Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: September 11, 2003

  • Intel is Wasting Time With 802.11a Centrino

    Infoworld:

    The introduction of the 802.11a version of Intel Corp.’s wireless chip, part of its Centrino mobile package, will be delayed past its expected arrival at the end of the third quarter, an Intel spokesman said Thursday.

    Call me crazy, but 802.11a seemed to be desirable for about 20 minutes.

    Can you use 802.11a at a Starbucks?  What about the thousands of other for-fee access points throughout the world?  How many 802.11a community (read: free) access points are there in the wild?  Does it interoperate With 802.11b or 802.11g?

    I honestly think that Intel would be better off spending their time and money elsewhere, preferably in ramping up their 802.11g efforts.  True, the 5GHz spectrum is a lot less crowded.  However, 802.11a is going to be in competition with the newest cordless phones as 5GHz cordless phones become the next chic tech.  I’m sure other gadgets will find use for the somewhat lonely 5GHz spectrum in the near future.

    This move (and plans to add 802.11g to the chipset) is also seriously diluting the Centrino brand that Intel has spent so much money on creating.  Last week, Centrino meant 802.11b (along with the required audio chipset and other baggage).  This week the wireless portion of Centrino means 802.11b + 802.11a.  Later this year, it is going to mean 802.11b + 802.11a + 802.11g.

    Is anyone else confused?

  • Windows Server 2003 On The Rise

    Netcraft notes an increase in sites hosted on Windows Server 2003:

    Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in January 2003 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 49% (153K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (16.5K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from FreeBSD (3K) and 1% from Solaris (2.5K).

    While the number of sites running on a Windows platform has decreased slightly this month, it is interesting to watch the migration of Win2k and older systems over to 2003.  I’ve found that overall Windows 2000 is pretty stable if you keep it at a production state.  That means NO THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE goes on there unless there’s a showstopping reason.  Windows Updates aside, a well-tuned Win2k box can stay up and running for quite some time.

    I was pleasantly suprised to find that the beta of Windows Server 2003 seemed even more stable than Win2k.  Granted, I just played around with IIS and the other included software and kept it clean otherwise, but I don’t think I had to reboot it for any reason other than swapping out some hardware for the month that I ran it.  Not too shabby at all.

    Now it’s time to switch my KVM and head over to my linux box…

  • Linux Kernel 2.6: An Embedded Perspective

    Brandon White at Linux Devices reports that many of the improvements being made to the 2.6 kernel are benificial to embedded systems.  From a glance, it looks like latency has been cut dramatically in the 2.6 kernel.  This is definately good news to developers of realtime and near-realtime applications.  There are many other improvements in the 2.6 kernel that allow it to operate on very lightweight hardware (MMU-less processors for example) to very high end systems (64GB addressable RAM on a 32 bit architecture).

    The entire article is definately worth reading even if you’re not into embedded systems.  The 2.6 kernel will be good for all machines, big and small.