[oclug]Another happy MS customer...

[Shad Young]

On Sat, 2003-01-18 at 10:41, Dana Webber wrote:
> BMW's 745! ( $70K US ) is controled by a computer 
> runing MS windows CE. 
> 
> http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,833424,00.asp?kc=BAZD103019TX1K0100547
> 
> "But companies like Microsoft can't do to the auto industry what they did to 
> the PC industry. You can't play Russian Roulette every time you stick the key 
> into the ignition." 

Well, CE runs only a few of the 150 parts of the iDrive (Navigation and
the like). I found no customer complaints, no recalls, and reviewers in
CD, R&T etc, complained about the knobby switchgear interface, not the
software.

I would like to point out that X crashed last night (all I did was
maximize a Netscape window), frozen solid.. no keyboard no mouse... no
remote access, no access to the CLI... hard reboot required. 

This is the third time in a month an application in X went down and took
the system with it. Applications regularly crash, and the KDebug tool is
my constant companion... To their credit Evolution and Open Office have
excellent system crash recovery and I have lost little work thanks to
them.

Contrast this with XP. I have had one application crash in the last year
in XP: MS Frontpage. But it just needed to be relaunched. It did not
take the system or any other application down with it. 

Personally, I would be more worried about a car with embedded Linux than
I would CE. (Not really as X is not Linux, I know. The point being ...) 

Shad

PS 

BMW and Mercedes are notorious for burying problems and keeping them out
of the press, and their owners are usually not vocal in their complaints
of their cars (an unspoken code if you will and pride of ownership). So
obviously my defense may not be fully accurate.

-- 
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"Fortune should have the arbitrant of one-half of our actions, but she
leaves the other half, or a little less, to be governed by ourselves." 
- Machiavelli
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