On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:12:48 -0700, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
On 10/30/2013 3:01 AM, Chris wrote:
On Wednesday, 30 October 2013 at 03:24:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Take a look at the reddit thread on this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1pgyaa/toyotas_killer_firmware_bad_design_and_its/
Do a search for "failsafe". Sigh.
One of the comments under the original article you posted says
"Poorly designed firmware caused unintended operation, lack of driver
training
made it fatal."
So it's the driver's fault, who couldn't possibly know what was going
on in that
car-gone-mad? To put the blame on the driver is cynicism of the worst
kind.
Much effort in cockpit design goes into trying to figure out what the
pilot would do "intuitively" and ensuring that that is the right thing
to do.
Of course, we try to do that with programming language design, too, with
varying degrees of success.
Unfortunately, that's a common (and dangerous) attitude I've come
across among
programmers and engineers. The user has to adapt to anything they fail
to
implement or didn't think of. However, machines have to adapt to humans
not the
other way around (realizing this was part of Apple's success in UI
design,
Ubuntu is very good now too).
I warmly recommend the book "Architect or Bee":
http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Bee-Human-Technology-Relationship/dp/0896081311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383127030&sr=8-1&keywords=architect+or+bee
Having experience with a 737 flight deck and Cessna 172/G1000 flight deck.
I can personally say that if even one of the devs on both of those (very
different) flight information systems had a clue about HCI he was
physically beaten for bringing it up. Yes, the absolute fundamentals might
be intuitive (AI, DG, etc,). But if you need anything advanced ... God
Help You. I did eventually figure it out (and started helping the
instructors at my FBO), but intuitive is NOT the word I would use...
There is also a story floating around about the boys (I'll not deign to
call the programmers...) at Honeywell FINALLY called in a group of pilots
for HCI analysis/critique of the 787 flight management systems months
after they had shipped the code to the FAA for certification...
And lastly, although it got buried because France needs to protect EADS,
there was a "By Design" bug that caused the Angle of Attack indicator to
NOT show when AF447 was in deep stall, overridden by the faulty airspeed
indication, never mind that this is the ONLY indicator a pilot needs to
recover from a stall... If the pilots had seen this when the plane went
into it's unusual attitude, the pilots could've seen it and corrected
immediately. Sorry Airbus, but the computer does NOT always know best,
it's only as good as the [non-pilot] programmers feeding it code... :-)
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
