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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (6292)	9/12/1999 12:50:00 PM
From: voop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Hi Brian Wind's products are used in anti-lock brakes, jet engines, air traffic control towers, Mars roving vehicles, military operations, etc where crashing and re-booting is not an option. the company chose to make strategic investments in Oracles's NCI? now Liberate and Zinc software for GUI, which I thought was for the sole purpose of launching an embedded software counterattack on Redmond. No they have not marketed their reliability, small footprint kernal and other advantages to which those more technically proficient could allude. FWIW, I do not see them ever being friends with MSFT unless they decided to become digested by it. They may not be capitalized well enough for what I suggest but IMHO they should be carving out a space in the RTOS that clearly shows there inherent advantages against a respected and despised bully. Voop

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (6292)	9/13/1999 6:49:00 PM
From: William Sheppard	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

Brian wrote: Do you really believe your statement "An alternative approach (Java + VxWorks) is inherently secure, both from attach and from upgrade failures."? The cable industry definitely agrees that a Java-based approach would be safer than any environment where binary executables are directly downloaded and executed (regardless of the underlying OS under Java). This is why both DVB and ATSC (digital television standards bodies in Europe and the US, respectively) have spec'ed Java as the base technology for their standard application environments. Whether this will translate to Java becoming a standard settop component is another question, however, although it does provide a very nice hedge against MS establishing a monopoly in this area.

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (6292)	9/13/1999 8:04:00 PM
From: Prognosticator	Respond to of 10309

Do you really believe your statement "An alternative approach (Java + VxWorks) is inherently secure, both from attach and from upgrade failures."? Apart from the fact that I typoed "attach" when I should have said "attacks", yes. It's the Java part that makes for security: the designers made sure that the Java Applet was a secure as can be, given the limitations of current technology, and security is a central part of the Java 2 API. It's certainly more secure than Windows, which was never designed with security in place, and has only managed to gain any FIPS certification at all when not connected to a network (wow!). VxWorks itself is not secure, but it's a lot less complex than Windows, in fact less complex by a couple of orders of magnitude in the size of source code it takes to implement it. It is also much more stable than Windows, and has basically been feature-frozen in the kernel for about 5 years. Microsoft are even as we speak, integrating more and more internet functionality within the kernel, which means that that code runs with privileges that allow it to do pretty much anything it wants with the system. So a Java+VxWorks solution is more secure, and more reliable, since both parts were designed to be so. P.