Parking with Windows
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
I had a great dinner tonight with the Openbravo management team in Barcelona. As we walked up La Rambla from a decadent pre-dinner "meal" of lava-like hot chocolate, we headed into the parking garage to get our car.
The door to the parking payment machine was open as we got into the garage. The computer had malfunctioned and the parking attendant was rebooting it. I got there just in time to notice the operating system (used city-wide) that was causing this parking attendant grief:
Windows.
One can't even park anymore without getting the Blue Screen of Death.
Incidentally, the parking attendant couldn't figure out why I wanted to take a picture of the payment machine. For my part, I couldn't figure out why he wasn't running a real operating system. :-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Or perhaps the attendant didnt do something correctly?
True windows isnt perfect but neither is Linux. I have a "very real" Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop that cannot see my SD card reader, or use my ATI Radeon 9600 card correctly. I dual boot with XP and it doesnt have a problem with the hardware.
Windows isnt as bad as you make it out to be nor is Linux as great as you make it out to be. This is why you are mystified by Windows server marketshare.
I didn't get my camera out in time to capture the reboot. And while it's possible that the attendant walks from machine to machine rebooting them for fun, I suspect that this was not the case since there was an irate customer next to him who had been trying to pay, but couldn't because Windows had died.
Linux is not perfect. (I've seen the airlines have to reboot it on their entertainment systems.) I wasn't trying to imply that it was. My comment was on Windows. Parking systems shouldn't have to be rebooted. They're somewhat essential and should use a completely stripped down Windows/Linux/VxWorks/etc. kernel. Something that is almost certainly not going to go down.
This parking system was using a relatively full-featured Windows OS (I know because I saw him go through the menus). So, it's partly Windows' fault and partly the parking company's fault for implementing a heavy system for a lightweight task.
- My apologies
- by Otaddy October 28, 2007 5:19 PM PDT
- I confused your blog on "Linux losing to Windows" with another one I read.
- Reply to this comment
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(3 Comments)I agree, a full blown OS of any kind is inappropriate for this application.