We’ve just been through ESC and are heading towards DAC. Both of these are “go-to” events for marketing: lots of announcements, lots of press meetings.

And yet, one of the recommendations you frequently hear as a marketer is that shows are a bad place to announce things. There’s so much going on, there are so many people making announcements, that you get lost in the noise. It’s really hard to stand out; your marketing energy is dissipated in friction, not in results. (Of course, if everybody stopped announcing at … Read More → "Joining the Chorus"

I had the good fun of co-moderating a panel with Multicore Association President Markus Levy at the Multicore Expo last week. The goal of the panel was to explore how software programmers who aren’t multicore architecture experts – and who don’t want to be – can write code that won’t have to be re-written for each multicore architecture variant that comes around. We were pushing our luck on the scheduling, since it was on the last day just after 4 PM. The exhibit booths were mostly down by then, and the chances were good … Read More → "An Unambiguous Message for Multicore Architects"

Microsoft just took Skype off eBay’s hands for the Buy It Now price of $8.5 billion. Yikes.

That’s a lot of money for a company that provides a free service. After all, the whole point of Skype is to use your computer to bypass the long-distance phone system. It’s like flipping a finger to The Man: I can use my $50/month Internet service to bypass the $3/minute phone system. Take that, AT&T! (Never mind that AT&T is providing many Skype users’ Internet service, too.)

Actually, Skype does make money. … Read More → "Microsoft plus Skype?"

LDRA and PRQA both had news at ESC last week. As a reminder, LDRA focuses on the traceability and certification of software, especially software targeted for safety-critical and secure applications. PRQA, on the other hand, prides itself in its deep, detailed code analysis, looking for potential bugs or other problems.

LDRA announced the ability to provide traceability from requirements all the way to object code. It’s that last mile to object code that’s new. The idea is to be able to document that all of the executable code can be traced to a … Read More → "Software Validation News"

Sitting through iSQED presentations on single-event-upset-tolerant circuits, I couldn’t help but notice the recurrent C²MOS moniker being tossed about. It was unclear to me whether it was stimulating some old, moldy memory or if that was just my imagination.

Some subsequent poking around to learn more proved harder than I expected. The term is tossed out here and there, but it was actually really difficult to confirm what it stands for: Clocked CMOS.

And then I saw … Read More → "What Goes Around"