Reply To: Brunner review by Austin

[aurel42]

Excellent analogy. Very good.

Please allow me as a beginner motorcycle rider to explain why I appreciate it so much:

Everybody can afford a bicycle. Everybody can ride a bicycle, it’s so easy, a five year old can do it. You can use almost all types of roads (not only two or three), and you can take the shortcut through the park. And when the bicycle breaks, Daddy can fix it.

To ride an expensive motorcycle, you need to be able to afford it, you have to be a certain age, and you need to spend months of training to acquire a license [the barriers to entry are much higher].

You need to rely on the manufacturer to attach the exhaust correctly to the engine, to set up the ignition timing correctly, and to install the correct ECU firmware, or you will not only be slower than the five year old kid on his/her bicycle, no, you will not move at all while you’re spending a lot of time trying to get the problem fixed by the manufacturer since you can’t really fix it yourself.

Of course there will be a veteran Hells Angels member and garage owner explaining to you that writing or modifying ECU firmware is easy, you “just” need a software engineering degree and permanent access to a rolling road. (He will rave about the speed and handling of his bike with modified firmware, but of course he will not share it.)

And if the street lights start flickering and car radios start crackling every time you drive by on your shiny motorbike, and you ask the manufacturer what to do, they will just tell you that they can’t reproduce the issue in their testing garage and that you should only drive in areas where the street lights have better shielding and cars don’t have radios.

(That last paragraph is an inside joke for Brunner support.)