From Mark:
>1) The military-industrial complex exists to provide jobs, not to >defend the nation in the most efficient possible manner.
>2) Nearly every engineer is proud of his work and believes the code >he designs and develops is the most elegant.
You've met some poor engineers (or were one of them). I've never
met a sw enginer that claimed he could write a better/more effiecient/more reliable/cheaper RTOS than Wind River, or pSOS or VRTX, for that matter. You are confusing application software with RTOS software. Most application software will remain propietary because that is the nature of the beast (that is until a specific application becomes standardized and therefore profitable for a COTS company to sell). However, any SW engineer who claims that starting from scratch he/she can write an RTOS that has more/better functionality and (this is the clincher) just as reliable and cost effective as Wind Rivers' (or even INTS etc.) is a fool and should be treated as such (or maybe a genius... and should probably be given as much berth as the fool in a time crunched sw project:)
Also, any fool that wants to write an RTOS for a new well funded software project should be fired! It's not too unlike a secretary wanting to write his/her own Word Processor before he/she starts working. The NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is what you refer to above and, believe me, it is dying a fast death in software development.
>3) The code already exists from a previous project and there's no >sense in paying an RTOS vendor for code that performs the same >functions.
Jesus... you just don't know the real time industry. People are switching all the time. (How do you think any of the RTOS vendors are growing) Not only are the engineers coming around to off the shelf OSs, but the entire trend is being driven by engineering managers ticked off with unreliable software, who are in turn under the gun to deliver better/faster/quicker. Software has been such a joke for years now that (with regard to being late and buggy) that upper management is all for throwing money at the problem to gain time and reliability. Sofware is the bottleneck, as your father said. In such a situation you need to "buy your way out" of the problem (if you can)... hence the use of a commercial RTOS.
Even if I am told that what I have in house is technically equivalent to that which the RTOS vendors sell me, I am not automatically going to use the in house version. What I want to buy is reliability. What I am buying is freedom from worry about hidden bugs. That is what the RTOS vendors offer.
Why is Wind the best choice for 32bit at present? First, because their RTOS is the most powerful. As a small example I remember asking an engineer from Software Components Group (used to make pSOS before they were bought by INTS) how he handled the problem of "priority inversion" (an arcane real time problem). His answer: "It's a design problem. You need to make sure that it doesn't happen. "
Then I asked the Wind River engineer. "Oh.. we handle that using priority inheritance". Sure, maybe the INTS guy was half right in his suggestion that I better design my software better :), but I sure felt more secure with the Wind River answer.
Why is Wind River taking over the RTOS market? In many cases it's for the above-mentioned technological superiority. In other cases it's what used to be called the IBM effect. Years ago when managers bought computers for their offices/networks there was a saying " You never get fired for buying IBM". Substitute Wind for IBM. It's also because of their sale and marketing force. Tornado rules. Hype or fact it doesn't matter. It rules. I just talked to an emulator vendor last month, and asked him what he thought of Wind River. His response: "Jesus.. they're everywhere. Everywhere I go, they've been there before me"
mac
>Like Warren Buffett, I oppose stock options
Thats the type of statement that must endear you to many, Mark. Let me see now. You made one quick killing on the market. You retired. You have two years of investing experience. And now you are comparing yourself to Warren Buffet :)
Also, since you spend a lot of time here saying Wind is overvalued at present (which is basically unarguable..could be true.. could be false) at least have the backbone, and the courage of your convictions to short the bloody stock.
|
