10182017

Vol. 30 No. 20
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Phone: (606) 758-9532
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From
The
Editor
Tom Tyler
Seagrove’s
Storage
606-355-2730
OCTOBER 18, 2017 5
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“Our Focus is
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Software Apocalypse?
I recently read an article
about the coming “software
apocalypse” and was
amazed at some of the information.
What is this apocalypse?
The article goes into
“code” or the programming of
software. You may not even
use a computer but this goes
much deeper than that.
April 10, 2014 the entirety of
Washington State would get
a busy signal if they called
911. The issue it was determined
was that the software
that ran the automated system
was set up to receive a
certain number of calls. Let’s
say 10 million. The problem
was, once it got to this number,
there was no other instruction,
so it gave a busy
signal. It was determined that
it all could have been avoided
if another zero had been programmed
into the system.
A few years ago a car company
was getting complaints
of the gas pedal sticking.
They blamed the cause on
faulty floor mats. NASA took
on the task of looking into the
cars software that helped with
the acceleration pedal. After
a certain period they gave up.
A modern car has more lines
of software code than a commercial
plane.
Part of this is due to new
features, automatic parking,
lane change crash avoidance,
etc. The gas and steering
wheel may not even be
mechanically connected and
you could drive with a gaming
controller. Another company
took over where NASA
left off and said they could not
confirm that the software was
causing the issue, but
couldn’t confirm that it wasn’t.
They said the code became
spaghetti code. Lines of programming
that had been
added to change or fix something
without taking out the
old lines or knowing if the new
affected the old. It was like a
huge pile of Christmas lights
that you couldn’t tell where
one started and where one
ended.
It was also discovered on
another car manufacturer,
that the software of the media
center (radio,wifi, etc)
could be hacked to control
the cars steering and acceleration.
They even did 2 demonstrations
to prove it.
“If the software malfunctions
and the same program that
crashed is supposed to save
the day, it can’t.”
“The current conception of
what a computer program is,”
is “derived straight from Fortran
and ALGOL (programming
languages) from the
late ’50s. Those languages
were designed for punch
cards.” That code now takes
the form of letters on a screen
in a language like C or Java.
These are likely what a computer
science course would
teach.
A group is trying to make it
simpler by having a software
developer’s proper role be to
create tools that remove the
need for software developers.
Then people would be
able to grasp computational
problems directly, without the
muck of code.
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