Automated cars could also save gas on the highway. We all know that driving right on the bumper of an 18-wheeler will increase your gas mileage. The main danger is unexpected braking. If we had automated vehicles, they could all ride up against each other and make great use of slip-streams.
There would be savings at stoplights as well. When the light turned green, all cars would start moving, instead of this inch-worm movement. More cars get through the light, less idle time, more gas/electricity saved.
Sun has been doing something like this almost a decade ago. Only it is not open space, but offices. You have a rolling file drawer for your personal items, etc. When you come in, you are assigned an office. You get your rolling drawer, head to your office and your phone number follows you. There is a monitor that lets people know who is in which office that day.
They are also a big proponent of telecommuting.
History Lesson:
Back in 1987 Doug Michaels and crew chose to build a unix variant based upon two computers. One was the Apple Lisa and the other was the IBM Intel based PC (one for two isn't bad).
Doug was from UC Santa Cruz and many of the early coders were as well. The atmosphere was typical Santa Cruz laid back, including a hot tub for the developers. The company name of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) made perfect sense.
With the death (although it never really lived) of the Lisa, SCO's full focus became UNIX on Intel (Xenix was the early incarnation). Remember back in the late 80's/early 90's the competition was HP/HPUX, IBM/AIX, SUN/Solaris, etc. and for the most part, you purchased their very expensive hardware to run their OS on. SCO's proposition was that Intel hardware was cheap and SCO's OS wasn't that expensive either. On the other side, you had Microsoft with very early versions of NT, which we know were incredibly unstable and not something you would bet your business on. Yes, there was Solaris x86, but at that time, Sun did not fully back the version and it disappeared for a while, remember, they make their money on hardware and support.
SCO tried to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by writing SCO OpenDesktop. The interface was very X11, they had an early version of the Mosaic browser. However, in addition to competing with Microsoft, they also worked with Microsoft. SCO could interoperate with Microsoft quite well. They could read DOS files, connect to MS machines and play nice. That is part of the reason why Microsoft was an early investor in SCO (business makes strange bedfellows).
The real vaule proposition came into play with the replicated sites. So companies like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Eckerds, Rite-Aid, AutoZone, etc. who had thousands of remote stores would purchase inexpensive Intel boxes to put in to each store and run SCO to manage the business and communicate back to corporate headquarters.
SCO went public in the Mid-90's and (looking back on it) went on a buying spree. They wanted to move into the enterprise space. This meant adding more robustness (clustering) and scalability. For this then went to Novell who had purchased the rights to AT&T/Bell Lab's version of UNIX from Bell Labs. SCO made an offer to purchase those rights and technology (yes, Novell kept some of the rights too, but that is another discussion). SCO took the code and built, almost from the ground up, the Unixware line, starting with Unixware 7.0 that was an enterprise quality OS, clustering and all.
Around the same time they purchased a company out of England which had built the base code that is now called Tarantella. Tarantella was a middle-tier application broker. In that I mean it was responsible for connecting to a wide array of legacy applications and servers and present the information/display to the top tier browser. We see it a lot now, but it was a fresh idea back then with the advent of the web. Anyone with a web browser could connect to a myriad of new and legacy servers and services. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is the gist. It was a continuation of the play in the enterprise space. Fortune 500 companies had old mainframes and legacy applications and Tarantella allowed you to "port"/access the applications to the web world quickly while you worked on rewriting the applications for real.
This was an actual application and not tied to the OS in any way.
That was the upside and heyday of SCO, now for the fall.
Linus Torvil started to work on a version of UNIX that would run on Intel. He used the open source methodology. It took some time, but it grew and grew. The value proposition of SCO took a hit. As Linux rose, SCO started to falter. Not just because of Linux, but certainly a strong factor.
In the late 90's SCO couldn't hang on much longer in its form. They sold the OS side to Caldera and kept the application side, which consisted solely of Tarantella. Not long
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Automated cars could also save gas on the highway. We all know that driving right on the bumper of an 18-wheeler will increase your gas mileage. The main danger is unexpected braking. If we had automated vehicles, they could all ride up against each other and make great use of slip-streams.
There would be savings at stoplights as well. When the light turned green, all cars would start moving, instead of this inch-worm movement. More cars get through the light, less idle time, more gas/electricity saved.
Sun has been doing something like this almost a decade ago. Only it is not open space, but offices. You have a rolling file drawer for your personal items, etc. When you come in, you are assigned an office. You get your rolling drawer, head to your office and your phone number follows you. There is a monitor that lets people know who is in which office that day.
They are also a big proponent of telecommuting.
History Lesson:
Back in 1987 Doug Michaels and crew chose to build a unix variant based upon two computers. One was the Apple Lisa and the other was the IBM Intel based PC (one for two isn't bad).
Doug was from UC Santa Cruz and many of the early coders were as well. The atmosphere was typical Santa Cruz laid back, including a hot tub for the developers. The company name of The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) made perfect sense.
With the death (although it never really lived) of the Lisa, SCO's full focus became UNIX on Intel (Xenix was the early incarnation). Remember back in the late 80's/early 90's the competition was HP/HPUX, IBM/AIX, SUN/Solaris, etc. and for the most part, you purchased their very expensive hardware to run their OS on. SCO's proposition was that Intel hardware was cheap and SCO's OS wasn't that expensive either. On the other side, you had Microsoft with very early versions of NT, which we know were incredibly unstable and not something you would bet your business on. Yes, there was Solaris x86, but at that time, Sun did not fully back the version and it disappeared for a while, remember, they make their money on hardware and support.
SCO tried to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by writing SCO OpenDesktop. The interface was very X11, they had an early version of the Mosaic browser. However, in addition to competing with Microsoft, they also worked with Microsoft. SCO could interoperate with Microsoft quite well. They could read DOS files, connect to MS machines and play nice. That is part of the reason why Microsoft was an early investor in SCO (business makes strange bedfellows).
The real vaule proposition came into play with the replicated sites. So companies like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Eckerds, Rite-Aid, AutoZone, etc. who had thousands of remote stores would purchase inexpensive Intel boxes to put in to each store and run SCO to manage the business and communicate back to corporate headquarters.
SCO went public in the Mid-90's and (looking back on it) went on a buying spree. They wanted to move into the enterprise space. This meant adding more robustness (clustering) and scalability. For this then went to Novell who had purchased the rights to AT&T/Bell Lab's version of UNIX from Bell Labs. SCO made an offer to purchase those rights and technology (yes, Novell kept some of the rights too, but that is another discussion). SCO took the code and built, almost from the ground up, the Unixware line, starting with Unixware 7.0 that was an enterprise quality OS, clustering and all.
Around the same time they purchased a company out of England which had built the base code that is now called Tarantella. Tarantella was a middle-tier application broker. In that I mean it was responsible for connecting to a wide array of legacy applications and servers and present the information/display to the top tier browser. We see it a lot now, but it was a fresh idea back then with the advent of the web. Anyone with a web browser could connect to a myriad of new and legacy servers and services. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is the gist. It was a continuation of the play in the enterprise space. Fortune 500 companies had old mainframes and legacy applications and Tarantella allowed you to "port"/access the applications to the web world quickly while you worked on rewriting the applications for real.
This was an actual application and not tied to the OS in any way.
That was the upside and heyday of SCO, now for the fall.
Linus Torvil started to work on a version of UNIX that would run on Intel. He used the open source methodology. It took some time, but it grew and grew. The value proposition of SCO took a hit. As Linux rose, SCO started to falter. Not just because of Linux, but certainly a strong factor.
In the late 90's SCO couldn't hang on much longer in its form. They sold the OS side to Caldera and kept the application side, which consisted solely of Tarantella. Not long