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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."
Actually, Embedded Linux is the present! I am this very minute putting the finishing touches on embedded Linux code shipping in a projector! Sorry, WindRiver -- guess you aren't the Micro$oft of the embedded world after all!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I just hope all these corporation continue to respect GPL and not find a way to tear Linux apart. Just a little caution needed after what happened to UNIX.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
It's only $32 for each embedded Linux device... which is still silly, since SCO claims it's the multiprocessor support that's infringing! Yeah, I'm sure most all toasters are using multiprocessor support!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Linux is freely available... The math is simple.
SCO-math aside...
Good to hear, though. I've been happy with my little Linux-based MP3 player for years now.
If everything in my home will eventually be computerized, I'd want something open source based, just to guard against snooping, as if not having my fridge give me a blue screen of death wasn't reason enough.
I'd guess maybe the cookie jar won't be the only thing with cookies in it though.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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
Yeah, I'm sure most all toasters are using multiprocessor support!
They better be! I like to make at least two pieces of toast at a time.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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?
Ñ'
Does that mean DeCSS is legal now?
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
Didn't I think this several years ago? By golly I think I did, and I doubt I'm alone. And just because its printed does not mean its true, especially in technological predictions. Truman lost remember, and so did Gore... Wait a minute...
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Or you could click on the Reuters link instead of the NYTimes one.
No, it's free, under the GPL, until SCO proves otherwise in a court of law.
Of course, if you pay your protection money on time, the SCO goon- excuse me, lawyers - won't have to break your leg- I mean, take you to court.
Speak before you think
Generating the heat to toast the bread still takes a few CPUs. Intel and AMD are working on their next-generation chips that should be powerful enough to only need a single CPU to toast bread.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Who is designing the sticker ?
Linux runs on smart vibrators?
That's too much information for me...
The original reads "Linux, currently a software system mostly used to power big servers and personal computers, is also now emerging as a small set of computing code to drive devices like mobile phones, remote controls and TVs." this Arrrrchive reads "Linux, currently a software system mostly used to power big servers and personal computers, is also now emerging as a small set of computing code to drive devices like mobile phones, remote controls and smart vibrators." and undoubtedly contains more idiocy. Please, don't subscribe to trolls.... vote them down with your modpoints, for gods sake.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Yes, that is what a read on first glance ;-) It made me take a double-take!
includes Sony, Philips, Matsushita/Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson/RCA and Toshiba.
What I find interesting is that many of these companies are selling consumer electronics that use OTHER OSes than Linux. So, what exactly does this context mean when they call Linux "the operating system of choice" ?
Seems appropriate to revive this classic at this time:
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 16MB of memory, a 300MB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
More than that, what is the purpose of linking to these companies ? Corporate behemoths that they are, with websites to match, you're surely not going to find anything at the linked-to URLs that will illuminate this story.
Because the consumer doesn't even know the damn things are running Linux. The manufacturers are doing a great job of taking Linux and producing custom interfaces (when needed) for their products so the average user doesn't even know they're running Linux. Maybe the desktop Linux folks should take notice...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I have a DVB-S (digital satellite TV) receiver that runs Linux, and I must say it is a very nice box for the computer hobbyist, and probably still quite usable for the normal consumer.
Out of the box one can just use it as a receiver, but once you connect it to your LAN (ethernet) you can browse its contents using SMB (it runs SAMBA) or a web browser. You can edit its configuration files using "vi" over telnet, you can NFS-mount a disk on another system and record movies on it, plug in a USB memory key and backup your configuration, etc etc.
Not all are things that a consumer would want to do, but very nice to have.
I presume not all Linux-based consumer electronics boxes will be as open as this one, though.
What "we" have to avoid, I think, is to criticize manfacturers that use Linux and do not at the same time make the box open to access like described above. Especially bad is to "hack" into Linux-based devices beyond what one can be reasonably expected to do with something you own, and to blackmail manufacturers into releasing information and source code of proprietary parts.
Behaviour like that could quickly make the big manufacturers a lot less enthousiastic about using Linux.
Especially if it's an AMD. You could cook breakfast on a T-Bird Core!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
lets face it. no non-trivial piece of software will ever be 100% free of bugs. when a security hole is found in my os, id like to be able to patch it. i dont see how thats possible if the os is at 'the hardware level' (by this, im assuming that you mean it stored in some kind of rom).
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
So if you run Linux on a single processor machine (as is true of many non-webserver deployments) SCO really has no case? I would be interested to see if they could uphold a case against a mass deployment on single processor systems :-\
here
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
You just illegally made use of technology patented by me; toaster jokes
Proof!
Never mind the fact that mine is crappier than you, that they're not really related, you still owe me 99$ per time you make a toaster joke!
Yes, and when the next major buffer overflow for a various piece of software gets found, you'd have no way to fix it, so you'd have to throw away the device. Scary.
Follow some of these links for variety of options.
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.
...the CHILDREN are our future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way.
This Linux thing is just a fad.
no
I'm sure I've seen this article many many times over the past several years. Linux zealots are starting to sound like Red Sox fans.
On a related topic, I've come to the conclusion that all audio devices should have USB ports (think of carrying your music between your home and car on a USB memory stick or external USB drive, depending on how much music you want to carry).
See... it really hasn't all already been done!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If people think the techno world is boring, they should take another look. Some of this stuff really does make "Dilbert" look better than real life.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Somehow I think slashdot readers are smart enough to find Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson, RCA, or Toshiba websites without the useless plethora of links.
Darn Skippy! Some of us use lynx after all. That's a lot of down-arrows to get to 'Read More.' Damn GUI-using muttermuttermutter.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Disquieting, obviously. But what isn't?
eh. a few examples...
Nikon Coolpix 775 upgraded from 1.3 to 1.4 via firmware.bin available on nikonusa.com
Garmin e-Trex Vista upgraded (frequently) from www.garminusa.com
Compaq iPaq 3635 OS upgraded in 2002 to the latest available at the time...
Looks like it is already being done. Why would it change?
Im concerned with major corporations developing it, we're gonna get back to the point where one program will only run on such and such version...and the fact that companies might try to sell it if they could...
That's the new way of doing things.
When placing an OS at the herdware level, why not place it in a flash chip such as your BIOS? This way you can patch a securtiy flaw if you would like to, or you can just leave it alone becuase it is working (like many users do with their BIOS).
"Linux, currently a software system mostly used to power big servers and personal computers, is also now emerging as a small set of computing code to drive devices like mobile phones, remote controls and smart vibrators."
And who said that Women didn't like Eunuchs?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Janet said: "I don't like a man with too many muscles." and Frank'n'Furter said "I didn't make him for YOU!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
i just got finished explaining to a non-techie friend how microsoft's long-term prospects on the back-end look dim. i also explained how microsoft's desktop presence is also threatened. i then went on to speculate that the future for microsoft might be under-the-hood of consumer electronics devices including disposable PCs (Dell, HP, etc.).
the future doesn't look bright for microsoft's OS business.
Does your toaster support hyperthreading? By which I mean cramming 2 slices of bread in the same slot...
the beauty they possess inside
I am so glad the poster helpfully pointed out the URL for IBM Corp.
Perhaps he thought that the list of names including IBM may give those blood-sucking fu^H^H^H^Hpeople at SCO pause for thought. A mighty force they make presented together like that...
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
What do you mean by "hardware level"? A hard disk is hardware. A CPU is software. The code in the BIOS is software that gets executed exactly in the same way as any other program. It's just stored on a flash chip instead of a disk drive.
Who's writing the catchy jingle?
:)
Anyway I prefer "Penguin Inside"
I just hope all these corporation continue to respect GPL and not find a way to tear Linux apart.
If companies wanted to "tear Linux apart", why would they get together in the CELF? The main point of using Linux is to get a market in which programmers and tools can be shared among many projects and companies. If companies wanted their own proprietary embedded operating systems, they wouldn't have to take Linux and hack it up, they could just keep using whatever they are already using.
If some companies end up making proprietary versions of Linux for their own use, we'd still be better off than we are now, since their systems would still be basically Linux and POSIX-based. That at least means they are contributing to the pool of Linux and POSIX programmers. It also means that any externally visible interfaces, file formats, and protocols are more likely to be open and interoperable.
Just a little caution needed after what happened to UNIX.
What killed commercial UNIX was high cost, poor marketing, high hardware requirements, and Microsoft's sneak-attack from the low end. None of those apply to Linux.
Actually, the processor can only do one thing at a time. You see the processor must switch back and forth between slices, and of course for system processes. So, while it might seem (to you or even the toast) that both peices are being toasted at the same time, really there is at most one peice being toasted at one time.
Yep, Linux is great on my laptop and at work, but why is it so great for embedded systems?
I assume that embedded systems don't need the Unix-like environment, and just run a single application. And how much of the Linux kernel do they actually use? Loadable device drivers are out, SMP is out, networking is probably out for a lot of them, filesystems may not be needed...
So what does an embedded Linux kernel look like? How does embedded Linux compare to things like, say, eCos (Red Hat's open source realtime embedded OS).
My bicyles
The only reason they are perfering linux is beacuse they are using free software. Your and mine hard work, they use it for free and what do they give back? nada. Just overpriced devices that are cool for a few weeks and totaly useless..
It's been that for 30 years.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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)
I'm just wondering why FreeBSD is not used more for electronics. It's as small and fast as Linux and seems to have less copyright issues. I know that has been and is used in embedded devices. I'm just wondering what Linux's advantage over it is.
Thanks,
Strater
strater.ca
To make it easier!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
ROM? Who uses ROM anymore? Most devices use flash for anything that could ever possibly need to be modified (like the OS/kernel). And since Linux can have a VERY small footprint, it'd not like you need any expensive flash memory. If I can buy a 128mb consumer flash storage device for under $30, you can put the linux kernel in a little bit of flash that you probably already have in your design for next to nothing. Besides, how often is there a important secuity hole in an embeded MP3 player or something like that? It's not like a "real" computer where you have to deal with new hardware and such.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I remember with nostalgia how the old-school Apple zealots felt they were 'taking on the evile empire' whenever they went into a rant about the evils of IBM.
Then a few years later, OEM drives labeled as being from IBM started showing up inside Macintosh enclosures. A few years after that all the PowerPC hype spun up, which included Apple, IBM, and Motorola (Motorola mostly as a victim as they have better business opportunities to take advantage of than dicksize wars in the desktop processor market).
And now, the strong anything-but-Microsoft coalition, with a VERY vocal contingent of all those Apple zealots, is cheering on big old Monolithic IBM as their savior.
It's pretty damn amusing.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Yeah, I'm sure most all toasters are using multiprocessor support!
Not all of them.
Would you like some toast?
IF there code isn't part of the kernel, and is only "user space" software, who cares? They can create whatever software they want on top of a very minumal kernel and as long as they don't use GPL software to build from, they don't have to release squat.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
how we used to be
This article claims the profit margins for consumer electronics manufacturers is 1-2%. But I've also frequently heard that the total markup-inflated price of CE is typically about 10x the manufacturing cost. So, if a designer wants to sell a stereo receiver that'll cost $500 in the store, the total cost of parts and labor to build it needs to be about $50. So my question, for anyone who may be knowledgeable in this area, is who are the other players in this mark-up game and how does the breakdown look. Obviously the CE manufacturers have large overhead, but certainly this cannot be the whole picture.
I find it especially ironic that an electronics hobbiest such as myself can often build better quality "CE" equipment at lower cost in my basement and using parts purchased in small (non-bulk priced) quantities. Granted, I count the time investment as hobby and education, but shouldn't the big players be able to do a better job with their massive economies of scale?
Now SCO owns my fridge, the tv, the washing machine...etc.
Doesnt it make you shiver to have McBride come in and take your slushie blender from your hands?
NO SIG
... and through the nasty little kneebiters are the barbie!
Children. It's what's for dinner!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
by this i mean like my pda, it has a rom chip that is flashable: ie it can be updated but for the most part it is non-editable, making a virus or an accidental deletion of a system file practically impossible...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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."
Most likely the program would be put on an EPROM (Eraseable Programmable Read Only Memory) or better yet an EEPROM (Electrical EPROM), and not just a regular ROM. Remember ROM doesn't mean you can't write to it, it is used to differentiate from RAM (Random Access Memory) where you can randomly read and write to any location in memory. EPROMs and EEPROMs require all of the memory to be erased at once, and all of the memory to be written at once, wich would be ideal for an OS, IMHO.
...interesting if true.
If they are working with miniscule profits imagine what the affect would be to pay the SCO blood money for the embedded OS license.
You're right, it is awful.
Will code a sig generator for food
We have a "embedded" product whichs is really just an old 500 mghz pc with custom hardware. Right now, its just running romdos. We considered switching it over to linux, but the 3rd party libraries would need to be replaced and a great deal of code rewritten. If we make a completely new version of the product ( from scratch) we would definitly choose linux.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It must be a slow day on slashdot.
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
Brain fart, guess I should get some sleep.
These are not barriers because:
1) Does anyone that buys a Tivo or a Sharp Zaurus, which use Linux underneath, have to install the software? No, of course not. These are specific use devices, not desktop or laptop computers.
2) Again, these devices have rather specific uses, and so the company will write the required applications for them. This is a non-issue.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I mean like a BIOS rom, the software is physically stored on the chip instead of a logical representation on a hard drive. this makes the data much more secure against user stupidity and file modifiying viruses..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Actually, it's where you cut a peice of bread in half and call it two peices of bread.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Only if that particular piece of software is part of your embedded solution. And since your product only uses a small subset of the whole of a Linux OS, you can strip out stuff with potential bugs that you don't use, and very very rigorously test the parts you do use.
Plus, unless you're talking about a very, very high volume product, your firmware will probably be flashed or in a socketed OTP. Masked ROM, let alone masked code right in the embedded controller, is expensive and not commonly used. I bet there isn't a product out there with Linux masked into a chip.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Don't forget the power-over-ethernet (IEEE 802.3af), so all I have to do is run Cat5 to it... how many existing SBCs support POE?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
IBM 405LP (Low Power) We are about to see on of the biggest breakthoughs in Linux embedded devices. Recently Motorola announced the AC970 Linux based phone in Asia. Currently the Windows CE pda and phones have a big power problem. They can only last about 3 hours. IBM has some big alliances in the cell phone chip market. It would make a lot of sense for IBM to incorporate their chip tecnology for cell phones. I think next year we are going to start seeing pda's based upon the 405lp. It would not be improbable for IBM to do a limited production run of let's say 5000 of 405lp and give them to their employees and have them show the pdas to their customrers.
actually, i also told this person that microsoft would never die because they are a huge financial entity. i've been simply questioning their ability to remain dominant in the areas they currently dominate.
What do you mean by "physically stored"? It's also physically stored on my hard disk. And the BIOS isn't very different from the CompactFlash card I use to carry PuTTY and other things around.
Maybe you mean that not being visible as a disk drive gives it some protection, but that's not that big of an advantage. I mean, under DOS, CD-ROMs and Flash drives aren't visible without a driver either, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Yes, but SCO claims that up to four-way SMP is not enterprise level so unless you have a 8-way or more toaster capable of toasting 8 slices or more at once then it is not enterprise class and shouldn't count.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
FreeMED is actually being used in some applications---mostly small physician practices, but some mid-sized hospitals as well. That's a development copy right now, but you can mail the maintainer (unobfuscate email to use) for info about the stable release.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca