And I thought we would go for NT Embedded...
Today I experienced a MSFT employee with an attitude that shocked me. He was sent by MSFT Denmark to be an expert on MSFT technologies for embedded systems, and we were at a meeting (or mini-conference) with at least 6 different companies involved in a computer system for public transportation. Currently, the system runs on 6 buses with Windows 2000, and a big question was to replace that with Windows NT Embedded or Windows CE before scaling it up to 1300 buses. It was my impression that we were going for the NT Embedded solution, because Windows CE doesn't support a few of the functions we need.
The MSFT guy started to bash Linux in his presentation. Nobody was talking Linux before him, and he was very determined to say everything he has learned about Linux before he started with his real topic: NT Embedded. Most attendees wondered about that behaviour.
In the discussion he said that NT Embedded doesn't support NTFS (only FAT) and doesn't have support for a flash-RAM file system. This means that we have to put an UPS onto the computer, making it more expensive. I asked whether there were any other technologies that would enable us to write to flash-RAM without writing the same bits over and over again (flash-RAM writes are destructive), and the answer was clearly "No". And he didn't think that a harddisk would be a good idea. Hmmm... he knows we are dealing with 20MB of data a day that has to be accumulated somewhere.
The project manager, who had chosen Windows 2000 originally instead of Linux, knew that Linux supports a special flash file system and has no problems with removing the UPS and keeping a harddisk. When he suggested to change to Linux on a later session, the MSFT guy started to bash Linux again in very unserious ways. The system is about counting passengers and logging GPS coordinates etc., which he knows very, very well, and a very important thing is that we don't want to upgrade software on 1300 buses. At one time, his major argument for using Windows NT Embedded or Windows CE was that the upgrades would include newer technology, like newer versions of MS Internet Explorer. At that time he wasn't taken very seriously by anybody any more.
The end result of this mini-conference will probably be, that we will use Interbase for storing data on the FAT file system, in order to minimize filesystem metadata changes, or we will convert the whole stuff to Linux. Since the computer is connected to a network via TCP/IP (radio link), the MS SQL Server solution would cost $6500...
Btw: I asked him about SQL Server CE. He agreed, that I had to pay $6500 in license for each $800 unit we would ship.
What an interesting day. Ended very differently from what I expected.
Lars. |
