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Red Hat Software Businesses

Ericsson And Red Hat In Home Communications 74

Posted by Hemos from the rpms-on-my-cell-phone dept.
Inforum writes: "From the Ericsson Web site: 'Ericsson and Red Hat announced a strategic initiative to develop a new range of consumer products and services for home communications. They will develop consumer products combining existing industry standards, such as Java, and the latest open source technologies, such as Embedded Red Hat Linux. The products will also support existing and evolving standards such as broadband networking and Bluetooth ...' Then I wonder: what will happen to Symbian?"
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Ericsson and Red Hat in Home Communications More

Ericsson and Red Hat in Home Communications

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  • A big burly guy with a horned helmet is on the prow of a boat at it lands on the Redmond campus. He turns and shouts to his men "Charge!" They proceed to rape and pillage.

    Voiceover: "In 2000 AD, Ericsson the Red(hat) sacked the degenerate empire's capital..."
    --
  • Yeah, but given the choice, _I_ would rather lug only one device around, thank you. ;-)

    I've already got rid of my text pager by getting SMS on my PCS phone, if I could get rid of the PDA by having more functions added to the phone, I'd go for it.

    >I would rather see a PDA that I can talk on like a phone than a phone that acts as a PDA though.

    Yep, me to! I'm hoping when 3rd generation wireless networks are built, we'll see devices that are essentialy PDA's that can send/receive Short message, e-mail, browse, etc. but can also function as VoIP phones. I've already got used to the slim earpiece/mic set idea, so having a device like this in a phone form-factor is not required (I would think).
  • a) going to cost a lot of money
    a) It really depends on volume. If it sales like hot cakes, then the prices will go lower (Ericsson is not M$ after all).

    b) require some fairly extensive changes to the house.
    b) The reason why Ericsson is interested in home appliances (the French call it domotique which is a nice name) is that with "in-house" telecommunications, you don't need to put cables everywhere.

    But it is true that the first such appliances will probably be very expensives.

  • Also, the fact that I was going to point out is that lots of cell phones already do these things.

  • This is actually great news for me because I really did not want to deal with another homegrown embedded OS. (I work for Ericsson, I am sure my views however are of no meaning whatsoever to the company) Our phones and most products do exactly what the are designed to do but nothing more and when we go to change it even for something simple like adding a new menu option or anything we have to almost completely redesign the phone. Maybe/hopefully this concept will make it over to our cellular and we will begin using a standard OS that we can change on the fly. Oh well. Just my ramblings.

  • Probably nothing. Right now everyone is going wireless (With good reason) and looking at the best way forward. Linux has a large set of developer support which will help them in any sphere, but equally Symbian have the expertise and the parteners to work.

    Personally (oh how dare I) I think that Symbian with their wealth of experience in this market are in a better position than Red Hat. What ever happens however one thing is pretty much for sure:

    The wireless future belongs to Europe, its there that the next generation of communication devices will be deployed and developed. Especially with the hold up to G3 phones in the States.
  • The issue is different.
    Gnome and KDE are direct competitors while the RH/Ericsson deal could affect the OS on the kernel level - putting greater strain on the Torvalds-Cox axis. Market pressure was always moderraded by the kernel people, but now a fork might develop more easily.

    This is not necessarily a Bad Thing. A splintered Linux would eventually mutate into disjoint OSes - so what, as long as they're compatible with each other. The problem is when they're not compatible, and we're back to M$ issues.
  • Best Buy sells single room window units (Frigidaire) that have timed on/off, digital thermostatic control, and a remote. Less that $200US, last I heard.

    For central air, you can get a thermostat that will do what you're talking about ~$100US. Install the thermostat, use it, and replace the old one when you move out.

    And yeah, these gadgets do pay for themselves.

  • Ok. So this is more of the "Gee Whiz" technology I saw at the CES in LV. Both Philip$ and Micro$oft were tripping over themselves trying to create the most useless home technology they could.

    "...and that play finishes the first quarter, we'll be right back."
    [click Home]
    [click Kitchen]
    [click Fridge]
    [click Beer Inventory]
    [click Home]
    [click Child #1's Bedroom]
    [click Spy Camera]
    [click Review Child #1's web surfing]
    [click Route copy of porn page to personal bookmarks]
    [click Electric Shock on child #1's collar]
    [click Home]
    [click Security]
    [click Survalence]
    [click Camera #7]
    [click Record Camera #7 to Tivo](neighbors topless wife sunbathing)
    [click Home]
    [click Pantry]
    [click Status of Mouse Traps]
    [click Home]
    [click Open Cat door]
    [click Home]
    [click Check Mailbox]
    [click Home]
    [click Living room]
    [click Laz-E-Boy]
    [click Built in Scale] (374 Lbs. *oof*)
    ...


    Gimme a tent and my dragonfly, see ya all.
  • There shouldn't be a coffee maker within a 5 mile radius that doesn't have at least 128 Megs of RAM.

    This is a big misunderstanding of the JINI concept. Not every device needs to run a virtual machine of its own, that was of course taken into consideration. You can connect simple things like a light switch (just two states) or a coffee machine to some 'mediator device' which is then connected to the network. Sorry, it's been a while, I don't have any links on this.
  • You forget Redhat bought Cygnus which is a very well respected embedded systems software developer.

  • Ok, would people stop thinking Ericsson is a phone only company. =) The mainly make phoneswitches and complete solutions for mobile phones, include basestations and stuff like that. They even made a loss from selling phones in the first 6 months, but made great profit from basestations and stuff like that.

    And aside from the phonebusiness the make a lot of intresting research, for example they invented Bluetooth. They desided that people would benefit from an standard so they standardized it.
    They also make radars and similar equipment for army use. I belive they made some part for ESA (european space agency).
    In the 80s they even made computers.

    They are also the makers of Erlang a functional language made for high availability use. From Ericssons website:
    "Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson. The most popular implementation of Erlang is available as open source from the open source erlang site."
    There is even a Debian package of Erlang.

    Recently they have started to get in to the world of internet by buying of a lot of small companies with intresting products aimed for the net.

    Besides being members of Symbian they have a deal with Microsoft for using Pocket-pc And now a deal with Red Hat.

    They are a huge company about 100 000 employees but they are too often compared to Nokia which is mainly a phonecompany.

    Ok enough about this... I am btw not connected to Ericsson in anyway other than using their products about every time a make a phonecall. Kind a hard to avoid it if I would like to, considering their equipment basicly runs the swedish phonesystem.
  • Not a bad idea -- can you do it with those oddball IR links I see on the top of lots of cell phones these days? :-) /Brian
  • Here's one difference for you: Sun has vetoing povers.

    By the way standards have nothing to do with code, or forking thereof. And oh, yes, I never said I love committees.
    --

  • I've had previous contact with Ericsons, offering support to them, and some of the people then running their IT infrastructure in Europe (particularly the UK) were utterly hopeless. One person cost me many late hours at work due to his utter imcompetance. I was doing most of his work, yet he was being paid far more than myself. Then I was lead up the garden path when a job was indeed going there. No contact, no acknowledgements, despite the fact I was one of the few in the country that had experience of the technology they used.
    Firstly if you can't spell ericsson after all the hours of hard labour with low pay you claim, it's not that surprising that they were reluctant to hire you. Even if they did not have the foresight that you might turn your indirect employment experiences into an opportunity to libel the company. Another mistake you made was to assume that ericsson IT infrastructure is run in house. It is completely outsourced in the UK and will eventually be outsouced everywhere as it is recognised that this is not a core business. In fact it appears to best suit the brain dead in the case of microsoft support.
  • Will it run on a Crusoe chip?

    Scratch that; a better question would be "WHEN will we see anything that will run on a Crusoe chip?"

    Embedded Linux sounds like a great idea for a lot of applications, and so do portable low-power devices with pretty flat screens.

    (but I want an Oompa Loompa NOW!)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • grammar nazi sayz...

    "One should never embed double quotes within double quotes as the following Slashdot article does.
    "Inforum writes: "From the Ericsson Web site: "Ericsson and Red Hat announced a strategic initiative to develop a new range of consumer products and services for home communications. They will develop consumer products combining existing industry standards, such as Java, and the latest open source technologies, such as Embedded Red Hat Linux. The products will also support existing and evolving standards such as broadband networking and Bluetooth..." Then I wonder: what will happen to Symbian?""
    One method to avoid this is to use single quotes for the inner comments. For multiply nested quotations, one should alternate double and single quotes (the Javascript method) or rewrite the article altogether."
    Please be more careful in the future. Thank you for improving the quality of Slashdot
  • Java does have a publicly available written specification. Word doesn't.

    But you used the word "malleable". Please explain what do you mean (I've already checked my dictionary, thanks).
    --

  • By malleable, I mean something under public control. If SMTP needs a change, anyone can submit an RFC. If Java needs a change, you have to ask Sun.
    --
  • What I learnt at university is that when you're desperate, you'll jump into bed with anyone.

    The more 'strategic deals' signed, the worse I think it makes the company look.

    So are slackware/suse making redhat desperate, or are nokia/moto making ericsson desperate.

    (I may work for one of the companies mentioned in this post, so I'll shut up now.)

    FatPhil
  • It doesn't need an OS. It will even run faster without one. Trust me. Solid state is MUCH faster than software, generally speaking.

    And it's also less flexible and upgradeable, not to mention non-Open Source. But I'm sure that you (and everyone else) has their own opinions on the question of what should be software and what should be hardware.

    My photocopier does not need to run windows. Even if it is networked, it still doesn't need ... an OS

    Surely you don't think that modern printers are implemented entirely in hardware, do you? Apple's first laser printer had a more powerful CPU than the computers that used it.

    My phone of today is much more complex, technically speaking, than the one I used 10 or 15 years ago. It also has a lot more useful functions (caller id, phone book, etc). That sort of thing really requires a software rather than hardware approach. Modern devices need to be more powerful, flexible, and most of all, connectable. If that means a CPU and embedded Linux, so be it.
    -- Floyd

  • Re:The home of the future (Score:3)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:14AM (#886383) Homepage
    Sure there is demand. One really good example i can think of is home cinema products.

    I don't know if you've ever tried to integrate multple home cinema products from multiple manufacturers, but it's a royal pain in the ass. I have a TV, VCR, Cable Decoder, DVD player, Surround Stereo, and of course the computer.

    Most of these devices use slightly diferent standards (For example, my cable box & DVD can output a clean RGB signal, my VCR only does composite - Meaning i have to manually adjust the colour & brightness each time), and a multitude of connectors and cables. I also have a total of six remotes controls (Two just for the stereo/AMP) The only way the computer is connected to the whole setup is via. a line from the soundcard to the stereo.

    What if all of these products worked to a singal standard. Physically, i'd love to have just one (Or perhaps two) types of connector, that can connect all of my hardware together. Then stick something like Jini on top of the standard hardware, and now my hardware can all talk to each other. No need for those six remotes any more, my DVD player will tell the Amp to switch it's inputs automatically. My computer can now become a much more integral component. Hell, i can even connect my stereo directly to the internet, and recieve Netcast radio, or download MP3's on demand. Or connect my TV/VCR to the internet, and download streaming video. Do away with the VCR completly, and i can record from the Cable Box onto the computer.

    Phew Anyway, if you managed to follow any of that, you'll get my point. Integration can only be a Good Thing. I can't wait :)
  • The truth is, sony considered linux w/ the ps and ps/2, but in both cases the OS proved too bulky (the ps was a 33mhz mips-like chip), so what are the chances that we will see a phone or Organizer with enough processing power to run a user friendly version of linux? The only way I can see this happening is if they go for a merge between a palm type device and a cell phone, but that would probably result in a rather bulky machine.
  • I suppose that you could use all of this excess crap to provide that, but why?

    What "excess crap" are you talking about exactly? I doubt they are going to put a full install of RH on these phones, with Gnome installed and Star Office and drivers for a million different kinds of hardware. Half the point of using Linux on small devices is how easy it is to cut out anything which you find to be "excess crap".

    Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.

    Other devices than what? Than their screen phone thing? I think an email/web pad type gadget with an address book in and a diary would be the one technological thing that Grandma might actually use, if you made the interface simple enough. If you think about it, a gadget like that plus a playstation would provide all the functionality that the average family uses a PC for, with much less complexity and at half the price.


  • Umm so we replace the JVM with "an embedded Linux version" so we are still using Java here as a programing language I'd assume.

    Jini is far from dead, just because a press release doesn't mention Jini doesn't mean it won't be using it. The press release didn't mention using the english language but I'd be will to bet Ericsson will support it.
  • I really really hope that they can pull it off. Right now we have crap for an imbedded linux distro. Yeah we have lineo - an opensource/closed cource option that leaves me with a really bad taste. And I've been seeing so-called embedded distros that are huge! If your "embedded" linux is larger than a old slackware release then something is very wrong (I want 2-8 meg installs 16 if you install the compiler/libs/kernel source/etc...

    On a side note though, has anyone found a good "embedded" linux distro that is installable by the normal linux user (no building the filesystem by hand)

  • The Symbian OS - Epoc is for small mobile devices (phones). I think you'll find that the marketa are slightly different. The Ericsson devices will be slightly larger desktop devices, sort of phone sized web/email terminals.

  • Ericsson's show-home of the future (Score:3)

    by Ratface ( 21117 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @05:36AM (#886389) Homepage Journal
    Having visited Ericsson's show-home recently, I was actually pretty impressed with the direction they are taking. Although they have one of the (in)famous Internet Fridges installed, this is actually one of the least important bits of kit they have.

    The majority of their focus at the moment seems to be on intelligent home automation systems - such things that might be found in a care home for instance, to help improve quality of life for the elderly or infirm. Such things as intelligent alarm systems, devices to control that electrical appliances are switched off when they should be, lighting systems with usage patterns and simple IR-based on-off routines. The emphasis is on using existing technology and making it simple and easy to use.

    I think that Linux would be a good step forward in this, inasmuch as it is freely and easily customisable for new applications. Who needs Windows for embedded systems?

    On the more nerdy side, I look forward to these technologies filtering out of the lab and into MY home :-)


    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • The servant has become the master. Like Bluetooth, Jini, Symbian, set-top boxes, "devices", WAP, all of this vapor amounts to good press, but it still boils down to desktops and servers.

    I'd be amazed if one tangible product emerges from this, but frankly RHAT needs to do anything it can (include lying) to prop up what is amounting to be the biggest scam of the century - linux stocks.

  • The difference is that HTML and POSIX (and C and C++) are designed by committees/consortiums/whatever which you (theoretically at least) can join and become a voting member. Java is not. I'm not saying that one way is better than another.
    --
  • Don't forget wearables and driveables.
  • That's cool, I'm sure that I could have all sorts of fun writing programs for all that hardware, but what APPLICATIONS do they plan on doing with all this gear/software? They make phone's daggonit.

  • Ericsson announced today that it would combine all the buzziest buzz words it could find into one product in a desperate attempt to regain some market share from Nokia and Motarolla. President and CEO, Mr. Ericsson said "If we squeeze enough buzz words into this product it's sure to be popular.. I don't see how we can miss really..".

    thanks

  • Links in the Media... (Score:3)

    by nutty ( 70104 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:34AM (#886395) Homepage
    I _hate_ to be a karma whore, but I saw this post just as I was checking out Ericssons stock (ERICY) [yahoo.com] on yahoo quotes.

    CBS MarketWatch [marketwatch.com]
    C|net News.com [cnet.com]

    This doesnt make me a karma whore, does it? :(
    After all, there are _no_ links to media coverage in the article. o well..
    Enjoy the links...
    /nutt

  • Java, eh? Interesting. (Score:3)

    by Floyd Tante ( 210193 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:37AM (#886396)
    While I'm sure some Java programmers will be thrilled to see the inclusion of that language in the list, it's equally important to notice what they aren't using, namely Jini [sun.com]. The idea behind Jini is that any device on a network will be able to discover and talk to any other device, through the use of Java programs running on an embedded JVM. While an interesting concept, it has failed completely.

    OTOH, I think that that method is clearly the way of the future. Plug 'n play has vastly simplified the installation of new hardware: systems like Red Hat's kudzu can autodetect and install stuff automatically. Imagine if your network could do the same. Wirelessly. Bring your laptop in a room, and you can instantly communicate with other computers and peripherals, such as printers or scanners. Apple has something very much like that, and I think that Open Source is seriously lagging behind.

    Jini would be a good idea, but I think we can discard the JVM and replace it with an embedded Linux version. Remove the dependency on Java, and a whole new world opens up. Sun can only lock new technology into it's languages and platforms for so long.
    -- Floyd
  • Didn't see this mentioned in the press release, but this was reported by C|Net [cnet.com] yesterday. It's a "Screen Phone" that will run RedHat and uses Bluetooth to communicate with its basestation, has a speakerphone, touch screen, web browser with Java support, and email client. In other words, a web pad with telephone features. Another picture on Ericsson's site [ericsson.com]. Pretty cool looking, no pricing mentioned and is supposed to hit the market later this year.

  • The home of the future (Score:4)

    by Dan Hayes ( 212400 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:42AM (#886398)

    ... is something we've been hearing about for a long time - remember those old 50s shows that portrayed everyone in silver suits sitting around in uncomfortable looking chairs whilst unlikely-looking robots catered for our every need :) And yet the average house of today is little different from what it was 30 years ago - there are more gadgets but its still the same idea.

    Now we have several companies offering us amazing new products which will turn our houses into networks constantly linked to the outside world through broadband connections. But the thing I wonder is - is the demand there yet?

    For sure there'll be those of us who like gadgets - most of /. for instance - for whom a setup like this will be almost irresitable. But for the average homeowner having all of this is still somewhat redundant - they just don't need an entire house connected via wireless links. As of now there isn't any real need for having your fridge/cooker/whatever connected to the rest of the house. Sure, there are advantages, but not enough for anyone to lay out the kind of money this will take.

    So apart from a few of us who like flashy new equipment, the take-up of this kind of technology will most likely to be pretty slow. Still, if it gets built into new houses then it'll gradually become the norm, but I don't think it'll become the next "must have" thing.

  • Possible Problem (Score:3)

    by Billed_190 ( 201201 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:44AM (#886399)
    What happens when an appliance running Embedded Red Hat Linux has a security hole? Let's say it is a refrigerator...for the sake of privacy you wouldn't really want anyone in the world to see what you eat on a daily basis......
    So how would you be able to upgrade the refrigerator's OS? Flash BIOS would be inconvenient, even if they were automatically updated, because it leaves a big margin for errors on Red Hat's side...if they rush out a security fix or are lazy writing one and it is buggy, how would someone like my mother be able to fix it?

    Remember....Most people that buy these once they become mainstream will be computer literate in the worst way......
  • 2000-08-01 20:08:39 Red Hat and Ericsson team up (articles,redhat) (rejected)


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
  • Redhat must be doomed!

    I've had previous contact with Ericsons, offering support to them, and some of the people then running their IT infrastructure in Europe (particularly the UK) were utterly hopeless. One person cost me many late hours at work due to his utter imcompetance. I was doing most of his work, yet he was being paid far more than myself.

    Then I was lead up the garden path when a job was indeed going there. No contact, no acknowledgements, despite the fact I was one of the few in the country that had experience of the technology they used. Later I found that this self same idiot was now responsible for hiring staff.

    As a result I'll never use anthing manufactured by that company, or associate myself with anyone using their products.

  • Yes but you are forgetting that people don't buy what they need but what they are told they need. Remember how many people bought computers in the 80s and did not know what to do with them?
  • OK. So Java isn't very open to change. Is it necessarily a bad thing? Look what they did with C++. I'd rather let Bjarne control the damn thing :)
    --

  • I don't know if you've ever tried to integrate multple home cinema products from multiple manufacturers, but it's a royal pain in the ass. I have a TV, VCR, Cable Decoder, DVD player, Surround Stereo, and of course the computer.

    Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what's in my house, and I know what a pain it is... Sure that's somewhere where integration would be a godsend, but most people don't have them all connected together, they're happy with having separate chunks of electronics in different places.

    It's only people like us that get pissed off with tweaking audio-visual settings every time we use a different device, just to get it *perfect* :) And so, we'll be the ones buying this kind of stuff.

  • 1. This is great news. Linux needs Bluetooth and other micro-pico networking, wireless and embedded technologies. The market needs more intelligent devices, and M$ had already shown that they are NOT up to the challenge (WinCE was a stop-gap and PocketPC just crashed during a demo, sorry no link)

    2. This is bad news if they're not released in source form. A strategic partnership with a hardware company may swing both ways. Either Ericsson won't care about the availability of source code, since hardware butters their bread; or more likely they'll try to go with a more 'proven' model of propretary, binary only (or ROM) distribution.

    3. This is bad news if it's a partnership with Red Hat and not a full-on support of Linux by Ericsson. Red Hat is just another distro, but with all the 'partnerships' it's been forming lately, intercompatibility of anything non-Free with other distributions may soon become a problem.

    4. This is bad news for the Linux purist. Linus/Transmeta is working on a portable kernel as it is. While 'portable' and 'embedded' are certainly not the same, they're closer than 'embedded' and 'easy to use desktop' - the later being the core of RH's business. It's early in the game still, but there may be a conflict of interest brewing between Red Hat+Ericsson and Transmeta.
  • What happens when an appliance running Embedded Red Hat Linux has a security hole?

    I actually thought about this a bit (jeez, I need to get a life), and decided that, realistically, home appliances would have to be on a home intranet, and protected from the outside by a firewall/router.

    On the other hand, I sincerely doubt a 'fridge with a built-in barcode scanner would be commercially viable. (Cool idea, but just too much trouble to remember to scan everything.)

    On the third hand, a 'fridge that could monitor its motor, internal temperature, and power consumption. That could warn you if the motor failed, or consuming too much power (time to clean the evaporator coils), could adjust its defrosting cycle according to the humidity, just maybe more practical (or not, who knows).
  • Well, Red Hat is based in Research Triangle Park. Ericson also has a campus in RTP. I'm assuming that Ericson was therefore a much more likely candidate for a partnership than Nokia or Motorola. (I don't think either of them have a campus in RTP)

    I would rather see Red Hat partner with Nokia, because I like their phones much better than Ericson's. However, geography is still a very powerful assest.


    Refrag
  • I realize that there are CPUs and software & such in it. I like things to run quick. I like them cheap. I see no reason to go with something controlled by one company. I really didn't care for Jini. We all have our opinions. I think that if everybody got together and made a standard, it would pretty much serve the purpose the Jini did without being tied to one company or having a terribly high system overhead. I would much rather run code native to the device, optimized for the device, than waste CPU cycles and memory. Just a personal thing. I can see where Jini would be great. Heck, I can see where I would just fall in love with Jini devices, but that's not how MY perfect world works. Besides, if you can't get people to open up the specs enough to work with each other now (uhh, take my damned Turtle Beach Montego Soundcard, which still doesn't have good Linux drivers), then how can you expect them to voluntarily do this. Personally, yes, I am pretty opinionated on that topic, and I think that A LOT of the CRAP that we load as software could be better done through hardware. It's not that I don't like it and all, but why bother? Digital senders are great, good use of software. That crappy touch display on some of the new copiers, that doesn't offer anything over the old system of having buttons on the side (other than making it slower to get work done, and take longer to start up the printer)... pretty crappy replacement for the buttons, but my friend wrote a few video games for it, during his breaks at work, so if you get bored while you are making copies on it, you at least can play his dumb pac-man game.

  • The only reason I would want a console all on my kitchen appliances is to have access to a linux prompt and make sure my other machines were still running without walking into another room.
  • 3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example
    4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality

    I guess they went with 3 rather than 4.
  • I live in a house in Woodland Hills, California, an extremely hot part of the world. It will probably get above 100degF today.

    Obviously I don't want to walk into a 110degF house when I get home, so I leave the air conditioner running continuously. This is expensive (about $ 200 a month), but ensures that, whenever I get home, I will walk into a cool, comfy house.

    If I owned the house (instead of renting), I'd probably get a timer to automatically turn on the air conditioner before I got back home. So at 5:00 pm, it would switch itself on, and by 5:30 when I got home, all would be cool.

    But what if I can't safely predict when I leave? I should be able to call up the air conditioner and tell it to switch on about 30 minutes before my departure. That way, I could save significant amounts of money on electricity over the course of a cooling season. So if I leave at 4:00 or 8:00, or even have lunch at home at 12:00, I should be able to tell my air conditioner to give me a cool, comfortable house no matter what.

    That's an application that might well justify the cost of such a system, and it could give significant extra comfort over all solutions other than running the AC continuously.

    D

    ----
  • In business, you need to be a visionnary to be sucessful.

    If you wait until the demand is there, it's too late: someone already jumped on the opportunities. So you don't wait for the demand, you *create* it.

    If you create a demand and fullfill it, you'll be succesfull. That's what Ericsson and RedHat want to do.
  • Immagine buying a refidgerator that automatically detects the microwave. They waltz across the kitchen and find the older traditional range, which decides to cut in. Meanwhile in the bathroom, the toilet running wince cryes it's lonely eyes out. Later someone cracks the toilet and floods the house, oh my!
  • So..... what's wrong with trying to compete with other companies ? If Nokia was the only maker of cell phones, prices would be to high...
  • Where did I say it was bad? desperate != bad...
  • If you need your coffee maker upgaded, its likely to make more coffee faster, which has zilch to do with software.

    No, you can safely hardwire the code for the toaster in ROM.

  • Trespassing (Score:4)

    by omarius ( 52253 ) <omarNO@SPAMallwrong.com> on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:48AM (#886417) Homepage Journal
    "Dammit, I can't ping the microwave. How in the hell am I supposed to make a sandwitch if I can't ping the microwave?!? Wilma!! Get me the packet sniffer! Ah, gods, someone's ping flooded the refridgerator! Get me my PDA! QUICK!"

    -Omar

  • That's odd, I work at Ericsson, and we use FreeBSD for the product we're developing.

  • Re:Ok (Score:2)

    by Harri ( 100020 )
    From Ericsson's webpage about one of their mobiles that they are bringing out soon (the R380):

    It's powered by Symbian's EPOC based operating system and has a complete range of PDA-like tools including address book, calendar, notepad and support for synchronization with industry-leading PC applications. It has voice dialling / answering, vibrating alert, voice memo, an in-built modem and a full graphic display with touch screen.

    They also make DECT phones, and it seems they want to get into the home wireless networking game too (web pads and stuff I guess). I can see plenty plenty of applications there.

  • Personally, I think that a suped up PDA is better for these functions, and leave the phone as a phone. The only think that I like about adding more functions to the phone is it keeps them from making it smaller, it's already hard to talk on those if your head is bigger than that of a small child. It's good to add stuff to the phones, I suppose. I would rather see a PDA that I can talk on like a phone than a phone that acts as a PDA though.

  • "...existing industry standards, such as Java..."

    The only sense in which Java is "standard" is the same sense that Word is "standard". Either the word applies to both or it applies to neither. I personally think that "common" or "widespread" (or "riddling the populace like a cancer") would be a better term. "Standard" implies there is a publicly available and malleable written specification.
    --
  • I think it could be the other way around. I should imagine most people shy away from buying things like DVD players, decent stereos etc. because it's far to complicated. If manufacturers could just agree on a standard, they can advertise it all as "Plug and Go" type stuff. Think about how quickly hardware sales took off after Win95, and Plug 'n Pray...:)
  • Um, actually, Ericsson makes quite a bit more than just plain cell phones. It's always fun to forget this, go to their site [ericsson.com] and hit the top combo box. It fills the screen with esoteric stuff! ;^) Anyway, I hope these plans (or some plans!) include the idea to add Bluetooth tech to a cell phone, so that it can make calls through some kind of base station while I'm around the house. That would give the best of two worlds from the same phone; low land-line rates while at home, mobile telephony as soon as I step out the door; all using the same handset of course. I've been waiting for this for a number of years now...

  • True, but this is a) going to cost a lot of money and b) require some fairly extensive changes to the house. These factors are likely to deter the casual buyer, even if they are bombarded with a huge advertising campaign saying that they "need" it...

  • Oh, but they are different. Very different. You actually had to get out of your chair to change the channel on your (only) black and white television. You had to deal with extreme heat in the summer and cold drafts in the winter. Your kitchen just had a stove and a toaster. If you were well to do, you might have a HI-FI, but most of the world listened to music on tiny monoral speakers. Information came to you twice a day on newsprint (how primitave). The telephone was used for a few minutes at a time, lest you tie up the party line too long. As far as long distance goes, forget it! You can't afford to talk very long (witness talking to my grandmother, who constantly worries that I can't afford to call her on my one-rate cell phone). Oh, and people died every year due to carbon monoxide poisioning and house fires.

    As far as a "personal server," which is what they are talking about, I'm finding more and more people who want new houses with data cable in mind (I work for a telecom company). They are putting it in for the simple reason that they don't know what is going to be happening, but they understand that there will be something down the road, and they need to become a part of it.

    As far as need, well, what would you do with several gigs available to any multimedia terminal in the house? With an easy to configure/use interface to all your movies, music, and able to pull content from the Internet as well? Sounds like nerdvana now, but once people see this sort of thing, they want it.

  • This partnership brings me one step closer to my ultimate goal: making a Beowulf cluster out of my cell phones.
  • I thought Red Hat's core business what the server market. Anyway...

    Is the conflict of interest that you're talking about between Red Hat/Ericson and Transmeta any worse that the conflict of interest between Gnome and KDE? Or do you just consider this one worse because someone may be giving Linus Torvalds' employeer some competition?


    Refrag
  • People have been blindly assuming that red hat and ericsson are going to create pda style machines. However, the press release does not say much about this type of devices (other than that lots of people are going to buy them over the next few years). However, these devices will need to be connected to the (wireless) local network. With ericsson being the inventor of bluetooth and redhat being specalized in server software based on linux, it all makes sense. They are going to develop all sorts of appliances one needs to connect your phones, faxes, webpads and pcs to your home network. This has no consequences for symbian (it might actually benefit) since symbian's OS is targeted at PDA & mobile phones only.

    Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I don't expect much of it since just an embedded linux kernel can't replace a platform like EPOC.
  • >They make phone's daggonit Actually, they make quite a bit of network infrastructure equip as well. I work for a company that does the billing for wireless phones and wireless data devices, over 1/2 of the marketplace we bill for uses Ericsson telco stuff. Of late they are branching out beyond just the end-user cellphone and cell switch business.
  • Writing the code for an embedded product under Linux provides one huge benefit. The embedded OS does not depend on the plans of an outside company for porting to the next hardware platform you choose. And the application should port easily as long as you avoid, or isolate, hardware dependent code. For companies for whom the OS they deliver their product on is a commodity item, open source OSs offer them a measure of control over the future of their product. Any hardware they choose can run the OS if the port is worth the effort. If having Linux run on your next hardware platform is worth enough to pay a few good programmers to do it, Linux will run on that hardware. No one can say no to you.

  • Well, no offense to Sun, but I can tell you flat out why Jini failed. From day one, I thought that it was, get this, "a crappy idea." Lets see, first, lets take a regularly inexpensive device. Next, lets make it more expensive by adding a CPU to it. Then, lets take that CPU, and make it grind to a halt by running an interpretter on it. Lets make sure that the computing overhead of non-computer devices is as high as possible. There shouldn't be a coffee maker within a 5 mile radius that doesn't have at least 128 Megs of RAM. Then, lets lock everybody into using our technology specifically. Lets make this as big of a pain in the ass for everyone on the implementer side, but since everyone knows JAVA, great fun for hobbyists.

    What makes MUCH MUCH MUCH more sense is to ask everyone to follow a common API, but heck, that wouldn't require a product and sales to a company that could REALLY use a boost in their business. (And I LIKE SUN).

    No offense, the solution isn't putting a full scale operating system on all of these devices either. These things DON'T NEED SOFTWARE. With software comes a much greater potential to mess things up. There are MANY things in this world that people try to put software on that just don't need them. My photocopier does not need to run windows. Even if it is networked, it still doesn't need windows. It doesn't need Linux, BSD, or QNX either. It doesn't need an OS. It will even run faster without one. Trust me. Solid state is MUCH faster than software, generally speaking.

    Make a common API, and you get all of the capabilities, and none of the overhead. I really don't WANT to play pac-man on my cell phone's display. If I did, I would buy a PDA, and play pac-man on it. People need to think a bit more centralized and practically, rather than developing EVERY DAMNED DEVICE into a huge meta-product, concentrate on doing one thing, and doing it well. I turn the sidebar off in Mozilla, because I want a browser, not AIM, not all of that stuff. I turn off ALL OF THAT crap, and MOST OTHER PEOPLE PROBABLY DO TOO.



  • What will happen to Ericsson and Microsoft? (Score:3)

    by Trracer ( 210292 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:55AM (#886432) Homepage
    Hmm, I wonder what will happen to Ericssons co-op with Microsoft?
    htt p://www.ericsson.com/infocenter/publications/conta ct/Microsoft_alliance.html [ericsson.com]
  • Here's the Registers' [theregister.co.uk] take on it, raises interesting points on it being a counter to .NET
  • I suppose that you could use all of this excess crap to provide that, but why? If it's relatively limitted in scope (and it is), you really don't need ALL OF THIS STUFF. I can see the "fun" in it, even the usefulness. Most users will never make good use of all of it though, and quite frankly, some of this stuff is better suited to other devices.

  • Why wonder what happens with Symbian? (Score:3)

    by Troed ( 102527 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:00AM (#886435) Homepage Journal
    Ericsson makes devices using ..

    * their own phone OS
    * Epoc (the Symbian platform you know .. )
    * Windows CE (until they switched to Epoc)
    * and now Linux

    ... they also make software on their own platforms, Windows, Epoc, with their own programming languages (yes, actually) etc ...

    Ericsson has announced two products using Epoc, the R380 smartphone (soon to be released) and their new Communicator platform (commonly known in the press as "the Palm killer") ... now they announced _one_ product using Linux - and Slashdot authors wonder what happens with Symbian? (Owned by Nokia, Panasonic, Motorola, Ericsson and Psion)

    Come on .. please .. reality check? :)

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