Wind River Blog Network

From W3 to the World Wide Web

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.

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Mobile Broadband dongles find success in UK

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.

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In-flight Internet access... and mobile phones too?

By Paul Parkinson

I read a business article in the Economist ('Mobile Phones on planes - Your call') during the Christmas holidays about the current developments in passenger in-flight systems, specifically the provision of Internet data access and the potential to support mobile (cell) phone voice calls during flight.

The article reports on trials of a Wi-Fi data service by JetBlue and Quantas, and a forthcoming mobile phone voice call trial by Air France (which follows on from the mobile phone SMS text messaging described in this Air France press release); it then goes on to discuss the social impact and acceptability of Internet data access and mobile voice calls during flight, which makes interesting reading.

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Drive by Ethernet?

By Paul Parkinson

I read last week that BMW has been researching the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) over standard Ethernet (Cisco) to network automotive controllers ('BMW brings Internet protocol under the hood', EETimes).

The motivation for the research is that at present, a number of different networking technologies (including CAN, LIN, MOST and FlexRay) are used in automotive applications, and these are optimized for different types of application, but the lack of standardization results in complexity and cost.

So, I was expecting the article to say that BMW had found Ethernet to be suitable for non-critical applications, but not well-suited to critical systems.

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Military Aerospace & Electronics Show

By Paul Parkinson

Yesterday, I attended the UK's Military Aerospace & Electronics technical conference and exhibition, which was held at the Heritage Motor Centre. The technical conference was split into three technical tracks, which were broadly related to avionics, land systems and technologies; and as is sometimes the case at these conferences I found that I wanted to attend some presentations which were running concurrently!

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DSDP-TM / RSE 2.0.0.1 critical patch release

By Martin Oberhuber

The Eclipse DSDP Target Management Project submitted a critical patch release of its Remote System Explorer (RSE) on Friday Jul 6. TM 2.0.0.1 fixes the following issues by changing 6 lines of Java code compared to TM 2.0 released with Eclipse Europa:

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Why Integrity Customers Get Free Support from Wind River

By Warren Kurisu

Previously, our CMO John Bruggeman blogged  about the importance of Service  and Support for Linux.  He called it the killer app for Linux.

We recently announced our new VxWorks and Wind River Linux platforms, which integrate the Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies.  This technology portfolio is a best-of-breed combination of technologies developed by Wind River and those acquired from Interpeak.  That is great news for VxWorks and Wind River Linux customers, but what about Interpeak customers using Integrity?

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DSDP: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

By Doug Gaff

Following up on today’s announcement of milestones in three of the DSDP projects—eRCP 1.0, MTJ 0.7, and TM 1.0—I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on DSDP…how it started, where it is today, and where it’s heading. First, let me start with a timeline of project events.

March 2005. Unofficially, the DSDP project got its start at a BoF session during EclispeCon last year. At the BoF, several device software tools vendors assembled to discuss the need for more embedded-specific functionality in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging area. There was acknowledgment of CDT and its extensive contribution to tooling in the embedded space, but there was also a desire to see more enhancements in the Eclipse Platform and more of a breadth of functionality around device software development. Shortly after EclipseCon, Wind River proposed the DSDP project and its two initial sub-projects, Target Management and Device Debugging. The TM project set out to build a framework and UI for managing remote embedded devices. The DD project initially focused on working with the Eclipse Platform Debug team to create a more customizable debugging framework in the Platform.

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Voluntary but coordinated - release test involving the user community

By Martin Oberhuber

The Target Management Project started its 2nd round of coordinated testing these days on its first release candidate, RSE 1.0RC1.

The interesting part of this test effort is, that it does not only involve committers but also many users who volunteered to join the testing. It looks like the users understand, that joining a coordinated test early helps each of them by achieving better quality - at little cost if lots of people join. The original test invitation E-Mail had been sent directly to all users we've had contact with, plus the tm-dev mailing list.

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The MVA - a consortium of consortia

By Paul Tingey

There is no doubt that open or industry standards now cover a large proportion of the technology components used in telecoms infrastructure equipment (as well as other markets). They have been so widely accepted that hardware, software and silicon manufacturers have organized themselves into consortia to coordinate their effects and create widely accepted standards within their technology fields.

In fact, the drive towards standardized components has become so widespread that these consortia have now created an industry movement of their own which requires coordination and marketing effort. So whose job is that?

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