Increa Technology |Engineer |Aviator |Educator

I wrote the following letter to the edtior of Intech Controls Magazine (www.isa.org/intech). It was published August 2004, page 9.

Regarding the May 2004 issue of Protocol, the article “Sharing data” by Ron Fredericks does a good job of finding common ground between Windows and Linux, white box PCs, and embedded processors. The author promotes the utility of the Common Internet File System, adopted and customized from the PC world into the embedded world.A few pages later the article ”In sync” by Kendal Harris, Anatoly Moldovansky, and Steve Zuponcic introduces the CIP Sync service that provides time synchronization down to fractional milliseconds between embedded devices connected with Ethernet/IP links, while maintaining compatibility with UDP [user datagram protocol] and TCP.

Time synchronization could be another area of common ground and cross-fertilization between the white box PC world and the embedded world. Commercial software is available, or you can use open source tool sets.

If world time is needed, many installations can connect to free Internet time servers with an accuracy of fractional seconds, using tools such as the NTP toolset in the Linux world . Alternately, Rossi Engineering provides two free solutions to pull time synchronization directly off radio waves, through a sound card, into your computer: CHU, version 0.1.29 available at www.rossi.com/chu, or WBZ, available at www.rossi.com/wbz/.

In this way real world time can he obtained with no external Internet connection. If your network needs time synchronization, but not real world awareness, you could designate one of your computers as “master,”or purchase a commercial time master, and slave the rest of the computers to the master.

If time synchronization is possible with tools already available, why does the embedded world need its own separate standard? That is not a rhetorical question. If there is a good reason, then comparing the multiple protocols would have added tremendous value to the article.

Fox news reported yesterday on the new Microsoft legal spin to Linux users.
In essence, if you can’t own another company’s technology, all you have to do is make significant numbers of potential customers afraid of it. It’s like negative political campaigns: liking me, or disliking all competition, gets the same result. The new tool on the business landscape is that ~winning~ a legal suit is irrelevant these days. 90% of the coercion is done by ~threatening~ a law suit.

Microsoft needed one cooperative Linux distributor to funnel everybody toward. Then down the road, they will buy that distribution. Then choosing Linux or Microsoft is irrelevant – Microsoft will profit either way. Notice Microsoft paid more money in this current deal, so they’re scheming something. The problem has been that Linux licensing prevents them from “buying a distribution”. So.. instead they let them all live, but scare everybody away from all others.

Specific interpretations of article quotes:

“Microsoft says it has patent rights to some of the technology in Linux, although it has never said exactly what those rights might be or what patents are involved. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said if customers bought Linux from anyone but Novell, they could face trouble.”

“If a customer says, ‘Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?’ Essentially, if you’re using non-SUSE Linux, then I’d say the answer is yes,” Ballmer told eWeek.com recently, referring to the Linux system sold by Novell.

In other words, scare tactics – FUD. Winning a legal case doesn’t matter or being right doesn’t matter. I just hint and make innuendos and very few companies will risk the possibility of a suit. Point: There is no “owner” of Linux, so you go after the users of Linux. A big precedence in this area was set 3 years ago by an industrial control computer company. And then the Blackberry issue of a year ago exercised the same type of legal issues. Microsoft will be the third “big news” company to do this tactic.

“I suspect that (customers) will take that issue up with their distributor,” Ballmer said, adding that if customers considered doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version, “they’ll think twice about that.”

In other words,

In case you don’t know what to do, let me tell you: tell your distributor to make a deal with Microsoft. Red Hat is a big enough service business to maybe do it to protect revenues. Mandriva will not because the European Union hates Microsoft and the French aren’t fond toward America. Distributions without commercial business implicaitons like Knoppix will always be around because Microsoft only cares about the big company customers, which are defecting right and left to Linux.

Switch to Mandriva 2007.0 Linux. They finally got their act back together, went back to their roots, and are distributing the full distribution free again (4 CDs or DVD).

The WordPress editor chokes whenever the word on the end of this line has any other characters after it on the line: mkdir

So for now, I’ve put dashes in the word, like this: m-k-d-i-r to remind myself to go back to fix these later.