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Hoboken, NJ vs. Giant Parking Robot
markwalling writes "Wired News is running a story about Hoboken, New Jersey's battles with robotic parking. A legal battle over the license had shut down the garage, essentially trapping hundreds of cars inside. Bill Coats has recommended that the parking garage be run off open source software: 'Vendees are going to become more sophisticated in the deals they enter into.' Coats even sees this as a driver of open source software. 'If you can get (open source software) you can't be shut down.' But that's harder to do in highly custom applications."
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple. And not only that, but robbery of a public organization that is likely not too well funded. When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic. That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed as long as the hardware specs are available (which you know they aren't). Considering that a standard parking lot to house as many cars would require more land and probably some staffing that get paid minimum wage, I don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
56 comments to date, by about eight or ten people in total... Not very impressive. (Especially when you consider that both the sites name and one of the most prolific commenters name both match your Slashdot user ID - and ID with exactly one post at this moment.) Further reading shows it to pretty much be a random (and muckraking) blog - despite it's brave claims to be something much better. *yawn*.