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why I don't want an SAP.
A very famous computer chip manufacturer with a
large installed base and annual unit sales in the 10's of millions still has to
rely on this heuristic for quality control:
In the field, every new system configuration
ultimately encounters some bug. For example, the wiz-bang joy-stick
that worked fine in 1995 doesn't work anymore because the timing changed just
enough that some formerly impossible lock-up condition occurs. It
only happens with this joystick, when running a certain game app, when in power
mode 4 AND a disk access occurs just when you depress the trigger.
The QA process is to add a machine to the testing
lab which runs this hardware configuration with this application and a disk
flogger/automated button pusher in the background. Somewhere there
is a room with hundreds of these machines in it, each representing some unique
failure mode. Mind you this all happens after massive amounts of automated
testing pre-silicon.
If there were 1,000 SAPs installed per year that
would represent .1% of the market covered by this effort.
SAPs are a great idea as long as you can find the
money for massive testing and are willing to expense a significant number of
failure-finding aircraft.
....but we're talking about a world where no one
has done a full spin test program on either of the leading contenders for
Lancair de-ice.
Colyn
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