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

To: Ronald Paul who wrote (5067)	4/27/1999 1:01:00 PM
From: Mike Milde	Respond to of 10309

<< The caution for WIND is that Moore's Law may very well blur the differentiation that WIND needs to compete in the same arena as CE. >> As hardware gets faster and cheaper, applications get more complex. That has always been true. You can't discount the importance of a good OS just because hardware is going to get cheaper. In 5 years the hardware will be different, but so will the requirements for software. I do agree that hard real-time requirements won't be much of a factor in Internet appliances. Fortunately, Wind River is jumping on the Java bandwagon much better than Microsoft is. I think Java will be very prevelant in the future. Java is wonderful, but most important is that most developers love Java. Mike

To: Ronald Paul who wrote (5067)	4/27/1999 1:15:00 PM
From: Prognosticator	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

VxWorks is not only hard: it is lean and scalable across a whole range of devices with different peripherals. CE is a heavyweight by comparison. VxWorks adds a lot of value even when an embedded device does not have a user-interface integrated into the hardware, Windows CE can't claim the same utility: it is after all... Windows. I don't think VxWorks and Windows CE do compete in the same arena, there is really no need for them to do so either. Any embedded developer who is thinking about using Windows CE should take a careful look at the priority mechanisms built into the Windows CE Kernel (http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsCE/developer/resources/techpapers/realtime.asp). CE gives you a whopping 8 FIXED priority levels for threads, compared with 256 DYNAMIC in VxWorks. 8 really isnt enough to run a system: once you assign priority levels for exception handlers, network drivers, and other operations, there isn't much left for the real work of the device. CE is at least simpler than the terrible mess they came up with in NT, where thread and process priorities interact in random ways to try and load balance the system for you so you can't know when a thread will execute. Corrections and elaborations welcome. P.