It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.
The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.
They know they are talking about Boeing right? and the entire point of the project was to ham-fist the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G, onto a plane it was too big to fit on whilst taking advantages of loop holes so the plane didn't need to be recertified, despite making changes that made the plane fundamentally unstable which is why they needed mcas in the first place.
Saying that Indian labor is cheep is why it failed is a weak excuse. The plane should have never been allowed to fly apart from for favoritism from regulators not doing their jobs. out sourcing is irrelevant if there was the remotest of checks, balances and testing. lines like "from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace" is bordering on racism if Boeing didn't think they were qualified why use them.
Seems for all their blaming of outsourcing they have no problem with outsourcing blame.
If it had been a foreign company the American market wouldn't touch their planes for another 20 years.
Bad coding is really prevalent in the tech world though.
I bought a radio for my car a few years ago, a Kenwood KDC-BT SD 92. It's jam packed with features and offers amazing sound quality and DSP for its original £250 price tag, so that I decided to not buy an amp since it's a compact car anyway. But the software was programmed PISS POOR. There are plenty of display bugs, the display often goes black suddenly in the middle of a song and you have to remove the detachable display module and reattach it. And sometimes, there is no sound at all, so you have to push in the tiny little reset button behind the display module with the tip of a key. After which you have to redo all your DSP and loudness, fader and equaliser adjustments and what-have-you, because the reset also resets the memory of all those settings. The same happens when you disconnect it from the battery. Either this is a genuine design flaw in the code, or they thought it would have killed them to spend an extra 35p on a flash or EEPROM-capable chip to store a few bytes of settings data on. And also, if you are browsing folders on an SD card for a song while the radio is pairing with your phone, you will get thrown out of the folder menu again with every status message during the pairing process. There were one or two software updates available during the radio's retail run, but inexplicably, you had to burn them onto a CD instead of just putting them on an SD card, after all it did come with an SD slot.
I guess with a price target of 250, something had to give and the coding had to be farmed out to Bangladesh or something, where a C programmer can feed a family off £6 an hour. But I gladly would have paid 20 quid more if that would have meant it didn't have all those coding flaws.
>>19581 >Either this is a genuine design flaw in the code, or they thought it would have killed them to spend an extra 35p on a flash or EEPROM-capable chip to store a few bytes of settings data on.
Or, and this is a radical suggestion, you might have had a faulty unit.
No, if you read reviews of this model online, almost every single reviewer complains that the settings are erased on reset or battery disconnect. So somebody at Kenwood actually thought that the product was fine that way, and that they didn't even need to correct it with the handful of software updates that were made available.
Well the other reviewers don't just complain about that one problem. They, too, say their unit was riddled with bugs of all sorts.
I just tried to find the Amazon reviews for it, but since it's an old unit that they stopped making about five years ago, I guess Amazon has removed it from their site as well. But you'll probably find other reviews on it online somewhere.
Webdolt here.
Can Amazon tell that I frequent a shed fanciers' forum if I follow that link?
I'm assuming yes, but that it'll just be yet another confirmation rather than a surprise to them.
I have no shame on this front, just wondering about the hygiene of following links from other places.
I'll wait for someone more clever to answer your question, but even if they didn't find out from that link, they'll know from some other information they've bought.
