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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (124)	10/28/1997 4:51:00 PM
From: Typhoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

"Oh. I don't really know anything about the embedded market" That is why I'm having such an easy time shooting down your blatant support of everything Microsoft does. "Who are the players in the embedded market?" Look inside your VCR, garage door opener, microwave oven, thermostat, computer monitor, under the hood of your car, telephone, answering machine, photocopier, printer, fax machine, calculator, childrens' toys that beep and flash lights, the watch on your wrist, your clock radio, your smoke detector, home security system, vending machines, slot machines, modems, gee - I could go on and on. Then write down the company names on all of those products. That's who. "Is 2MB really that big?" Yes, it's huge for the very vast majority of embedded systems. There are very few embedded applications where that isn't seen as a large amount of ROM (especially to burden your application with something completely unnecessary and slow). "I have to believe Windows CE would be a good fit in some applications." I agree with you here - low-quantity, expensive applications where the designers aren't smart enough to do it the right way, where they can afford to waste money and where reliability doesn't matter.

To: Robert Winchell who wrote (124)	10/28/1997 9:28:00 PM
From: Jerry Heidtke	Respond to of 1600

>Oh. I don't really know anything about the embedded market. Obviously... Who are the players in the embedded market? What part? CPU's are available from Intel, Zilog, AMD, TI, Hitachi, and a couple dozen others. Common OS's include QNX, RTOS, and others that have been on the market for ten years or more. A lot of high volume devices don't use a commercial OS at all, just a custom-written application that handles all I/O functions directly that an OS would usually abstract to an API. >Is 2MB really that big? This is a highly competitive market, where $0.10 difference in manufacturing costs means a lot. Since many embedded systems get by just fine now with 16-32 KB or ROM, adding 2MB for an OS, and 1-2 MB for a bloated application developed with MS's CE Toolkit would increase costs tremendously. I doubt that the savings in programmers' salaries from using Visual Basic newbies vs. experienced C/Assembly grunts would be more than the added product costs in most cases. >I have to believe Windows CE would be a good fit in some >applications. No doubt. I use a PDA with WinCE, and find it very useful. I don't think I'd trust it to run a power plant though, or even my car. It might be useful on a VCR, so it could be programmed on screen with a GUI interface. You'd probably see a lot fewer VCR's flashing <blink>12:00:00</blink>. I have had one crash in CE that wiped out all my data. Fortunately I had a backup on my PC. I don't think a full-blown PC as a backup device is a realistic option for very many embedded applications. Jerry