Wind River Blog Network

Safety Standards Convergence?

By Paul Parkinson

In a recent post on software certification, Alex Wilson asked why there are so many software safety certification standards? The current situation is of course due to historical reasons, and this has resulted in some interesting anomalies. However, I think there is some reason for cautious optimism, as there appears to be more increasingly widespread acceptance of standards in recent years, and there is also a degree of convergence between standards, at least in some cases.

The RTCA DO-178B standard was originally developed for the safety critical software on civil aircraft certified by the US FAA, but in recent years this has been increasingly adopted by US military aircraft programmes, and subsequently on civil programmes in other countries around the world. (In Europe, civil aircraft are actually developed according to the EUROCAE ED-12B standard, but this is identical to DO-178B).

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Next-Generation Applications and The Device Food Chain

By John Bruggeman

2006 is in the home stretch. Only a week or so left and we can ring in 2007. December was a busy month for me: sales training, customer meetings in Europe and finally, the release of our full product line updates delivered late last week. We’ve accomplished a lot this year and I look forward to continuing the momentum when we kick off FY08 in February.

As Chief Marketing Officer of Wind River, one frequently-asked question I get...A LOT...is: “How big is the DSO market?” This question has become one of my favorites to answer because there are so many mind-shattering things happening in just about every segment of device category available to end users. I try to explain how the potential size of the DSO market is directly linked to the growth of the unquestionable explosion of demand for next-generation applications and services.

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RDC in China

By Tomas Evensen

I just came back from a couple of weeks in China. Fascinating country. Besides the usual customer visits, we also held three Regional Development Conferences (RDCs) in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing.

The RDCs were a huge success with on average more than 400 attendees per day. And they were all very interested in hearing about Wind River's latest offerings and future plans.

How do I know they all were interested? Well, my leading indicator was that all seats were taken from the front working towards the back. Somewhat different from your typical American or European conference, where the back seats seem to be the hottest commodity. (BTW, I am of course not indicating that our American and European friends are not interested... Perhaps they have better eye sight).

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Software Certification

By Alex Wilson

I wonder why it is always the case that the period of time just before year end is suddenly very hectic! There must be a universal law about that, something like Murphy's Law...

Anyway, I have just returned from 2 weeks of travel around Italy, Sweden and the US visiting customers and presenting our solutions. I always enjoy meeting folks and seeing what they can do with our software as I love to see the latest and greatest devices; and so I have been negligent in posting to my blog for that time and noticed over the last few weeks some noticeable events have taken place.

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Powering Out of Social Networking - Powering Down with Social Conscience

By John Bruggeman

It’s that time of year again. The time when all of the industry’s great thinkers pause for a moment of reflection and look back on the year’s significant trends, themes, events, big winners, best and worst performers and any and every other metric that can best sum up a 365-day period in a nice, neat “Top Ten List.”

I’m not sure about the other nine things, but this year it would be hard to argue that social networking was anything but THE dominant industry trend. Now I am not saying social networking was a new phenomenon this year but it seemed to be all anyone wanted to TALK about. It was EVERYWHERE. MySpace, Second Life, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and on and on and on.

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Fixed Mobile Convergence, Episode One : Please mind the step !

By Paul Tingey

Glenn Seiler's recent post (Report from the International Telecommunications Union Conference) gave readers an interesting insight into developments in the world of Fixed Mobile Convergence. As Glenn points out, FMC attempts to "enrich our every-day lives by making it easier to do the things we value most". Essentially FMC is about making technology work the way we want it to rather than leaving us struggling simply to make it work.

However, the reality is that FMC will only be realized in small steps. Like a baby finding its feet for the first time, some steps will seem bold and assured while others will seem uncoordinated and divergent. I thought in this post I would outline my thoughts about the first faltering steps along the path to Fixed Mobile Convergence.

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Report from the International Telecommunications Union Conference

By Glenn Seiler

I’ve been in Hong Kong the last week visiting the ITU Telecom World 2006. The theme of this show, as articulated by a keynote speech from Vivian Reding, the European Union commissioner for Information Society and Media, is “Living in the Digital World”.  The fact that someone from the EU was giving the keynote at a Telecom show in Asia shows just how international this trade-show is. There are pavilions from nearly every major country, with Telecom providers from each country showing how they are bringing to their markets new Fixed Mobile Convergence services such as VoIP to cell phones.

As with any large trade-show – and this show is one of the largest – it’s a little overwhelming. There are so many vendors all trying to get their message heard above the others. There are ten halls of vendors with everything that has anything to do with telecommunications – from coaxial cable vendors with cable as big as my arm (for FTTP – Fiber-to-the-Premise) to consumer electronics. It is the latter of course that drew my attention. It was hard to escape the hype around triple play. Not just to the home or office, but to the phone itself.

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Open Source makes Free Beer possible

By Paul Tingey

Open source has made a lot of things possible in the years since it first appeared. Of course, Linux is probably the best known open source project but there are also countless other projects which have caught the imagination of computer users worldwide (for example PHP, MySQL, Apache and BSD). Free Beer is not an obvious child of the open source revolution but it really does exist. Read on and I'll explain more shortly....

Firstly, here is an interesting question; what is the dominant feature of open source? Is it the availability of source code or is it the community working on the project? Is open source simply about making source code available to everyone or is it about building communities of like-minded people?

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Mitigating Risk

By Mike Deliman

The phone rings.  A customer has an application destined for a high-risk environment, and somewhere in test they've found a new unanticipated condition.  A "Tiger Team" is formed - a group of experts who've "been here before", who understand the priority and the risks, and know how serious it is. Many times a Tiger Team may give the go / no-go, the final answer that either saves a mission, or drops all that work into the dust-bin.  Such a team itself represents a *lot* of work, frustration, and time - investigations may run on days, weeks, or months, as long as they reach their conclusion on-time.  And there's the one facet that can't be changed by any engineering practice:  Time.

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