keeping simple

Category: business

  • Cell phone handsets and linux and software value

    Update at the end. Two FSMLabs alumni are leading the charge for Linux handsets in two different companies. Jason Whitmire is now GM of cell phones for Wind River. Jason’s blog is here and a Linuxdevices article discusses his first post which concerns the, well, machinations of Google and the two big cell-phone consortia Limo…

  • Hollywood writers are smarter than programmers

    The strike in Hollywood is about royalties. The writers, who are used to getting a share of the royalties on their work, want to keep getting royalties on work shown on the internet. The producers are making the claim that since they give away views on YouTube and other internet sites, you know free content,…

  • OpenBSD developer notes king’s clothing is “virtual”

    Theo de Raadt explains why virtualization does not improve security. How about this: to improve security, you have to have a secure design, a marketing buzzword won’t do the trick. Anyone who has seriously looked that the current generation x86 virtualization hardware knows that it does not provide clean separation or levels of security. It…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • universal machinery

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