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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."
Robots are controlled by computers, with software. The city used to have a license for the software to operate the robots. Now they don't, so they can't operate the robots to remove the cars. If the software was open source, they would still have the license for it, so they could still use the robots.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
http://www.woehr.de/engl/source/frameset.htm
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
The fee was decided in arbitration after the city apparently thought they could pull a fast one on a contract they had agreed to and ended up shooting themselves in the foot.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Heres another site with some animations showing how it works:
http://www.robopark.com/
Looking at the site you posted, it looks like the cars are stacked on top each other, with nothing in between (or if there is anything, you can't see it. I'd sure hate to have someone's clunker dripping oil onto my windshield.
Presuming a 30-month, there are 720 hours in that month. NJ state mimimum wage goes up to 7.15 on Oct 1st. At that rate, that's A 24-hour a day parking attendant would cost 5148. $5500 a month in software developer fees was just paid for by the former attendant.
The car pallets are designed not to allow this to happen.
So no drips or other such things falling onto your car.
Still, sounds like a safe place to sleep for the night...
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
From http://www.nj.com/news/jjournal/index.ssf?/base/ne ws-0/1154154297217660.xml&coll=3
Hmmm, sounds like someone has been taking lessons from Darl McBride ...
And from http://www.hudsonreporter.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=12 91&dept_id=523585&newsid=16980856&PAG=461&rfi=9
I guess 99.99% reliability means only one in 10,000 cars gets totaled.
Read over 50 comments from local Hoboken residents on http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ This debacle continues and despite the heroic statements from our inept town government, it still stinks.
Now, as to why so many people here dislike the deal: it's artificial. You have the software, the garage, the equipment. You can pay your own people to operate it. What service are you paying the software company for? You could be paying for support, but in this case, 'support' seems to be like protection money. "If you don't pay us to support your software, it just might stop working. You wouldn't want that, would you?"
It's not about the software company doing charity for the city. It's about them earning money for the work they do, not for the work they've done years ago. They can sell more copies of the software, they can sell updates, they can provide support options. An expiration date on the software so you can renegotiate a contract at a higher cost later sounds like exploitation to me. The software company of course has the right to do it. They have the right to shut the software down. Now, hopefully the city and everyone else will realize that it's a bad deal, and just what the risks associated with letting another company control the software on your equipment are. Then they'll never enter such a deal again, and that ridiculous business model can die.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Yes, this is a Scientology owned and operared business. http://www.truthaboutscientology.com/stats/wise/wi se_2004_directory.html
According to http://hoboken411.com/archives/3524/ people received a letter on the Wednesday before August 1st informing them that "It is with sincere regret that we now have to announce that we will conclude our servicing and operation of the 916 Garden St. Garage in Hoboken as of midnight, Aug. 1. The city was given 30 days notice," and "Therefore, as a courtesy, we urge all patrons to remove their vehicles from the 916 Garden Street Garage before midnight Aug. 1 or make other arrangements with the City of Hoboken Parking ahead of time to retrieve their vehicles after that time."
Discounting Wednesday, the day that people received the letter, that still left five entire days for people to remove their cars. While it still would have been a much better choice for Robotic Parking to include a 'graceful shutdown' so that people would still be able to retrieve their cars it doesn't seem to be the case that they hid a logic bomb in their code in order to strand lots of cars within the structure so they could be held hostage. Given what I've read I would even say there is a pretty good chance that Hoboken Parking Utility was told that the software would shutdown on August 1st, though that is simply an assumption I am making based on the documented actions of parties involved and not something I have seen in print. On the other hand I haven't actually seen anything reputable that indicates that HPU wasn't aware the software would stop working. That's simply an assumption people have been making.
As a Hoboken resident, I can tell you that the parking situation is horrendous. There are many times that the city's very narrow streets are either nearly impassible or just impassible because of the parking problems. At one point a few years ago, the mayor put the city under an illegal lockdown because the parking problems were just so severe.
There are a few major parking garages in the city, and parking is a high premium. Also, there is a college (Stevens Institute of Technology, where I attend classes) that takes up a large portion of the city with its own parking lots. There is a long-standing conflict over the parking the school would provide to the city in one of its new buildings.
The city is very small (approximately 2 square miles) and very dense (approximately 500,000 full-times residents). The reason for the size and density is the city's proximity to downtown Manhattan and the financial district (the city is quite literally directly across the Hudson River from downtown and midtown Manhattan). The road system dates back to the late 1600s and is mostly very narrow streets with limited parking. This is something that I can't stress enough, as its a cause of the traffic and parking problems.
These lots were designed as a means to try to get rid of some blockages and to provide parking to residents. Unfortunately, the effect was relatively limited. The garage was an extra fee on top of an already-required Hoboken-specific decal for parking four or more hours.
That said, with the problems that the city government has had in the past, it doesn't surprise me that something like this would be done. It's not so much an argument of open-source versus closed-source software, as it is about government responsibility. The city, to my knowledge, did not take account of the fact that the contract was to end in a few days, or that there were residents' cars in the lot. Instead of posting notices that the cars had to be emptied on this date (in order to remove the equipment, this just "happened."
City government and its poor planning is to blame for this, not software liscensing and F/LOSS vs. closed source.
freeflux-powered open-source blog
The sptimes.com article is interesting. It points out that as of 2001, the company had delivered nothing but hot air, and had apparently charged the city of Hoboken for US$3 mil in the process. Do you think that the company got another ransom payment for finishing the parking structure after they were (apparently) rehired? I suppose all that money went right to auditing and training classes. It seems to me that Scientology is made of the attributes listed in the article: "part exuberant salesmanship and part hyperbole." These are nicer terms than I would use. I speculate that this software licensing row seems to indicate the Co$ stance on software - it's all in the license. Fight Scientology by supporting FOSS :)
A few factoids I can contribute from having followed this in the local press:
:(Boston Globe article) (http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/200 6/01/30/robodude_wheres_my_car/). I personally know a couple who had the door torn off their car by it. As far as I know, the robogarage contractor paid for the damages.
p olitics-in-hoboken.html#5corruption. Can't claim to know enough to say for sure that source is authoritative. However, based on their track record, my inclination is to believe a good percentage of any charges of corruption or malfeasance on the city's part are justified.
The garage has killed two cars
The robotic parking folks were fighting with the city from day one, when the garage was still under construction. An (openly biased) account of the city's history with the garage is here: http://mistersnitch.blogspot.com/2005/01/parking-