Dang! I wrote this during a meeting in a bit of a hurry. This will teach me to not screw up cut-n-paste. I sure brought the spelling police out in force. Here is a correctly spelled and edited version.
I have no idea why this made the news. The article says he is "a" principle
development manager, not "the" principle development manager. he most
certainly is not an executive. There are many “Principle Development
managers” at Microsoft. How this departure became news is a mystery.
Microsoft is a big company – people come and go all the time.
"Principle" is a job title. The individual contributor levels go like
this for software devleopers:
Intern (not really a rank but part of the general idea)
Software Developer (lowest rank)
Software Developer -II
Senior Software Developer
Principle Software Developer
Partner Software Developer
Distinguished Engineer
Fellow
Managers go like this
"Lead" - manager of individual contributors. Almost always
senior or principle level.
"Manger" means manager manager of leads. Always principle or
better.
"Director" manager of manager of managers. Always principle
or better – usually partner.
Vice President (rougly equivlent to distinguished eigineer)
Senior Vice President (like Jon DeVaan)
President (like Stephen Sinofsky)
Ballmer (known to Slashdotters as Cheif Chair Thrower in Charge)
For several years, I was "a" Principle Development Manager in Windows. I am
now a principle lead because there was a specific team I wanted to be a part of.
It certainly wouldnt be news worthy if I left Microsoft.
I have no idea why this made the news. The artcile says he is "a"
principle development manger, not "the" principle development manger.
"Principle" is a job title:
Software Devleopers (lowest rank)
Software Devloper -II
Senior Software Developers
Principle Software Developers
Partner Software Developers
Distinguished Engineer
Fellow
Mangers go like this
"Lead" - manger of individual contributes
"Manger" manger of mangers
"Director" manger of manager of managers
VP
For several years, I was "a" princpiple development manger in Windows.
Im now a principle lead becuase there was a specific team I wanted to be a part
of. If I leaft, it would be news.
Actually, the product teams and research teams often work together - regularly and very deliberately. Many developers have moved between the research and product groups. There are many features in Office, Windows, Bing and other products that came right out of MS Research. In my experience, we're really good at this.
Dude, what are you talking about? We make money of our own software. Your "Gee Mr. Coder" statements make it sound that you think we should sell stuff for competing platforms. Really? You gotta be kidding.
Are you insulating that isnt fair? Really? How is it not fair? Are
there not other places than a Microsoft sponsored store where FOSS folks can get
their stuff to users? Your "Mr. Coder" has lots of ways to get his
software to users. Its like your saying Mr. Coder needs
Microsoft....
That being said, why would we sell or provide Linux or other office products
in our store? That would be the store that we paid a
gazillion dollars to build - in terms of both hardware and software. Do you
have any material reason other than "Microsoft is bad".
Come on Mr. open source Linux guy - get off your duff and go build the be-all-end-all FOSS app store that can beat Apple and soon Microsoft at our own games. Really, knock your self out.
Do you best. I can safely speak for Apple as well - we welcome the
competition.
Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public
cloud. But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all
be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by
saying
"Dont go private! We can provid you with cloud services more effecitcly,
just as securetly, at better scale, and for less costs than you can do it
yourselves!".
They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.
Moreover, Microsoft will complete directly with Canonical here.
Going head to head with Microsoft in an established market is often (not always)
very difficult to do profitably. Weve made it very clear that we are going for
the brass ring with both cloud services and cloud products.
Im not at all suggesting they will fail - bit it will be a tough slog for
them - they will continue to set fire to money the whole road to profitability
(if they ever get there). Its intersting that Canonical chose this
space to compete profitably. The ROI seems very low here...
Lots of people like to claim that "Free is a business model". In
one sense I agree: Giving away some things for free so you can make money other
ways can work. But free by itself is not a business model.
This is what Canonical has decided. After 5 years of trying to be
successful in giving a way a free client operating system, they have decided to
stop lighting money on fire and do something to make a profit.
"For the first five years of the companys life, it wasnt set up to make
money," Asay said. "The company was set up to make a fantastic Linux
distribution and other tools around it and get it out there and get people
using it. That was the focus."
Thats now changing at Canonical as the emphasis is now shifting to
generating revenues.
"Weve achieved a significant amount of traction within an important
constituency -- that is the developers and system administrators of the
world," Asay said. "As we build tools that appeal to them I think they will
pay us money."
TThe cynic in me - or as some would likely claim, the Microsoftie in me - sees
that their path for the last five years has been a failure. They
produced a client OS that is considered one of the best Linux client
distributions. But beyond that - no success.
I suggest they will not be very successful here: For cloud computing -
the value is not in the operating system itself, but in the cloud systems
ability to scale economically: keeping operational costs super low.
It will be difficult for them to compete with Microsoft. We really do
know how to run massive data centers at scale. More over, we eat our own
dogfood and have a world class team of developers building our cloud products.
Just how is canonical going to get this experience? They are very unlikely
to go build a big data center.
They also will be competing with Google, IBM and Amazon (among others).
These guys dont sell software with which to build a could, but they sell cloud
services.
My predictions have nothing to do with the goodness of Linux - it is a
very good OS and the people that build it are every bit as good as people at
Microsoft, Google, Sun, Oracle and others. The challenges Canonical faces are operational, and business related.
Larry is the CEO of a public company. Save as Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer and Samuel J. Palmisano.
Complaining that all these guys think about is money, money, money and NOTHING else is like complaining that all a tiger things about is meat.
I appreciate open source -
really I do. (but I dont like RMS and his ilk). But
really, just stop complaining that companies are evil or bad becuase they are
working to make a profit. Thats the entire purpose of corporations.
That motive will always win out.
Companies can do things that are good. The big ones employ lots of
people: providing jobs is a good thing. Many companies pay tons of taxes.
Some companies give away large amounts of Money to charity. Did you know
that Microsoft matches every single dollar up to $12K that employees give?
Microsoft has given away well over a billion dollars this way.
So stop, just stop complaining that making a profit is evil.
I dont know how you make a living, but odds are its from a company, a person,
or even your own self making a profit.
FOSS is awesome, but its simply a business model - its not a righteous cause
or the answer to some evil or injustice. Its just not. FOSS
proponents are using one of the most powerful capitalistic tools - giving stuff
away for free to sell services. Its a business: its a bit
different than Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.
Most open source is developed by people working on it full time. They
must be paid. That money must come from somewhere - it just doesnt come
from selling software as a product.
Regarding the open source code Oracle now owns after buying the failed Sun:
Its Oracles - they can legally and morally do what every they want with it.
You have zero room to complain...
Why are you complaining about this? Its open source right? Cant
you just get the code, compile it and ship it? Isnt that was one of the big
benefits of open source? Nobody can keep it from you - you can just fix
any-ole bug, change it, add value to it, and ship it your self... right?
What are you waiting for?
This question is ask as if Java is somehow imporant in and of itself.
It isnt. Neither is perl, or PHP, Phython or gasp - C++ or even C.
Throw C#, F# and VB into that group as well.
These are tools. We (as in devleopers) should simply use the
right tool for the job. If thats Java - then okey-dokey.
If its C#, then groovy, if its C++ then thats ok to. Hey, I still use
assembly language for a few things.
Do real engineering work folks! Pick the right tools for
the job based on the business and technical requirements.
Yes - it takes about two years (or more) to go from a white board to first silicon. Until I worked at Microsoft, I worked at hardware and silicon companies. But remember, the competition to Intel, AMD and NVIDIA will be other silicon companies - not software companies. The new compitetion will have the same constraints. This is also a small industry - its very difficult to do someting both major and new in secret. When I was at AMD, we knew about Transmeta's plans when they were still in stealth mode. It wasn't because of anything nefarious - the community is small and leaky.
-Foredecker
The intial
Larrabee product was canceled. Intel had to re-trench on the graphics
plans. Again. They are a smart company, but they have
struggled to get off the ground in the graphics area. Im assuming
they will someday be successful. But today isnt that day.
That is what Transmeta thought. Intel proved more agile than they predicted. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can move faster than people think. i suggest that it is their market to loose, not others to win.
-Foredecker
...Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else
out of business?
NNote, the post is a good one - Im not being critical. But change
in the tech industry rarely result in big companies going out of business - if
they do, it takes a long time. I think sun is the canonical example here.
It took a long time for them to die - even after many, many missteps.
Sun faded away not because of competition or some gaming changing technology,
but simply because they made bad (or some would say awful) decisions.
Same for Transmeta.
People have been predicting the death of this or that forever.
As you might imaging, my favorite one is predicting Microsofts death.
Thats being going on for a long, long time. The last I checked, we are
still quite healthy.
Personally, I dont see Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA ding any time soon.
Note, AMD came close this last year, but they have had several near death
experiences over the years. (I worked there for several years...).
Intel, AMD and NVIDIA fundamental business is turning sand into money.
This was a famous quote by Jerry Sanders the found of AMD. Im
paraphrasing, but it was long the idea at AMD that it didnt matter what came
out of the fabs as long as the fabs were busy. Even though AMD and
NVIDIA no longer own fabs, this is still their business model (more or less).
I think its interesting how a couple of posters have talked about ARM -
remember, AMD and NVIDIA can jump on the ARM bandwagon at any time. Intel
already is an ARM licensee. Like AMD, they are in the business of turning
sand into money - they can and will change their manufacturing mix to maintain
profitability.
I also dont see the GPU going away either. GPUs are freakishly good
at what they do. By good - I mean better than anything else.
Intel flubbed it badly with Larabee. A general purpose core simply
isnt going to do what very carefully designed silicon can do.
This has been proven time and time again.
Domain specific silicon will always be cheaper, better performing and more
power efficient in most areas than a general purpose gizmo. Note,
this doesnt mean I dislike general purpose gizmos (like processors) - I believe
that the best system designs have a mix of both - suited to the purpose at hand.
There is actualy an old protocol (Cannot find the RFC) for ad hoc IP address assgiment. There is also universal plug and play. Both would work just fine here. Two devices could also simply communite with a simple protocol righ ton top of the MAC layer. Like many other things, people were doing this stuff 15 years ago.
Not much really - it only takes a very minimal stack to do simple things like TFTP or Telnet. Back in the mid 90's We used do to do this on '186 class stems in a few k of code. Its also easy to do a very simple low level UDP based thing - that that would be a bit proprietary.
I agree that serial ports are useful. What I'm suggesting is that the best alternative is Ethernet, not USB.
I understand what you are saying: RS232 ports suck for any number of
reasons.
But there are a few why it is still often used.
First, it has been ubiquitous for 20 to 30 years. When I started
my first development job in 1982 - everything talked to everything else via
RS-232. Back then 9600 baud was considered fast. At 8 bits per
character with no parity and one stop bit, 9600 baud could paint a screen with
characters in one second. Yes, we thought that was fast.
Things got better as baud rates improved - but RS-232 remained everywhere - it
was the one constant universal interface. Even though it is incredible
antiqued, it is still in many PCs.
Second, RS-232 (and its many cousins like RS-422) are very, very easy to use
in software. The simplest I/O can be done in a few lines of code.
Its easy to put RS-232 code right in firmware. This makes it easy to write
bootstrapers, boot consoles, debug consoles etc.
USB would be a poor choice for a replacement. The reason is that it
isnt peer to peer - it is a master/slave architecture. There is always
one master -usually a PC, and one or more slaves (keyboards, mice,
printers, scanners, cable modems, disk drives, storage keys, cameras etc).
LLike a few other posters have said - USB is much more complex to use in
software than simple RS-232. Ive written code for it and I find it more
complex than Ethernet at the MAC level.
I think Ethernet is the real replacement. A little TFT or Telnet
server / client is really trivial to write. This can (and often has been done)
in firmware. For example, most (all?) home Ethernet and
wireless routers dont have a serial port. Their management is over
Ethernet - works great.
Yes - it is pretty cool. I think that Linux is well suited to the embedded space. Windows is not designed for this. Windows CE was at one time, but the focus on mobile phones took the team away from that market. To be honest, Windows CE was never a very good embedded OS.
We do have a Windows Embedded product - but it is meant more for stripped down PC applications like kiosks, point of sale termianls and non real time industrial control applcations. Windows was not at all desigined to be a real time OS
I accidentally washed my VX9000. After washing,I took the cover off and took out the battery then put it in a heated blanket for a couple of days. It work up and worked fine for about two months. Then it died a horrible death.
Ok, so that is interesting, but only just... This isnt
desktop Linux so Im not sure why you are saying "eat that".
The OS is DMAed directly into system memory. Ok, thats kind of
spiffy. That means its been "pre-loaded" which is already located.
Let me put this in perspective. Back in the mid 90s I worked at AMD.
On the
ÉlanSC520 system on a chip (133mhz 486 class):
Booting of Windows CE, QNX, Psos, VXworks and other real time operating
systems to a running state (like these guys) was measured in 100s of
milliseconds.
Even better, the SC520 supported Execute in Place (XIP) - FLASH was
directly conntected and had a controlerl off the CPUs cache - it was fast.
This let the OS and applicatoins run right out of flash from reset - no "booting" at all.
Systems could easily initialize in 10s of MS and be fully running - with
graphics in a few 100ms. This included a running network stack. Pretty spiffy for the old school.
There was a company that was doing this with an early version of Linux
back then too. Their company name started with an R - but I cannot
remember the rest. I think someone bought them. This was fast too.
So, this really isnt that spectacular - cool yes, ground breaking no.
I think that is a salient comment. One of the reasons Ive chosen to
participate here on Slashdot is to be an
apologist for
Microsoft people specifically, and for the company to an extent.
Two things bug me the most
When people just make stuff up about Microsoft. As a
company, we certainly deserve criticism, but wow, some people sure make up
some goofy stuff. I ask people to criticize all they
like, just dont make stuff up.
A certain class of people say really nasty personal things about people
that work at Microsoft. This is really uncalled for and needs to be
stood up to. These people are simply bullies. Its worse when
they are anonymous. To those folks I say
this.
IIm still learning about the best way to post here on Slashdot. But I
hope Im having some positive effect. I think your comment above is a good
result.
I cannot disagree that our senior execs have made some bad decisions.
It happens. I also agree that we collectively stumbled in shipping
Vista. It wasnt our best work. While you may not see
it, there were many significant repercussions in the Windows organization due to
this. Windows-7 was the result.
One thing I find interesting is they visceral dislike that many in the FOSS
community have for Microsoft people and products. I can tell you
this - it is not reciprocal at all, not even with our senior execs. Yes,
Ballmer has made some famous quotes about the GPL, but notice hes talking about
even this from a business perspective. I can honestly say that among
Microsoft people there is very widespread respect for Linux, Apache, Perl,
MySQL, and many other open source projects. Many softies also
consider the idea of free and open software a noble purpose. I do.
Ill tell you another thing: We learn a lot from FOSS projects and the
open source approach. While being open isnt the right thing for many of
our products and businesses, it is for some and I think youll see more of this
over time (I say this with no insider knowledge except for my projects).
For example, Im a proponent of making the source of my next major project open.
There is broad agreement and support to do so. It really is a no brainer.
What I find almost fascinating , is that the FOSS community doesnt seem to
learn from Microsoft. [ pre-emptive snarky comment "We learn what
not to do..." ]. We do a lot of things very, very well.
Despite some obvious exceptions, our senior execs are very good. Ive
worked at several big companies that were (and remain) very poorly run.
I suggest that if some people in the FOSS community spent as much energy
focusing on delivering great products instead of focusing on beating Microsoft
then they might be more successful. Microsoft is not in the list
tiny little bit afraid of competition. We have lots of it.
Personally, I think it makes us better. We compete by focusing on
delivering great products that our customers like. While we pay attention
to our competition, we dont spend a lot of time talking about how to beat it.
Our strategy is to focus on what customers need first. Sometimes we screw
up (like with Vista), but more often than not, we succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang! I wrote this during a meeting in a bit of a hurry. This will teach me to not screw up cut-n-paste. I sure brought the spelling police out in force. Here is a correctly spelled and edited version.
I have no idea why this made the news. The article says he is "a" principle development manager, not "the" principle development manager. he most certainly is not an executive. There are many “Principle Development managers” at Microsoft. How this departure became news is a mystery. Microsoft is a big company – people come and go all the time.
"Principle" is a job title. The individual contributor levels go like this for software devleopers:
Managers go like this
For several years, I was "a" Principle Development Manager in Windows. I am now a principle lead because there was a specific team I wanted to be a part of. It certainly wouldnt be news worthy if I left Microsoft.
-foredecker
I have no idea why this made the news. The artcile says he is "a" principle development manger, not "the" principle development manger.
"Principle" is a job title:
Mangers go like this
For several years, I was "a" princpiple development manger in Windows. Im now a principle lead becuase there was a specific team I wanted to be a part of. If I leaft, it would be news.
-foredecker
Actually, the product teams and research teams often work together - regularly and very deliberately. Many developers have moved between the research and product groups. There are many features in Office, Windows, Bing and other products that came right out of MS Research. In my experience, we're really good at this.
-Foredecker
Dude, what are you talking about? We make money of our own software. Your "Gee Mr. Coder" statements make it sound that you think we should sell stuff for competing platforms. Really? You gotta be kidding. Are you insulating that isnt fair? Really? How is it not fair? Are there not other places than a Microsoft sponsored store where FOSS folks can get their stuff to users? Your "Mr. Coder" has lots of ways to get his software to users. Its like your saying Mr. Coder needs Microsoft....
That being said, why would we sell or provide Linux or other office products in our store? That would be the store that we paid a gazillion dollars to build - in terms of both hardware and software. Do you have any material reason other than "Microsoft is bad".
Come on Mr. open source Linux guy - get off your duff and go build the be-all-end-all FOSS app store that can beat Apple and soon Microsoft at our own games. Really, knock your self out. Do you best. I can safely speak for Apple as well - we welcome the competition.
I've participated in a few industry wide organizations like this. They can be somewhat effective, but even then, they move very, very slowly.
That's an interesting perspecive - we'll see how it plays out.
Best Regards -Foredecker
Sure - if the first order criteria is going to a private cloud from a public cloud. But cost, reliability, features, operations (and likely others) will all be factors here. All the public cloud providers will compete with Canonical by saying
They may not always be right - but that is how they will complete.
Moreover, Microsoft will complete directly with Canonical here. Going head to head with Microsoft in an established market is often (not always) very difficult to do profitably. Weve made it very clear that we are going for the brass ring with both cloud services and cloud products.
Im not at all suggesting they will fail - bit it will be a tough slog for them - they will continue to set fire to money the whole road to profitability (if they ever get there). Its intersting that Canonical chose this space to compete profitably. The ROI seems very low here...
-Foredecker
Lots of people like to claim that "Free is a business model". In one sense I agree: Giving away some things for free so you can make money other ways can work. But free by itself is not a business model.
This is what Canonical has decided. After 5 years of trying to be successful in giving a way a free client operating system, they have decided to stop lighting money on fire and do something to make a profit.
I love this quote from the article:
TThe cynic in me - or as some would likely claim, the Microsoftie in me - sees that their path for the last five years has been a failure. They produced a client OS that is considered one of the best Linux client distributions. But beyond that - no success.
I suggest they will not be very successful here: For cloud computing - the value is not in the operating system itself, but in the cloud systems ability to scale economically: keeping operational costs super low.
It will be difficult for them to compete with Microsoft. We really do know how to run massive data centers at scale. More over, we eat our own dogfood and have a world class team of developers building our cloud products. Just how is canonical going to get this experience? They are very unlikely to go build a big data center.
They also will be competing with Google, IBM and Amazon (among others). These guys dont sell software with which to build a could, but they sell cloud services.
My predictions have nothing to do with the goodness of Linux - it is a very good OS and the people that build it are every bit as good as people at Microsoft, Google, Sun, Oracle and others. The challenges Canonical faces are operational, and business related.
Larry is the CEO of a public company. Save as Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer and Samuel J. Palmisano.
Complaining that all these guys think about is money, money, money and NOTHING else is like complaining that all a tiger things about is meat.
I appreciate open source - really I do. (but I dont like RMS and his ilk). But really, just stop complaining that companies are evil or bad becuase they are working to make a profit. Thats the entire purpose of corporations. That motive will always win out.
Companies can do things that are good. The big ones employ lots of people: providing jobs is a good thing. Many companies pay tons of taxes. Some companies give away large amounts of Money to charity. Did you know that Microsoft matches every single dollar up to $12K that employees give? Microsoft has given away well over a billion dollars this way.
So stop, just stop complaining that making a profit is evil. I dont know how you make a living, but odds are its from a company, a person, or even your own self making a profit.
FOSS is awesome, but its simply a business model - its not a righteous cause or the answer to some evil or injustice. Its just not. FOSS proponents are using one of the most powerful capitalistic tools - giving stuff away for free to sell services. Its a business: its a bit different than Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.
Most open source is developed by people working on it full time. They must be paid. That money must come from somewhere - it just doesnt come from selling software as a product.
Regarding the open source code Oracle now owns after buying the failed Sun: Its Oracles - they can legally and morally do what every they want with it. You have zero room to complain...
Why are you complaining about this? Its open source right? Cant you just get the code, compile it and ship it? Isnt that was one of the big benefits of open source? Nobody can keep it from you - you can just fix any-ole bug, change it, add value to it, and ship it your self... right? What are you waiting for?
This question is ask as if Java is somehow imporant in and of itself. It isnt. Neither is perl, or PHP, Phython or gasp - C++ or even C. Throw C#, F# and VB into that group as well.
These are tools. We (as in devleopers) should simply use the right tool for the job. If thats Java - then okey-dokey. If its C#, then groovy, if its C++ then thats ok to. Hey, I still use assembly language for a few things.
Do real engineering work folks! Pick the right tools for the job based on the business and technical requirements.
-Foredecker
Right! I had momentarily forgotten. That just leaves AMD.
Yes - it takes about two years (or more) to go from a white board to first silicon. Until I worked at Microsoft, I worked at hardware and silicon companies. But remember, the competition to Intel, AMD and NVIDIA will be other silicon companies - not software companies. The new compitetion will have the same constraints. This is also a small industry - its very difficult to do someting both major and new in secret. When I was at AMD, we knew about Transmeta's plans when they were still in stealth mode. It wasn't because of anything nefarious - the community is small and leaky. -Foredecker
The intial Larrabee product was canceled. Intel had to re-trench on the graphics plans. Again. They are a smart company, but they have struggled to get off the ground in the graphics area. Im assuming they will someday be successful. But today isnt that day.
-Foredecker
That is what Transmeta thought. Intel proved more agile than they predicted. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA can move faster than people think. i suggest that it is their market to loose, not others to win. -Foredecker
You can always spot a sensationalist post when part of it predicts or asks who will go out of business. Or what thing will disappear.
For example, in his post, ScuttleMonkey asks this:
NNote, the post is a good one - Im not being critical. But change in the tech industry rarely result in big companies going out of business - if they do, it takes a long time. I think sun is the canonical example here. It took a long time for them to die - even after many, many missteps. Sun faded away not because of competition or some gaming changing technology, but simply because they made bad (or some would say awful) decisions. Same for Transmeta.
People have been predicting the death of this or that forever. As you might imaging, my favorite one is predicting Microsofts death. Thats being going on for a long, long time. The last I checked, we are still quite healthy.
Personally, I dont see Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA ding any time soon. Note, AMD came close this last year, but they have had several near death experiences over the years. (I worked there for several years...).
Intel, AMD and NVIDIA fundamental business is turning sand into money. This was a famous quote by Jerry Sanders the found of AMD. Im paraphrasing, but it was long the idea at AMD that it didnt matter what came out of the fabs as long as the fabs were busy. Even though AMD and NVIDIA no longer own fabs, this is still their business model (more or less).
I think its interesting how a couple of posters have talked about ARM - remember, AMD and NVIDIA can jump on the ARM bandwagon at any time. Intel already is an ARM licensee. Like AMD, they are in the business of turning sand into money - they can and will change their manufacturing mix to maintain profitability.
I also dont see the GPU going away either. GPUs are freakishly good at what they do. By good - I mean better than anything else. Intel flubbed it badly with Larabee. A general purpose core simply isnt going to do what very carefully designed silicon can do. This has been proven time and time again.
Domain specific silicon will always be cheaper, better performing and more power efficient in most areas than a general purpose gizmo. Note, this doesnt mean I dislike general purpose gizmos (like processors) - I believe that the best system designs have a mix of both - suited to the purpose at hand.
-Foredecker
Of course - but they are usually not "pinned out" on comerical devices. I've had a pile of these gizmos and only one had a RS232 port.
There is actualy an old protocol (Cannot find the RFC) for ad hoc IP address assgiment. There is also universal plug and play. Both would work just fine here. Two devices could also simply communite with a simple protocol righ ton top of the MAC layer. Like many other things, people were doing this stuff 15 years ago.
Not much really - it only takes a very minimal stack to do simple things like TFTP or Telnet. Back in the mid 90's We used do to do this on '186 class stems in a few k of code. Its also easy to do a very simple low level UDP based thing - that that would be a bit proprietary.
I agree that serial ports are useful. What I'm suggesting is that the best alternative is Ethernet, not USB.
I understand what you are saying: RS232 ports suck for any number of reasons.
But there are a few why it is still often used.
First, it has been ubiquitous for 20 to 30 years. When I started my first development job in 1982 - everything talked to everything else via RS-232. Back then 9600 baud was considered fast. At 8 bits per character with no parity and one stop bit, 9600 baud could paint a screen with characters in one second. Yes, we thought that was fast. Things got better as baud rates improved - but RS-232 remained everywhere - it was the one constant universal interface. Even though it is incredible antiqued, it is still in many PCs.
Second, RS-232 (and its many cousins like RS-422) are very, very easy to use in software. The simplest I/O can be done in a few lines of code. Its easy to put RS-232 code right in firmware. This makes it easy to write bootstrapers, boot consoles, debug consoles etc.
USB would be a poor choice for a replacement. The reason is that it isnt peer to peer - it is a master/slave architecture. There is always one master -usually a PC, and one or more slaves (keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, cable modems, disk drives, storage keys, cameras etc).
It requires a special cable to make to client USB devices talk to each other. This cable has a small do-dad that looks like a master to both ends. This works ok, but it requires special knowledge of this USB end point to work correctly. Note, Windows began to support this in Vista for migration. Its called Windows Easy Transfer/a>.. There is a version for XP too (downloadable/a>). It actually works very well, but the cables were not cheap. Note that the cables really are not cables - but a dual-headed master USB controller with two ports - it just looks like a cable with a lump in the middle - Belkin sells one for $40.
LLike a few other posters have said - USB is much more complex to use in software than simple RS-232. Ive written code for it and I find it more complex than Ethernet at the MAC level.
I think Ethernet is the real replacement. A little TFT or Telnet server / client is really trivial to write. This can (and often has been done) in firmware. For example, most (all?) home Ethernet and wireless routers dont have a serial port. Their management is over Ethernet - works great.
-Foredecker
Yes - it is pretty cool. I think that Linux is well suited to the embedded space. Windows is not designed for this. Windows CE was at one time, but the focus on mobile phones took the team away from that market. To be honest, Windows CE was never a very good embedded OS.
We do have a Windows Embedded product - but it is meant more for stripped down PC applications like kiosks, point of sale termianls and non real time industrial control applcations. Windows was not at all desigined to be a real time OS
I accidentally washed my VX9000. After washing,I took the cover off and took out the battery then put it in a heated blanket for a couple of days. It work up and worked fine for about two months. Then it died a horrible death.
Ok, so that is interesting, but only just... This isnt desktop Linux so Im not sure why you are saying "eat that".
The OS is DMAed directly into system memory. Ok, thats kind of spiffy. That means its been "pre-loaded" which is already located.
Let me put this in perspective. Back in the mid 90s I worked at AMD. On the ÉlanSC520 system on a chip (133mhz 486 class):
So, this really isnt that spectacular - cool yes, ground breaking no.
-Foredecker
mmmm... they are here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
Hi FuturePower,
I think that is a salient comment. One of the reasons Ive chosen to participate here on Slashdot is to be an apologist for Microsoft people specifically, and for the company to an extent.
Two things bug me the most
IIm still learning about the best way to post here on Slashdot. But I hope Im having some positive effect. I think your comment above is a good result.
I cannot disagree that our senior execs have made some bad decisions. It happens. I also agree that we collectively stumbled in shipping Vista. It wasnt our best work. While you may not see it, there were many significant repercussions in the Windows organization due to this. Windows-7 was the result.
One thing I find interesting is they visceral dislike that many in the FOSS community have for Microsoft people and products. I can tell you this - it is not reciprocal at all, not even with our senior execs. Yes, Ballmer has made some famous quotes about the GPL, but notice hes talking about even this from a business perspective. I can honestly say that among Microsoft people there is very widespread respect for Linux, Apache, Perl, MySQL, and many other open source projects. Many softies also consider the idea of free and open software a noble purpose. I do.
Ill tell you another thing: We learn a lot from FOSS projects and the open source approach. While being open isnt the right thing for many of our products and businesses, it is for some and I think youll see more of this over time (I say this with no insider knowledge except for my projects). For example, Im a proponent of making the source of my next major project open. There is broad agreement and support to do so. It really is a no brainer.
What I find almost fascinating , is that the FOSS community doesnt seem to learn from Microsoft. [ pre-emptive snarky comment "We learn what not to do..." ]. We do a lot of things very, very well. Despite some obvious exceptions, our senior execs are very good. Ive worked at several big companies that were (and remain) very poorly run.
I suggest that if some people in the FOSS community spent as much energy focusing on delivering great products instead of focusing on beating Microsoft then they might be more successful. Microsoft is not in the list tiny little bit afraid of competition. We have lots of it. Personally, I think it makes us better. We compete by focusing on delivering great products that our customers like. While we pay attention to our competition, we dont spend a lot of time talking about how to beat it. Our strategy is to focus on what customers need first. Sometimes we screw up (like with Vista), but more often than not, we succeed.
In closing, I appreciate your comment and find much truth in it. I read your companys white paper /a>aand found it quite insightful.
Best Regardsbr />
--Foredecker
We shall see :)