The Gadget Show 'Flash Forward Special'

In this weeks Gadget Show (Series 12, Episode 9), which you can at the time of writing watch here, was a 'Flash Forward Special' concentrating on "seeking out gadgets that will be commonplace in the near future". Ignoring the blatant plug of a new Channel 5 Series, the most interesting part for me was Jon Bentley's piece on humanoid robots and those that attempt to emulate human thought. Firstly amongst the laptops in the Turing I'm sure some of them are running Linux but I couldn't get a good screenshot. However during bentley's visit to Plymouth University there's the iCub, a robot toddler that moves and learns like a human. The Dell laptop that runs the thing clearly shows a Gnome desktop. It looks like the Debian default theme, so I guess that's what it runs.

Dell Laptop running Linux










Close-up shot of 'icubsrv'










Close-up shot 2










The iCub

Visions of the Future

Quite clearly spotted some UNIX/Linux desktops on various workstations, around 12 minutes into this program on BBC Four. It's a very interesting series actually, well worth watching. It looks like either old KDE desktop or maybe XFCE, it's hard to tell, any ideas readers?

Update: Looks like it's actually a CDE desktop, as Red Hat was the only distro to come with CDE a long time ago, before settling on Gnome, so it is most likely running on Solaris, as seen here. Thanks to Myles for recognizing CDE!

Screenshots:




Synopsis of this episode from tvguide.co.uk

"The Biotech Revolution: Professor Michio Kaku looks at the revolution in biotechnology. Advances promise unprecedented health benefits and increased lifespans, but raise the spectre of uncontrolled human genetic engineering and the possibility of a world divided by genetic apartheid."

Bang Goes The Theory

Firstly welcome to my Linux On TV blog!

I'm dedicating this blog to showing Linux (and other OSS software) on various TV programmes, wherever I can spot it, starting with the first episode on the BBC's new TV show Bang Goes The Theory. I spotted a Gnome desktop and Terminal open showing output from a programme measuring the gait of the presenters. The University of Southampton is researching into how we can be recognised from the way we walk, for surveillance purposes. As for the show itself, it's a shame it's not as good as Tomorrows World in it's heyday. Some more intelligent presenters would be great.

Screenshots:

As you can see, they are using the Nvidia Cuda SDK:

At the moment you can still view the episode on BBC iPlayer here