And noone bat an eye. Programming is not an engineering discipline.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29832525.
*edit, you are responding with "who cares it is a clock" but the parent was talking about programming in general has a pervasive quality issue that shows that programming as we do it now is NOT engineering. Engineering is like 80% failure analysis. In no other discipline do we call the 20% the 90% (even the good in programming is barely passable). I'd love a filter that killed comments that aren't even talking about the same thing
Everything is interconnected, this is why safety critical systems go to such great lengths to cordon themselves off from the rest of the world. It is the unintentional critical system (everything at some point will be critical to someone). This is the equivalent of bondoing (putty used by backyard car body mechanics) over some important piece of technology.
Honda should at least send everyone a piece of tape that says remove on Date ZZZ so someone doesn't see the wrong time and do something unwise.
I understand that customers are rightfully pissed off that they paid for a clock and no longer have a working clock, but the cost of said clock can't have been more than a few dollars so it still doesn't really matter.
In my head this would suck a lot more if the time was needed to enable more connectivity i.e. syncing calendars, remote start/unlock, etc. But if that was the case these systems would use NTP and avoid this whole mess entirely.
If you’re making a durable product that’s going to be around for a decade or two, make it right.
This attitude that we should just shrug and accept bad “engineering” is just dumb. Honda in particular didn’t move their entertainment systems to CarPlay/Android Auto until 2018 in some models - so internally they felt there was some strategic advantage to owning the car entertainment stack, and they still fucked it up.
Where else do they suck?
Screen doors have an essential use during storm conditions. They are important for physical safety. What safety benefits do you rely on a clock for?
> This attitude that we should just shrug and accept bad “engineering” is just dumb
Are you really going to tell the Honda owners in your life to go buy another car because of this clock issue? Otherwise, they're just accepting bad engineering!
> If you’re making a durable product that’s going to be around for a decade or two, make it right.
The cars still drive, and those that are properly maintained drive well, better than most other brands. I ask again, who the hell buys a car for its timekeeping abilities?
Anything not directly related to getting you from A to B can be a non-issue. Do you really need power windows? Do you really need AC? Do you really need sound insulation? Do you even need heat? I mean put on a jacket for christ's sake! Doesn't really matter. I guess if the whole car falls apart around you, it's a non issue as long as it gets you where you wanna go right?
No
> Do you really need AC?
No
> Do you really need sound insulation?
No
> Do you even need heat?
No
> I guess if the whole car falls apart around you, it's a non issue as long as it gets you where you wanna go right?
Yes, this is how the majority of people approach used car sales. They're bought for the A to B capability, not for anything else.
Regardless, it is ridiculous to compare something as critical to human comfort as heating to an accurate clock. Who the hell needs the time to be right in their car? You can afford a car but not a $5 wristwatch?
In 2002, probably not. In 2022, it could have much more of an impact if OTA updates are signed/decrypted/etc so that being able to generate a valid timestamp is required. It would totally suxors to get into your car to have it not start because of some stupid time related bug.
There's always a fix, it might just be expensive. If this was a critical safety issue that had the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and cost the company billions of dollars, teams would work night and day to rewrite the code and they would bring the cars in and replace the navigation systems with ones that work. But this isn't a critical issue...
Someone has done a cost benefit analysis and decided it's cheaper to just tell people to wait until August and make whole any customer who throws a fit about it. There's "no solution" because no solution is cheaper than the actual solution to the problem.
<insert Fight Club quote here>
The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol!
But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.
Which side is that? Insurance companies total out cars based on repair value exceeding the car’s value. If you want to fork out your own cash, nobody is going to refuse to fix it.
A couple of years ago I was a tech lead on a project that “totaled” a 30 year old, perfectly functional application and migrated it to a big cloud solution.
Remember during COVID hearing about state unemployment systems running on obsolete mainframes? The dirty little secret there is that many states use a semi-standardized solution developed by IBM in the 80s (when the Feds spent a bunch of money to computerize unemployment insurance). The mainframe stuff is solid, the garbage bolted to it for IVR and web support 20 years ago is not. Because of that poor stewardship, the Federal government will probably spend billions over the next decade totalling those systems.