The idea is for the Urban OS to gather data from sensors buried in buildings and many other places to keep an eye on what is happening in an urban area. The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms. The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life.
Seriously, this is not even close to an operating system. Who markets this kind of stuff? It makes me so mad…
No – it _is_ an Operating System, we’re just used to looking at it at a different level of abstraction. Contrast the many levels of abstraction between the early operating systems and modern ones. This has fewer.
… lets hope that they pick an OS that has a proven track record of running stably and reliably. Such as the distro that runs the Nasdaq
Perhaps it’s better to be happy with the name – what would you prefer, that or “city cloud”? (“fog”?)
As for the general idea… for this to make proper sense, it would probably be advisable for us to get over the abomination of suburban sprawl.