Toyota Acceleration and Embedded System Bugs

An anonymous reader writes "David Cummings, a programmer who worked on the Mars Pathfinder project, has written an interesting editorial in the L.A. Times encouraging Toyota to drop claims of software infallibility in their recent acceleration problems. He argues that embedded systems developers must program more defensively, and that companies should stop relying on software for safety. Quoting: 'If Toyota has indeed tested its software as thoroughly as it says without finding any bugs, my response is simple: Keep trying. Find new ways to instrument the software, and come up with more creative tests. The odds are that there are still bugs in the code, which may or may not be related to unintended acceleration. Until these bugs are identified, how can you be certain they are not related to sudden acceleration?'"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F03%2F13%2F1611248%2FToyota-Acceleration-and-Embedded-System-Bugs" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Toyota+Acceleration+and+Embedded+Syste m+Bugs%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9vEIV1" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/13/1611248/Toyota-Acceleration-and-Embedded-System-Bugs?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/sZHtwuMIDy-Q3nINmhmuXnG11Qo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/sZHtwuMIDy-Q3nINmhmuXnG11Qo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/sZHtwuMIDy-Q3nINmhmuXnG11Qo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/sZHtwuMIDy-Q3nINmhmuXnG11Qo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/Tuvwxc188fU" height="1" width="1"/

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