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posted by
janrinok
on Saturday December 13 2014, @05:14PM
from the BlackBerry-Inc-mops-its-brow dept.
from the BlackBerry-Inc-mops-its-brow dept.
El Reg reports
As foreshadowed in February, Ford has announced a new in-car entertainment and communications system that will run on BlackBerry's QNX real-time operating system, not Windows as is the case for the company's current efforts.
Ford Sync 3 will offer touch-screen and voice recognition controls. The latter will allow drivers to command both their vehicle and apps on their phone. Siri control is another feature.
The auto-maker's offered a touch-screen system for some time now, but it's widely regarded as one of its weak points. A complete refresh on a new operating system therefore looks like a good move.
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It's Official: Ford Dumps Windows for QNX
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Good day for a change of scene. Repaper the bedroom wall.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @06:13PM
Earlier this year, Apple CarPlay [zdnet.com] was revealed to be based on QNX. Oddly enough, QNX is only about 2% of BlackBerry's revenue at the moment.
Things looking up at BlackBerry, with the Passport getting solid reviews. Wish I would have jumped on the stock last November when it was around $5.60/share.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday December 13 2014, @09:41PM
Why would QNX get BB a bunch of revenue? It doesn't exactly do much. It competes against Linux, which is free, and customers still have a ton of work to build stuff on top of it so that they can have something they can sell.
Sure you can say they have it in on a billion devices [random number], but they can only get a couple pennies a copy. And it's not like BB can start selling value-add stuff to increase QNX revenue, because they have been an absolute failure at building stuff on top of it, like the Playbook. And they can't exactly sell upgrades to end-users [ie, pull a Microsoft].
The best you can say about it is that BB hasn't screwed up QNX. They just left it alone, licensing it out, and trying to use it for their own hardware.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Saturday December 13 2014, @10:48PM
Because companies can use QNX without fear of an RMS attack or GPL's viral nature? When RMS went after TiVo by name and wrote GPL V3 with attacks aimed at TiVo he might as well have smeared shit on the GPL because what corp is gonna want to use an OS for their embedded product where they have to worry about some nutter prattling on about the "spirit" of a license instead of its actual text and risk having their company listed as the devil in GPL V4?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @01:28AM
Oh dear. Are you really this stupid?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday December 14 2014, @06:46AM
No, he's not really this stupid. He just has a financial interest in Microsoft continuing to be the dominant OS on consumer devices. Makes it a bit difficult to think clearly, that does! But why the vitriol against Linus as opposed to Blackberry? Well, maybe you will be attacked by RMS if you abuse and violate the free software license (as well you should, being a lawbreaker and generally no good human being), but hairy forgot to mention what they were running away from: the Smaug in the room, so to speak.
Viral GPL has nothing on jackbooted BSA! Imagine you are pulled over by flashing lights, and it is the BSA!!! (Boy Scouts of America, wanting to help you across the street to earn a merit badge? NO!) Backed by ICE (Intelligence Control Entity) even though you are miles from a border, and DHS (Department of Homeland Shopping), they ask you: "Do you have a valid End User License Agreement for your in vehicle entertainment system, sir?" In such a situation, you should think very carefully about what you say next. If you bought your car "bare", without a pre-installed Windows operating system, it is quite obvious that you are an illegal. The Business Software Alliance will put up with none of your shenannigans, and if you attempt to resist or re-license, you will be shot. In any case, your vehicle will probably be seized and sold at auction to cover the cost of enforcing Microsoft's intellectual property. And so that when said vehicle is on the road again, the BSA, DHS, ICE, NSA, and WTF can make yet another _extortion_, I mean, bust.
Hairyfeet is on fire! Go, Bro!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @08:38PM
Microsoft continuing to be the dominant OS
It would be more profitable for Hairyfeet to sell rides in that time machine he seems to possess.
More of M$'s cheese-sculpture user base gets nibbled away by the multitude of persistent, nimble FOSS mice every time the aged Borg goes to the store for more cheese.
Only those receiving bribes from M$ will insist that Redmond's business model isn't obsolete; only they won't note that M$'s technology is inferior.
...and it's worth mentioning that the Linux kernel will be GPLv2 until the end of time.
For starters, tracking down EVERY contributor and getting every one of them to sign on to a license change would require an immense effort.
...or, alternately, identifying which code was scribbled by which person, removing that, and writing new code.
Either way, it ain't gonna happen.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Informative) by schad on Saturday December 13 2014, @06:15PM
My wife has a Ford with the Windows-based Sync. It's a little slow and a little clumsy, but the real reason she seldom uses it is that it's a touchscreen: she has to take her eyes off the road to use it. Besides, ever tried using your phone in direct sunlight? It sucks. Normally you'd just turn slightly to shade the screen, but in a car you can't do that. The system is basically unusable, by its very nature, during the day and whenever the vehicle is moving.
I much prefer my BMW's... I think they call it iDrive? Whatever it's called, there's no touchscreen at all. Everything is controlled by buttons or the big clicky scroll wheel thing. In earlier versions you had to use the scroll wheel for everything, but later versions have added progressively more buttons (rather defeating the purpose of the wheel, but it's still good for scrolling quickly through long lists of things). I pretty much just want BMW to clean it up and polish it better. Voice control is terrible[1] and it randomly forgets what screen I'm on. Sometimes the radio goes wonky, and... well, suffice it to say that there are bugs. QNX-based, by the way, so a mere OS change doesn't guarantee an improve in user experience.
I hate this fetish everyone has for touchscreens. They're actually a pretty shitty user interface. There are specific situations where they're really good. And sometimes you just don't have the space to have both a readable display and a usable keyboard, so in that case it makes perfect sense to combine them. But outside of those cases, they really ought to be avoided like the plague.
[1] "Phone book." Phone book. "Call (person's name)." Do you want to be connected to (person's name)? "Yes." There are multiple entries for this name. Say the number of the entry. "Entry 1." Did you say: Entry 1? "Yes." Dialing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Saturday December 13 2014, @09:12PM
Yeah, when I was looking for a new car earlier this year, I got a Ford Fusion, but I deliberately went with one WITHOUT the touchscreen for the reasons you cite. Granted, there are a million buttons and they're all are flat, but you at least can feel the positions well enough to press them without really looking.
Also, physical environmental controls. Maybe I'm an old bastard, but fuck the guy who decided they should be buried in the same touchscreen interface that controls your music/phone interface. Leave me my knobs, damnit.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @11:50PM
I rented a Chevy (by mistake, I assure you) earlier this year. Worst godforsaken interface ever, and half of it's disabled but visible (greyed out) if you don't have a subscription to their satellite service or whatever it is that makes that side of things work. So, if you don't pay a subscription, you *look* cheap to whoever rides in your car, and you're constantly reminded of your failure to consume.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday December 13 2014, @11:56PM
BMW is also Apple*only*. That is an absolute non-starter in many people's books, and a bad move on BMW's part.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @05:54AM
Err what? I drove a mitsibushi for the last week (queue the travelling salesman jokes). No issues with the built in monitor. YMMV
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday December 14 2014, @12:58PM
Its a strange market bifurcation. I have a Toyota commuter car, and from the car point of view, the UI is nothing more than a 2300 pound gasoline powered bluetooth speaker. Thats the entire UI, once I paired to it all that happens is magically sound comes out of the car instead of out of the phone. And that's exactly the way I like it and its what I shopped for and specifically selected. At the other end we have car mfgrs trying to turn their car into the phone itself, which must be weird.
Its like comparing the market for gaudy 80s era plastic and chrome boom boxes, vs the market for those car stereo "brick" amplifiers that are 99% heatsink. There's not much overlap other than coincidentally.