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

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7820)	5/26/2000 2:04:00 PM
From: Logain Ablar	Respond to of 10309

Alan: On a separate but semi related topic to WIND. It appears the SAN market is heating up again with the recent EMC news and SUNW scheduled to launch their SAN initiative on June 14. For the SAN market fiber channel has been the mode of choice versus ethernet. It now appears the next advances in ethernet may be posing a risk to the FC maket (I say may because to date we have only heard announcements of future ethernet SAN ideas and they are not ready for market). Assuming the ethernet solution will need to be quite efficient and cost effective to displace FC do you have any opinion of its ability to replace FC as the preferred mode? Thanks in advance for your opinion. Tim (a wind and ancr investor).

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7820)	5/26/2000 3:34:00 PM
From: Peter Church	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10309

"...Even as microprocessors and related silicon double in most metrics every 18 months, they will forever fall farther and farther behind in their ability to keep up with much faster growth in bandwidth." Allen, I think that Metcalfe's Law has a time dependency: If the value of the network increases with the square of the number of nodes (chips?), and the number of nodes (chips) is doubling every 18 months, then the value of the network is doubling every 9 months. QED

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7820)	5/27/2000 10:47:00 AM
From: peter grossman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Allen, Using the lilies of the pond metaphor for the network effect, where in the summer do you think we are? When will the "doubling" become noticeable. In past years, we've expected earnings growth to outstrip revenues because I2O and other royalties would kick in. Now, it appears from guidance that management is geared more toward revenue growth. Is this a design to dominate? Earnings reports also used to be more predictable, a comfort to my investment style. Next week and going forward this year and next, do you think WIND can manage all of these: revenue and earnings expectations; exceed both; accelerate growth rates of both? -Peter

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7820)	5/31/2000 2:01:00 AM
From: Anthony Ettipio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Allen, Ning appears a bit beside himself, while at the same time making some very good points: From: ning2m <ning2m@y...> Date: Tue May 30, 2000 6:03pm Subject: RE: QNX and explosive growth Allen said "If Ning's assertion is true, then general-purpose OSes, like what you find on desktops and servers, will take over network equipment." I hate to repeat myself but I have said that there is a huge difference between general OS and embedded OS and that the embedded OS is more appropriate for network equipment market (see my posting on 5/17/00). The point I was making is that the market demand is driving many advanced features from general purpose OSes to embedded OSes (and RTOSes, which is a subclass of embedded OSes). For example, a pretty recent addition to VxWorks is the virtual memory, which is a common feature in general purpose OSes for years. WIND's next OS will have memory protection, which is again a common feature in general purpose OSes. So QNX has done what WIND is trying to do. I wish Allen would directly address any advanced features in QNX that he dislikes rather than attacking general-purpose OSes, which is NOT the point of discussion here. Allen said "The issue is not whether QNX is the Holy Grail of OSes that can handle a desktop while also shrinking to a footprint..." I didn't know QNX can handle desktop. If Allen knows an example where QNX is used as a desktop OS, please share with us. If not, please stop associating QNX with desktop OSes with innuendos. Allen said "...ASICs' inflexibility has given rise to a new breed of intelligent network processors that most likely embody the future." ASIC is anything but inflexible. In fact, ASIC is so flexible that it requires a lot of effort to work with it. The motivations for network processors are 1) to reduce the flexibility (thus the development time) by offering a inflexible canned solution to a subclass of network problems. 2) to reduce the development cost. 3) to reduce the production cost. I think there is a niche for network processors (especially in the low performance, commodity network equipment market). However, I don't think network processors will be prevalent in the network equipment market, at least in the next few years. The reasons are: 1) Better development tools significantly reduced development time and cost. For example, to implement an algorithm in ASIC that used to take a hardware engineer 12 months to do in VHDL can now be done by a software engineer in 3 months in C. 2) You can now do prototyping, development and small-quantity production with FPGA and switch to ASIC only when you need to produce a large quantity of a relatively mature product. The FPGA design can be used directly with ASIC without additional development efforts. 3) ASIC offers much higher performance than network processors. I will discuss this in the next point. Allen said "Moore's Law's loosing battle against the Law of the Telecosm..." This is a very astute observation. However, his conclusion "...that speed will be a primary consideration in software solutions." is wrong. If you take the average networking software in the market and optimize it to the theoretical limit, you are getting just a few percentage gain in speed. Even if you took the worst piece of crap in the market and optimize it, you would not get more than 10 times (or 1000%) increase in speed. Therefore, optimizing the software is not a viable solution to bridge the gap between the Moore's Law and the Law of the Telecom. So how do we solve this problem? I assert that the solution is ASIC. I could substantiate my assertion with tedious technical discussions. But to keep it interesting, let me use an analogy. Let's look at our own brain. When we are first born, our brains are like unprogrammed FPGA. As we grow up, we are programmed to recognize faces (among many other things we do). Human neurons are operating at much slower speed than the gates (or a collection of transistors) in today's computers, yet we can recognize faces better and faster than the fastest computers. The secrete is in the specialization of a set of neurons for face recognition and the parallelism inherent in a web of large number of neurons. There are no CPUs in our head. Our brain is a collection of ASICs, each of which is programmed to perform a specific function. So the nature is telling us that the path to high performance is not the ever increasing clock speed of transistors but ever expanding collection of ASICs. Another interesting observation of ASIC is that the line between hardware and software is finally gone. There is no software instructions to be read into a machine and executed. The hardware is the embodiment of the software. The software is realized as the web of interconnections, just like the essence of us is realized as the web of interconnections of neurons. There is a saying that when you hold a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. Intel, being a CPU company, obvious would think every computing device needs a CPU. As you can see, this CPU centric view is having problems with the Law of the Telecom. Allen said "Becoming the Microsoft of the post-desktop era is the only acceptable outcome for WIND, and it is attainable. This is a simple consequence economics in a competitive market with a zero marginal cost of production. There is no in between; its all or nothing." Wow! Perhaps Allen is using hyperbole to make his point. I think this view is too narrow and simplistic. As I said before, a competitive market is dynamic and chaotic. It's unlikely that we will see a repeat of PC market in the post PC era. There is a wide range of possible outcomes for WIND. Although I am generally bullish on WIND, I am unconformable to subscribe to such dogma. I think tunnel vision is dangerous in investing. Having healthy respect for the uncertainties in this dynamic market is only prudent. Ning

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7820)	5/31/2000 2:08:00 AM
From: Anthony Ettipio	Respond to of 10309

Allen, this is from the QNX.com website. Should we not all consider QNX to be our chief competition - or is this more hype than reality? Sounds like they've used lines awfully similar to WIND: QNX is... more than just an RTOS QNX is... a realtime platform QNX is... open (in all the right places) In today?s competitive market, embedded developers need technology that is accessible, secure and reliable - technology that enables them to create innovative, feature-rich products. The QNX realtime platform delivers all of this and more, by providing standard APIs and tools, free access, open source to much of our technology, and open architecture. More? Introducing the QNX realtime platform, the first integrated, self-hosted, graphical platform for embedded developers. Everything needed to create reliable, realtime devices - today. As the world gets "smarter," and continues its push toward connected devices, the demands on embedded developers are ever-increasing. The race is on to provide reliable, feature-rich solutions to a quickly evolving, highly competitive market. For over 20 years, QNX Software Systems has been serving the complex needs of the realtime, embedded market - needs like high reliability, hard realtime performance, sophisticated functionality, small footprint, and massive scalability. Our experience and long tradition of innovation make us uniquely positioned to drive this new wave of smart, e-devices. By offering a complete realtime platform, with a full-featured, customizable GUI, an integrated suite of production-ready components, and an open, extensible architecture, we can provide developers with the leading edge they need to win. Advanced, memory-protected architecture Open systems APIs plus source for drivers and applications Fully embeddable windowing system Self-hosted development environment with industry-standard toolchain Production-ready suite of customizable modules, including Internet and multimedia QNX is... a solid foundation Every platform needs a solid foundation. The QNX realtime platform is built on the QNX NeutrinoTM realtime OS, the most advanced RTOS on the market. The QNX Neutrino RTOS enables the design of highly reliable, scalable, and deterministic systems. reliable architecture With QNX Neutrino it all comes down to architecture...microkernel architecture, that is. The microkernel includes only a small set of core services within the kernel, including thread services, message passing, mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, signals, and scheduling. The kernel can be extended by dyamically plugging in service-providing processes, such as file systems, networking, POSIX message queues, and device drivers. Each process runs in its own memory-protected address space, which makes QNX Neutrino inherently reliable. With so little code in the kernel to cause problems, kernel errors are virtually eliminated. And when there is a software fault, even in drivers and other critical programs, a QNX Neutrino-based system can intelligently recover - without rebooting. Embedded systems developers can also rely on other reliability-enhancing features of microkernel architecture, including support for both software and hardware hotswapping, and the ability to distribute components across a networked environment. fully scalable Since only core services are included in the kernel, with optional processes plugged in to add functionality, the result is a modular operating system that's incredibly scalable. QNX Neutrino scales seamlessly from the leanest consumer device right up to the largest distributed SMP systems. realtime performance QNX Neutrino, of course, offers superior realtime response. With features like multitasking, threads, priority-driven preemptive scheduling, synchronization, and fast context switching (0.55 æsec on a Pentium III), the RTOS provides the serious realtime performance demanded by today's embedded systems developers. QNX is ... well-connected One of our greatest strengths is networking. Our full implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite and utilities - including PPP, DHCP, NFS, RPC, and SNMP - makes it possible to run a variety of Internet services over a wide choice of networks. Using Ethernet or serial lines, users can connect to the Internet, the company WAN, log in to remote systems, exchange mail, run remote user interfaces, and more. What's more, TCP/IP for QNX can be easily scaled down to a small stack, suitable for tiny client-based systems, or scaled up to a full BSD 4.4 implementation. QnetTM: seamless access But QNX goes beyond simple networking. QNX Networking (QnetTM) is message-based native networking that gives you access to any resource, anywhere. Qnet features fault-tolerant networking, load-balancing on the fly, efficient performance, extensible architecture, and transparent distributed processing. Qnet simply extends the QNX message-passing mechanism to provide the ultimate in flexibility. Under Qnet, messages are transparently transferred from one node to another, which makes it possible to access and use resources from remote nodes - seamlessly. Qnet routes messages across the various nodes. From an application's point of view, sending messages to a local or remote server is the same. One node can easily access another node's file system, servers, hardware resources, and so on. Qnet can also be configured to distribute processing needs across multiple nodes. QNX is... a graphical environment The QNX platform is the only realtime platform that features a fully customizable, embeddable windowing system - making it possible to bring professional, high-end graphics to even the smallest, memory-constrained device. embeddable GUI The Photon microGUI© windowing system is a high-performance graphical environment with an extremely small memory footprint. Its modular design gives developers the freedom to scale up and build feature-rich applications - like multimedia, Internet, and more - into embedded products. The Photon microGUI offers a number of technologies for creating high-end graphics applications, such as offscreen video, direct graphics mode, video overlay support, and 3D. Simply add or remove modules to scale from a tiny embedded system to a full-blown, workstation-class development environment. easy maintenance Since Photon was created with the same distributed architecture as the underlying RTOS, connectivity is built in. It makes little difference if customers are in the same city or on the other side of the world, developers can monitor and support them with ease. In fact, they can view and interact with any Photon application at any time - anywhere - using TCP/IP as the transport. Internet ready Whether a product needs to surf the web or serve HTML pages, QNX's leading-edge Internet technologies have everything developers need. If developers need a web browser, but don't want to spend the time or money to build one from scratch, there's VoyagerTM browser. Full-featured and scalable, the Voyager browser has support for SSL-128, as well as optional plug-ins and helpers, such as Macromedia Flash 4, RealNetworks RealPlayer 7, and our own media player for MPEG and general sound support. multimedia ready The QNX realtime platform includes all the necessary plug-ins to create the most complete and dynamic multimedia experience possible. The suite includes plug-ins for DVD with Dolby Digital AC-3, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, CD audio, and more. Not only does the QNX platform feature an extensive suite of plug-ins, their capabilities are often enhanced when used with QNX. For example, processor-intensive, multithreaded applications such as DVD can deliver smoother, more seamless playback, thanks to QNX's fast context switching, priority-based scheduling, and other realtime capabilities. QNX is ... developer friendly The QNX realtime platform is the ideal environment for developing realtime, embedded applications. the best tools To begin with, the QNX platform includes the tools developers need to create high-quality, realtime, embedded systems. The popular command-line GNU development tools are included with the platform, as are graphical debuggers and third-party development tools. And, of course, since QNX Neutrino and Linux share the same POSIX APIs, almost any Linux development tool can be easily ported to and used with QNX. Developers creating Photon applications can dramatically reduce the amount of programming that needs to be done with the Photon Application Builder (PhABTM). The PhAB visual design tool generates underlying C code to implement an entire user interface. PhAB saves time not only in writing the interface portion of an application, but in the debugging and testing stages as well. The end result? Full control over the user experience and shorter time to market. With PhAB, standard widgets can be cut and pasted into an interface, or they can be quickly created with the widget palette. Built-in resource editors can be used to change text fonts, modify colors, customize bitmaps, and add callbacks without writing a single line of code. choice of development environments Unlike traditional RTOSs, the QNX realtime platform offers a friendly, graphical development environment. So, whether developers choose self-hosted development or cross-development, the QNX realtime platform offers an environment that's easy to work in. developer-friendly architecture The same UPM architecture that gives QNX Neutrino such unmatched fault tolerance, also makes it easier to add or change modules during development. Since every module runs as an independent process, it's no problem to add new features or enhance existing ones. Only the modules that are changed need to be re-tested, while the kernel and other modules remain separate and secure. So, rather than the days it may take to recompile, relink, and retest an entire runtime image with other OSs, with QNX Neutrino it takes just seconds. Developers can also start, stop, modify, or upgrade any part of the system safely and seamlessly, without a reboot or kernel rebuild. In a conventional OS, subtle programming errors can crash the system without leaving a trace. With its full memory protection, however, QNX Neutrino not only prevents memory-access violations, but identifies which module was responsible - at the exact instruction. custom look-and-feel With QNX, OEMs have the freedom to brand their products with a unique look-and-feel. Applications can be easily customized using the PhAB design tool and our time-to-market source kits. runtime friendly With ever-changing standards, developers need to be able to dynamically upgrade and maintain products in the field. With QNX, they can upgrade new features or fix problems on the fly, even remotely, without interrupting service. For example, users can download new software or replace existing software themselves. Or the device could be programmed to update itself without the user being involved at all. Either way, there's no downtime. ¸ 2000, QNX Software Systems Ltd. QNX, Photon microGUI, and Neutrino are registered trademarks, and IAT, FLEET, FTL, In-Hand, PhAB, Phindows, PhinX, Qnet, and Voyager are trademarks, of QNX Software Systems Ltd. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.