3 ms·

The rover has got two computers though and during upgrades only one is updated. If something goes wrong, the non-updated one takes over and they can restore the

The rover has got two computers though and during upgrades only one is updated. If something goes wrong, the non-updated one takes over and they can restore the last working state. Phones are easy to brick since they lack a backup system.

nknighthb 13y ago
The ease with which many consumer devices can be bricked by firmware updates is really ridiculous, though. You don't need full hardware redundancy to virtually eliminate them, just a redundant OS partition and a little sane engineering. At that point, any bricking is almost certain to be the result of an actual hardware failure, which is its own problem.
- jotm 13y ago
  I haven't seen an easily brickable device for half a decade now... Android smartphones and tablets are very hard to brick, post-2008 laptops and motherboards have excellent BIOS recovery, what else is there? I bricked an external RAID enclosure by flashing the wrong firmware, but that POS was running on a SiliconImage chip that for some reason allowed flashing a completely different firmware to it...
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Funny, I just saw a friend's Android phone get bricked by an update about two years ago. It was in a state I probably could have recovered it from if its bootloader were unlocked, but it was beyond reach of Joe User. I've also bricked or seen bricked routers, external HDDs, and TVs in the last five years. Many TVs, actually, if you include pre-release units. As far as I can tell, most of them rely entirely on testing to avoid bricking devices. They make zero provision for the inevitable case where something goes wrong. Power failures during updates remain a frequent cause of bricking. Your "exception" is quite a common case when firmware updates are performed manually. Those failures have, of course, dropped dramatically since devices started being able to self-update, but they're far from the only such failures out there. The "some reason" depends on the product and manufacturer, but it's usually a combination of laziness and penny-pinching. Somebody didn't want to do the work, or somebody else didn't want to pay for it to be done. I've seen the processes that lead to these situations up-close. There are a lot of engineers out there who don't think about failure modes, and a lot of managers who dismiss the engineers who do as paranoid and/or troublemakers.
    - nickonline 13y ago
      > it was beyond reach of Joe User. I would argue that this is not bricking, if it's beyond joe user that's just a job for experts. Bricking to me is totally gone with no hope of recovery.
      - aroch 13y ago
        There's outside of what the Average Joe can do and then there's needing a JTAG
      - nknighthb 13y ago
        Attempting to narrow the definition of "brick" past the point of an RMA already being necessary is ludicrous.
    - caprad 13y ago
      > I just saw...about two years ago. Well, that is not just seeing, and it probably was not bricked in the traditional sense. It may have been a pain to try to recover, but it was probably possible.
    - jotm 13y ago
      Oh yeah, routers and hard drives. Well, DDWRT runs fine and WDidle3 didn't brick any of my WD drives, so I guess I'm lucky! No TV in this home, either :-)

nknighthb 13y ago

The ease with which many consumer devices can be bricked by firmware updates is really ridiculous, though. You don't need full hardware redundancy to virtually eliminate them, just a redundant OS partition and a little sane engineering. At that point, any bricking is almost certain to be the result of an actual hardware failure, which is its own problem.

jotm 13y ago
I haven't seen an easily brickable device for half a decade now... Android smartphones and tablets are very hard to brick, post-2008 laptops and motherboards have excellent BIOS recovery, what else is there? I bricked an external RAID enclosure by flashing the wrong firmware, but that POS was running on a SiliconImage chip that for some reason allowed flashing a completely different firmware to it...
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Funny, I just saw a friend's Android phone get bricked by an update about two years ago. It was in a state I probably could have recovered it from if its bootloader were unlocked, but it was beyond reach of Joe User. I've also bricked or seen bricked routers, external HDDs, and TVs in the last five years. Many TVs, actually, if you include pre-release units. As far as I can tell, most of them rely entirely on testing to avoid bricking devices. They make zero provision for the inevitable case where something goes wrong. Power failures during updates remain a frequent cause of bricking. Your "exception" is quite a common case when firmware updates are performed manually. Those failures have, of course, dropped dramatically since devices started being able to self-update, but they're far from the only such failures out there. The "some reason" depends on the product and manufacturer, but it's usually a combination of laziness and penny-pinching. Somebody didn't want to do the work, or somebody else didn't want to pay for it to be done. I've seen the processes that lead to these situations up-close. There are a lot of engineers out there who don't think about failure modes, and a lot of managers who dismiss the engineers who do as paranoid and/or troublemakers.
  - nickonline 13y ago
    > it was beyond reach of Joe User. I would argue that this is not bricking, if it's beyond joe user that's just a job for experts. Bricking to me is totally gone with no hope of recovery.
    - aroch 13y ago
      There's outside of what the Average Joe can do and then there's needing a JTAG
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Attempting to narrow the definition of "brick" past the point of an RMA already being necessary is ludicrous.
  - caprad 13y ago
    > I just saw...about two years ago. Well, that is not just seeing, and it probably was not bricked in the traditional sense. It may have been a pain to try to recover, but it was probably possible.
  - jotm 13y ago
    Oh yeah, routers and hard drives. Well, DDWRT runs fine and WDidle3 didn't brick any of my WD drives, so I guess I'm lucky! No TV in this home, either :-)