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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."
It's the return of the Model T engine!
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.
"With any luck your 2007 Toyota Camry and your Mitsubishi food processor will be exchanging recipes in the not too distant future."
I'd prefer my car stick to driving, thank you.
is futile; all your devices will be assimilated!!
Standards Conformance usually gets cut when doing embedded development if conformance ruins the cost of components or power the device requires.
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.
Otherwise, sounds neat.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The article states that MontaVista has ported its real-time version of Linux to run on the T-Engine. Additionally, Windows CE and Java have also been ported. However, running these systems on the T-Engine is known as running 'guest operating systems', which is a fancy word for 'translated operating sytems'.
"TRON, ITRON, and ITRON do not refer to any specific product or products."
This is from the official TRON website.
So now... how are they going to sell something based on nothing.
I too can build and sell the top-notch-most-powerfull stuff ever built.. and I won't be selling it cheap.. oh, of course this would only be theory-reselling.
I've seen nowhere in TFA that this techno is actually going to be used. Bu anyway, if it's gonna be.. maybe we should all beware of the Attach of the Killer Tomatoes which will seek revenge because the fridge just said they were out of date ^^
I think I used to date this guy...
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
As always, the TRON Web is the most valuable source of infomation on the TRON project in English.
You can find some good articles on the T-Engine platform here.
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.....
Oh well, dream on...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
- 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.
what, you actually read the article?
Blasphemy!
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
This diagram on this page shows in general terms how they're addressing this.
Although it will be tough to get the T-Engine out of the Hive...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
I used to work at Hitachi America so I know about TRON/iTRON/microITRON/etc. It's this weird, baroque API that's non-POSIX and not standard C library compatible. Kind of like an extreme example of Not-Invented-Here syndrome. For some reason Hitachi Japan thought everyone wanted it without realizing that nobody outside Japan cared about it. We kinda tried to humor them..."sure, we will distribute microITRON if customers ask for it".
And only because of the T-Name. Deutsche Telekom "T-Com" (german previously state-owned telecom company) will most likely sue them.
Hopefully they don't use magenta in their official announcement. :-)
(Caution, links in german language)You and the anonymous coward ubergeek who replied to this need to settle this once and for all.
Benchmark Quake on these for a DEFINATIVE answer as to the superior machine.
Stupid geek techno babble doesn't impress the ladies as much as a good frag!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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.
You may be more interested about a related project, ubiquitious id also by Ken Sakamura, at the uID Center.
check here: http://www2.t-engine.org/bbs/
Now it is in Japanese. English and Chinese version will be available in future.
Looks like a lot (300+) of companies have shelled out at least a 100k yen ($900) to join the industry consortium:
http://www.t-engine.org/english/member.html
I know what the word Ubiquitous means.
I know what the word Computing means.
But what does it mean when you put them together?
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.
Why do you ascribe this write-once, run anywhere stuff to Java? Look up the UCSD P-System. It used p-code (pseudo code) that was interpreted on multiple platforms. There was a UCSD Pascal released for the Apple in 1979 or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_P-system
So I think you are off-based on the idea that the US had to match the Japanese on this front and that the Japanese and iTron created it.
I know several Taiwanese who would take umbrage and your insinuation that the Japanese created their foundries. It's as if you think all other countries in the Orient are subservient to Japan...
ARM isn't an open core. ARM has been known to sue companies that implement their instruction set.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000228S0007
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I've seen the various TRON project technologies / OS' mentioned a few times around here ... Apparently there's even a commercial closed-source desktop OS based on it ...
Since we've got a topic for Be (which seems to be sorely lacking in Haiku / Zeta updates) , I think that this OS might merit one...
(Or perhaps an "alternative OS" category?)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Um, if you wnat to create a GUI application on the T-Engine platform, you are supposed to use middleware programs such as PMC T-Shell Development Kit (screenshot in PDF) that runs on top of T-Kernel. This development kit is a direct descendant of the BTRON operating system and still rather primitive, but the situation is not as bad as you portrayed it to be in your post.
Hmmm. BeOS seems to have an interesting file system and GUI, but the OS underneath is a bit language-specific and hoggy for my taste. How about implementing BeFS and the BeOS GUI on top of TRON? You could call it "Beatron" and finally have an OS that's got enough pop-culture references to achieve a kind of pop-Zen perfection and eliminate Microsoft.
I'll agree with you that Shift-JIS is a sinister American conspiracy.
I'll agree that much of what has been said in Asia about Unicode is mis-informed.
I'll agree in principle that, if Unicode is not the solution, Mojikyou is definitely not the solution.
But if you look at the history of Unicode, you can understand what caused the doubts and why the doubts, resentment, and resistance linger.
16 bits? Some people still think Unicode is 16 bits. Yes, the Japanese equivalent of an unabridged overflows 16 bits, and trying to fold characters together breaks semantics.
Ten years ago, most of the Unicode Consortium still did not get that. Even now, there are a few holdouts who think that a little clever folding characters together could have solved things.
Folding two Chinese character sets together with Japanese Han and Korean Han? If Cyrillic A and Greek A and English A are all distinct code points in their own language sequences, why did those westerners think Chinese and Japanese should be folded together?
And why did those didn't those westerners understand that fixing the set of Han ideographs was a bit like fixing the set of English root words?
In a very real sense, Unicode is just the old JIS encoding re-arranged and extended to force it to cover things the Japanese printing industry figured were best left until better ways of encoding could be invented.
Sakamura and others may have non-western points of view, and I don't agree with them on everything, but they are not a nut cases. Their points need to be understood by westerners who work with Asian language information encoding.
We only differ in our interpretations of just how bad that makes the situation. Seriously, life's too short - and there are too many well featured alternative platforms - to deal with that kind of insanity.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I used to say just what you are saying. In fact, I used to go round going "But don't you see, character X and character Y are seen as TWO SEPERATE CHARACTERS! You can't force people to use one!". And of course it's true that Han unification is a difficult job that can never be done perfectly.
But, it's a difficult job that Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean representatives were all able to see the need and true meaning of, and co-operate to do it well. The Japanese input into the discussion was clouded by their internal politics (the 'let's all speak Esperanto and ban kanji!' brigade versus the 'bring back Yukio Mishima!' brigade) and by bureaucratic inertia.
I actually did quite a lot of research into this sad bit of computing history, and the more I learned the more I realized that Western insensitivity hadn't been the real problem. I summarized the results here:
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
(It's kind of aimed at people without much background knowledge. It also contains mistakes and simplifications.)
Sakamura is a special case, though -- I think his disregard for facts in favor of nationalistic grandstanding (and I don't just mean Unicode, although it's a good example) do indeed justify the term 'nutcase'. The fact that people like him formed a significant part of Japan's outward-facing IT organization is regrettable... but the MOF is still worse overall
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
A quick scan didn't turn up any serious errors, but I didn't have time to dig and compare.
You do have some typos, and one paragraph shows signs of having been eaten by something. And I did notice that you let a desire to debunk get in the way in a couple of places.
In response about Sakamura and the tendency for Japan's society to be too inward facing, it's representative of the entire core issue of internationalization. They may be wrong in many points of fact, but they are right to insist on their right to be wrong.
If internationalization tries to force people and countries to be right, just how far has our so-called modern society advanced from the Crusades?
I think you're putting too much faith on academia.
Every job one does, one has a responsibility to do one's best. Schooling effects so many people that responsibility is a heavier weight than on, say, someone taking tickets at the local theater.
But the weight of responsibility doesn't somehow magically overcome the fundamental nature of humans to be less than perfect, and even less than ideal.
Now that I have you distracted with a red herring, let me ask you -- How do you know that Sakamura is not right?
For all that you have a fair amount of experience in things Asian, it appears to me that you are operating under the assumption that globalism is not evil. How do you know that is the case? And if it is not the case, can you really argue that Sakamura's position is incorrect, or that the non-optimal current situation is worse than the alternative?
For instance, from my point of view, since I can guess that my children are going to be wanting to record their genealogy on computers, being able to use the ancient kanji is much more important than being able to use the texting smileys.
But we need an encoding that can handle both.
Jew-Driven, Shmoo-Driven. I think that part of your comment is inappropriate, Adolf.
You're right about the T-Shirts, though.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
I am showing how American nationalism is all I care about.
Facts are facts, and errors are errors. It is an error to say that iTron created write-once-run-anywhere, and that Java is an attempt to catch up.
It's that simple.
If you want to read that as nationalism, then fine. That's your biases getting in the way.
I merely corrected a factual error and thus questioned the conclusions drawn, since they no longer have a firm factual foundation.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Actually, I'm not entirely sure if it's "translated" cos I'm not 100% sure of the definition of that.
:)
:) I don't think this is a translated OS, but I may be wrong..
The work was done in conjunction with Montavista and Microsoft (separate projects, of course) to get T-Linux and T-Windows working. I saw the demos at the TRON Show in December in Tokyo. As I understood it, in both cases, the original application runs on the original kernel (Linux/ Windows).
If I remember correctly, in case of Windows at least, both kernels run in the system - and hard real-time work was done by T-Kernel (video decoding) and the rest of the work (UI, etc.) was done by Windows.
I wish I could find the literature that I had picked up! Would be able to give you more details.
Anyway, it was interesting to see a Microsoft booth at the TRON show - and to hear the message that T-Engine & Windows CE were complementary technologies and how Windows could run with the T-Kernel to deliver much better performance.
According to what I had heard, Windows CE.net 5.0 (at least the Japanese version) is supposed to include support for running with the T-Kernel... but, not sure if they will deliver.
To get an idea of how windows + t-kernel work, take a look at http://www.esol.co.jp/embedded/twister.html
The page is in Japanese, but the pictures are in English
I think the readers following this particular sub-thread may benefit from looking at "CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing" By Ken Lunde (First Edition January 1999 ) ISBN: 1-56592-224-7 1128 pages, $69.95 US, $108.95 CA, £49.95 UK from O'Reilly.
This book illustrates the basic issues that people handling these languages on computers. Unicode "problems" are discussed as well.
TRON character code set is also explained therein.
I am not sure what pages of Sakamura"s are referred to here, but they sure don't sound like quite right.
See the following URL for Toyota's GBOOK-compatible navigation system:
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/special/gbook/index.htm l