Visions of The Future

Watch out for the repeats of Michi Kaku's Visions of The Future on BBC4 in the next few weeks, on Mondays at 7:30pm and on BBC iPlayer. I've blogged about various appearances of Linux on the program before.

Ubuntu: The Gadget Show (Season 13 Episode 8)

I just watched the latest episode of the Gadget Show and spotted an Ubuntu desktop during the pool playing challenge, as Ortis Deeley took on a pool champion using gadgets. One of the gadgets is a device to show you how to play shots using projectors hooked up to a PC with an app called ARPool - Augmented Reality Pool. At the moment you can still watch the episode on DemandFive (UK only). It's using the Clearlooks theme and you can see the Ubuntu logo on the menu in the top left of the screen.

The Sky At Night - Extraterrestrial Life - Is Anybody Out There?

I was watching an episode of The Sky at Night yesterday morning, on the search for extraterrestrial life using SETI and SETI@Home and spotted several Linux desktops/laptops. It's an old episode from around a year ago, I reckon, but interesting none-the-less. I also found the episode on YouTube in two parts. It's hard to see what the PC's running in the first clip, skip to 5:25 in the second video for some good views of Linux PCs, running quite old versions of KDE. Reminds me of when I used to use KDE 3, good times. This was before I started to have instability problems in Kubuntu which made me switch to Gnome on Ubuntu. See screenshots.

Horizon - Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?

It's been awhile, but I just spotted a nice Linux desktop on the documentary series Horizon "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?" Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist whose discovered the theory of "Dark flow" has a nice dual monitor desktop with what is most likely Red Hat (you can tell by the icons) running on a Dell workstation, at his office at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.


Screenshots:


compiling a map?


Dual monitors and Kaslinsky himself:


Another close-up shot of desktop

Watch on BBC iplayer.

or jump to kaslinsky's linux desktop

Ubuntu Spotted On Doctor Who Set

An eagle-eyed blogger, "Popey" has spotted Ubuntu running on some PC monitors on the Doctor Who set in Dr Who Confidential, apparently all linked to one machine. And Torchwood uses ubuntu too :)

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."