On 01/03/2017 11:22 AM, Anthony Youngman wrote:
But you're missing a vital point. I'll quote Carlos again ... "They just need to know when to take the car to the garage shop." My daughter wrecks cars. She has no clue, and cannot spot the signs of impending doom. It drives me nuts. What's the saying - "a stitch in time saves nine"?
To refer to Alan cooper[1] once again, filtered though my own experience. before cars were computerized the "signs of impending doom" were all to apparent. Strange noises, "wobbly feeling", smoke coming out the exhaust, unwarranted increase in fuel consumption. Now we drive computers and the computers are in charge of everything, the engine, the steering, the suspension, the lighting. The computers 'optimise everything, for some value of 'optimise' that the designers thought best. They optimise out all those little warning signs. Often the mechanics, even with the best tools don't recognise the meaning of the 'adjustments'. So you end up with things going wrong. One day my engine tried shaking itself out of the car. It happened when idling and got worse as the revs increased even when the car was stationary. I called my mechanic. Well it _might_ have been a plug misfiring or not firing, but this was excessive. its possible the computer had compensated right up until the point that the plug was unusable. I can check for that and did and that wasn't the case. Next up was all the standard stuff: hoses, fluid, loose bolts. NIX to all that. Its a transverse mounted engine so needs shock absorbers on the mounts to absorb the 'kick' as it starts and as the revs go up suddenly. He thought that was the problem. "but we replaced those 4 months ago!". It turned out that there is a sort-of flywheel on the crankshaft called a "harmonic balancer" that smooths out its running. Its a largish metal and rubber device. It had worn out, fallen apart. The computer had 'compensated' for this. As it failed it did a lot of damage to the crankshaft and hence the cylinder joints and cylinder alignment. Its something that would have been apparent early on in a non-computer car. Should it show up in the logs? Yes, and after the event its possible to figure out what the warning signs were, but they weren't obvious a-priori. When the mechanic reported this upstream to GM the reaction was denial, denial, then "oh?". He tells me there was no bulletin issued about this and nothing in later model's releases or logs or diagnostic procedures about this. The computer compensates and hides the signs of impeding doom. It drives me nuts. It drives my mechanic nuts. Perhaps it drives us nuts because we're old enough to remember how it was before computers. A new generation of mechanics has grown up, and car users too, who never knew how it used to be', how to look out for the warning signs themselves. "Well it *must* be in the logs", they say", "the designers must know about all this and code it in there somewhere". The designers and coders are infallible, then. Perhaps you or I would not be able to spot the signs of impending doom in a computerized car lie your daughter drives. Yes it drives a lot of people nuts. But software is like that. [1] Alan Cooper, "The Inmates are running the asylum", SAMS 1999 ISBN 0-672-31649-8 -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org