Tehanu is a fine book. It just happens to be utterly and completely different from the three before it.
Deliberately. LeGuin wrote it as an adult looking back on her juvenile work and finding it less than satisfactory, with the intent of allowing all of her readers to see as she did. Difficult, yes. I found it very powerful. Few people, especially creatives, have the self-discipline to critique themselves in that way.
It is neither utter crap, nor anti-men. That said, the Deus Ex Machina style ending, while foreshadowed adequately, is predicatble and a little tedious -- it is how the third ended, after all.
Both Ender's Game and Wizard of Earthsea are, by themselves, great children's novels. Both of them become more complex in the context of their sequels.
However, the intensity of LeGuin's character development outshines Card. Card's no slouch, but Ged always came across as real in ways that Ender, whose world is much closer to ours, didn't.
This is, of course, merely one reader's opinion. YMMV.
Given WIND's track record, does this mean that they are now going to attempt to ditch Linux?:)
Seriously, though, the only strategy WIND has ever had has been to sell heinously overpriced VxWorks products. If they are touting Linux right now, it's only because they expect to be able to convert some portion of that Linux interest into sales of expensive proprietary software and tools.
The article asked what gain WIND could hope to see out of this move. To me, WIND's gain is obvious -- I'm not certain what Red Hat was thinking! This move is just as likely to backfire in their faces by tarring them with WIND's reputation as it is to generate new sales from the VxWorks crowd.
um,you do know that there's a difference between the PowerPC970 (Mac G5) and the IBM POWER usedd in RS/6000s, right? Different generations of chip, different architectures, order of magnitude difference in cost, etc.
I'd expect them to be running something small, light, and reliable. Either a roll-your own job on an 8- or 16-bit processor or something from Wind River or Green Hills. I mean, really, have you never heard of "the right tool for the job?"
There is no such thing as "the embedded market," no more so than you can speak of "the computer market," anyway.
You can tell from some of the companies listed that VDC included everything from the tiniest 8-but microcontrollers to 64-bit RISC video and server appliances as "embedded." A rational view of this marketspace would segment it into many categories, because, obviously, a company making 8-bit microcontrollers for traffic signals will have no need for Windows, and a company making server appliances is not going to want PalmOS or Eneas's OSE.
Microsoft is in server appliances, Xbox, and PDAs.
WindRiver is in a lot of traditional embedded apps, such as industrial control, telecoms, consumer electronics and transportation.
Symbian is in cellphones.
Palm is in PDAs, expanding into cellphones.
QNX is usually found these days in medium- to high-end embedded apps, such as industrial control and consumer electronics.
Enea is more traditionally found in lower-end embedded apps, like transportation systems.
So the list is basically meaningless. Half the top six companies aren't in 'traditional' embedded markets, and most of them are not, for the most part, direct competitors with each other, in spite of their marketing claims. (Yes, M$ wants to be in cellphones and more deeply embedded apps and WindRiver wants to be in server appliances, etc., but realistically speaking, they ain't.) Just about the only thing they got right is that Linux share in this space is awfully small. Unfortunately for Linux, claims otherwise also come from marketing departments.
Actually, the corporate name is aeons old. Even still, the current incarnation of Wasabi happens to predate the Wasabi - True commercials from Budweiser, if only by a few months.
On a slightly more substantial issue, no you can't just stick some random PowerPC code onto an FPGA and expect anything to happen. Of course, I'm sure you know exactly what you're talking about and, in fact, enjoy a lucrative living as an embedded engineer, so you don't need me to tell you that.
Actually, real time OS used by the military typically have reboot times expressed in fractions of a second. Standard, and even RT variants, of general purpose OS like *nix or Windows just don't cut it in those applications.
We demoed the ML300 at Embedded Systems East last year. It has an LCD screen, CompactFlash, serial, parallel, USB, Firewire, Fibre Channel, Ethernet and who knows what other I/O, PLUS heaps of blinking blue LEDs, on this one little card. It was like a shiny toy designed to attract geeks.
Fantastic to look at, even if you had no reason to be legitimately interested.
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Deliberately. LeGuin wrote it as an adult looking back on her juvenile work and finding it less than satisfactory, with the intent of allowing all of her readers to see as she did. Difficult, yes. I found it very powerful. Few people, especially creatives, have the self-discipline to critique themselves in that way.
It is neither utter crap, nor anti-men. That said, the Deus Ex Machina style ending, while foreshadowed adequately, is predicatble and a little tedious -- it is how the third ended, after all.
However, the intensity of LeGuin's character development outshines Card. Card's no slouch, but Ged always came across as real in ways that Ender, whose world is much closer to ours, didn't.
This is, of course, merely one reader's opinion. YMMV.
Seriously, though, the only strategy WIND has ever had has been to sell heinously overpriced VxWorks products. If they are touting Linux right now, it's only because they expect to be able to convert some portion of that Linux interest into sales of expensive proprietary software and tools.
The article asked what gain WIND could hope to see out of this move. To me, WIND's gain is obvious -- I'm not certain what Red Hat was thinking! This move is just as likely to backfire in their faces by tarring them with WIND's reputation as it is to generate new sales from the VxWorks crowd.
um,you do know that there's a difference between the PowerPC970 (Mac G5) and the IBM POWER usedd in RS/6000s, right? Different generations of chip, different architectures, order of magnitude difference in cost, etc.
I'd expect them to be running something small, light, and reliable. Either a roll-your own job on an 8- or 16-bit processor or something from Wind River or Green Hills. I mean, really, have you never heard of "the right tool for the job?"
You can tell from some of the companies listed that VDC included everything from the tiniest 8-but microcontrollers to 64-bit RISC video and server appliances as "embedded." A rational view of this marketspace would segment it into many categories, because, obviously, a company making 8-bit microcontrollers for traffic signals will have no need for Windows, and a company making server appliances is not going to want PalmOS or Eneas's OSE.
Microsoft is in server appliances, Xbox, and PDAs.
WindRiver is in a lot of traditional embedded apps, such as industrial control, telecoms, consumer electronics and transportation.
Symbian is in cellphones.
Palm is in PDAs, expanding into cellphones.
QNX is usually found these days in medium- to high-end embedded apps, such as industrial control and consumer electronics.
Enea is more traditionally found in lower-end embedded apps, like transportation systems.
So the list is basically meaningless. Half the top six companies aren't in 'traditional' embedded markets, and most of them are not, for the most part, direct competitors with each other, in spite of their marketing claims. (Yes, M$ wants to be in cellphones and more deeply embedded apps and WindRiver wants to be in server appliances, etc., but realistically speaking, they ain't.) Just about the only thing they got right is that Linux share in this space is awfully small. Unfortunately for Linux, claims otherwise also come from marketing departments.
On a slightly more substantial issue, no you can't just stick some random PowerPC code onto an FPGA and expect anything to happen. Of course, I'm sure you know exactly what you're talking about and, in fact, enjoy a lucrative living as an embedded engineer, so you don't need me to tell you that.
Actually, real time OS used by the military typically have reboot times expressed in fractions of a second. Standard, and even RT variants, of general purpose OS like *nix or Windows just don't cut it in those applications.
Fantastic to look at, even if you had no reason to be legitimately interested.