keeping simple

Author: yodaiken

  • Silver Bullets

    Like many famous papers, Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet is more referenced than read but it deserves better. Here is Brooks explaining why verification hype, for example the recent vast investment in marketing supposed security levels of Common Criteria Software (“EAL”), needs to be taken with more than one grain of salt: More seriously, even…

  • Two new web sites

    The FSMLabs web site is finally up with some material about new work. The web site for Finite State Research, our sister company focused on R&D and consulting is also up although it contains very little – FSR is there to develop IP and to consult on more general areas than FSMLabs.

  • OSIM Madrid and Value Manifolds

    Spent a couple of very interesting days at the OSIM conference in Madrid as part of my consulting for WindRiver which has a very powerful market position in cellular handsets now – partly due to their acquisition of RTLinux for embedded last January. Interesting to see these companies negotiate the vast complexity of the technology…

  • Exciting moments in fiber

    … the first truly game changing advance in bend-insensitive fiber came at the FTTH Council Europe meeting in Amsterdam early 2005, when an NTT engineer demonstrated a tough fiber that could be tied into knots. As we reported in oour March 2005 issue, the 700 person audience – mainly engineers and executives – rose to…

  • Thinking like a subcontractor

    Many industries are organized so that a small group of companies controls the “product” and sit on top of a pyramid of subcontractors who provide parts and labor. It’s natural for companies at the top of the chain to prefer this scheme since from the top you can squeeze of BOM (Bill of Materials )…

  • Apple’s strategic brilliance

    I may be reading too much into it, but Apple looks to have come up with a strategy to pass Microsoft in the next ten years. They are linking their phone, music, and PC business together to form an unavoidable platform in a way that has not been done since Microsoft put together the office…

  • Carbon neutral processors and ecocidal operating systems

    Carbon neutral processors and ecocidal operating systems

    Data centers are reckless consumers of power. Since modern processors leak somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of their peak power consumption even when idle and since most measurements show that most computers are nearly always idle, that’s a lot of power wastage. RMI has some innovative thinking about data center design. The designers of…

  • Underlying requirement for hard real-time

    Simple point that is widely ignored: you need hard real-time capability to offer any meaningful “soft” real-time. Let’s suppose you say that you can drop up to N frames a minute or K< N frames over any 10 second period from a nominal H>N frames per minute feed. This is a typical soft real-time task…

  • universal machinery

    If even 20% of what Peter Gutman says is so, then I’ve been optimistic in my assessement of DRM.

  • DRM python sets another coil

    Docomo is using Microsoft DRM products in its phones so that customers can move protected “content” between phones and PCs under control of the DRM software. The goal here is to generate a network effect so that it becomes difficult to find content that is not under such a scheme or devices that will work…