Slashdot Mirror
Ford's New Radar Technology Based On Open Source
zakkie writes "Ford is releasing new safety-enhancing radar equipment for its 2010 Taurus sedan. The radar itself is based on F22 fighter radar, but interestingly, it's claimed that the software is built from open source. What that may mean, in the vague, waffling context of the article, is unclear, but it's interesting simply because they've gone to the effort of stating it in those words. Clearly, 'open source' is being thought of outside the IT world as a good thing, and that surely is itself a good thing. The purpose of the radar device is to help 'avoid crashes by sounding an alarm and flashing red lights when the driver gets too close to another car.'"
What they can achieve with radar is constant 360 degree monitoring. The local police has gray vans that look like ordinary vans. They park them somewhere near busy intersection. The systems in the car track the movement of every car around the van, and automatically take images of the targets going too fast. Basically there are no police officers sitting inside, they just leave the car there and send you the speeding tickets a few days from the incident.
Also, radars have improved in the past years. Most of the new systems have advancements from military radars - they hop frequerencies and whisper instead of yelling. The amount of energy they put out has dropped to 100th of what they used to do. At the same time the quality of the radar systems have improved. The old ones used to have quite high margin of error whereas these new systems are accurate to centimeter/hours.
Lidar is hard to spot but in overall they suck because they can't do all the coolest tricks.
The problem with the submission is that the submitter does not realize that there is another definition of Open Source. One that is used in referring to possibly classified information or equipment. And this definition has been around much longer than the current IT realm definition.
What Open source in this context refers to isn't the IT/GPL version of Open source it means it was developed from unclassified research and publications.
So what it is saying is that Ford has not put classified technology into these cars, not that they used free "as in beer" software.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Do you really think tailgate asses do it because they are late?
They do it because it's what they like. I heard it's the only way they can get an erection.