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Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer)
Scott Ruecker looks at
the Tux500 campaign. "The idea to have the Open Source community
sponsor a car in the Indianapolis 500 put forth recently has more than just
the Open Source Press taking notice. Here is my take on it. First a
disclaimer: I am in not in any way, shape or form involved with the Tux500
campaign. I happen to know several of the people involved but other than
that I have no connection to it whatsoever. With that said I am free to
express any opinions I may have on the subject, which I plan on doing right
now.."
(Log in to post comments)
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 8, 2007 22:23 UTC (Tue) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link] > The Indianapolis 500 is the single largest Motorsports event on Planet> Earth. It is a one of a kind car race with no equal inside or outside of > the United States.
I know of *nobody* that has ever watched the Indy 500 in Spain, and I'd venture that very, very, very few people watch it in Europe, Scott Ruecker's so endearing faith notwithstanding.
Should we do a Formula 1 campaign instead? Or better try not to associate Linux with something so frivolous as motorsports altogether?
Motorsports! Hey, an oxymoron in just one word!
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 0:13 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] NASCAR == Non-Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks.If people can connect hot-rodding a PC using Linux to hot-rodding a car, the sad truth that proprietary OSs have the appeal of a '79 Ford Fairmont station wagon shall be more fully communicated. I made a notional donation, in any case.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 0:40 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] I know someone who does IT work on a Formula 1 pit crew. In past races each team provided its own engine-control software. Curiously enough, all future races will be run with every car running identical software. Guess who provides it... "A computer in every engine compartment, running" [yes] Microsoft software. The "crash" joke that invariably follows the revelation lost its amusement value, though not its relevance, very early on.
I don't see any value whatsoever in a Tuxy racecar. I do often see people hoping to indulge their enthusiasm for auto racing using other peoples' money, but feel no obligation to subsidize them. Probably it would be easier to interest Free Software enthusiasts in sponsoring a hot-air balloon. It would be easier to make out the logo, then, and the balloon's contents would better match the significance of the event. Certainly a Tux-shaped balloon would work better than a Tux-shaped car.
Calling attention to Linux's pervasive and critical role in Olympics event coverage seems to me a better bet. Then it's not just a cheap stunt (however exorbitant to stage), but a real demonstration of power. People using GNU/Linux because they need something they can rely on is much better publicity than running an expensive sticker around a track.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 13:12 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] >>I don't see any value whatsoever in a Tuxy racecar.
Not in the Indy500 sponsoring, but after what you've just said I'm sure if someone tried to go for F1 it would garner more interest,
350k$ should buy a kernel maintainer and the necessary lawyering with an anti monopoly stick to get a single small team to run alternative software.
It would provide the necessary coverage for linux and the team even without having related decalls on the car. It would also provide jobs for some kernel people, and probably improved real time capability for the kernel.
I'm sure it is a lot more work than just buying a spot on a car, but it would actually feel like money well spend, with something to point at afterwards.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 17:55 UTC (Wed) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link] 350k$ should buy a kernel maintainer and the necessary lawyering with an anti monopoly stick to get a single small team to run alternative software. If you're referring to the engine management software, it can't be done: F1 rules for 2008 require that all teams use the same software. It's not a monopoly issue. If you want to run F1, you follow the rules. (Or, well, you very cleverly break them. That tends to last about two races, max, and often leads to non-trivial fines, or worse, loss of points.) If you're talking about software and OS that the teams use, do you mean the simulations platform(s)? Team scheduling and managment(?) Race communications(?) Or one of the othe 19 dozen systems that I imagine exist but don't actually know anything about? Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find that at least some of the simulations stuff runs Linux now.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 11, 2007 9:57 UTC (Fri) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link] I have to agree!
Indianapolis 500 may be the largest motorsports event on this planet, but interest is mostly confined to the US as far as I can tell.
I certainly don't know very much about that race, I recognize the name, but that's it, I have never seen the race on TV (don't think any TV channel available here actually covers it). From looking it up it seems to be on one of these oval tracks that seem to be very popular in the US racing scene, which doesn't really inspire much interest for me personally.
I'm no real motor sports junkie, but I enjoy following the Formula 1 series casually. More varied tracks there, too :-)
Anyway, from my point of view sponsoring a car in Indy500 seems like a bit of a waste, but then the whole thing seems a bit distant for me.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 0:44 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I don't get why so many seem to think that throwing away money in this way is worth the bother. You sponsor a car, spend a lot of money, no one notices because it comes in 32nd, the race is over, then you've just flushed that money away. And people don't turn on the Indy 500 while they are making their computer software decisions.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 18:03 UTC (Wed) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link] Intel disagrees with you (BMW/Sauber F1). So does AT&T (Williams F1) So do lots and lots of other companies. In F1, at least, the best racing is mid-pack, and so non-contender cars get more coverage than you might guess.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 4:28 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] They want to collect $350000. That's 3 times the price that was paid Blender. Is it worth it to pay such money and get no lasting effect? IBM marketed Linux on the streets of the major US cities, but I don't remember any tangible results of that campaign.If you want to help spreed free software, there are better ways to contribute.
You don't understand Posted May 9, 2007 11:47 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] > If you want to help spreed free software, there are better ways to contribute.
No silly, there aren't. Just imagine that car at high speed while the driver does an oops. The thing will crash spectacularly and fall apart into thousands pieces, scattering them all around.
If you can think of a better way of spreading free software, I'm sure they'd like to hear about it (planes won't do, much higher safety constraints there).
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 10:57 UTC (Wed) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] I see we have to usual collection of GREEN (in more ways than one) anti anything that is fun DARN HARD WORK and entertaining Ho Humm.
Whats wrong with putting Linux name on a car if some people want to and can afford to then go ahead at least it is a bit of advertising and while on it would be nice to see the Linux name on a Rally car (a propper rally car thou not one that is allowed to take out it's restricter just to guarentee and American car won the event( a round of one of the US championships last year where the organisers turned a blind eye to the fact because it kept the winnings and trophy in the US )) and yes i got a bee in my bonnet about it as has every other NON US rally fan that knows and the teams ripped of by it ..
Pete .
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 9, 2007 12:36 UTC (Wed) by ssharkey (subscriber, #4451) [Link] I don't know about Linux *ON* the car, but I do know that there is linux *IN* the car, at least part of the time. I was contracted by Menard Engineering Inc (MEI) to do a custom linux on an ampro board with a CF card. The purpose of the rig was to collect engine and other sensor data during testing. I know that they planned to (and do) sell the package as part of their engine management stuff. MEI builds engines for Dale Earnhart, and for Vitor Miera when he was with Rahal-Letterman a few years ago. Not sure who else though.
Interesting specs - must boot in less than 30 sec's, fit in 128M or less, boot from CF, and store data to CF, web-based interface for downloading data, as well as ssh, etc.
I tried to talk them into putting "Tux" on the car, but no luck.
-Scott
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 10, 2007 21:33 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] The purpose of the rig was to collect engine and other sensor data during testing. [...] Interesting specs - must boot in less than 30 sec's, fit in 128M or less, boot from CF, and store data to CF, web-based interface for downloading data, as well as ssh, etc.Hmmm. Interesting. Lacking the money for an official Racepak datalogger, I ended up building one myself for our racecar that records engine and other sensor data. Sounds remarkably similar to yours. My current boot time is 21 seconds (although I'm hoping to cut that further), it fits in 16MB, and data is stored on a CF card which is then uploaded and analysed after the race.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 11, 2007 13:03 UTC (Fri) by ssharkey (subscriber, #4451) [Link] I think I had it booting in about 18 seconds. It fit in about 20MB, and was using an 8GB flash card to collect and store the data. We actually had it using a tiny web server, and they collected the data by pluggin in a lan port, accessing the web page, and downloading.
Linux and The Indianapolis 500 (LXer) Posted May 20, 2007 0:47 UTC (Sun) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link] At my last job, I did a car datalogger that boots in 3 seconds and uses a 5MB CRAMFS filesystem (14MB uncompressed). It has a Web server, file server, C compiler (TCC w/most headers) and 2 CF ports (or 1 and wireless B/G). Actually, it's got 8MB on-board flash, so the extra space is used for a recovery filesystem.
Actually, it takes more like 10-11 seconds to boot (w/wireless) because I found it too much work to maintain the boot up scripts in C. I measured about 200ms overhead per line of shell script in Busybox (probably VM accounting or something), which slows things down quite a bit (on ARM only?).
I don't want to seem too commercial by posting a link, but I'll give you a keyword: CarDAQ.
Another approach would be to just buy a GumStix and add what you need.
A really stupid idea Posted May 17, 2007 16:18 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] Well, it's not my money, but here's my take:as an European I tell you, we couldn't care less about Indy500, we'll never ever hear about it. Whereas some European media reported about the Mozilla's full page ad in the new york times. I don't think that an ad for Linux is useful: it's too much work to try it. And ad for OpenOffice would be useful though: it's not much work to try it and the less people are locked in proprietary standards, the more free software gain.
Now the question is: is OO good enough for an ad? FF was good enough to advertise against IE, I'm not sure that at a technical level OO is good enough against MS Office to advertise yet.
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