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BMW Blasts Its Cars' Internal Screens With Aggressive Ads

3 weeks ago
Longtime Slashdot readers schwit1 and fjo3 shared a report about BMW displaying a Spider-Man promotion on connected vehicle screens in more than 70 markets. According to reports, drivers had to play or dismiss the ad before they could use the infotainment system. Futurism reports: BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a "special surprise." According to The Autopian's coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad's done playing -- a cheap looking animation that doesn't come close to warranting all this hubbub -- it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code. While it does give you the option to play or skip the "festive animation," it's still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It's also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads when they're trying to hit the road. Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

A More Civilized Age

3 weeks ago

Greta (previously) sends us more updates from her "Ancient Development Environment".

An important task an IDE must do is report build errors to its users. Arguably, that's one of the most important parts. I wouldn't know, I insist on building from the CLI all the time, because IDEs confuse and frighten me. I recognize I'm the weird one here, who is more comfortable in GDB than in a GUI debugger, but this isn't about me, it's about the IDE Greta is using.

It needs to display an error. Why does it need to display an error? Well, Greta hasn't figured that out yet. The error I'm about to show you doesn't really explain what happened or why or give any hint as to what needs to be done to fix it. To make matters more confusing, it doesn't happen consistently, so simply re-running the build could potentially fix it.

None of that is why we're here, though. What makes this a WTF is how the error is displayed:

Greta shares her bullet points about what she hates about this:

  • It's a popup that happens arbitrarily during build, under unknown conditions
  • It says nothing about what went wrong, or indeed if anything went wrong
  • It's in a non-user-legible XHTML format. It shows the markup of this XHTML rather than it being rendered.
  • It arguably shows the XHTML markup in the worst way possible: in a tree view (?!) with one row per source line
  • The markup isn't even well-formed. I'll let you count the reasons why.
  • The control used is from some sort of legacy windowing toolkit that doesn't support text anti-aliasing.
  • The first button on the upper-left, "Get latest C++ Builder Direct headlines from the Internet", does nothing.

I'd honestly forgotten about the era when the Internet was still kinda novel so every application had a "push a button and go to our web page, and this somehow definitely won't just break when we change our URL structure in the future."

Greta adds:

For all of the hatred I harbour for this, the second button ("Information about C++ Builder Direct") brings up the following powerful dose of 90s nostalgia, so I can't stay mad:

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Remy Porter