An article in Baseline covers the increasing reliance that everyday appliances have on complex software, and the potentially disastrous results when that software fails. One prominent example of this is the BMW 745i, which has a sort of uber-control joystick that controls a WindowsCE-based system. This system was so buggy that BMW has done two recalls. The software was too ambitious and too poorly tested, so things like the brake lights not working and the units suddenly changing to metric are the result.
Old rule — from the dos days — Never Never NEVER use M$ 1.0 of anything. Too bad BMW did not know this. Me thinks that they would have been much better off with some Linux distro. Oh well maybe BMW will learn but who knows.
perhaps I’m a linux loving weeny, but jeezus kriest people – windows on something as important to human safety as a freaking car! Your car shouldn’t “blue screen”, one shouldn’t have to install Service Packs for your new car, your car shouldn’t be prone to viruses – etc. etc. Windows is dandy in some areas I suppose and it is the most widely used desktop o.s. – but thats just it, its a freaking desktop o.s. It does poorly as a server, and even worse as an embedded o.s. Sigh…
This gives new mean to windows crashing and the blue screen of death.
Windows crashes -> car crashes
the windscreen of Death!
Clutch-downshift-ignition to reboot system.
I would think that a QNX system would be the safest for a car.
Anyone using a car with a Windows OS could be prosecuted for driving
without due care and attention. It is the same as driving with bad
brakes.
The unit changing to metric is not a bug, it’s a feature. You’d think everyone in the 21st century would be using metric. The system is just doing something the user should have been doing decades ago.
Who’d wanna drive a bmw anyway….better yet with Windows?
I do understand Microsoft when it desires to earn money in the lucrative embedded market. But until they learn to write software that is not prone to crashing and extremely bulky, I will never use their stuff in an embedded system.
BMW for some reason thought they could use Microsoft and here they pay the price. Sorry Bill, you can’t do everything.
Ewout
Driving a BMW without windows (as in OS!) does not seem to be a problem:)
Frankly speaking, I think incorporating more and more “smart” features in the car is a waste of time. I prefer driving with minimal “help”…
I wanted to post something at least not related with the expected stupid joke which is if you use windows, it will crash, blue death screen, so on…. I didn’t see Windows CE with blue screen, but it seems that a person who thinks that Windows is Windows 95, it is the best shot.
The fact that BMW selected Windows CE as their choice for the display technology in their cars is a tremendous success for Microsoft. Just think about it. There were other choices, but Siemens and BMW selected Windows CE. So despite this, I don’t understand why some people make the same stupid joke which has no meaning in this case. I am even shocked with people who doesn’t understand anything about this type of technology at all, and still speak up as if they know the best OS to be used in this technology.
Well, for what its worth I never claimed in my post (not that your necissarily commenting on mine directly) that they should use Linux instead. There are plenty of great choices – I personally am impressed with QNX. But really – WHY Win CE?
If BMW have now HYDROGEN CARS (alterative energy, good for environment)
They are some cars a petrol and others a hydrogen, why don’t they change to alternative operating system like for example linux like they do with alternative energy. They can change the source and adapt to their requirements 
I know, the future is HYDROGEN CARS and LINUX inside
It is time to change:)
Sergio,
Just because Msoft has gotten ‘Better’ at reducing catastropic system level crashes and put a nice graphical wrapper around the remaining BSOD’s doesn’t reduce the fact that they still happen in the windows world. Frankly, for systems this important a strong history of excellent quality would seem to be a minimum requirement, not a long string of “Way better than the previous versions” type promises. Using any variant of Windows in my opinion is sheer lunacy given the fact that none of them has a track record of long/reliable service.
And compound that with the use of WinCE, which is in my opinion a perma-beta OS. This is obviously the result of excellent Microsoft sales/Lobbying. I can just see the product managers at BMW forcing the use of this crap on their engineers because of some stupid co-branding scheme that Microsoft bribed them with.
And while my comments are pretty much in line with what I would have said (and did) when I first read that the BMW system was WinCE powered, it is verified by the current track record.
My other car runs BeOS
Well, for what its worth I never claimed in my post (not that your necissarily commenting on mine directly) that they should use Linux instead. There are plenty of great choices – I personally am impressed with QNX. But really – WHY Win CE?
Where did you see that the cause of the crash lied in WinCE ?
WinCE by default doesn’t handle cars, breaks, motors, gps,… All this was added on top of WinCE by BMW.
So please, stop putting the fault on WinCE when you have absolutely no idea of the cause of the problems
Windows CE doesn’t have anything to do with Win95 (which is horrible). And as far as problems goes we’ve had plenty of them on Linux yet none on our win2k servers. Your milage may vary depending on what you are doing.
But back to winCE. It is far from as bad as everybody seems to think, and I have only had very limited exposure to it. Yes, QNX probably is better in many ways (except they didn’t give me the job *sob*), but don’t think WinCE is pure bollocks. And consider what kind of support M$ can give you if you are a prime customer (like BMW/Siemens) and what development tools you get, I am sure they made a good decision.
Besides, why would QNX or Linux have helped them if they didn’t test properly or didn’t have good enough developers (I don’t know if they did, and I suspect that the problems lay in the management layers, not the development layers)? If you haven’t developed embedded software under stress it is very easy to make jokes, I rather feel sorry for the developers, I am sure they would have wanted this to go differently.
And Betcour, damn you, I so wished I could have given that comment first;) The SI (I prefer that term to metric) is the way to go, convert and stop making yourself look like idiots.
And Mr Pickle Man. Which version of WinCE is running the BMWs? Do you know? I don’t, but I bet you that it is 3.x or 4.x.
The issue with the BMW (specifically with the brake lights) brings to mind issues of software safety in general.
The most prominent example of this is incidents surrounding the Therac-25. See http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html if you’re unfamiliar with these incidents.
I think the main lesson learned from the Therac 25 are that it’s unwise for any safety critical system to have a single point of failure (in the case of the Therac 25, it was the software, of course).
It shouldn’t be possible for the software alone to cause something like a car to operate in an unsafe manner (at least, in an manner that wouldn’t occur were the software not in place whatsoever)
On a different note, I think it’s also extremely beneficial for safety critical software to be implemented in functional programming languages so that its correctness can be verified mathematically rather than therough testing.
Also, in the case of this BMW, many are knocking BMW’s choice of an embedded operating system. My question is: was the OS at fault here, or was it a failure of BMW’s in-house software? From the article, it sounds more like it was the in-house software, although it’s hard to tell what this quote is referring to specifically:
“BMW tried to do too many things at once with this car, and they underestimated the software problem”
This almost sounds like second system effect in regards to computerized cars. BMW saw the success of the use of software in cars and decided to take it to the next level, but bit off more than they could chew.
So, we run into basic software engineering concepts here. There’s an easy way to fight second system effect: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Why Win CE is a legitimate question? Frankly I am not sure, but it seems that Microsoft’s technology is a good choice for Siemens. One important thing is that Microsoft has a focused solution for the telematics systems based on Windows CE. So they are actively marketing a product specifically designed for automative industry. But strategically there are more reasons. .net is one reason for example, Microsoft has windows ce .net now. With .net you can use services like mappoint which is quite important for these type of technologies. On top of that you have visual studio which you can use it to develop applications for these devices. Also you have pocket pc platform which gets more and more popular. In the future being able to integrate different solutions such as pocket pc or tablet pc with telematics systems is quite nice. Another advantage is visual basic, you can develop in visual basic for these devices, which makes it really easy for people who are not so technical for programming.
By the way my post was also commenting on your post. You think that windows ce is essentially the same windows 95. That’s not the case at all. They are different operating systems. Like linux, qnx and linux are different in many respects. Linux is not a real-time operating system normally, but QNX is. You mention blue screen, service pack, virus all have nothing to do with what we are talking about here. Please check out the technology first. Service pack may have in some sense, that is an update to the os ma be needed, but I don’t see why this is a bad thing. I use apt-get update, upgrade all the time. When a problem is discovered for open SSL what am I supposed to do? Not use apt-get upgrade just because it is linux and you don’t do such things because it is the perfect operating system. I mean all that sentences are too cheap.
Look at their hydrogen car (750hl model) and also a MINI at:
http://www.bmwworld.com/models/750hl.htm
Is this car powered by LINUX???
And compound that with the use of WinCE, which is in my opinion a perma-beta OS. This is obviously the result of excellent Microsoft sales/Lobbying. I can just see the product managers at BMW forcing the use of this crap on their engineers because of some stupid co-branding scheme that Microsoft bribed them with.
I know it doesn’t worth to discuss with you and I don’t value any of your opinion, but just to point out why I think I want to state several things.
First of all the above paragraph itself shows how much hatred you have against Microsoft. It is so much that, you think you can make outrageous claims without even showing any single proof or any explanation. The best you can do when it comes to Microsoft is that, you can claim they do that, they bribed, blah blah … That’s the best you can say here, because essentially you have no idea what’s going on. You have no idea what is the underlying issues on this technology. You can’t come up with any logical explanation why BMW selected this OS. The only explanation that you can come up with is Microsoft bribed them. I should mention that this claim is pretty plain stupid. BMW officials make a business decision for their company, and they are bribed by Microsoft, and thus they make a bad choice for BMW. Well of course there is nothing to discuss about why someone choose Windows CE, or embeded linux. What are the advatages or disadvantages of the respective solutions? No we can’t discuss this with you, obviously. What we can discuss with you is whether BMW officials are bribed or not. Do BMW officials need bribes from Microsoft. How Microsoft gave the money secretly? What kind of stuff these BMW officials buy with this money? Does the CEO also bribed? Well actually we missed a point, since actually Siemens is the company which actually uses Windows CE. BMW selected Siemens actually. So there is a confusion here, but who cares, let’s talk about how Microsoft bribed both Siemens and BMW? I think Microsoft most probably gave the money through a Swiss bank.
Anyway as you see, people like you can and will never discuss the issues. All we will hear from you is cheap and stupid comments. However I find them quite funny, so keep them please.
Back in 1995 and since, there were jokes about what will happen if Airplanes and Cars will work on Windows. Now it’s a the sad reality.
Doesn’t matter which Windows it is… it’s pretty well known that Microsoft software cannot be relied on, especially in such cases.
In terms of reliability, which also means safety in this case, I think that using Linux, or probably *BSD would have been much better.
One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t sit into a car powered by M$ software, just like I wouldn’t sit into a car driven by a drunk driver.
My first post was done tongue in cheek.
In reality, through out the history of Microsoft clear back to Altar Basic the first renditions of their works are quite buggy. This is a new use for any version of Win CE – so if I had to guess, a lot of bugs come with the mods.
At least with Open source software you can rely on your own people to complete and debug the programs if all else fails. Nor are your development people trying to build reliable software to run on and around a black hole of proprietary software at the core.
No MS is not the only source of bugs in the software, true any fool can turn out buggy code, and fail to test for it. True we do not know how much of the system uses Win CE – and yes it may just effect display.
But as someone who was around to use PCdos 1 and Saw Windows 1 first used — I would guess that the problems start at the OS and work out. Mind you — just a guess…
Windows is not an OS, it is a brand. Windows 2.0, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows CE and Windows Embedded are all basically different chunks of code. Impressions of one do not necessarily apply to another you’ve never seen.
My turn. 🙂 I’m sure as far as low-level stuff goes it is not the same as Win 9x, I doubt MS is that stupid. Nonetheless we have exhange servers here operating in a cluster running Win 2K server that has one of the nodes down and crashed at least once every other week. Far too often. My co-worker had a Win CE based PDA that he quickly took back after its constant crashing (mind you this was over a year ago) and replaced it with a Palm device. Recently as well I’ve read a story about a *cell phone* that runs Win CE that needs a security patch *!!!* Since when should I *ever* need to patch my friggen phone? MS, more then any other company in our industry, has lowered our acceptance level of what constitutes good working technology. My parents readily accept that computers are prone to crashing and that loss of data is normal. Thats not how it should be. If computers were always this fragile we wouldn’t have come as far as we have. Did the mainframes of old crash this often? What about VAX VMS machines? Our Sun machines at work haven’t crashed since I’ve been here. MS has made themselves rich off of selling mediocrity and claiming its gold. My Nokia cell phone had better not ever crash on me or demaind that I install a service pack – I think I’d run it over with my car!
</rant> 🙂
Its not really windows fault as such – its really BMWs for thinking lets not use the industry standard and multiple safety certificated real-time OS that is QNX, lets cut corners and use the millions of cheap Windows programmers instead. I mean cmon QNX is so big in the emebedded market for a very good reason – it works <full stop> and it doesn’t stop working either.
In my area, Eugene, Oregon we have a large for us RV manufacturer who a couple of years ago was trying to hire people to use MS Visual Studio with Visual Basic to design the software for the RV. That is scarry. I’m going to make sure my car uses some form of UNIX vefore I buy it. Since windows is a brand and somw of its products are faulty it is reasonable to assume all versions of it are faulty. The reason for branding something is to guarantee a certain level of consistent quality throughout the entire brand. I won’t buy an Itanium from HP because they sell crappy monitors. How am I to know what products they do a good job with if their track record is spotty.
…that old BMW ad -you can easily find it on the net-:
“Our hardware runs better without windows.”
… and in the other news:
Micro$oft today released its Windows powered Cars…
The thirst car is caled M$ Car(tm) 2004(R)..
This car is ment only 4 1 human…
If u want a Family car
u Should buy a M$ Car(tm) 2004(R) .Net(TM)(3 Seats not included)
Apple realesed its cars 2…
Cars: Apple iCar. Apple PowerCar. Apple PowerCar Ti
Those cars eat 15% less fuel then M$’s, Are 30% more faster,
Are 10 % safer.
But they are only on 5% on all roads
In the edition M$ (for custemers convinience) realesed a car
M$ Car(tm) 2004(R) Plus! 2005(tm)
This car is Equipt with 8.1 surround speaker system.
U just need to unlock the car and it will q. u “Where do you want to go today?”. After u tell it it q. u “Should i start up?”. Wafter that it tels u to Plug’n’Play (Pray :]) ur safty belt…
And if u crash, before realesing the safty pillow it will q.
u “Should i reales th Safety Pillow?”
http://www.enemy.org/gallery/jpg/BMW.jpg =]
Aside from the fact that I’m not sure I would want Windows OR Linux running any critical systems in my car, I would just like to point out that the Windows CE 3.0 source code is available on MS’s web site (although not under GPL,of course ;-)). BMW’s engineers probably had the chance to look it over before making their choice… see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/ce.net/previous/downloads…
no comments
Is Windows CE a Real Time OS? Things like Brake Lights etc shouldn’t be controlled by a plamtop OS. The reason QNX etc exists is that it is aimed specifically at Real Time processing. If WinCE isn’t realtime and is controlling safety critical features of this car, then I certainly won’t be buying one. Not that I can afford one anyway!!
None of linux or windows are the answers for this kind of software. The solution is fine software specification and verification with the help of (semi-)automated verification systems.
This enforce software to be simple which is good thing for such critical systems (because complexity increases the number of bugs)…
if something happens, they need to have a place to point their fingers
linux is better in many areas, but nobody will bet a career on the assumption that it is perfect.
if they chose linux, they probably are still tweaking xft to offer an acceptable GUI 8-))))) after $ 80K, the ugly fonts are just not right in any angle
There was famous story in TheRegister about train-ticket automates with NT OS.
I’m really wondering why not to use QNX or some of compact and reliable unices.
I think, this is just lack of knowledge and information.
My friend was writing huge amount of embedded soft, all on NT (e.g. for fuel station) and permanently complained about this crap.
But he was absolutely sure, that MS product is only option, adn was totally confused and then impressed when i demonstrated QNX.
But he still writes on NT – he knows it and don’t wish to learn anything else.
Here were tquestions, how app soft relates (and its bugs) relates to OS choice.
Answer is simple – if developer prefer (and has knowledges) only about VisualBasic style programming. easy-to-use-tools, and where to find “Start” button – what you can expect?
I think that main reason of choice of MS products is just support and such “easyness”. And if such reasons are dominant over proved (20 years for QNX) quality, but harder development – we get what we get.
Please refer to :
http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/november9/6.htm
MS “Trusted Computing” at it’s finest. It was found to be “human error” that someone entered a 0 into a database, causing the ship to sit dead in the water for 3 hours. I wonder how helpful the MS helpdesk was. If I was at war, I would have shelled MS–being that they were aiding the enemy. An OS for a car should be a realtime, fault tolerant one. Not a “CE.” There is absolutely no need for any “windows-esque” operating system in a car. I wish I was privy to the “Trusted” military applications that MS got contracts for. I’d love to see how their software performs for aircraft specifically. Dead in the water for 3 hours? well, if you’re flying, you’d be dead in 3 minutes. “Error 0x000007B has occurred, please eject from plane and try again.
Isnt Wince something you do when you feel a pain?
My brother owns an ’89 firebird. While we were working on the electrical system, we found that EVERY SINGLE PART OF WIRING TO/FROM THE ELECTRICAL PART OF THE IGNITION SYSTEM HAD MULTIPLE REDUNDANCIES. It took like 5 attempts to finnaly kill it. That is failsafe engineering. One could probably remove that car’s embedded computer IC totally and it would still run (albeit poorly [it would have to guess when regulating air/fuel ratio using the throttle position sensor.])
I think the IC is a motorola 68xxx in that car. Did I mention Mac rules! haha.
To all the wintrolls, go ahead and show me a single CRITICAL system running on Winblows. A plane, satellite, (working) car (BMW – Bei Mercedes Weggeworfen – maybe someone’s willing to translate this :-), nuclear reactor etc…
If your life depends on software, you would never use M$ – you’d go for QNX, BlueCat, Lynxos, WX, highly customized Linux, or your very own software.
But after all, why do you use Windoze anyway???
What’s easy is the APIGUIDE here: http://www.allapi.net
What’s easier is Dev C++ here: http://www.bloodshed.net
I write embedded software for microcontrollers & microprocessors. I work for a company that makes fire alarms & fire alarm notification appliances. I write everything in assembly. I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever trust a microsoft product in ANY of the products I develop. Did I mention ever? A system reboot requiring user input would mean death (literally) in my case. As such, my company writes it’s own software, ALL OF IT, so that we can test ALL OF IT. I get this odd feeling that MS is going to target the “automatic driver cars” being tested now (the ones where the car drives itself.) How can anyone working in a mission critical field actually trust MS? HOW? I couldn’t trust MS (or anyone else for that matter) unless they signed a liability pact accepting all the blame for any failures in the field (this would mean that MS would have to test our software with theirs and qualify it.)
I am missing someone making a point here. I don’t know anything about this car control system, but if it can make the brake lights fail then there is a design flaw. Why would you need to have the computer control the brake lights? Would a lo-tech approach of a switch not be better? I think so. You don’t need high tech solutions for everything in the world. It would be much better to make the computer monitor the brake system – including the switch and the brake lights. That would indeed be useful. It coould give a warning if the brakes were active without the brake lights being activated. That would be a good safety device.
Even if you did opt for the software control approach, the system must be able to monitor itself. There is a field waiting to be discovered in software engineering there.
Seems to me we need some systems (and software) designers with an ability of logic thinking and a broader view on technology and its purposes. No insults meant at all. But it is becoming more and more important. More is not necessarily better.
Regards and thanks for a brilliant news site – including the most often informed and interesting comments from readers.
<nostalgia>I’m not too fond of newer vehicles anymore… too much electronics for the average person to work on. I was quite fond of my dad’s old pickup, a 1972 chevy. There was enough space under the hood I could climb in inside the hood when I went to change the plugs. When I helped him switch the old AM radio to an AM/FM radio, I could actually reach up under the dash with both hands. If needed, I could actually trace wires. He sold the truck a year ago, with 150,000 miles, and the guy who bought it is still running it every day. We never had to worry about an OS crash on that!
</nostalgia>
What’s this all about? BMW is a quality brand, and I would not expect them to run the car’s software on Windows. Some kind of proprietary OS would be more appropriate, or BeOS, or some kind of industrial-strength Unix. Linux would work, but wouldn’t be chosen because it’s not “expensive” enough. I just can’t imagine the powers that be at BMW wanting to use Windows CE for it! They’re out of touch with what’s cool, and they deserve all of the crashes they get. Hopefully no innocent people will be harmed.
It sounds like they got suckered by MS marketing people. They should have used QNX or something similar. MS is not doing to well lets not forget their Phone OS snafu from a few days ago
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2591
Thought the article doesn’t mention who developed the car system that run on WinCE
that Bill Gates has the guts to drive one of these cars? Microsoft’s technology is so *great*, I’m sure he wouldn’t have a problem driving one of these new CE-powered BMW’s. Same thing with any CE-powered device/appliance, I’d like to see one of them in his house before I would even consider it.
Most of the comments (mine included) come from a place of very little actual working knowledge of WinCE. Having said that, most of the people here are quite familiar with the disjointed relationship that appears to exist between Msoft engineering and marketing. I made a comment a couple of pages back about “bribes” from Msoft to BMW, and while I don’t believe that Bill went the the BMW president with a big suitcase full of cash. I do believe from past history and current appearances that the inclusion of WinCE in BMW’s technology flagship model is quite valuable to Msoft from a marketing perspective. and that by allowing Msoft in on the project BMW likely reduced their R&D on this project by a significant amount.
To me, this is tantemount to a bribe only in the sense that this is a mission critical system that has no business running an OS with an unproven track record in the open market. I would imagine there are many succesful projects out there that run WinCE for real time operations, just like there are tons of Win2K/XP users who have never suffered a system crash. However, when public safety is the primary concern, where should the emphasis be placed? fancy graphics generated by inexpensive VB (Just a guess). or solid proven stability and Open API’s that allow one to tune their applications properly.
The 7-series chief designer is Bangle (ex-Fiat employee). This is what you get for mixing Fiat into the formula
WinCE is more than likely a move from the traditional BMW computer system, which alone is extremely complex. All models have a fat data-bus running around the car. Having said this, a bimmer is a great car to own. Hands down.
It seems to me that the fault with the BMW probably lies with the BMW-hired programmers who wrote the software for their joystick thingy. It’s quite possible that the OS never failed once. Now I’m no fan of WinCE, and I acknowledge that MS probably has some share in the blame because their developer tools made it too easy for lazy programmers to write bad code, but I’ll have to say that the brunt of the fault lies at the feet of the programmers, (Or more likely their slave-driving managers who rushed them to release this software before it was fully tested)
Is clippy included in that version of Windows to help you drive ?
I wonder,
If I was to ask the Royal Admirals who ran the unbelievably one-sided victory in the Falklands, or the Admirals and captains that participated in the Gulf War, would THEY use one of these new ships?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28950.html
Windows for use in battle control systems (sounds like automated or radar guided targeting.)
The words of Lenin echo in my mind, The capitalists will give us the nails to put in their coffins. Well hopefully for the British, they thoroughly test their warships before deployment into the royal navy. I’m sure their test trials will go… umm perfect.
Gee maybe they could add wireless networking to it–that would make it REALLY TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING.
even if WinCE is classified as realtime, I can’t picture any bright engineer pushing WinCE in their cars. This had to come from management which, like suggested, most likely saved a big bunch of cash (or thought they did) by using some parts pre-made by Microsoft.
AFAIK MS, they probably offered WinCE at some ridiculously low price per license, a free development bench for the software, free compiler suite, with premium tech support.
Pretty hard for BMW’s management to refuse a deal like that, I wish they’d listen more to their engineers.
note: I have no inside contact, those are my personal opinions and not based on proven facts.
My other car is a Mercedes … with Linux
In working for the aerospace industry, we would NEVER implement any sort of existing personal computer operating system for mission-critical applications. This applies to both Microsoft Windows and Linux. The only sort of software that would be used in aircraft are low-level personally designed code.
You have a reputation for quality engineering and
you go with Windows CE ?!
You don’t scratch behind the surface and do a little
pros/cons research before you make decisions?
Because if you did, you would know that win ce has
never had the “right stuff”.
I hope Volvo isn’t as foolish.
I’ve had several near fatals,
In a Ford Escort driving in the right turn lane, engine dies & locks up the steering just before I made right. Issue, overheated ignition control system.
In a Toyota Corrola, the slightest brush on the auto shift put it in reverse at 50mph on a major highway. Issue loose lock mechanism.
In both cases I/we was lucky, niether one had an OS behind the cause. I hate cars.
Mitusbishi Sigma gear stick came off in my hand when going across a major intersection.
The whole point for drive-by-wire is to get rid of things like the steering column and bulky mechanical/hydrolics systems.
It’s the steering column that is going to kill you when you smash into it, causing massive internal injury. It’s the bulky hydrolics systems that takes up all the space in front of the car that’s going to crush your legs because that extra space can be used to put crash absorbing materials.
WinCE only controls things like navigation and radios. All the other problems are BMW’s fault.
Imagine get into the driver seat, insert the key into the ignition and turn the key, the head-up display (HUD) turn on with the message
“Where do you want to do today?”
or
“Your car was improperly turned off. Please wait while Windows is performing a crash-proof test…”
Can Americans buy and drive these hydrogen cars? I can’t find much info about it.
I must agree that this is BMW’s fault. No matter where the flaw was, BMW chose the technology they used.
I also have to say this is an example of where we are headed, globally: more needless complexity, less testing, less engineering, less costs for development, higher cost and failure of product.
I can say from experience that MS sales will promise the world to get a licensing deal, however MS products have not proven themselves in the embedded market, other than in glorified WEB browsing devices. I don’t know of any self-respecting engineer that would use WinCE in such an application.
Products from companies such as WindRiver LynuxWorks and in particular QNX have a long history in applications where a ‘glitch’ can result in loss of life or billions of dollars. As well as an experienced support team to help in difficult situations.
Granted it looks like BMW bit off more than they could chew with this car design but I can’t understand why they would select WinCE and in such a way as it would actually have some influence on the power-train of the automobile.
Oh well….
There are two types of fools in the world: One says,
“This is old and therefore good.”
while the other says
“This is new and therefore better.”
John Brunner – ‘Shockwave Rider’
I have to agree with you Jace…
The supplier that only sold a system to BMW that it asked for. It is BMW’s responsibility to 1) make sure the supplier did the proper testing they were responsible for & 2)make sure the system works without interfering with the other vehicle systems. Month’s ago when BMW announced that it would use a system with WinCE, many other automakers shook their head because they knew better. Ha… exactly what was predicted happened. At least the American automakers know ( from the high cost of lawsuits ) not to allow a toy company with the reputation it has to make the OS. I’m surprised any reputable company even talks to MS anymore, where choice exists.
In another article in an embedded systems magazine, the editorial this month discussed that younger people are growing up accepting poor, buggy, and substandard software as the norm because they grew up using windows. Products that have to be power cycled, rebooted, or even patched (have you patched your phone today?..ha).
Unbelievable…
It seems that a lot of the posters are making the easy mistake of confusing the effects of a poor application for the operating system that the poorly written application is run on.
Not to say CE was in any way an appropriate choice for the job-if for no other reason than MS is unwilling to certify the OS as “fail-safe”.
Let’s not forget, however, that even a “fail-safe” OS (the only two I know of are QNX and WindRiver) won’t work if, for example, the vehicle’s electrical system goes on the fritz. There is no excuse for putting a vehicle’s drivetrain, braking, or steering under the control of such a high-level (OSI-wise) device, when so much in between can go bad.
By the way, don’t take this as a slam at drive-by-wire. That’s different-a much lower-order function.
The people who have really earned the blame here are BMW and Siemens.
-Arbiter
>>>>Granted it looks like BMW bit off more than they could chew with this car design but I can’t understand why they would select WinCE and in such a way as it would actually have some influence on the power-train of the automobile.
The powertrain problems have nothing to do with WinCE. People just assume that it is and they write stories on the web about it.
>The powertrain problems have nothing to do with WinCE. People just >assume that it is and they write stories on the
>web about it.
Not true. Todays vehicles, with all their computers, are basically a network. Throw crap data, or incorrect messages out onto the vehicle bus, and anything is possible. Safety critical components have more safegaurds, but still are not immune.
>>>>Not true. Todays vehicles, with all their computers, are basically a network. Throw crap data, or incorrect messages out onto the vehicle bus, and anything is possible. Safety critical components have more safegaurds, but still are not immune.
WinCE only displays dashboard data, they don’t interact with actual powertrain systems. Not even QNX is certified for that kind of thing.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990726S0065
If the BMW radio has problems, it’s WinCE’s fault. If the navigation has problems, it’s WinCE’s fault. If the voice recognition has problems, it’s more likely to be the voice recognition software’s fault (though WinCE will get the blame for it).
“Excuse me while I reboot my dishwasher”
Aptly said, David
I’m sure as far as low-level stuff goes it is not the same as Win 9x, I doubt MS is that stupid.
But you claimed that blue screen also appears there.
Nonetheless we have exhange servers here operating in a cluster running Win 2K server that has one of the nodes down and crashed at least once every other week. Far too often.
What does this mean, and what is your point, especially related with the subject we are talking about. What does this prove? If I give an example where we are having a problem with Mac Os X, or linux, or BeOs or whatever, what does it mean?
My co-worker had a Win CE based PDA that he quickly took back after its constant crashing (mind you this was over a year ago) and replaced it with a Palm device.
I have a Palm and it crashes quite often. I have to reset the machine quite a lot. I don’t go and buy Win CE for various reasons and claim that Palm is inheritly a bad product. That would be pretty stupid isn’t it.
Recently as well I’ve read a story about a *cell phone* that runs Win CE that needs a security patch *!!!* Since when should I *ever* need to patch my friggen phone?
First of all I read lots of stories which are plain wrong. They are mostly produced or distorted to bash Microsoft and entertain people like you. Don’t tell me you read stories to me, anything you said based on those stories are pretty much worthless to me. TO be able to say something about the story, you should not only read it but also think about it. Many such stories are totally stupid and you should be able to understand that by asking simple questions about what the article really shows, proves. There is an inherit problem with human intelligence when it comes to interpreting what they read.
MS, more then any other company in our industry, has lowered our acceptance level of what constitutes good working technology.
Hehehe, oh yeah, right. Everythingelse works better than Microsoft products, and actually everythingelse is the best. They have no flaw at all. Use linux, use Mac OS X. Those products are far more better than Microsoft products. Oh yeah, you are absolutely right on that point!
My parents readily accept that computers are prone to crashing and that loss of data is normal. Thats not how it should be. If computers were always this fragile we wouldn’t have come as far as we have. Did the mainframes of old crash this often? What about VAX VMS machines? Our Sun machines at work haven’t crashed since I’ve been here.
Sure we would like computers to be far more stable. Your problem is that, you think only MS produces such unstable products, because you read them more often. I read computer science for a while, and the only truth about computers are they can crash. Nothing is absolutely perfect. There are tons of work done on distributed algorithms from the past, and all of them assume that computers may crash. I should mention that tradionally computer science is mostly using Unix machines, not Windows. Sun machines at work doesn’t crash of course, because they are far more expensive. Do you want your parents to pay 10,000$ to Microsoft and Intel, so that the their computer doesn’t crash. Those machines have lots of registers and traditionally they are not designed to run on cheap hardware, like intel. If you look at the history of computers, the current situation is a big success for Microsoft in any sense. Microsoft comes from x086 machines, there are millions of developers for their platform, there are millions of details, thousands of devices, and so on. Offer Sun to produce an OS with the same requirements and see what happens. Your points are pretty much worthless, since they really don’t deal with any real issue. They are like, hey Microsoft’s product doesn’t do that, that’s very bad, that’s the end of the world, it should have not crashed and so on. You don’t think about why it is like that, you don’t really compare Microsoft’s products with others. You point out few problems with Microsoft’s products and you conclude that thus the others are better and Microsoft’s products are worse.
MS has made themselves rich off of selling mediocrity and claiming its gold. My Nokia cell phone had better not ever crash on me or demaind that I install a service pack – I think I’d run it over with my car!
First of all you didn’t really show anything that shows that Microsoft’s smart phone needs a service pack. Your claim with regard to service pack is completely bogus and thus doesn’t need any discussion. You read something somewhere and that’s all you know. My home phone also doesn’t crash and thus it is better than Microsoft’s product. What Nokia phone you are talking about, does it have an OS?
My conclusion is that, unless you are a something-zealot and a political guy, I suggest you to examine the stories you read closer. Also don’t jump to conclusions just because something crashed. You need a far more better understanding of the technology to really make a bold claim like, hey Microsoft lowered our expectations. That’s a pretty stupid claim I have to tell you.
Sorry to point out to you that nobody blamed Windows CE for the crash (except most of you guys). Personally, I would have chosen QNX, but what BMW choose is their choice. Personally, I think Windows CE just can’t really take buggy software (like all Windows 9x).
But the blame may as well fall on BMW writing skills.
“The Power of the BMW” “The BMW as a respected Brand”
BMW has as much power and Respect as Windows!
Its not all windows fault……BMW just cannot make cars! The only real car they made was teh old alpina….rest are cheaply made with really really bad parts (fact) and they jam this all together and make a big engine that with a little bit of hard driving…….perhaps lasts a month or two… BMW is not a car….its a wannabe and so is windows, Its not an OS its a wannabe…it sucks
sorry for bad english
The yugo of software providing software for a BMW…. You are all missing the point, which is, that you should not want ALL THAT F(&U)%^)*# crap in your car in the first place. It used to be, hang up and drive, now it’s logoff and drive. wtf…. lol