I was at some trade show wandering around with a cynic who was pointing out that every booth advertised productivity improvements. How many improvements we’ve made to productivity, and this has gone on for years” he said,“By now, we must
Synchronization blues
Synchronization is hard in real-time applications, but not as hard as people imagine. If you follow a few simple rules you can make it manageable. Never force priority and mutual exclusion to fight each other. You can’t mean “Task A
Class and lack thereof
From the always readable Joel on Software: Attention, FogBugz competitors: a court has ruled that you are welcome to continue to advertise your products when people search for FogBugz on Google. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with this
Engineering cool factor
One of our customers wrote to us today and said that he was impressed with how enthusiastic our engineers are about our software and customer applications. And why not? Real-time software is core technology for so many incredible applications. Here’s
Soft real-time and software costs
Imagine designing an automobile with a motor that runs really well on a demonstration frame, with none of those heavy panels or safety devices, and only tested on a short flat track. Imagine an engineering team designing an automobile or
What is software security for
The natural tendency of an engineer is to assume that “security” is an engineering issue that reduces to a type of reliability. And the Common Criteria security document outlines a solid engineering approach (written in astoundingly opaque bureaucratese) for assuring