Re:Researchers find it’s easy to hack traffic lights
by snarfy on Friday August 22, 2014 @08:07AM
(#8211717)
But as a software engineer, I can certainly say that comic is wrong.
After enough short sighted releases, mountains of technical debt, poor coding standards, and general apathy, I do not believe the engineer depicted in the comic is accurate. "Hours of simulation" and "took me a week to work out the timing sequences". No. No government paid software engineer spent a week working out the timing sequences. They hacked out something as quick as they could to meet the ridiculous deadline they were given, and then had a good laugh about fixing the process during the retrospective meeting.
Re:Researchers find it’s easy to hack traffic lights
by walls on Thursday August 21, 2014 @04:10PM
(#8209307)
When you're sitting at a red light for several minutes at one in the morning with no cars visible for miles, it doesn't take a traffic engineer to realize that intersection is not working optimally.
That is, as a driver, one isn't in a position to judge whether traffic lights timing make sense, because they're optimized globally to ensure best traffic throughput in the whole city.