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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.
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'
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
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
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.
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.
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)
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."