Bringing CI/CD mindset to cars is probably not a great idea. Software updates to commuter vehicles should have a high bar for operational standards, and a simple thing such as an expired certificate should have never been deployed. Having isolated networks in vehicles helps but doesn't prevent broken updates from, eventually, bricking the cars.
I think this shows more of a fundamental flaw in their update mechanism, than anything.
I don't think a botched update is a big deal. It happens, and should be expected, in a sane design. The fact that the customer noticed is a big deal.
There are many implementations that could be used for an "auto rollback" feature. They either failed to implement that in a sane way, or they were goobers, and assumed things would always be rosy.
I would be pretty pissed if I went out to my garage to head to work one morning and found that a damn software update bricked my car overnight. This shouldn't even be a thing, why does a car need regular software updates to keep functioning?
It doesn't need regular updates to keep functioning. It offers regular updates as they add new features. For instance, in this update a new feature was added to allow for proximity locking at home but disable proximity unlocking. That would lessen the number of times the car would lock and unlock accidentally as you walk in and out of the garage. No one was forced to install the update.
Cars 20 years ago, even most of them 10 years ago, never got any updates unless they got recalled. Nothing broke, nothing got hacked, and most are probably still working fine.
What happened to cars today? I refuse to believe that it's solely because these are electric cars, as if the way the car stores and uses energy dictates that it must be part of the internet of things.
Edit: there were electric cars over 100 years ago. I bet they never got software updates.
Cars 20 years ago didn't have realtime traffic on big touchscreens that you can use to look up your destination and plan out a route that also lets you schedule fueling/charging stops, oh and also stream humanity's entire library of recorded music, books, and podcasts. It's a tradeoff that the vast majority of people want.
But almost every smartphone already has those features, they work fairly well, and it makes more sense for a phone to have those features than a car. (Because sometimes it's useful to know where traffic is when you're not in a car, and stream things while walking around.) It doesn't make much sense for each car manufacturer to replicate everything if they can figure out how to connect a phone to a car, and borrow the phone's features.
As software eats the world, it becomes more and more apparent to the non-developers of the world that software engineering is not, and never has been, a real engineering discipline.
Tech Support: "Oh your garage door is bricked after last nights update? Yeah, apparently the [totally uncredentialed] contractor that wrote that update is only 3 weeks out of coding bootcamp and was just copying and pasting from ChatGPT. Lmao"
At the same time, we're losing tons of mechanical problems that use to go wrong with cars. The amount of time lost to car malfunctions is way down over the past couple decades, even with slight regressions like this one.
If ICE tech was the hot new thing in cars, things like spark plugs would have a chip so that it would fire n times then break, but don't worry, there's a subscription for new ones and they will be automatically ordered when the car says so. If the credit card on file expires, your spark plugs won't work anymore, even if you just replaced them.
I believe one of the reasons it is slow is because it is also updating the firmware on any number of connected ECUs over the CAN bus. This typically means the image has to be sent over a 500kbit/s bus so there is a limit to how long it has to take.
I would naively expect it to just do A/B updates, which unless I'm forgetting something shouldn't incur a speed penalty? (Other than that the update doesn't get applied until restart)
Innovation means more duds than hits and it should be encouraged at every level. For business critical applications, yes, there should be a well defined path, and in this case, I am sure there is.
People lose their head every time Google sun sets service. In some cases the criticism is well deserved but not in all. In this case, I am sure there is a path forward for the customers. Heck, they even refunded all costs for Stadia. Google goes well above and beyond what is expected in most cases.
It's a shame this is closing. I love this program and more importantly, our local school PTO is a beneficiary and will feel the loss of this program.
Having said that, I am sure there are people misusing this and its a burden on Amazon to make sure they are not funding / supporting malicious users. I get it but closing it is not a solution.
Have you considered switching to a non-profit? I am not saying for-profit is bad but you may have more avenues for fund raising as a non-profit.
Alternatively, gofundme for this would be very successful I would assume. You could also think of a some sort of corporate sponsorship. Corporates can write off for supporting program like this. Again, non-profit here would help a lot.
Congratulations to AMD, HPE and ORNL! This is an amazing achievement. Can't wait to see the spectacular science results coming from this installation.
Intel was supposed to build the first Exascale system for ANL [1] [2]. to be installed by 2018. They completely and utterly messed up the execution, partly drive by 10nm failure, went back to the drawing board multiple times, and now Raja switched the whole thing to GPUs, a technology that Intel has no previous success with and rebased it to 2 ExaFlops peak, meaning they probably expect 1 EF sustained performance, a 50% efficiency. No other facility would ever consider Intel as a prime contractor again. ANL hitched their wagon to the wrong horse.
I quit after getting vaccinated for COVID, only stayed because of the pandemic.
The biggest problem was that Intel simply couldn't execute. They couldn't design and manufacture hardware in a timely manner without too many bugs. I think this was due to poor management practices. My direct manager was amazing, but my skiplevel was always dealing with fires. It felt like instead of the effort being orchestrated that someone approached a crowd of engineers and used a bullhorn to tell them the big goal and that was it. The left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing.
I often called Intel an 'ant hill', because the engineers would swarm a project just like ants do a meal. Some would get there and pull the project forward, some would get on top and uselessly pull upward, and more than I'd like would get behind the project and pull it backwards. Just a mindless swarm of effort, which generally inefficiently kinda did the right thing sometimes.
The inability to execute started to effect my work. When I got a ticket to complete something, I just wouldn't. There was a very good chance that I'd have an extra few weeks (due to slippage) or the task would never need to get done, because the hardware would never appear. Planning was impossible.
Conversely, sometimes hardware CAME OUT OF NOWHERE, not simple stuff, but stuff like laptops made by partners. Just randomly my manager would ask me to support a product we were told directly wouldn't exist, but now did. I needed to help our partner with support right now. Our partners were starting to hate us and it was palpable in meetings.
I'm so glad I quit, I was being worked to the bone on a project which will probably fail and be a massive liability. Even if the economy crashes, and I can't get a job for years, and end up broke, it'll still have been worth it. I also only made 110K/yr base.
I’ve been reading about Pat Gelsinger turning things around on execution, but many of the announced products for this year are already late (Sapphire Rapids, GPUs, even alder lake roll out was late).
Do you know if anything has changed at Intel? Is it reasonable to expect changes within a year and a half of starting on the job given the size of the company and the changes needed?
He came on as CEO a little over a year ago. A new CPU from inception to release might take 5 years on a good day. Design tools and methodologies take many years to change and improve. I imagine the manufacturing side of it has much longer lead times, if anything. And then perhaps slowest of all can be the institutional structure. Executives, managers, even technical leaders can remain entrenched in their positions for years, decades. And it may not be that they're not doing good work or are incompetent (on the contrary they may be extremely bright and productive) so it's not like you can just come in and fire them all, it's just that they may be stuck on ideas that used to be great. Big organizations turn more like an oil tanker than speed boat, in large part due to this institutional entrenchment.
Although keep in mind they have a lot of momentum that is going largely in the right way to begin with. They have among the best logic designers, circuit designers, EDA, silicon research and manufacturing process and technologies, and software division in the world. Despite Intel having had a > 5 year train wreck in their 10nm manufacturing technology, they're able to release CPUs which are for many cases among the best if not the best in the market which goes to show how far ahead they were and how good their design capability still is.
So I think the problem is both bigger and smaller than people think (i.e., they've not completely crashed and burned, but it won't be a matter of just wiping the slate clean and ordering the engineers to deliver on the next product).
I'll somewhat echo the other response: I believe in Pat. He clearly communicates during his press releases, obviously is very technical and has a good understanding of the industry. He also seems to work well with others. I think it's possible he can turn that ship around (and may already be doing so), but it was just too late for me.
I haven't sold the $INTC I got as comp, and that probably speaks louder than whatever I say here.
The Pixel 6 Pro camera, which they showcase and market as capable of representing true skin tone [1], has been a pain in the neck for me. I am a brown skinned person with a balding head and the camera preview and final product are completely different. The final product adds random blotches of dark tones on my face and head. None of the photos are usable. This is 100% reproducible especially in bright day light. I filed a bug report with offer to send in my pictures as samples, not a single response, its been 4+ months.
It's a catastrophe for white people as well. My wife has blue eyes, and the camera pretty consistently makes them black. Skin usually turns gray. The portrait looks fine in the preview, but the algorithm messes it up.
Similar weird problems in portrait mode on my iPhone 13 Pro. My youngest daughter comes out looking like an unholy tellytubby on crack for some reason.
Got fed up of trying to negotiate with the bastard thing and bought a Nikon mirrorless instead. Absolutely no regrets.
Umm ... No. This blanket statement is certifiably false that it only applies to a company running maybe 1 or 10, or at most 100 physical machines. My work needs across the world presence, networking, fault tolerance and a boat load of storage and compute. I cant shift all those to on-prem or a cheaper, alternative provider.
I was there when this happened. So many short term decisions to boost stock price, company objectives focussed on market cap than innovation etc. It was very painful to see in from the inside, first hand.
CGI should be a tool to tell a well crafted and well narrated story. Unfortunately, CGI has become the driver for how a movie should be made. Once it becomes the only tool for telling the story, everything else falters. CGI should absolutely be used to support making a good movie but a movie should not be defining the scenes and the movie.
