Wind River Blog Network

Why a good platform can't be free

By Doug Schaefer

I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.

In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.

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BMW wants to go open

By Doug Schaefer

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

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Open Console you say

By Doug Schaefer

Linux powers "cloud" gaming console.

More info here.

I hate the term cloud, but this is close to the internet appliance/open gaming console I have been thinking about. Specs are damn close too. Although I'm not sure the ATI HD 3200 class graphics (I assume it's the 780G chipset) will do a good job at the games. But it's good to see someone with money came up with a similar idea and has made this concept a reality, or at least is marketing it.

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Another legend has eyes on the future

By Doug Schaefer

I just finished reading an interview with another legend of the game programming industry, Epic's Tim Sweeney (Mr. Unreal). First it was John Carmack from id (Mr. Doom) wondering how game developers will be able to harness multi-core technologies to improve game performance. Now I see Tim has a very interesting vision for how these technologies are going to change the industry.

It looks like both of them agree, multi-core general purpose processors will make graphics specific processing units obsolete, at least the fixed function parts of those graphics processors. But Tim seems to have a grasp of what that environment will look like. And it's both exciting and liberating.

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Time ripe for a Linux console?

By Doug Schaefer

I was watching my son the other day on our XBOX 360 that's tucked nicely in our cabinet under the TV with our DVD player, digital cable box, and receiver. He was playing Halo 3, which looks great on our LCD HDTV, BTW. He'd break out once in a while and go back to the Dashboard and send a text message to a buddy then go back into the game and use the headset connected to his controller to talk about his school day with another buddy he was shooting at. It's incredible how far consoles have come from the old Atari boxes we had when we were kids. Now they're these multi-processing entertainment centers and communication devices that hook our kids up to the rest of the world.

It's also interesting how he's migrated away from our PC over to the XBOX. That could be because our PC is getting old and the 360 is actually a more powerful machine. But, still there are still things you can't do on it.

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Open Source Handhelds

By Doug Schaefer

Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.

At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.

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Wind River Webinar: Q and A

By Mike Deliman

Hello All,

last week as some of you know I was the featured presenter / presentation for a Webinar. (you may have problems watching that with firefox...) .  During the course of the webinar, we were asked a number of questions, and we ran out of time...

Here are some of the questions and answers we couldn't get to.

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Who's leading anyway?

By Doug Schaefer

The LinuxHater linked off to Christopher Blizzard's (from OLPC fame and now at Mozilla) blog on the current state of affairs with the GNOME project. He gives some very eye opening insight into what's happening there and the potential future directions for GNOME, GTK, and friends. It's not pretty, literally.

GNOME is getting big in the mobile space, or at least the number of contributors from that space is starting to dominate the GNOME project. And as we all know in the open source world, the contributors are the leaders and get to make the decisions. What this likely means and what blizzard is afraid of is that the GNOME desktop is not going to get the attention it needs to compete with the modern interfaces it competes with. The commercial interest just isn't there to make it happen like it is with GNOME mobile.

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Is Vista another ME?

By Doug Gaff

I have an ongoing lunchtime discussion with some of my coworkers about Vista. We've covered the usual topics: the hardware requirements, the OS footprint, the driver challenges, comparisons to Ubuntu and Mac, etc. Lately we've been drawing parallels between Vista and Windows ME.

Windows ME (Millennium Edition), as you old timers will recall, was the last version of Windows on the 9x kernel (Windows 95, Windows 98). Microsoft had already released Windows 2000, based on the NT kernel, and Windows XP came less than a year after ME's release – supposedly unifying 2000 and ME (NT kernel + nice UI).

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Bye Bill. You will be missed

By Doug Schaefer

Reading the news I see that today was Bill Gates last day at Microsoft. Apparently, they held a tearful farewell in Redmond for him. And it really does mark a significant moment in the history of our industry and a time to reflect.

If I had a dime for every time I read someone say that Bill Gates crashed their machine or was someone personally affecting their life in some negative way, I'd be as rich as he is (well, maybe not). But as much as you may hate Microsoft and the methods they've used to drive their vision, you have to take a good look at what Bill Gates and company have done and how they've succeeded.

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