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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Rebooting appliances?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Cafe au Lait points to this question - "Think about it: have you ever had to reboot your microwave?" . Well, just like the Cafe Au Lait guy, I've noticed an increasing number of common appliances that need to be rebooted. My microwave, no. However:
My minivan sometimes has spurious sensor malfunctions that light up the "check engine" light. A trip to the mechanic results in a hardware reset for the sensor in question, with no repair needed. I've had this more than once; the last one ended up pushing my annual pollution check on the car back
My stereo receiver - a very nice Sony unit - sometimes refuses to play audio for any devices. It's clearly receiving signal from radio, or the CD or the DVD - it just won't play audio. Powering on/off doesn't work; I have to unplug and count to about 20, then plug it back in.
We have two Replay TV's in the house, and they are supposed to be aware of each other - allowing streaming A/V between them. Periodically, they "forget" that there's another machine on the network, and have to be rebooted.
This is all due to the spreading of embedded systems to appliances and other devices. One of the things it's pointing out to me is that the people who write embedded software don't seem to be significantly better at catching boundary issues than the rest of the developer community is. Kind of makes me wonder about some of the truly mission critical systems out there....
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