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Consumer Electronics Industry: Linux is the Future
securitas writes "The New York Times is carrying a Reuters story about Linux as the software of choice for consumer electronics. At the world's largest consumer electronics show, the IFA trade fair 'the first Linux products are already on show and more will come soon, companies said.' The reason? Linux is freely available, widely embraced and profit margins in the consumer electronics business are one or two percent at best. The math is simple. The industry push comes from the members of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), that includes Sony, Philips, Matsushita/Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson/RCA and
Toshiba. The CELF was previously discussed on Slashdot. Mirrors at Silicon.com and CNet News."
Won't all computers end up being embedded devices? I mean really think about it. Why would you load the OS on to a hard drive when you could easly put it on a hardware level and put all the programs on the disk. Makes a lot of sense because you save so much disk space, and at the same time, the OS is more secured against accidental deletion and file corrupting viruses.
So I treat this as the ultimate victory for Linux. The next generation of computers is wireless and mobile and trying to keep everything secure. Firmware Operating Systems is the solution; hail the next coming of a great era, the wireless/linux revolution!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I mean sure devices like Tivo which can download patches from the server once a week may not really care, but what about something that's stuck with whatever OS it leaves the factory with...
Is linux really "there" yet?
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The bottom line is that it's always the bottom line with such applications. Companies don't give a flying fig about free as in speech, but free as in beer gets their attention every time.
I was in my local photo shop today, collecting some films. Some people wanted to have prints of their digital photos. "No problem" says the photo guy, we just burn those pics from the smartcard onto a CD and send that in to the Lab.
He fires up the burner - a standalone device with a reader for every digital cam storage medium and a built-in burner and... yes.. its a linux boot sequence and the touch-screen app ran on X. This thing needs drivers for a lot of exotic stuff and was up within 15 seconds.
Quite impressive.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
FreeBSD isn't as portable as NetBSD, nor is the kind of advantage in hardware support for desktop OSes needed in an embedded device application.
Plus, you're not as likely to hear about products that embed one of the BSD OSes, as there's no reason for the company to disclose they're using a BSD.
There's lots of embedded NetBSD out there.
A Good Intro to NetBS
I'm a physician at a large academic hospital. The healthcare area is one that I think Linux is ideally suited for. Few have attempted it and yet, if you look at the potential benefits, it's almost a no-brainer:
- A large hospital will have hundreds if not thousands of computer terminals. Linux could significantly reduce hospital overhead costs, which nowadays is being given a high priority.
- Linux doesn't currently have the virus/worm problem that Windows has. This is majorly problematic for Windows in the healthcare industry where almost any informatics downtime is unacceptable. Healthcare informatics is rapidly turning into a mission-critical enterprise as more and more hospitals depend on their computer systems to deliver information.
- There's no reason healthcare workers couldn't use the StarOffice/OpenOffice Suites for applications. Most users' needs are pretty basic and documents regarding patients are supposed to be held strictly confidential as well.
- Which brings me to the one downside. Few medical informatics applications are written for Linux. Those that have been are open-source and are developed very slowly since very few programmers out there know anything about (or care to know anything about) healthcare informatics application requirements.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
This is very much like the post I would have liked to have written. While I was reading it though, I started to think about the future, which is kind of fun because you can make shit up. One thing I didn't make up though is that a friend of mine once told me that people would run Unix on their microwaves (they did not say what kind, I think it was cute that they said Unix) because it's all you'll be able to get. It must have been Charlie. Okay so that sounds like horseshit, but there are devices that were pretty neat but fell off the market due to lack of demand that no one is making any more, I recall some voice synthesis chip that had a phoeneme lookup table and you could record your own samples, stick them in a prom, and you could make a speech synthesizer sound like you, or anyone else for that matter, and it went away. (It might be back by now.)
So think about all the crazy shit we can do now, how fine our processes are in general. Only the best fabs can do the really tiny stuff but everyone's processes are getting smaller, so you can make chips cheaper. The packaging is getting cheaper all the time too, though it's already pretty damn cheap. I mean think about how inexpensive assorted little chips are today. Whip out your good old BG Micro catalog and you can get assorted basic ICs for fifty cents, stuff that I personally have paid five bucks for. An XPORT with a 186 chip in it is $50, and that's a whole frickin computer. I mean if you had that and a terminal, you could get a few simple network apps on it. Actually, that sounds like a really fun project, now if only I could afford an XPORT :P
So how long is it going to be before consumers are paying ten bucks for some little microcomputer that comes with Linux on it and is smaller than the battery you attach it to? It can't be THAT long. And in quantity they'll be maybe five. Really you can do the job of controlling a microwave with a really nice interface with a pic today, but they keep promising us dirt-cheap oled displays so I'd assume people are going to want to have touch-sensitive video interfaces in even low-end appliances within a few years. Okay, maybe more than a few, but you know it's coming...
Anyway, people are making really low power x86 processors now, so the fact that people are still teaching programming them in assembler in schools since x86-based systems are inexpensive and readily available (most everyone has one already, so you kind of have to teach it for now) means that we likely WILL see embedded NT make a comeback. It will become more useful as the hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper. Old designs that people are interested in using don't go away; some magic research and bing! here they come again. You have to wonder what chips you've seen recently that somewhere inside of them contain an Am386 or something similar. Old cores never die, they just get chopped up into bits.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"