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T-Engine Enables Ubiquitous Computing
An anonymous reader writes "A Japanese-government sponsored research consortium that include five chip makers and 17 other Japanese high-tech firms, has announced that the T-Engine, a ubiquitous computing platform is ready for prime time. The engine is featured in a IEEE Computer Society article (PDF)
and discussed more on Windley's Technometria. The system is based on the iTron real-time OS and includes multiple boards for different applications."
So it's an embedded computing platform?
Ok, if I was a company [like say Motorola] and wanted to make some sort of portable device [say a cellphone perhaps?] I'd take a READILY AVAILABLE ARM core and drop the sucker into my design.
What really are they offering there other than perhaps a "standard" [though amongst ARM cores there are standards and they use well documented interfaces, etc...]
Is this just better because it's newer or?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I don't think they will be able to get everyone to hew to the party line; there will be too many economic reasons to deviate.
.. take any single Asian-produced cell phone, and at its heart you will find pieces of the i-tron initiative. it has already been proven in this space that there are far, far greater reasons to comply with the party line than to deviate. insta-deviation for the sake of it is anathema to the i-tron initiative; it is this very powerful fact that has resulted in such growth in the Asian core and embedded mfr. market in the first place.
..
umm
american electronics/semiconductor giants ridiculed i-tron, and its resulting policies, in the 80's, and Asia has been eating the carcass of former US' manufacturing prowess for lunch. if it weren't for i-tron, philosophically, we wouldn't be buying EUro 5,- MP3 players, made in Taiwan instead of Kansas, at the Aldi checkout lines
if you're a US comp-sci person, and you haven't boned up on i-tron, you've got some history lessons ahead of you. quick, before its too late.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I've been waiting for a system of this calibre to come along for quite a while. To me, the T-Engine specification, along with iTron, is a tool that can revolutionize how we look at our daily life. For some, it means that they may not have to worry about having to leave their PC to make coffee during a Gentoo install. This specification can and will change the way we look at how we view computers in our daily lives. This is the age of the computer, plain and simple. This system will make computers an even more important, and more critical part of our daily lives.
And they wonder why I left Windows.....
- A phisher sends a small worm to your stereo, the stereo asks the user to re-input the password on the DRM system, the phisher collects that password and uses it to re-sell all your music (possibly making you lose the right to listen to it). Even at $0.02/song and a 5,000 song collection, the phisher gets $100 per cracked stereo.
- Phishers attack one, low-level device hoping that the phished password from that device is also used on other, more important devices. How many people might use the same password on their stereo's DRM system, their refrigerator's automatic reordering system, their car's ignition system, or their bank's online account access?
- Spams starts arriving on ALL audio devices -- audio pop-ups ("audiups"?) start intruding on iPODs, VOIP phones, stereos. Worse, the infection could attack anything with a sound chip. Imagine suggestive Viagra ads coming from your pop-up toaster oven.
- A sleazy marketer buys access to or plants spyware in your vehicle's navigation system. You start getting pop-ups for oil-lube places or the database of locations of competitors becomes corrupted misleading the driver on their location.
- Digital cameras become spam-sending zombies. Anyone who walks within bluetooth range of you suddenly finds an image file on their device that contains an ad for whatever is the latest spam du jour.
- ...... I'm sure there are a million other scenarios, but its early and my coffee hasn't sunk in.
The point: Cool technology, but I wonder if the core OS has needed security layers to prevent exploits like these. I wonder if the systems designers have embedded a strong sense of permissions on processes and interfaces.Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Has anyone outside MITI actually done an objective comparison of TRON with any contemporary RISC? The examples I've seen are ludicrous... comparisons "proving" that TRON is faster than RISC by comparing individual highly specialised TRON instructions with a straightforward unoptimized translation of the same code to an unspecified RISC processor. They don't even do any common subexpression elimination... who would write code like this? http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/tronvlsicpu.html
I can remember when the cool parts of TRON were still going -- the bTRON desktop, which had its own hyper-ergonomic keyboard with about eight shift keys, and the TRON charset which included Unicode and Mojikyou, so you could actually have a fair shot at representing old Asian texts on a computer without using image files for the characters.
Now, only the embedded iTRON part of the project is left. And it's been very successful -- I think at one point it was the most-used OS in the world, although to someone from a Linux/standard C background it seems kind of weird. But there's seriously no news here -- T-Engine is the attempt of the TRON project to remain relevant now that hardware can run embedded Linux or Windows or Symbian and what have you, and it's too little too late.
TRON rocked once, and for industrial robot arm controllers and what have you maybe it still does, but it's never going to break into the IT world now.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It's an academic boondoggle that has enough support to keep it alive, but not enough to actually keep it up to date. Implementations of it, like T-engine, feel like circa 1990 era SDKs, particularly if you want to write actual user applications (you know, if you have a job) rather than low level drivers. For the most glaring example, there is no way (in the SDK that I have, at least) for process-based user applications to write to the screen. None. Yes, I'm serious. The one example in the SDK that attempts to do so fails (correctly) with an access violation. You actually have to write a custom screen driver if you want to allow your application to access the screen buffer. T-Engine is fussy, confusingly documented, and basically just unpleasant to use compared to modern application platforms like Symbian, BREW or J2ME. I don't exactly see device manufacturers abandoning ARM chipsets and OSes in droves either. This is just another joke announcement about a toy OS designed for HelloWorld level projects.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Ken Sakamura's a bit of a nutcase -- he always had this idea (common in Japan at the time, but wrong) that Unicode was some kind of conspiracy to take away Japanese identity and make everyone use a sinister Sino-American character set. So most Japanese computing initiatives have tended to avoid Unicode, and TRON insisted on seeing Unicode as just one charset among many, all mapped into a 'meta character set' space.
Thus when you say 'A' in TRON, you have to specify whether it's a Unicode 'A', a Mojikyou 'A', or some other 'A'. I am simplifying a bit.
In practise, ironically, everyone uses Shift-JIS, which really IS a sinister American conspiracy
Sakamura used to have a web page containing the most extraordinary rant about Unicode, with A LOT of factual errors, which was quite interesting for those wanting to see how certain very reactionary parts of the Japanese business community think. It wasn't exactly a good advert for TRON, though!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.