Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Auto Makers Teaming Up To Create Standard OS
CNet is reporting that Japanese car manufacturers are teaming up to develop a standard automotive operating system. "Just as computer operating systems [...] allow multiple applications to communicate with one another, an automotive operating system enables different driving systems to work together. The standard automotive operating system from Japan will include everything from fuel injection, brakes and power steering to power windows. Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model. Smart car parts that operate off a common software standard would enable that kind of convenience to continue, while allowing them to communicate more easily with other smart components in a car."
But will it run rinux?
According to another Yomiuri article, BMW, DaimlerChrysler and other European automakers are jointly developing a next-generation OS and are expected to complete a prototype in 2008. ...a year earlier.
A traffic jam?
In other news, family of 4 dies as their Japanese car careens off of a cliff after experiencing a BSOD in their Microsoft Windows Vista Auto Edition software.
Then again there was the other news piece where the driver was asked to authorize or deny the deployment of the air-bag, when he crashed into the lamp-post.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a software engineer are driving along when they start heading downhill. The brakes go out, and as the passengers panic, the driver manages to just barely swing the car to safety, narrowly averting a short trip off of a tall cliff.
With the car stopped, the engineers all get out and discuss what must have gone wrong.
The mechanical engineer says "we must have lost a brake line or something."
The electrical engineer suggests there was a problem with the ABS system.
The software engineer suggests they all drive back up the hill and go back down to see if it happens again.
The Slashdotter tied up in the trunk mumbles "I, for one, eagerly await our new standard OS overlords."
Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model.
Currently? Back in my teens, in the 80s, I hung out with a family that built street machines. There used to be this company called GMC and it had others called Chevrolet and Pontiac, et al. We could take a bell housing off a 66 Pontiac whatever and fit it perfectly to a 68 Chevrolet whatever. ALL water thermostat housings between all of these makes were the same. I can remember helping my dad with his 69 Ford Bronco to replace a cracked thermostat housing, and when we went to the junkyard the dude pulls out a huge box of ford thermostat housings -- even between Ford cars they were different. You could fit a Nova front-end to a Ventura and all the bolts matched. Anyone toying around with American cars from the 60s learned to love the GMs, especially Chevys....
GMCs, and especially Chevys, from the 60s, were God's gift to cars and auto mechanics and it was all interchangeable. Couple this with the raw power of those cars (yes yes, environment concerns and all that) and those are some of the best memories of my life....
Hehe, currently.... Reminds me of my daughter saying, "way back in the 90s...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill