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By Martin Oberhuber
The Eclipse Architecture Council is holding a special 1-hour open phone meeting to discuss the Architectural Foundations of Eclipse, this Thursday May 15 at 8:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 15:00 UTC / 17:00 CET. The meeting is focused on preparation of the Architectural Foundations slot during the upcoming E4 Summit in Ottawa.
By Paul Tingey
Fifteen years ago this week, on the 30th of April 1993, two directors from the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory signed and published a document which relinquished "all intellectual property rights to" and permitted "anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute" a technology they referred to as W3.
Today W3 is better know as the World Wide Web, but the concept is the same; a scalable, platform independent information medium where documents are connected through hypertext links. This ground breaking idea was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a respected technology visionary.
By Paul Parkinson
In case you missed the news, the article 'COTS for unmanned flights' (Electronic Product Design, 22nd April 2008) describes how the nEUROn UCAV programme (Airforce Technology) has standardized on the VxWorks 653 RTOS.
nEUROn is a technology demonstrator programme involving five
European companies, which in itself is not unusual, but it does have a
significant objective - to demonstrate the maturity of technologies by
producing modular safety-critical avionics systems
running on COTS-based on-board computers. The development of avionics
systems for a UCAV are in some ways even more challenging than for a
military fast jet, given that it will provide a similar level of
capability, but yet has less Space, Weight and Power (SWaP)
available. This is one of the driving factors behind the ARINC 653
software architecture, enabling multiple applications to be hosted on a
common computing platform (see 'ARINC 653 software weighs less' for background).
By Doug Gaff
I know, I know… shame on me for taking so long to become a Friend of Eclipse or FOE. I've paid my dues to Eclipse in a lot of ways, and now I can add Pay Pal to that list.
What prompted me to do it? Altruism, love, sense of obligation or duty? Nope… bandwidth. I'm working from home today, where I have a very fast Internet connection (unlike work). But the download from eclipse was really dragging. So I became a FOE, used the FOE mirror, and got some very nice download speeds. Totally worth the money. Hey… at least I'm honest.
By Paul Parkinson
I've been tracking the developments since the publication of the article 'Non-Answer on Armed Robot Pullout From Iraq Reveals Fragile Bot Industry' in Popular Mechanics. The article covered the recent RoboBusiness conference and had highlighted the fact that three SWORDS armed robots which had been deployed to Iraq in 2007 and had subsequently been withdrawn. Popular Mechanics cited the US Army's Program Executive Officer, Kevin Fahey, who reportedly said that there was an incident where "the gun started moving when it was not intended to move".
The article didn't go into any further details about the circumstances in question, but that wasn't enough to prevent some hysterical headlines in a number of blogs, for example: 'Combat Robot Attempts Rebellion Against Human Masters in Iraq, Army Pulls Plug for 10-20 Years' (Gizmodo), and 'US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades' (The Register).
By Paul Parkinson
A few months ago I commented on some of the technical developments in passenger in-flight systems ('In-flight Internet access...and mobile phones too?'). In recent weeks, there have been some rapid developments, not on the technical front, but in terms of regulation and operation, with announcements from the UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom and the European Commission.
On the 26th March, Ofcom published the results of its consultation on the use of Mobile Communications on Aircraft (MCA). The executive summary summarizes the findings and Ofcom's decisions, but the full statement (PDF) provides much more detail, revealing a mixture of social, operational, safety and security issues.
By Doug Gaff
…to run on the hardware of your choice. Or so Psystar wants you to believe about the Leopard OS. In case you haven't been following this story, Psystar has created a Mac computer clone and is selling them pre-installed with Leopard (or Ubuntu, XP, Vista, or nothing). It's called an Open Computer. According to Apple, this is a violation of Leopard's EULA. I don't use a Mac, and while I am occasionally wowed by these bright and shiny objects, I prefer to be voluntarily water-boarded by Vista. So this particular offer doesn't appeal to me.
However, I do find it both comical and a little scary. In the Operating System space, be it host OS's or real-time OS's, the name of the game is running on as many platforms as your customers can dream up. Wind River's operating systems have been doing this from the beginning. Like many others, we affectionately call this our "Matrix of Pain". PC vendors are no exception, of course. In fact, many of the critical problems people run into with Vista and Linux have to do with hardware driver problems (or non-existence) and not the OS's themselves. Apple is certainly lucky to have such a small set of platforms to support.
By Paul Tingey
There seems to have many news stories about the imminent rise of 3G technology in the UK over the last few years. Looking back these stories would seem to have heralded repeated false dawns with 3G being relegated to little more than another mobile voice calling technology. However we now seem to have positive proof that 3G based mobile broadband is becoming a viable alternative to (or addition to) more traditional broadband technologies for UK users.
In a blog entry titled Mobile net takes off, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC includes what he describes as "an extraordinary graph" showing how the amount of data crossing the 3 mobile operator's 3G network has increased 14 fold in just six months.
By Martin Oberhuber
HyacGsocpi = Here's Yet another cool Google summer of code project idea - looking at the very end of the Eclipse Google Summer of Code Ideas page:
Comparing, Merging and Synchronizing directory trees of remote servers between each other or with a local replica, all over standard Eclipse APIs with replacable connection schemes. The Remote System Explorer (RSE) provides the UI framework for transparent remote system access, and while it supports comparing individual remote and local files, it does not yet have support for comparing or synchronizing whole folder hierarchies.
By Mike Deliman
When I was a kid anything that was a computer, or had one in it, was pretty obvious. Computers weren't "just everywhere". Now we've got multiple CPU chips on a board, multiple CPU cores on a chip, different kinds of cores on a single chip, multiple computer boards in a single chassis, ... it goes on. These things are embedded in everything around us, all this hardware glued together to achieve something. This brings us to software. Software has to evolve to keep up with hardware, and with the needs of users. With all these cores and chips and boards and systems running around, it gets a bit confusing. Software is what enables everything from multi-processing to "poly-processing". There's a lot of buzzwords about it - SMP, AMP, POS, VOS, Real time kernel, Separation Kernels... but what does it all mean? And... what's it for?
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