Let Go of My Car!

Ha!

A fancy new garage controlled by a robot that inserts cars into slots stopped working.

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

The city began licensing the software month by month, and whoops... eventually the software expired.

It's funny, but I think that's kind of weak. They own the garage, they should have paid for the software and all should have moved on. I don't know how advanced garage automation is, so maybe there'd be a small maintenance fee yearly. A lot of very high end software is sold that way. But it shouldn't stop the garage.

In the 80s, there was a company selling compressor and turbine control software to third world nations.... and companies within them. Obviously on big equipment, it gets installed, running and then the payments get completed. After a run of "non-payments" the controls company began installing code with a month or two "startup grace", and then after a while, it would stop. If you're using turbines to make electricity, you can imagine what kind of a bind that put the theives in.

Government Posted by AlexC at August 8, 2006 6:18 PM