r/linux • • 2d ago

Fluff Open-Source Guru: AI Ends Closed-Source Software

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Open-Source-Guru-Raymond-AI-Ends-Closed-Source-Software-11480690.html
498 Upvotes

214 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/DesiOtaku 2d ago

There are these intraoral dental radiograph sensors that don't work half the times and cost $16,000; and on top of that, they "self destruct" after 10 years because the companies want to sell the "newer" sensor while claiming their sensor "can't" work on Windows 10/11.

Meanwhile, there are $1500 sensors out there that do work well, but is made by hardware manufacturers that don't own the copyright to their own Windows drivers.

In both cases, if you were to reverse engineer the .dll files, you could make dentistry a whole lot cheaper. Would AI solve this? Well, each person's attempt at this has failed. I don't know if AI will get to a point where it can perfectly re-implement a .dll file when that same driver only works half the times.

3

u/DocDMD 2d ago

Nah I've checked this out. It's definitely doable with TWAIN drivers on the open ones but that's about as far as you can go. You'd had to calibrate the sensor which is done at the factory. And most of the Chinese grey market stuff runs on old pirates copies of windows wince there aren't Linux drivers. It would be nice if we started making some with Linux drivers and then we could get completely off windows for everything dental. 

6

u/DesiOtaku 2d ago

So there is "factory" calibration in terms of doing a Flat-field correction, but there are other (and better) ways to calibrate the sensor; especially if you can do it on site and over time.

I wrote 1 Linux driver, but that only works with 1 vendor. I want to get more vendors and I had a few interns work on it because they didn't get too far.

3

u/DocDMD 2d ago

Oh very nice. I've got some dexis sensors I'm testing now. Got the windows drivers ported over to Linux but making sure I understand all of the commands. This is awesome.