miele in Singapore.
(The Australian customer service of Bosch was a joke, though. The one in Singapore seems competent, though.)
Where do you recommend I buy long-lasting refrigerators, washers, and dryers?
Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever.
It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...
Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.
My point was the comparisons that are often made, to things like consumer electronics, really aren't apt.
Agile is a response to this, not the cause.
There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long.
>Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.
Couple things here:
1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'.
2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow.
3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software).
>if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell,
Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.
We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.
Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.
I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.
But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737.
All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents.
While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do.
I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate.
There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something.
That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!
No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.
Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.
Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?
It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.