It's a bit more heavy weight that eCos but much much less than Linux. Unlike eCos it also comes with a TCP/IP stack and soon will have a lightwieght, realtime filesystem thus making it very suitable for embedded internet devices.
RTEMS has already been used in set top boxes and at least one prototype internet access "appliance".
Of course RTEMS is Open Source software with GPL+simple exception licence and is heavily oriented towards the GNU tools(but does not exclusivly require them like eCos).
Unlike the previous poster I am biased.. I'm helping to write RTEMS;)
Unlike Linux advocates, FreeBSD advocates do not believe FreeBSD should be running on every microchip.
I don't really want to shoot holes in the article but a large chunk of FreeBSD does run on a large number of embedded systems... RTEMS 4.0, the Open Source real time operating system, uses the FreeBSD networking infrastructure and TCP/IP stack. This runs in very little memory(for a full TCP/IP stack) on a wide range of 32 and 64bit microcontrollers (e.g. x86, 680x0, 683xx, ColdFire, i960, sh, MIPS, ppc, sparc)
The reason we chose the stack was because of the FreeBSD licencing which matched the GPL+exception licence that RTEMS uses. That and the speed and efficiency of the stack which is important for many applications.
More info on RTEMS can be found at OARCorp's web page.
Reminds me of our President...
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
·
· Score: 1
..Blair that is. Erm, I mean our humble Prime Minister Tony Blair. He doesn't look anything like a witch..no, not at all;)
As for low budget independent films... been making them for years this side of the pond. Some are very very good...some are very very bad. The best ones are almost always better than the best that Hollywood churns out.
Grab a book on basic audio design...should be possible to hackup a simple(but high quality) mixer with a couple of $ worth of components, a bit of stripboard and an hour or two of time.
However when I needed such a thing I bought one.. from Tandy(Radio Shack for my American readers) for £50($75) which has 3 mic channels + 2 line, VU meters, etc. That was years ago so they're probably much much cheaper now.
Perhaps if you ditched 95/98 and used a decent OS like NT Workstation your troubles would be reduced.
I quite happily skip between NT and Linux depending on the project I'm working on...neither OS crashes on me or blue screens almost no matter what I subject it too(Linux has been the most fragile).
I'm looking forard to VMWare for NT so I can run both OSs at the same time.
Who cares really.
Re:Only a good thing if the driver's free software
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
Aren't there patent problems that preclude an open solution?
I'd certainly expect that 56k modems would have difficulties..perhaps not for slower pre-V34 ones.
Embedded systems don't have 400MHz processors
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
Embedded systems usually take the total cost in to account...and "software modems" are very cheap for those sorts of system. Why take two $5 processors (and their board space, power requirements, etc) when one $10 processor will do...
Getting an Intel processor to compete with a $5 DSP is incredibly foolish though... "Big computer" processors just don't have the MAC units needed to handle "software modems" efficiently.
A point to note is that all modems are software modems these days...
It's worth noting that qmail's maildir format is very efficient at handling large numbers of email messages. It also stores the messages in the users home directory which makes the system a bit more secure and easier to track down disk usage. Of course it supports the "standard" unix mailbox format if you want to run with unpatched versions of IMAP/POP tools(why?).
GNU C(and friends) make fantastic embedded cross-compilers. I love them but...
Borland make the worlds fastest compiler. There's been a lot of talk about bcc being faster than gcc but you people forget that C++ is just an addon. The real compiler is the Object Pascal one that forms the core of Delphi. Some basic experiments I have done indicate that it is 10-20 times faster than bcc.
I can build the current system I'm working on (50k lines in 5 or so EXEs) in under 40 seconds on a PII-233. An equivalent sized(in LOC) C++ program takes somewhere between 5-10 mins to compile. This is before you see that it usually takes 5 lines of C++ where 1 line of Pascal would do...
> It talks about the struggle of the MS Temps, as > well as the fact that techies are often paid > well (cash, stock options and benefits) that > the 70 hour work weeks just don't seem so bad.
Hmmm. AFAIK we're restricted to 48 hours per week(with rules on just how much of that you can do at once) here in Europe. The French are even proposing having a 35 hour working week.
For me this is a good thing. People generally work much harder and smarter when they aren't trying to out-psyche each other with "macho" programming marathons....which usually have to be rewritten anyway.
Hmmm. I would have said that ReplayTV et al will have an impact similar to that of the video recorder. Significant but not as catastrophic as people forecast at the time they were launched...
I want one. When can I have a PAL/230V version please?
I guess for Sun, Mozilla development "not going very well" means that it's not going ahead under their dodgy "community" licence scheme and being manipulable by their upper management who want more people to massage their over inflated egos.
In terms of an Open Source project Mozilla is working very well...lots of contriubtion by non-Netscape people(growing by the day) and a workable bit of software.
In terms of a Netscape project Mozilla is working very well. Stong product coming together mostly on schedule, strong standards complicance, light years ahead of the "competition" in every respect, etc, etc.
Besides it's been a week or two since a Sun/AOL story did the rounds...they need to give their PR people something to do.
I'm involved in the effort to provide MathML support in Mozilla. This involves a deep an meaningful interaction with the Mozilla Layout Engine. I've been hacking and poking at the layout engine for a month or so now(I don't have much spare time) and it's really not that tough. I managed to figure out the basic interaction of content v's frames in a few hours...a few questions to the layout newgroup sorted a couple of misconceptions I had in no time.
It's a big bit of OO software but nothing that should scare any moderately experienced programmer. The average Perl hacking slashdotter will have trouble though...but that is the same regardless of the project.
I have to say that the Netscape guys have been incredibly helpful... Guy's like Eric Krock(Navigator head honcho) and Rick Gessner (layout god) have bent over backwards to help out an unblock problem areas...even for my own minor project. Real pros.
I suspect that the reason that there *appears* to be little 3rd part involvement is because of the size of the Netscape effort. They have 100 guys working on the project full time... it's tough for part time people to show up as having contributed as much.... that's not to say that non-Netscape people aren't providing critical parts of the system (James Clark and Davin Baron take a bow please;).
>I don't know about you, but if I can't use Mozilla, I'll not be improving it; Lots of other people have said the same.
Well. What are you using...? It's a pretty usable browser now(much better than Nav 4.x IMHO) and you can get binaries for a couple of platforms that allow you to try it out. Building is a piece of cake and doesn't even take that long(comparable with GCC or the Linux kernel).
1000Base-T uses all 4 *pairs* in the cable. You could use coax but you would need 4 cables per connection. Sure it would go further than TP but it would make fibre look cheap....
The reason you're having problems with 100Base-T is because you are probably using dodgy components. Proper Cat-5 cables and installations should have been tested to certify that they work. Perhaps using a tester would give you some indication as to where the faults lay.
Hmmm. Replay seems a bit US centric... when are they going to do a PAL version? They could increase the quality by missing out the analog rubbish altogether now that we have Digital MPEG II terestrial and satellite TV (in the UK anyway).
My web site has info on Motorola ColdFire processors both of which are trademarks... If I have to remove all of the trademarks in my META tags then the search engines will slowly start to ignore me... Not good for anyone, especially Motorola as they like what I do;)
"They can take away our META tags.. but they can't take away our websites!!!" (A Scot paraphrasing another Scot who was played by an Australian...)
In the Uk we have been sustaining that kind off drop for years. In "difficult" subject areas like Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering the drop has been nearer 12% p/a.... Pansy subjects like Computer Science aren't as badly hit but their numbers are still dropping. This is at a time when University attendance is at an all time high and is rising rapidly.
No wonder the UK is going down the pan. On the plus side I'm an endangered species! Perhaps the WWF will give me a game reserve!
I use it on NT workstations and Linux boxes with little memory. It's great and it runs sooo fast especially when it is bogged down unlike Apache or IIS.
If things get really tough then stick a Novell box running BorderManager FastCache infront.
OK. I know that's not P.C. round here but Novell have a better clue when it comes to Real Time network data server than Linux does. Not that I have anything against Linux being the source server.....it is very good at that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit more heavy weight that eCos but much much less than Linux. Unlike eCos it also comes with a TCP/IP stack and soon will have a lightwieght, realtime filesystem thus making it very suitable for embedded internet devices.
;)
RTEMS has already been used in set top boxes and at least one prototype internet access "appliance".
Of course RTEMS is Open Source software with GPL+simple exception licence and is heavily oriented towards the GNU tools(but does not exclusivly require them like eCos).
Unlike the previous poster I am biased.. I'm helping to write RTEMS
Unlike Linux advocates, FreeBSD advocates do not believe FreeBSD should be running on every microchip.
I don't really want to shoot holes in the article but a large chunk of FreeBSD does run on a large number of embedded systems... RTEMS 4.0, the Open Source real time operating system, uses the FreeBSD networking infrastructure and TCP/IP stack. This runs in very little memory(for a full TCP/IP stack) on a wide range of 32 and 64bit microcontrollers (e.g. x86, 680x0, 683xx, ColdFire, i960, sh, MIPS, ppc, sparc)
The reason we chose the stack was because of the FreeBSD licencing which matched the GPL+exception licence that RTEMS uses. That and the speed and efficiency of the stack which is important for many applications.
More info on RTEMS can be found at OARCorp's web page.
..Blair that is. Erm, I mean our humble Prime Minister Tony Blair. He doesn't look anything like a witch..no, not at all ;)
As for low budget independent films... been making them for years this side of the pond. Some are very very good...some are very very bad. The best ones are almost always better than the best that Hollywood churns out.
I agree. Building a quality mixer for recording use, etc is a tough excercise.
;)
I think all the guy wants is somethig to mix together 6 line inputs...technically this is a mixer but only just
Grab a book on basic audio design...should be possible to hackup a simple(but high quality) mixer with a couple of $ worth of components, a bit of stripboard and an hour or two of time.
However when I needed such a thing I bought one.. from Tandy(Radio Shack for my American readers) for £50($75) which has 3 mic channels + 2 line, VU meters, etc. That was years ago so they're probably much much cheaper now.
Perhaps if you ditched 95/98 and used a decent OS like NT Workstation your troubles would be reduced.
I quite happily skip between NT and Linux depending on the project I'm working on...neither OS crashes on me or blue screens almost no matter what I subject it too(Linux has been the most fragile).
I'm looking forard to VMWare for NT so I can run both OSs at the same time.
Who cares really.
Aren't there patent problems that preclude an open solution?
I'd certainly expect that 56k modems would have difficulties..perhaps not for slower pre-V34 ones.
Embedded systems usually take the total cost in to account...and "software modems" are very cheap for those sorts of system. Why take two $5 processors (and their board space, power requirements, etc) when one $10 processor will do...
Getting an Intel processor to compete with a $5 DSP is incredibly foolish though... "Big computer" processors just don't have the MAC units needed to handle "software modems" efficiently.
A point to note is that all modems are software modems these days...
It's worth noting that qmail's maildir format is very efficient at handling large numbers of email messages. It also stores the messages in the users home directory which makes the system a bit more secure and easier to track down disk usage. Of course it supports the "standard" unix mailbox format if you want to run with unpatched versions of IMAP/POP tools(why?).
GNU C(and friends) make fantastic embedded cross-compilers. I love them but...
Borland make the worlds fastest compiler. There's been a lot of talk about bcc being faster than gcc but you people forget that C++ is just an addon. The real compiler is the Object Pascal one that forms the core of Delphi. Some basic experiments I have done indicate that it is 10-20 times faster than bcc.
I can build the current system I'm working on (50k lines in 5 or so EXEs) in under 40 seconds on a PII-233. An equivalent sized(in LOC) C++ program takes somewhere between 5-10 mins to compile. This is before you see that it usually takes 5 lines of C++ where 1 line of Pascal would do...
> It talks about the struggle of the MS Temps, as
> well as the fact that techies are often paid
> well (cash, stock options and benefits) that
> the 70 hour work weeks just don't seem so bad.
Hmmm. AFAIK we're restricted to 48 hours per week(with rules on just how much of that you can do at once) here in Europe. The French are even proposing having a 35 hour working week.
For me this is a good thing. People generally work much harder and smarter when they aren't trying to out-psyche each other with "macho" programming marathons....which usually have to be rewritten anyway.
Dave
AFAICS Breezecom offer wireless E1(or T1) links which are synchronous....
Hmmm. I would have said that ReplayTV et al will have an impact similar to that of the video recorder. Significant but not as catastrophic as people forecast at the time they were launched...
I want one. When can I have a PAL/230V version please?
I guess for Sun, Mozilla development "not going very well" means that it's not going ahead under their dodgy "community" licence scheme and being manipulable by their upper management who want more people to massage their over inflated egos.
In terms of an Open Source project Mozilla is working very well...lots of contriubtion by non-Netscape people(growing by the day) and a workable bit of software.
In terms of a Netscape project Mozilla is working very well. Stong product coming together mostly on schedule, strong standards complicance, light years ahead of the "competition" in every respect, etc, etc.
Besides it's been a week or two since a Sun/AOL story did the rounds...they need to give their PR people something to do.
I'm involved in the effort to provide MathML support in Mozilla. This involves a deep an meaningful interaction with the Mozilla Layout Engine. I've been hacking and poking at the layout engine for a month or so now(I don't have much spare time) and it's really not that tough. I managed to figure out the basic interaction of content v's frames in a few hours...a few questions to the layout newgroup sorted a couple of misconceptions I had in no time.
;).
It's a big bit of OO software but nothing that should scare any moderately experienced programmer. The average Perl hacking slashdotter will have trouble though...but that is the same regardless of the project.
I have to say that the Netscape guys have been incredibly helpful... Guy's like Eric Krock(Navigator head honcho) and Rick Gessner (layout god) have bent over backwards to help out an unblock problem areas...even for my own minor project. Real pros.
I suspect that the reason that there *appears* to be little 3rd part involvement is because of the size of the Netscape effort. They have 100 guys working on the project full time... it's tough for part time people to show up as having contributed as much.... that's not to say that non-Netscape people aren't providing critical parts of the system (James Clark and Davin Baron take a bow please
>I don't know about you, but if I can't use Mozilla, I'll not be improving it; Lots of other people have said the same.
Well. What are you using...? It's a pretty usable browser now(much better than Nav 4.x IMHO) and you can get binaries for a couple of platforms that allow you to try it out. Building is a piece of cake and doesn't even take that long(comparable with GCC or the Linux kernel).
If you aren't doing it now when will you?
Dumb Americans.....
I know it is proprietary tech but minidics just can't be beat.
Not quite as small as a click disc but a heck of a sight smaller than a CD.
See http://www.minidic.org for more info
Simple.
1000Base-T uses all 4 *pairs* in the cable. You could use coax but you would need 4 cables per connection. Sure it would go further than TP but it would make fibre look cheap....
The reason you're having problems with 100Base-T is because you are probably using dodgy components. Proper Cat-5 cables and installations should have been tested to certify that they work. Perhaps using a tester would give you some indication as to where the faults lay.
Hmmm. Replay seems a bit US centric... when are they going to do a PAL version? They could increase the quality by missing out the analog rubbish altogether now that we have Digital MPEG II terestrial and satellite TV (in the UK anyway).
Other than that...I want one!!!!(5 years ago)
My web site has info on Motorola ColdFire processors both of which are trademarks... If I have to remove all of the trademarks in my META tags then the search engines will slowly start to ignore me... Not good for anyone, especially Motorola as they like what I do ;)
"They can take away our META tags.. but they can't take away our websites!!!"
(A Scot paraphrasing another Scot who was played by an Australian...)
In the Uk we have been sustaining that kind off drop for years. In "difficult" subject areas like Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering the drop has been nearer 12% p/a.... Pansy subjects like Computer Science aren't as badly hit but their numbers are still dropping. This is at a time when University attendance is at an all time high and is rising rapidly.
No wonder the UK is going down the pan. On the plus side I'm an endangered species! Perhaps the WWF will give me a game reserve!
I've just taken to plonking my work and home emails where it says work and home telephone numbers.
Phones are useful...but the majority of the phone calls I get could have been done by email.
We will wean the world away from the POTS eventually!
I use it on NT workstations and Linux boxes with little memory. It's great and it runs sooo fast especially when it is bogged down unlike Apache or IIS.
the URL is http://www.imatix.com/
If things get really tough then stick a Novell box running BorderManager FastCache infront.
OK. I know that's not P.C. round here but Novell have a better clue when it comes to Real Time network data server than Linux does. Not that I have anything against Linux being the source server.....it is very good at that.