Toyota's Killer Firmware 610
New submitter Smerta writes "On Thursday, a jury verdict found Toyota's ECU firmware defective, holding it responsible for a crash in which a passenger was killed and the driver injured. What's significant about this is that it's the first time a jury heard about software defects uncovered by a plaintiff's expert witnesses. A summary of the defects discussed at trial is interesting reading, as well the transcript of court testimony. 'Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.' Anyone wonder what the impact will be on self-driving cars?"
Technology is hard and dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
I'm convinced. I'll give up my career as a computer programmer now, and go use my bare hands for subsistence farming now. Sorry, I was wrong.
The impact on self-driving cars? Documentation. (Score:5, Funny)
A longer chapter on debugging in the first edition of "Programming Self-Driving Cars: The Missing Manual."
Re:If there's no human fall back, I'll never trust (Score:5, Funny)
"If there's no human fall back or ability to overthrow the computer's control of the car I'll never drive it."
by definition you wouldn't be driving it.
Re:wtf (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you are a software engineer, and not some programmer with delusions of grandeur?
Re:Technology is hard and dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
Why the need to push and pull everything to the extreme that they can pushed or pulled to?
It's kind of the unofficial /. posters motto:
Ad absurdum, Ad infinitum, Ad nauseam!
Add Vodka...
Re:"Impact on self-driving cars?" - None (Score:5, Funny)
Ada 83 sucked. Ada 95 fixed most of the problems, and I believe that they're up to Ada 2012.
Wow. From 95 to 2012 - they must be using Chrome/Firefox style version numbering :-)
Re: Technology is hard and dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
A shame that manual transmission didn't stop you posting while driving though.