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I find there's a pervasive hardware culture that's at odds with both software and security cultures. Hardware culture involves designing it once, testing it on

by imglorp 10y ago

I find there's a pervasive hardware culture that's at odds with both software and security cultures. Hardware culture involves designing it once, testing it once, setting up the supply chain and production line once, and from then on it's just quality control and marketing: totally a fire-and-forget weapon. That means in a hardware dominated organization, where you sell hardware, revenue is in terms of units sold. Anything else is fixed overhead which detracts from the R. All those once-s above have moved on to other projects or they were short term contractors anyway.

bitJericho 10y ago
And that is the very reason we need to not only push for FOSS, but demand it.
dbcurtis 10y ago
That culture comes from the Darwinian selection of the marketplace. If you make chips, after you tape out, the design organization must absolutely turn their focus to creating the chip that will obsolete it or someone else will eat your lunch. In a hardware organization, long attention span is a liability, not an asset. With software, the road to success is incrementally increasing your value to the customer with each successive release. You are in it for the long game, and if you do not have the attention span to achieve a long-term vision, coupled with the ability to deliver incrementally on that vision, you will lose. Having worked on the software side of a predominantly hardware company, I can tell you first hand how hard it is to get someone whose background is physical chemistry to grok anything to do with user-level software. They have been selected for a short attention span, and are good at their job because of the short attention span. This is at odds with the needs of software product management.
- yuhong 10y ago
  What is fun is that Intel is still trying to hold OEMs to a one year cycle even as fabrication tech advances are slowing.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Considering the number of bugs that continue to show up in every new hardware iteration Intel has pushed since Haswell I'm rather surprised they haven't increased their cycle, I have a Haswell i5 in both my desktop and my 2014 XPS 13 and I shudder at the thought of upgrading (which thankfully I have no reason to, like you said advances are much slower these days anyway).
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
Vehicle manufacturers also have this same mindset issue with their in-vehicle entertainment systems. For them things are either a "recall" or they don't exist, they have no concept of software updates or how to deliver them.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Or, honestly, how to do software. I can crash my Subaru's audio system just by handing it a sufficiently large MP3 file to play. Let's not even go to how bad Bluetooth is. And they will never, ever fix it.
- newman314 10y ago
  Actually, that's not quite true. I know of at least one manufacturer whose internal commitment is 15 years. HOWEVER, the problem is all the third party interfaces that these systems increasingly leverage. I can pretty much guarantee that Google Maps is not going to be the same 15 years down the road and I very much doubt Google has the interest in supporting something for that period of time. So somewhere down the road, we'll end up with all these cars that part of the early stages of connected cars that end up having completely unusable systems.
  - plttn 10y ago
    And that's why Android Auto (and possibly CarPlay) are just dumb streams from the device to the car infotainment system, and input streams back. The car doesn't need to know what's on screen, and the phone doesn't need to know the capabilities of the infotainment system.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Yep. I find it baffling that people in the tech industry (who should know better) are enthusiastic about vehicle infotainment systems, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, etc. Keep it simple. Power, a 3.5mm audio connector, and a windshield suction mount. Something they can't screw up too badly. I can easily buy a new smartphone every 2 years, but a car I'm going to hold on to for more like 10. Why would I want to be stuck with a 5-generation-old navigation/music player system when the car is still fine?

by imglorp 10y ago

bitJericho 10y ago

And that is the very reason we need to not only push for FOSS, but demand it.

dbcurtis 10y ago

That culture comes from the Darwinian selection of the marketplace. If you make chips, after you tape out, the design organization must absolutely turn their focus to creating the chip that will obsolete it or someone else will eat your lunch. In a hardware organization, long attention span is a liability, not an asset. With software, the road to success is incrementally increasing your value to the customer with each successive release. You are in it for the long game, and if you do not have the attention span to achieve a long-term vision, coupled with the ability to deliver incrementally on that vision, you will lose. Having worked on the software side of a predominantly hardware company, I can tell you first hand how hard it is to get someone whose background is physical chemistry to grok anything to do with user-level software. They have been selected for a short attention span, and are good at their job because of the short attention span. This is at odds with the needs of software product management.

yuhong 10y ago
What is fun is that Intel is still trying to hold OEMs to a one year cycle even as fabrication tech advances are slowing.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Considering the number of bugs that continue to show up in every new hardware iteration Intel has pushed since Haswell I'm rather surprised they haven't increased their cycle, I have a Haswell i5 in both my desktop and my 2014 XPS 13 and I shudder at the thought of upgrading (which thankfully I have no reason to, like you said advances are much slower these days anyway).

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

Vehicle manufacturers also have this same mindset issue with their in-vehicle entertainment systems. For them things are either a "recall" or they don't exist, they have no concept of software updates or how to deliver them.

kabdib 10y ago
Or, honestly, how to do software. I can crash my Subaru's audio system just by handing it a sufficiently large MP3 file to play. Let's not even go to how bad Bluetooth is. And they will never, ever fix it.
newman314 10y ago
Actually, that's not quite true. I know of at least one manufacturer whose internal commitment is 15 years. HOWEVER, the problem is all the third party interfaces that these systems increasingly leverage. I can pretty much guarantee that Google Maps is not going to be the same 15 years down the road and I very much doubt Google has the interest in supporting something for that period of time. So somewhere down the road, we'll end up with all these cars that part of the early stages of connected cars that end up having completely unusable systems.
- plttn 10y ago
  And that's why Android Auto (and possibly CarPlay) are just dumb streams from the device to the car infotainment system, and input streams back. The car doesn't need to know what's on screen, and the phone doesn't need to know the capabilities of the infotainment system.
superuser2 10y ago
Yep. I find it baffling that people in the tech industry (who should know better) are enthusiastic about vehicle infotainment systems, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, etc. Keep it simple. Power, a 3.5mm audio connector, and a windshield suction mount. Something they can't screw up too badly. I can easily buy a new smartphone every 2 years, but a car I'm going to hold on to for more like 10. Why would I want to be stuck with a 5-generation-old navigation/music player system when the car is still fine?