Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus

Posted Jan 18, 2007 17:38 UTC (Thu) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995)
Parent article: LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems

I dislike Tannenbaum's (and other's) references to TV or DVD players. These devices are closed, fixed, firmware. I never heard of any user installing software on any of these.

Well, one could hardly imagine a PC on which you cannot install any additional software: any buyer?

Now many of the problems people have with computer is application setup. Looking at the Tannenbaum's list of OS recommended feature, I do not see how he addresses any of these.

If my text processor dies and minix has restarted it, what about the 300 pages document I typed? Of course, good text processors maintain a recovery log on disk, but that is a design of the application and the OS cannot take credit for this.

Mr Tannenbaum has a (OS) hammer, and anything looks like a (OS) nail to him.

Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus

Posted Jan 18, 2007 18:12 UTC (Thu) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995) [Link] (4 responses)

To add to my own comment, I also disagree with Tanenbaum's comment that DVD players are bug free and just work.

I recently created a DVD with some simple menus using dvdauthor. It worked fine with Oggle. It worked fine on my $25 DVD player. It worked fine on my sister's DVD player in France. It worked fine on my mother's neighbour DVD player. It does not work on my mother's Philips DVD player. Only God knows...

Go to any web site dedicaced to the very subject of DVD players and you will find that this model plays this but not that, etc...

Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus

Posted Jan 19, 2007 13:49 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (2 responses)

Only for your information, there are plenty of DVD players out there that
are firmware-upgradable. I happen to have one of those (Philips model 5100
IIRC -- I am at the office right now), and its firmware has its bugs (*),
but you can write a firmware image unto a CD-R, boot it, and it will
reflash the player.

(*) mostly, rendering problems (pixelations on some type of DivX movies)
and caption positioning problems...

Those that read Spanish, can take a look at http://dvp5100.blogspot.com/

Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus--not!

Posted Jan 24, 2007 2:26 UTC (Wed) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

Only for your information, there are plenty of DVD players out there that are firmware-upgradable.

Sure there are. And there are plenty of operating systems and other such pieces of software that offer upgrades to new versions, too, where you can trade in your old bugs for new ones.

Which reinforces the point, that Tanenbaum's analogy that a common household appliance like a TV is somehow inherently more reliable than a computer or a piece of software, is false. As such appliances incorporate full working computers into them, running complex pieces of software, they inevitably become just as unreliable as our PCs. Nobody is immune to writing buggy code.

Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus

Posted Jan 27, 2007 22:54 UTC (Sat) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995) [Link]

Thanks. My mother is 80 years old, and never used a computer.

I am not sure I want to tell her to upgrade the DVD firmware. I found that not using any menu worked. So my DVDs now behaves like old VHS tapes :-)

The point is: DVD firmware hell makes the original claim ("DVD just work") look silly.

Comparing closed firmware with general purpose OS is bogus

Posted Jan 19, 2007 15:31 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

To add to my own comment, I also disagree with Tanenbaum's comment that DVD players are bug free and just work.

Second. I have a (fairly old and inexpensive) DVD player that is subject to buffer underruns. Unexpected things happen when this occurs, all well outside the category of "just working."

But I don't disagree with his premise, my cheap DVD player notwithstanding.