Parking Attendant 2.0

theodp writes "Would you trust a robot to park your car? That's the question facing New Yorkers as the city's first robotic parking garage opens in Chinatown. With new software and enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous, it's believed that the new facility — which can squeeze 67 cars in space that would otherwise hold only 24 — will not suffer the kind of glitches that caused the nation's first robotic garage in nearby NJ to drop and trap cars."

Comments

Re:Better now than later..

[MichaelSmith]

But does it run linux?

Funny you should ask that. This morning I was waking up at my desk. Slurping coffee and deleting spam when a co-worker wandered past with a discharged mobile phone. He borrowed a USB cable to charge it from his PC but came back because windows tried and failed to find drivers for that type of phone and refused to supply electrons to charge it.

He solved the problem by plugging it into a linux box, which doesn't expect to have drivers for mobile phones, but it raises an issue about the "drivers for everything, even standard things" approach of windows. Will you be told that a windows controlled car park can't accept your car because it doesn't have the drivers to interrogate your sound system to verify the validity of your CD collection?