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Lately I have been noticing a lot of things changing from mechanical to electronical. Take boilers for example. Before, they had mechanical arms controlling how much air and gas would be used when they are firing. These linkages would stay good forever as long as you oiled and greased them, and didnt move them out of their original position. Now, barely anyone knows how to work on them and adjust them to work. So....comes in the electronical equipment. No more mechanical linkages, just parts talking to each other. Which can be more accurate. But that brings me to the issue, if that company doesnt come to service them, and their programming starts to have bugs...only they can fix it. You are forever tied to that company now. Which I dont feel is a great idea, I would have rather fixed the mechanical linkages. Anything like this happen to you lately?
There's an opinion: Robots - is our future. People will be involved less and less on all processes and get more and more time to study itself and outer nature
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Robots are inevitable. I dont doubt that. But even robots need oversight.
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The only way this can work, long term, is if they are required to open source the software.
If enough customers demand it they will be forced to deliver.
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Im not sure it will become open source.
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It rarely does become open source. Then we are in a situation where someone might be interested enough to reverse engineer it. Or, the product dies. Its kind of crazy to think a good piece of hardware is only as good as the code can be read.
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Usually it is propietary knowledge. Usually its only good for a certain amount of time, then they have to replace it witha newer model. Thats why mechanical is better, in my opinion.
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