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This defense basically says that software engineering is far more of a joke than hardware engineering. But it’s not a real defense for the Max because the prob
by thawaway1837 7y ago
This defense basically says that software engineering is far more of a joke than hardware engineering.
But it’s not a real defense for the Max because the problem with the Max is that Boeing has shifted a lot of the work from hardware to software.
This defense only punts the ball a few yards because the question now is why Boeing chose to shift a lot of the reliability from hardware, which this defense admits is better engineered, to software, which it admits is almost intrinsically worse.
If anything, this defense leads to the conclusion that the Max is an intrinsically unsafer plane, because it has shifted far more of the burden to software which is an intrinsically worse engineering discipline.
If it was just a matter of the software QA being rushed then the additional time gained by the grounding of the planes could solve the problem. But if it is software engineering itself which is the problem then no additional time will help unless it leads to shifting some of the burden of safely flying the plane from software to hardware, which doesn’t even appear to be an option Boeing has considered.
- harikb 7y agoThis seems like a weird way to look at the problem. Hardware also has software/logic. The only reason it appears more stable is that people are shit scared of finding a bug that can't be fixed. If we delay the software release as long as a hardware development takes, with corresponding QA, I don't see why switching it all to hardware is going to make any more sense. Immutability is all it has, unless you are somehow implying that one can be hacked (by bad actors) and the other can't be.
- nomel 7y agoI've worked for a couple of fabless semiconductor startups. When fixing a hardware mistake costs millions for a new mask, there are bugs in all the silicon, even the big guys [1]. [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/26/cloudflare_crashes_intel_broadwell_bug/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/26/cloudflare_crashes_...
- bradstewart 7y agoWhile I do agree that hardware engineering generally employs more verification and validation, look at the errata sheets for modern processors. They have a lot of bugs as well--most of which are patched in microcode (software) or handled by operating system kernels (also software).
- Anarch157a 7y ago> most of which are patched in microcode Because most of it is software anyway. Unless the CPU is something ridiculously simple, like an 8-bit microcontroler, a lot of the instructions are executed by microcode stored in ROM on the CPU. What those patches do is load a replacement software in RAM at boot time.