Slashdot Mirror

Metroworks is refining some unleaded just for you.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3211177525.html that was mentioned recently, http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/ 2154245&tid=163&tid=106 for even more info.

Micro$oft = "Cheat with your assignment"

"The single line coding format that we all use is an obsolete product from the 1950's when a byte of computer RAM memory cost more than a good restaurant dinner. Those days are gone."

Wrong!
http://linuxdevices.com/

Know your roots.
http://www.gnu.org/
http://www.linode.com/products/

Please support the FreeNet Project, and this is why your should!
http://news.com.com/Digital+Agenda+Homeland+securi ty--A+global+assault+on+anonymity/2009-1009-540594 7.html

http://news.netcraft.com/

I am doing so well, because I am standing on the shoulders of great women and men.
Work smart, and have fun,
-Steve

This one? http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4604576509.html

There is a difference between "hard" real-time, and "soft" real-time.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3524337625. html

Personally I agree with Linus. Many embedded applications don't need "hard" real-time. Actually, hard real-time is a bit more of a burden.

I'm guessing that Linux can probably do most of what is required for a "soft" real-time system already....

Perhaps Victor Yodaiken might want to pull another one of his lame patent stunts on Montavista. That'd be rather amusing actually...

I wish they'd use a different name for this. The product "RTLinux" already exists, and it's not related at all to what Montevista is doing. It's the microkernel based "run Linux as a thread" approach taken by Victor Yodaiken at FSMLabs. According to this article it was first released in 1995, predating the existence RTAI and Montavista by many years.

just to make things clear, archos original firmware is really different from linux. But there is a project of running linux on this device see
http://linav.sf.net for more details or http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4929282643.html

And for the name avos, I think they stole it from another project that was working on the av3xx device.

What the heck is FLOSS ?

There was a 2002 paper published by the Mitre Corporation that used the term "FOSS", meaning "free and open-source software". As far as I know, this was the first use of the term, but it may go back a bit farther than this.

I don't, however, have any idea what "FLOSS" is supposed to mean. Assuming that it isn't related to dental hygiene, what is it supposed to stand for ? "Free {Linux, liberty, low-cost} open-source software" ? Just a nonsense corruption of "FOSS" ?

The closest explanation I can find is this blog entry by David Wheeler: "Free-Libre / Open Source Software". Is this really what people are trying to say ?

This model does not run Linux yet. (The 500 one apparently will, out of the box.)

However, do not forget that the model before the 400, the 300, has similar specs (although not as slim), and there is a Linux version running on it:

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4929282643.html

linav home page:

http://linav.sf.net/

Want to talk proofreading? On the page with info on the dual processor mini-itx board you can find the following gem:

The DP prototype board eschews the DB-15 VGA port traditionally found on Via's motherboards in favor of a DVI port for use with flat-panel displays. However, DVI is backward-compatible with AGP, so perhaps a VGA port will be snuck in under the wire before the final version of the board reaches production "early next year."

Things wrong with this sentence:

1. DVI is a connector type, nothing more. It comes in analog (DVI-A) and digital (DVI-D) signalling types, with both often present on the same connector.
2. AGP is a bus technology. AGP, AGP2x, and AGP4x are a single host, single device bus which has priority access to main memory. You cannot compare AGP, DVI, and VGA because they all mean very different things. Incidentally if you think you can compare DVI and VGA, you need to look up the meaning of "HD15". VGA is a signalling type, which can be compared to DVI-A.

DVI is a "VGA port" (meaningless term) if you have a VGA-compatible display adapter behind it. VGA-compatible monitors typically use a male HD15 connector to connect to a female HD15 connector on the display adapter or motherboard. However, with the use of a standard, commonly available adapter widget, you can take the VGA signals from DVI-A and put them on an HD15.

These people are either dumb, or need editing badly. Actually, they're dumb either way, because there is simply no need for a "VGA Port" on the unit. All that is needed is a DVI to HD15 adapter included in the box.

Are all articles on linuxdevices written by the same person? There's no attribution on the article so it seems like they are... If so, I know I never need visit the site again.

So the SP uses the nanoBGA CPU and CN400 northbridge. Does this mean we will finally see the long awaited nano-ITX board VIA originally announced last year and still has yet to deliver, despite announcing availability months ago? Or are they giving up on the Nano-ITX and just giving us Yet Another Mini-ITX?

So the SP uses the nanoBGA CPU and CN400 northbridge. Does this mean we will finally see the long awaited nano-ITX board VIA originally announced last year and still has yet to deliver, despite announcing availability months ago? Or are they giving up on the Nano-ITX and just giving us Yet Another Mini-ITX?

./-ers might not like VIA, but you should really give them a chance. Their subsidiary Centaur is the group that designs their chips.
CEO Interview: Glenn Henry, founder of VIA processor subsidiary Centaur

Well, since we are, for the most part, Linux proponents, here is a link to the most recent article I can find on PDA's with Linux. Linux PDAs Quick Reference Guide

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

"Linux wil run on most, if not all desktop computers currently running Windows."

In fact, Linux runs on about 23 additional architectures that Microsoft can't even remotely support with their most-flexible embedded target.

• Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
  • Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i, ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
  • Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
  • Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced Instruction Set RISC architecture)
  • Elan SC520 and SC300
  • Fujitsu FR-V
  • Hitachi H8 series
  • Intel i960
  • Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX, STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
  • Matsushita AM3x
  • MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR series, Realtek 8181)
  • Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards, ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball & ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
  • Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I, II, III families)
  • NEC V850E
  • Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH: link1 link2)
  • Samsung CalmRISC
  • Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
• Intel 8086 / 80286 .
• Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well as IA32 clones from AMD, Cyrix, VIA, IDT, Winchip, NexGen, Transmeta, VIA C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", and others.
• Intel/HP IA64: Trillian/Itanium/Itanium2
• AMD x86-64 Hammer family (including AMD Opteron)
• Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and Sinclair Q40.
• Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000).
• MIPS

According to this article, an OQO VP says the unit "will run whatever OS would run on a PC, so yeah, Linux should run just fine."

was it this?

That board does look nice. There is a new 366 Mhz Geode as seen on this 5 watt board.

Was this it?
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8275095591.html /
Sounds like an excellent idea.

This article covers what the CPU can be used for and there are plans for a LinuxSkin that'll allow access to the busybox shell running on the phone. Doesn't say when, it just says the plan exists.

I know one of the developers of this phone up in the Seattle area. Great work, guys!

Quoting from this page

Engstrom said that Wildseed plans someday to make a LinuxSkin, which would provide some way of accessing the busybox shell running on the phone, and running commandline utilities such as ssh clients. No immediate plans for such a skin have been made, however.

So maybe, someday.

Slashdotted already... alas, I can find no google cache.

If you believe that linux is less bloated and more stable, then it's THE natural OS for embedded systems.

Well, if you want to get your daily fix of "linux has been placed in something else" news... you can always visit linuxdevices.com

If you want to do-it yourself... ibm embedded.

As someone in an organization which has several hundred installed servers, we looked things over in the past year, and are choosing Debian as the next platform for us. Debian stable is the best choice in organizations that can control their application environment. We are lucky, in that most of our apps are in-house, and we have reasonable corporate memory and support in place.

The main attraction of redhat used to be that their software was newer than debian, and that their installation was easier. if you assume a reasonable level of expertise, the installation is a non-issue. Since we were standardized on redhat 7.x, we were having to backstitch things to just install the latest hardware, so the latest and greatest was not helping us at all.

We started to look longingly at Debian stable... 3 years since the last release, only updates in that time... free... decent kde via backports...

Remember what redhat did last year? Any clue how many corporations were running thousands of instances of free redhat 7.x, getting only patches from RH, who were suddenly SOL as of last December? Did you perchance notice a passing similarity between the plans for RHAS (5 year life cycle) and Debian stable (3 years so far)

apt-get wonderful not because of the ease of use of apt-get itself (which is wonderful nonetheless) but because there are tens of thousands of packages which are in the repositories, ready to go, far more packages than are available from any combination of dependency-hell + freshrpms.net + google. "redhat xx rpm" and far more simply installable.

Debian stable is what Redhat enterprise can only hope to become, but will never be, because they have priced themselves, slowly but surely, out of the market. Three things have happenned in the past year or two which will fundamentally alter things:

1. Debian sarge release with a new installer real soon now, so the stable version will not look so ancient, making it more attractive, and supporting 2.6 as an option (which redhat still doesn't), and with an installer that should reduce the major pain of the current installer down to minor grumbles.
   
2. KNOPPIX has made debian unstable for easy enough for anybody to try out and even install, so testdrives show that it ain't so bad
   
3. redhat's radical changes: discontinue free, re-continue as fedora, free as in beer, but controlled as in messed up KDE distribution has successfully rattled enough cages that folks are looking elsewhere and finding that debian "just works."
   

Within a year or two major ISV's will support debian (stable, at least), because the customers are going there.
And it ain't just me saying it and HP already does it from some telco's :

It is just the right answer. All that said, if your shop is committed to binary-ware, and you favourite bit-vendor won't support your chosen environment, you are toast. Do not go there.

Talk, cajole, encourage, convince, or switch vendor or plain drop the binary ware if you can afford to do it, but do not use the commercial software on an unsupported platform. That is the worst of both worlds: The free people don't use your package X so they can't help you, and the paid people go through their menus and hit "we don't support that, click!"

I don't think Bluetooth is competing with Wi-Fi, no. But only because the bandwidth is different.

But no good for streaming data? Come off! Maybe you haven't heard, but us Tungsten owners all get our Internet access via either Bluetooth to a phone, or Bluetooth to a PC or access point. I can say without hesitation that the download speeds are quite usable, and certainly more than enough for simple browsing. We've been getting internet access via Bluetooth long before the Wi-Fi card showed up just last week.

As for Bluetooth network routers, do you mean something like the Possio PX30? That thing looks something like what you might call a wireless "router", only it can provide Bluetooth access as well.

It appears that proprietary PDA's with their proprietary OS's are merging into proprietary mobile phones with their proprietary service providers. (Some may run Linux but they are useless without a wireless provider...)

That said, I would hope classic miniaturization and off-the-shelf desktop or server software become the norm in "PDA" handheld space. As per other posts, the display could be optional.

THAT said, does anyone know if the IBM e-LAP ever materialized? It was intended to serve as (yet another) PPC reference platform.

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9222005703.html

MD

Just to clarify the statistic so we are talking about the right thing, since the actual posting and the LinuxDevices articles seemed pretty vague to me. ("Linux is 15%! Windows is 6%. Yay!")

About 27,000 developers on their mailing list (which targetted embedded developers) were given web-based questionnaires to answer. This figure is for "what OS are you using for your current project" and the statistic is counted by percentage of answers.

Chart here.

More info at VDC's website.

Ok, now back to the regularly scheduled programming...

I thought that M$ was allready working with BIOS makers on this and that it was already here. This could be an admission that trusted computing is not secure computing.

I like this one a lot.
http://216.218.185.154/index.html

Why is this modded troll? he links to LinuxDevices.com.

$ host linuxdevices.com
linuxdevices.com A 216.218.185.154

This simple embedded Linux project builds a dedicated music recording and editing computer that uses a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive, to eliminate hard disk chatter. The project is simple because it starts with an embedded Linux distribution: a "Live CD" released by the Agnula Project.
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8275095591.html

ELJonline: Linux-Based USPS Mail Sorting System

NEC Postal Automation

According to this Intel Whitepaper both MIMO and an increase in channel widths from 20MHz to 40MHz will both be required to meet the 100Mbps performance goals of 802.11n. (See Figure 2)

So, it's merely being considered, but it's also pretty much a given for 802.11n.

Finally, you state that you do not wish to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts. Instead, you apparently want to force them to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves.

As you know, we have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the "play" button on our devices to a "pay" button. At least you have addressed the semantics by suggesting new devices come equipped with a "buy" button.*

*Excerpt of letter to Cary H. Sherman, President, RIAA, from Gary Shapiro, President & CEO, Consumer Electronics Association, 4/15/04, responding to a fax, by Cary H. Sherman to Gary Shapiro, at 14:30, 4/14/04, with this attempt at greasing the wheels:

We also point out that a lack of content protection will forever preclude a myriad of new business models that could [insert hush money offer here] benefit your members [end insert of hush money offer here] as well as other interested parties. For example, device manufacturers could provide "buy buttons" that would offer consumers the ability to quickly and easily purchase music that they hear on the radio. Indeed, iBiquity has said that it would like to offer to consumers, for a fee [as opposed to free], on demand weather and traffic reports. The same opportunity could and should exist for music, the bread and butter of radio broadcasts.

Sources

), they'll need control over the BIOS. That's why Microsoft is pushing so hard in this area, and why the Linux community must push back just as hard, and get the Linux BIOS.

5 second boot times were promised with a Linux BIOS. I'm still waiting. For the BIOS, and for my computer to boot up.

Another recen

Motorola spunoff (all|a large section) of their IC department and thus was born Freescale. They've been making CPU's for apple for decades.

IIRC, PowerPC was engineered to be backwards compatible with 68k. To preserve apple's software. The main dis-advantage of this is that you'd have to support the umpteen billion addressing modes.

There is a RISC'ified alternate side though: The ColdFire processors. They've been a uClinux target for a while.

However, whats truly notable is that the new MFC54xx series has a mmu. No need for uClinux, it runs real linux. Quite well i'd imaging: 133mhz DDR ram, 433 mhz, pci-interface, dual ethernet (100 mbit), usb and onboard crypto accelerator. All with a low advertised power consumption.

Still awaiting the Base Support Package. C'mon Metroworks.

Myren

On-going report with pictures over at LinuxDevices:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4827920836.htm
Lots of cool gagets and other "embedded" stuff running Linux! Now, where did I leave the darn Pitch Fork???

MS will use this in ads, and MS sales folks will mention this. "Telstra looked into Linux, and they saw MS is a better deal."

There will also be some kind of press release, with quotes in it like:

Mr. I. T. Director of Telstra says, "Microsoft's TCO was compelling, yada yada yada."

Probably MS will write the quotes for Telstra.

None of this is shocking or new. This isn't even the first time I have read a story like this on Slashdot, let alone the first time it has ever happened. (Remember when Home Depot announced they would go to Linux for their POS terminals? Remember when they announced they would go to MS?)

steveha

Actually, Sony, along with many electronics company from Japan, formed a Linux collaboration to do just that, fight against Microsoft. Here. Sony should be applauded on their move, as they are trying to promote Open Source, and more importantly, Linux, as Microsoft is continually trying to take-over all markets they tread into. People should be buying PS2 and PS3 to help Sony in this fight, so we can all have a brighter future without Microsoft's strong-arm business practices and Microsoft's lack of technological innovations.

I agreee, once more, I didn't even have to read the article to realize by the name that it would be a proprietary format.

For the amount of money that one has to shell out on something like this, it is just not worth it, there will not be enough content available to the reader to make it worth while.

When will Sony learn? When will they learn that while they are innovative, they ALWAYS have to re-invent the wheel

The ideal reader would be a simple embedded linux device with the ability to read any of todays formats giving the user some value! I, for one, chose the Progear.

We all know that there is a market out there willing to buy, I know that I am not the only one with 100's or more PDFs and other documents that I would like to have available. I understand the problem which is DRM. the technology is here that would enable a manufacturer to develop a product at a reasonable price with useful functionality.

The solution to this is not delivering a product in which their are immediate limitations with alternate/proprietary formats, or software that is necessary in order to convert documents, please!

The Linux Gateways, servers, AP link is the same link for Tablets and Webpads. This should be the proper link.

I knew gats didn't like linux, but to resort to violance, I didn't think he was even that low.

This comes on the same day Moto announces their new Linux/Java based A780 http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5382692917.html / phone. Motorola also announced today that a deal with Apple will bring an Apple-created version of iTunes software to "all" of Motorola's mass-market phones by mid-2005. How far are we really from having iTunes on our Linux boxen???

While it might not be fair these days, Wind River in the past have certainly issued their fair share of anti Linux FUD.

Certainly, when I was at Wind River, the prevailing attitude of the management at the time was that Linux was 'tainted' because of the GPL.

There used to be be a bunch of white papers on the Wind River web site by the then VP of Marketing, Curt Shacker - unfortunately they appear not to exist anymore, although some references to them exist to them from linuxdevices.com:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT9161119242. html

Do you mean MontaVista, LynuxWorks, Metroworks, or some other company?

Each company should be in charge of auditing, testing and validating its products. It should also be noted that embedded realtime Linux distributions are much smaller than regular desktop/server distributions. Most DOD systems aren't accessible over a network, so that type of vulnerability is largely not a problem.

BTW, this complaint from Dowd is old news - it first surfaced this spring. Not many are buying his argument, from what I can tell.

"I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this."

Here's a page that lists several such phones, in various stages of availability from Now to In-Development.

Re: the "Flash is evil" meme, well, I don't find it evil. I just like graphics formats (including creation tools) to have at least some free / open-source equivalent, so there's some chance of it being supported on all-free/Free platforms. Mileage obviously varies. If I could view Flash, and create (even if awkwardly) Flash presenations using all Free software, then I certainly wouldn't begrudge Macromedia making lots of money selling their source-secret versionto people who liked Macromedia's interface best. More power to you.

Flash can be used well or annoyingly, all up to the designer; it's a shame though that many sites rely on it at the expense of those who for various reasons don't want to need Flash.

(I could well be wrong; are there yet any working, Free tools for creating Flash presentations?)

timothy

This is why I'd like to have Lycoris on my PDA. Or, well, just any form of Linux. Slackware would be nice. =)

Actually, BMW traced the problem. Several memory leaks in WinCE were the cause of the majority of the problems. This has been a recurring problem with those who have used WinCE in their devices. It seems that WinCE is riddled with memory problems which crash the system. Its instability is one of the reasons why you don't see that many hardware manufacturers using WinCE and instead opting to use Linux.

Over on Linuxdevices there's a intresting article on ATA over Ethernet which a startup, called CoRaid has made a protocol for as well as, developed affordable hardware and submitted a driver to be included in linux.
This is poor mans SAN - the future looks bright for storage geeks ;-)