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Volvo's "Safety Car" Runs Windows 98
An anonymous submitter writes "MSNBC is carrying a report on Volvo's new "Safety Car." It sounds pretty cool, too, until you get to the part that mentions it runs Windows 98 as its operating system. Yikes! Be sure to reboot your car frequently to avoid crashes."
Would this have even made it onto /. if the car didn't run Windows 98?? If you want to actually learn something then here is the official Volvo site for the car and here are a bunch of other references you can look at. None make mention of Windows 98.
Wouldn't be quite so funny if it was a kit car that comes in 5,000 pieces that runs linux, now would it? :P
This is the article I saw earlier.
Unsurprisingly, Volvo is not using Windows 98 in their safety concept car. As Motor Trend reported in May, they're using Microsoft's embedded operating system, Windows CE. It's kind of old news that Microsoft has been leading an initiative on embedding CE into cars. Check out the information from MS at Microsoft Windows CE for Automotive.
> Your "joke" was the first with a funny moderation on it that i saw. I would like to take the opportunity to address the rest of the slashbots and say "all the rest of the windows 98 BSOD jokes are going to suck". ... I'd like to see linux circa 1998 try and power a car.
You probably wouldn't have too look too hard to find a Linux system that hasn't been down since 1998.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, I pointed out that you are either a victim, or, more likely, a perpetrator of FUD regarding the GPL and the Linux kernel.
The Linux kernel is GPL-ed, but it has an exception, which allows the creation, use and distribution of proprietary drivers. NVidia uses this to provide their closed-source Linux drivers. It is very likely that any changes automobile manufacturers need could be limitted to specific drivers for the kernel.
Can you hear me now?
My brother in law worked on some of the components of this car. It doesn't "run" anything. Nor does it even use 98. It uses windows CE to run a few of the non critical subsystems of the car. It's actually a great concept. Everyone needs to chill on the "jump down whoever's throat is mentioned using any microsoft product" bandwagon. This site is actually starting to sound a lot like middle school. Boo to MSNBC for misreporting and setting off the microsoft alarms.
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
Ahem... MacOS X aka Darwin is basically a FreeBSD release reworked to run on Mach.
...and it is an amazing bitch to use. The edmunds article you link talks about the horrific complexity of iDrive. Indeed, BMW North America has a call center with 20 employees (not all day, but during the day 20 employees, though it's a 24/7 call center) to support just iDrive, and not the other features of the 745i--or any other BMW vehicle.
But that's not to say that iDrive doesn't have potential--with a major redesign it does. However in the long run, until cars drive themselves, having so many features in so many menus (especially features that are either critical or often adjusted) will not work out very well.
check out the ARGO project.
They had an autonomous car running linux in June 1998.