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Afghanistani mountain village ponders Microsoft business tactics

From Rory Stewart’s book the places in between about his absurd/wonderful walk accross Afghanistan in 2002: That night we stopped in Dahan-e-Rezak, Dr. Habidullah’ mothers village. This was my first night in a tribal hill village. … Everyone in Rezak was descended from a single grandfather. There were six houses and seventy people in the…

August 29, 2006
The embedded enterprise

It is now possible to put together sophisticated and powerful embedded and control systems that are mostly composed of pre-existing working software. One of the demonstrations we showed at AMD’s recent embedded workshop was a small two processor (4 core) box running RTLinux and Windows XP. Embedded development teams for RTCore based products can mirror…

June 29, 2006
Speculation on modularity and information theory

One way of defining modules is by what engineers have to know. If a program X consists of components X1 … Xn then we can say Xi is a module if a programmer can modify it without learning “much” about any other module. A second, related measure can be in terms of information hiding –…

June 15, 2006
multicore and virtualization and real-time provisioning

We added the “reservation” capability to RTCore real-time POSIX threads a couple of years ago. Normally, the client platform operating system shares the processor with RTCore threads as a completely pre-emptible low priority thread. This works exceptionally well. Worst case interrupt latencies of under 10 microseconds on Opterons and under 20 on Arm9s are possible…

June 11, 2006
Single core cell phone solution and marketing vs engineering

FSMLabs is finally able to discuss the single core cell phone handset solution we developed with Infineon Technologies last year. This system is cool technology – literally – since it allows parts count reduction on the handset and that reduces power consumption and that reduces heat production. More to the point, in a volume driven…

May 26, 2006
Microkernels and why academic OS research is boring

Andy Tanenbaum writes a defense of microkernels that (1) misses the content of Linus Torvald’s critique, (2) ignores the most relevant paper on software development, David Parnas’ Software Jewels paper, and (3) pretends RTLinux does not exist. The problem with microkernels is that they are not modular and the problem with all the “nearly ready…

May 15, 2006
GreenHills, foreigners, and the gummi bear threat

When GreenHills launched their anti-Linux offensive, they crossed a line – and I doubt they even knew it. To cast doubt on the value of Linux in critical applications, GreenHills tried to create a scare about the nationality and “loyalty” of engineers working on Linux. This is stupid on three levels. First, software security is…

May 15, 2006
Pitiful formal methods in computer science

FSMLabs is making its way through the DO178 requirements and we’ve given a lot of thought to Common Criteria over the last couple years. One of the advantages of DO178 is that it does not accept the totally untested and frankly unlikely premises of “formal methods”. The reason mathematics has advanced so much was not…

May 1, 2006
Above all, the SUSPENSE: Wind River’s DSO with Robert Mitchum and hippies! (updated)

I’ve been meaning to write about DSO – WindRiver’s attempt to define synthetic “standards” (see the linuxdevices article for technical detail and a more serious approach). “Is DSO hype or substance?” asked Wind River CEO Ken Klein during the sponsored address, and sought to persuade the engineers in the audience that it is indeed substance…

April 9, 2006
Paul ErdÃ¶s day

March 26 is Paul ErdÃ¶s birthday. The book about ErdÃ¶s by Paul Hoffman is a nice read and thought provoking. ErdÃ¶s’ concept of the BOOK recording the most elegant proofs is one that is natural for both mathematicians and engineers even though he might have disagreed. The relationship between mathematics and engineering is peculiar: ErdÃ¶s…

March 20, 2006

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