Tesla shipped Autopilot this week, an over-the-air update, and suddenly tens of thousands of already-sold cars can steer themselves on highways. Software update as a hardware transformation: the car you bought in June gained a capability in October while parked in your garage. YouTube instantly filled with people testing it in ways the release notes explicitly forbid (hands off, filming, one guy in the back seat), because the gap between “driver assistance” and what marketing lets people hear is a canyon with no lane markings. This will go fine until it doesn’t; noting the date.
Also: Dell is buying EMC for $67 billion, the largest tech deal ever, two giants of the datacenter era merging while the cloud eats their lunch. Consolidation is what industries do when the tide goes out.
EPL is delivering: Leicester City, who barely survived relegation last season, are sitting in the top four and showing no signs of stopping. Back to the Future Part II predicted hoverboards in 2015 as a joke. The timeline is converging and BttF Day is literally this Wednesday, October 21, 2015. If Leicester win the league I’m uninstalling reality.
TIL: OTA update architecture, signed firmware, A/B partitions, staged rollouts. Tesla ships to cars the way we ship to servers. Everything is a deploy target now.