keeping simple

Category: software business

  • 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.

  • GPL Interface arguments and proprietary kernel modules

    (rewritten for clarity Aug 21, 22, 2007) Changing interfaces of GPL software is permitted under the GPL. The license specifically permits anyone to make any changes in the code. There is no limitation concerning the intentions of the coder or the desires of the code “maintainer”. The entire project of marking certain interfaces in Linux…

  • Easy patent solution: Exponential method

    Suppose that we said each year, each person named as an inventor or each company or person named as an assignee on a patent  qualified for a rolling fee. Say $200 for the first patent, $1000 for the next, $5000 for the third and $25000 for the fourth – 200×5^N.  Nice and simple. And to…

  • Building what customers want

    Visting LinuxWorld in San Francisco reminded me that one of the advantages Apple has in the cell-phone market is that it can set design goals to be “what people who buy cell phones want”. While you might think this would be the obvious choice, many players in the market are trying to build what the…