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After being a predominantly one-back offense for most of Andy Reid's tenure as head coach, the Philadelphia Eagles plan on shifting to a two-back offense next season.
According to Reuben Frank of CSNPhilly.com, offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur plans to use both LeSean McCoy and Bryce Brown and split the workload in the Eagles backfield.
"I think it's important that you use more than one running back," Shurmur said. "It's a long season, and a guy can run out of gas quickly.
"If you have guys who are different, you can use them in different ways, and you try to play to their strengths. I think that's important."
Head coach Chip Kelly frequently relied on multiple running backs during his tenure at Oregon. Kelly had at least two players with more than 90 carries a season in each of his four years as head coach of the Ducks. Last season, running backs Kenjon Barner, De'Anthony Thomas and Byron Marshall and quarterback Marcus Mariota all had at least 87 carries a piece for Oregon.
Both McCoy and Brown each carried the ball over 100 times last season for the Eagles. It was the first time since 2003 when Shurmur was the Eagles quarterbacks coach that Philadelphia accomplished that feat. In between, McCoy and Brian Westbrook had been relied on to take the majority of the carries for the Eagles.


text:
Rainbow Cat face paint
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Inner Colour – Face Painting Melbourne
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© Copyright Inner Colour. All rights reserved

subset: commoncrawl


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text:
Export 8 results:Author Title Type [ Year]
Filters: Author is Nave, Lucas E. [Clear All Filters]
Exploring the role of ectomycorrhizal fungi in soil carbon dynamics. New Phytologist.. 2019.
A national approach to leverage the benefits of tree planting on public lands. New Forests. 50(1):1-9.. 2019.
Effects of canopy structure and species diversity on primary production in upper Great Lakes forests. Oecologia. 18842211098218217142537632627632815132609242981265014892535430649351639730292051897617728313279669172151496619199815257(2):405-415.. 2018.
Impacts of experimentally accelerated forest succession on belowground plant and fungal communities. Soil Biology and Biochemistry. 125:44-53.. 2018.
Physiographic factors underlie rates of biomass production during succession in Great Lakes forest landscapes. Forest Ecology and Management. 397:157-173.. 2017.
Maintaining high rates of carbon storage in old forests: A mechanism linking canopy structure to forest function. Forest Ecology and Management. 298:111-119.. 2013.


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The New Now Thing: Where Linux is taking the Embedded World
Out of nowhere Linux has suddenly became the leading operating system for embedded devices and applications. There was no battle. No CEO surrendered his keyboard to an army of penguins. No stiff-suited guy talking to a bank of microphones. No parades.
But it happened. Linux won the embedded space. The only other OS vendor of any significance in that space, Wind River, still makes a fine living doing what it has always done, which is suppling semiconductor companies and various manufacturers with embedded and real time operating systems (RTOSes), software development tools and support, to the tune of a few hundred million dollars in revenue per year. Not bad. Also not significant.
Go back a few years and two other leaders in the space were Lynx and Ready Systems. Today Lynx is Lynuxworks, and Jim Ready - perhaps the leading personality in the history of embedded operating systems - runs MontaVista, one of the top new Linux embedded OS companies.
Meanwhile Bryan Sparks, who made Caldera the first well-branded Linux distribution back in the mid-Nineties, is charging forward with Lineo, a Caldera spin-off that is on an aggressive campaign to blow away not only its Linux competition, but Wind River as well.
It's hard to find any hard numbers about Linux adoption in the embedded world, just as it was hard to find hard numbers about the Internet when nobody seemed to notice that it was taking over. But it's happening. Just as surely, and just as rapidly.
The embedded processing market is enormous. It's everything that processes bits and isn't general purpose computing. Look at it another way: it's everything that could possibly connect to the Ne,: the sprinker system in your lawn, the conveyor belt controller at a distribution facility, all the medical instruments at your doctor's office, the navigation systems in airplanet ... anything and everything that relies on digital intelligence. This is the world laying at Linux's feet. It's all Antactica now.
Why? The short answer is engineers. Hey, they like Linux. It's familiar. It's small. It's net-native. It's fast. It's reliable. And it's open to improvement by anybody who wants to bang on code. What more could you want?
Lots, apparently. A faster, "harder" real-time Linux would be good. Visual development tools. Ever-better ways for engineers to support each other. The embedded world is open for renovation and reinvention from top to bottom. Next to embedded, what's happening in the rack & box world of client/server computing is micropotatoes.
Where there's more than enough business to go around, there's room for more than one leading market personality. Such is the case in the embedded Linux world, where Lineo's Bryan Sparks and MontaVista's Jim Ready are not only pushing development envelopes, but also each other. While there is clearly much mutual respect, there are also vast differences. At the risk of oversimplification, MontaVista is all about development while Lineo is all about business, which are exactly the two thrusts, literally, of Linux development Both will surely succeed, but one suspects for largely different reasons, which is why their two perspectives give us a stereoscopic view of a marketplace that's as new as Now. Or maybe newer.
On September 7 and 8 we spoke with both gentlemen at great length, recorded the conversations and found ourselves with a 16,000-word transcript. What follows is about 4,000 of those words. We e hope our edits do justice to their unique visions for this whole new development universe.
- Doc Searls
Jim Ready, MontaVista Software
How did you get started in embedded Linux?
My first job out of Berkeley back in '76 was with an early mil-spec computer company: Rolm. Back then it was all about cross-development. They would have development stations just like we've had for embedded work ever since. What changed since then were form factors. These Rolm boxes were huge.
Then we were fortunate in '81, when the 68k was announced. It became clear that the minicomputer situation was going to change. You would be able to build good computers out of micropricessors. But there really wasn't a standard, off-the-shelf, constant-across-microprocessor operating system.
Each was essentially a stovepipe that went up from the silicon all the way through applications.
If it existed at all. So we thought, why not build an RTOS - a real time operating system - that would, independent of processor architectures, present the same interface to the customer whether they were on an 8086 or a 68k? Then let them program in the languages that were popular at the time - PLM or PASCAL - and let customers pick and choose without changing their devlopment environment. That was the original Hunter & Ready solution, which is still valid to this day. Hunter & Ready later became Ready Systems.
I had forgotten about Hunter.
Here's a totally weird coincidence: Colin Hunter became one of the founders of Transmeta, where Linus now does his work.
It was an interesting fact to me that when I first met and interviewed Linus, he brought the conversation around to embedded devices. He did the same in his speeches. Wtthout giving away too much about Transmeta, he kept saying that the most interesting future for Linux wasn't in beige boxes.
Obviously he's a smart guy who can figure this stuff out. We certainly agree that the most level playing field - the one that favors Linux most - is the embedded space. Microsoft owns the desktop. Servers are competitive: Linux does well there against Solaris and NT. But in embedded, there's just Wind River. They're the biggest player, but still a tiny fraction of the overall market. That market is begging for standardization.
Wind River looks pretty big.
VXWorks is fine, but it's known only to its developers, it's closed source and nobody knows how it works. So, as much as Wind River would like it to be mainstream, it isn't, nor is it going to be. Meanwhile there is this pent-up demand in the embedded area to get normal. Linux is the shining light in this dark space. The customers are like moths to a flame, in a good sense.
Let's get back to your history. How did you get into Linux?
In 1992 I brought Linux into Ready Systems, coincidentally to the building I am in right now. I brought all the engineers into the cafeteria and said hey, I just downloaded this stuff that's been produced on the Net by a bunch of guys, including this guy from Finland, and I built these two floppies, doing raw writes out to a Sun workstation. If you know anything about any of this, you know that the probability of anything working was zero. But I stuck it into a clunker 386 that I bought at a junk show and the goddam thing worked. It came up. And it was UNIX. I was blown away. It was a very sophisticated system. We got X Windows running, put it on the network, and found acres and acres of functionality were working, very stably. Relative to the embedded software of the time, this thing was so far ahead in terms of functionality that it was an amazing eye opener. We actually did an internal study about Linux and wrote a paper called VNIX - I forget the spelling, but it stood for "VRTX is not UNIX." It was basically about how to use Linux in an embedded operating system.
What happened?
We had a company to run. We got busy and got merged and did a bunch of other things. Still, it has been on our minds ever since. Every month I got my copy of Linux Journal. I was a very early subscriber.
We started in '94.
Yeah, one of my engineers showed me the very first edition, and I immediately subscribed. I noticed that virtually every month the magazine got thicker, the paper got better, the ads got more sophisticated, the articles got better. You could tell that something was going on. So my indirect measure of the goodness of the Linux market in general was Linux Journal. Seriously. It was my benchmark. You guys should know that you reflected what was going on.
What happened to Ready Systems?
We merged with Microtec Research in '93. With Microtec we were the largest combined embedded RTOS tools company - larger than Wind. That was '93. In '94 we went public. Then in '95 Mentor Graphics, the EDA company, in a future-looking move, bought Microtec. And that was how the food chain worked.
Then what?
Without throwing rocks at Mentor, let's just say that the business did not prosper for any number of reasons. But I kept my subscription current in Linux Journal, followed the Linux distributions. But the shocker was an article about four or five years ago, by a guy from NASA Langley, about a side-looking radar system. The previous version of this thing was based on Multibus-I with two CPU boards, one of which ran VRTX - my software. The other one ran some UNIX. He wrote that they managed to replace those two systems with one running Linux. And I thought, Hey! Something is going on here! VRTX was being replaced by Linux. So, between that and knowing where the customers were going, we could see Linux as a serious player in our space.
Let's jump to the start of MontaVista.
When I left Mentor Graphics I went to the guys who had invested in Hunter & Ready in 1981, who by now were old friends of mine, and said "I have not come to you with a new idea in eighteen years." That was in March of '99. For the first six months we were exactly what our competitors called us: seven guys in Sunnyvale. We didn't hide that. We were testing everything like crazy: customer requirements, hosts, targets, real time… We had some preliminary hypotheses. We tested those and came down to some interesting discoveries.
Such as?
We thought that real time would be a big factor, but there were many others that were in fact more important in terms of customer acceptance. Those needed to be addressed first, so we re-ordered our priorities.
Starting with what?
The fundamental one was availability. If you go to Fry's and get Linux from Red Hat or anybody else, it's a self-hosted X86 or possibly PowerPC system that works fine for installing on a PC or a Mac. But the classic paradigm for embedded systems is cross-development, where the system is hosted in one place and targetted somewhere else, because an embedded processor typically is not capable of supplying its own development. So the very first job was making Linux available and supporable as a cross-hosted environment, which means your Solaris machine or Linux box would let you compile, do a sysgen, build the kernel, and also compile applications and then download them into the embedded target.
How many hosts and targets do you support?
We support four processor architectures and three different host machines.
I'm guessing the host, the development platforms,s are PowerPC,X86 and Solaris.
Yes. But there are varieties on those as well. RedHat 6.1 and 6.2 on X86. Yellow Dog on a Macintosh. And Solaris - I forget the revision number - on Sun. Then the targets are a subtle point too. There's X86/IE32 family from Intel, and within that there are many variants. The compilers are built for four or five subsets of X86 - 486, 586 and so on, that GCC - the Gnu compiler - supports. Those are all uniquely built. So, when we say we support X86, it's a broad statement. Over on PowerPC, there are even more variants, and they are more fundamentally different than the X86 variants.
I know the 601 and the 604 are highly different.
Yeah, and then you get into the Motorola and IBM embedded controllers, which are great processors, that often don't have any floating point. So it took considerable effort to put together support for five or six different variants of PowerPC so that all the libraries were built correctly. I should add that one of the core values of Monta Vista is building all of this stuff out of common source, and a common rev. We maintain a strict discipline of building all of it every night.
If I look at all the permutations, you've got three hosts and four targets-
-And if you include variants it's more like twelve to fifteen targets.
That comes to 45 different directions that your souce can compile.
That's correct. And if you ever get on the wrong side of that you can see how easy it is to have drifting feature sets and all kinds of conditionalities to account for.
How do you stay on the right side of that?
Software engineering. One of the things that distinguishes MontaVista, if you look at the engineering team, starting with Kevin Morgan, is that it comes out of the enterprise-level, mainstream, state-of-the-art UNIX world. This is a fundamental and deep skill in the company, and it is not one that is shared with others in the Linux world. People who might be very strong in Linux - God bless them - don't necessarily have this kind of background in large-scale software engineering. That's an insight we acquired by getting it wrong. No pride here.
Are there people outside the company who have jumped in to help with the project?
Indirectly, yes. For instance on PowerPC, we have done most of the bring-ups, but not all of them. So the normal processes work there. Which means we are big contributors to the PowerPC tree and help maintain it. But we don't do it all. This is a community effort.
You're positioned as pure open source.
Yes. And we are absolutely an open source advocate, so all this work is always available on the Net immediately through FTP or on CDs.
So if somebody wants to download a .tar ball of what you're doing -
-They've got it. No tricks. No hold-backs, no passwords. It's there. We have a moral obligation here. We've benefited greatly from open source and ought to give back. But beyond that we think it's a business advantage. We fully believe in it. Anything we can do to make Linux - and especially embedded Linux - go farther, faster, benefits us.
You seem to have a strong relationship at Motorola. Do you have a cooperative development relationship with them?
They have been very helpful to us as a company, making sure that reference hardware is available for us. When a new processor comes out, FedEx appears with a board in hand. It's gracious on their part, and we do our best to do the bringups immediately and put them out on the Web.
There is a Motorola microprocessor in the Kerbango radio, running your Linux.
Yes, it happens to be an 823. It's a strong architecture. The IBM 405GP, for example, is also a very hot part, in the figurative sense. Both are PowerPC. We have a bunch of customers designing that part in. So we have a great relationship with IBM Microelectronics, too. We did the Linux bringup on the 405 with them. Right now we're the center of the universe for that.
Are there any embedded multiprocessing applications? I only ask because I was involved with Groupe Bull in the mid-90s, when they had finished their initial design work on the PowerPC, helping design SMP into the chip.
Yes. Certainly in some of the server-type systems where the distinctions between embedded and standard servers are blurred, you'll see some SMP efforts. But it turns out that the same work you need to do to make Linux SMP-compliant is the work that you need to do to improve the hard real time preëmptability of Linux.
So it can be done?
Oh yes. Our guys have done real-time UNIXes so many times that they know exactly what to do. We jumped on the SMP work and found that we could dramatically improve the response, by a factor of thirty. That's just a huge increase in the responsiveness of Linux in the real-time domain, based on enabling, on a single processor, the SMP software, and using it to basically make Linux more responsive. But it's done with standard Linux. That's the holy grail. Since our whole positioning is 100% pure Linux, it's not surprising that we're the guys who did this. Some of the other Linux embedded companies, such as LynuxWorks, have another operating system to sell you. Why would they put the effort in, if it undermines their own OS?
What about Lineo?
Lineo acquired the guys who do RTAI, Zentropics, so they think they've got a real-time solution there. But their motivation to improve Linux is very low, because they have a company trying to work a different way. Red Hat wants to sell you eCos for real time. That's not Linux.
What's with eCos?
It's a kind of VRTX small kernel. They should have done Linux, but they didn't, and now it's too late. They've invested all their money into building eCos and have tried to reposition it as some kind of Linux, but it isn't and everybody sees through that.
This is part of what they picked up from Cygnus, right?
Cygnus did it, and it was funded by Japanese customers who wanted a small kernel. They did an okay job, but it's not Linux. It's a rhetorical patch. A dead end. We're pure Linux, pure open source. We spent the money, hired the guys, and went after making Linux hard real time.
Tell me more about what it is, specifically, that you did to Linux to make it more preëmptive and SMP friendly, and somehow manage to speak to all these different instruction sets.
Good questions. Couple of things. When people think of real time, they think of "well, how fast does it respond to interrupts?" But the weakness in Linux, in terms of classic real time, is not how quickly it responds to interrupts. It actually does a pretty good job at that. The amount of time that the Linux kernel itself keeps interrupts turned off is reasonably small. On a 300 MHz Pentium it's probably 130 microseconds or something. It's not supersmall, but it's very very respectable. So the issue of losing interrupts is relatively trivial. The weakness in Linux actually shows up after an interrupt occurs and you want to have a process run because of that interrupt. The question is, how long should that take? The weakness is that, in standard form, Linux is a non-preemptable kernel. That means some low-priority process might have just started a system call that will take Linux a long time to finish because it does complex things. You're the pilot in the airplane and you push the eject button, and Linux gets the eject command and says "Oh, I'll queue that up, but first I'm going to go finish this low-priority thing - flushing the memory or something." Hundreds of milliseconds later, you're still waiting for action. So you have relatively long response times for completing the circuit from interrupt to actual process running.
What you want to do is make the operations in the Linux kernel itself interruptable and preemptable, so you can stop internal processing on that low-priority thing and switch to the process level where you get punched out of the airplane. It turns out that the process of breaking up the Linux kernel - so it can leave where it was and come back later - requires identifying sections inside the code where this is possible. This is the same thing that makes running multiple processors possible. It turns out that the same engineering investigation and thought process we use for SMP can be utilized to make the Linux kernel preemptable and very much more responsive. So we're not hacking out the middle of the kernel on this. We're just enabling, on a single processor, the SMP facilities, but not for SMP. And it works like a charm.
How does the rest of the community take that?
We're being very careful here. First, part of the charm of Linux is that you can do whatever you want with it. However, we're being very humble. This is a prototype. As we announced, our source will be on our Web site, which is our tradition. And we are offering this as a starting point for a very good set of capabilities that we are suggesting, in the most humble way, that 2.5 should consider. Linus always says "show me the code." Well, we're obeying that rule. We think this is a significant improvement in Linux in general, and showing the community the code, for all to see and play with, is the right and only thing to do.
So you're submitting it for peer review.
Absolutely. Out it goes, in the best of the open source tradition.
How do you make your money?
Service. We get technically selected, just like any embedded OS company would be. We sell, on a per-seat basis, subscriptions to Hard Hat Linux, for every engineer on a project, for one year. Like a magazine. This is how the RTOS business has always worked, except for where you assign the perceived value. The customer wants a functional RTOS and the company behind it. Whether the code is free isn't relevant. As an issue, it's naive. Our prices are industry standard - about the same as Wind or anybody else.
So what you're recognizing is that what you were always selling in your earlier companies, was not the binaries, but the relationships, the expertise, the guy on the phone.
Exactly. And the road map. And everything else a customer wants to know is there.
What about royalties?
We think royalties are a very uninspired way of doing business with an engineering team. We just don't do it. By the way, in the business nobody paid royalties anyway. They always did buy-outs or other deals that negotiated royalties away.
So you want to de-complicate life for the engineers.
Engineers like stability. So the subscription model de-couples the rev of your product, which you will do from time to time in any case, from your revenue stream. How many revs happen in two years isn't the issue. Known costs and current software are the issues. Engineers want constancy and good supplier relationships. For classic embedded, with engineering involved, this is a superior way to do business.
You have fewer interrupts in the conversational process between vendor and customer.
Absolutely. Our larger customers beat this into us. In effect, they threw our catalog in the waste basket and said "We want to do business with you, but with a structured, engineer-to-engineer relationship, based on your products, but much deeper than that. We want better visibility, better responsiveness, influence on your roadmap, and a closer relationship all around." We got more money from those customers rather than less.
Your customers then, are engineers.
We have a B2E or E2E way of working. We sell to engineering teams. That's who we automate and outfit.
I have a friend who likes to substitute the letter W for the number 2 in those X to X business model acronyms. They think the problem with "to" is that it presupposes a distribution rather than a cooperation relationship. We don't do business "to" people. We do it withthem.
That actually is a lot better. I like EWE: engineer with engineer. I could buy that. It's a multifaceted business relationship, based on technology and product. Our customers get technology seamlessly from us, in the best possible form, which is EWE. We answer the phone. They know where we're going. We know where they're going.
What this also says to me is that Linux is a living operating system - a network of "W" relationships. It's organic, and companies like yours are organs in the growing body of expertise about Linux.
Yes. You have to lead and participate and follow along all at once. Given the way that Linux has evolved, without central control, is so remarkable that you've got to believe that there are some forces at play that are working so well that it would be very rash to think the process could be helped along or improved. It's fascinating to be part of, and it's certainly something I would not want to bet against or be on the wrong side of, honestly.
One of the things I've observed about the Net is that it was made by this same phenomenon. It is embodied by its creators with three virtues: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. What you're describing here is more of that same thing, and one way to make a living in it. It's in Lineo's interest to take apart your real time Linux release and put it through that same peer review process.
Yep. You're absolutely right about the Internet, and about Linux. This thing is spreading like wildfire, and its in our interest - along with everybody else's - for us to pour gasoline on it. These things have very explosive properties. And we have to contribute to the ongoing explosion. Michael Tiemann at Red Hat tells the truth when he says there is a proven model here and it's the scientific method. You do your experiments, show your results and so on.
Eric Raymnond talks about that too.
Yes. In this unruly and wild Linux community there is something that propogates very quickly through companies like MontaVista that make it possible from a business standpoint to depend upon it. It's a force. We have to be careful not to act as a filter in front of all of this, but rather to act as an enabler, so people can tap in to this phenomenon in a sane way and still get their job done. That's our purpose in life. We want to enable the engineers to do what they want to do anyway, which is use Linux. Boy, that's a deep phenomenon.
Are you saying Linux is ubiquitous with your customers?
We go into these places and virtually everybody we talk has fooled with Linux at home, at the very least. All we have to do is give them the justification to use Linux at work and you've got all these guys working on your behalf.
One of the things I observed about the IBM announcement, when they essentially declared themselves a Linux company, was that this was clearly a company that was now in full compliance with its own engineers.
Oh, there is no question that this is a phenomenon of software engineers. Look at Sun's success in the early years. There is no question that they won the hearts and minds of software engineers. If you were an engineer sitting there at a VT100 with VMS at the other end of it, and the guy down the hall had a Sun workstation with a big monitor and a mouse and multiple windows open and running UNIX, you will do everything in your power to get one of those things.
I like your way of characterizing Linux as a fire you pour gasoline on. For years I liked to talk about the only kind of truly effective marketinn. The logic went like this: A) Markets are conversations; B) Conversations are fire; and therefore C) Marketing is arson. What you're saying is that if you're not committing arson, you're not really committed.
That's not a bad analogy at all. With good old VRTX, we were trying to practice marketing arson, trying to set fire to the world, and we did okay. But they were just our efforts alone. If we scaled it up a bit, we had the RTOS industry, alone, trying to set that fire. It's a respectable business. In fairness, Wind is a $300 million company through acquisition and everything. But it has taken forever to get there.
Now, however, we're part of a larger phenomenon called Linux, which is many, many conversations going on all at once. It is a wildfire. That's why it's so fundamentally different. It's instantaneously worldwide. It's very deep. It occupies the minds of countless engineers, naturally selecting the best and the brightest. It is all of these things. It's a whole lot of fun, I can tell you that.
Will you do acquisitions?
Sure. That's a real possibility. But I have been through two acquisitions, and I can tell you that in the best of times they are very hard to do. You get what you get, which includes good guys and bad guys, old agendas, different code bases. Lineo's acquisition of six companies has to be extremely difficult. We've grown to 100 people organically. And it shows in results. We're producing software.
Are you making money?
No. We're a start-up, and we're just trying to grow. This is a land grab. We have customers. We are doing well. But clearly when you establish European and Japanese offices, you've got a lot to eat while you ramp up. Investors don't put the money out to have it sit in the bank. They want it spent.
What does your plan show?
A turn to profitability at a future point. And we are exceeding our plan.
How many customers do you have?
So you have EWE going with fifty customers.
They aren't contracts. They're orders. Customers issue purchase orders. They buy subscriptions. We do consult, by which I mean that customers buy NRE (non recurring engineering). But if you were to think about embedded systems, you'd think hmm... telephony equipment, internet infrastructure equipment, etc. That's who we have. Companies who make gizmos.
Do you think one industry will turn out to be a more significant embedded Linux category than the rest?
We see three categories. One is what we call A-to-Z embedded. That's embedded controllers and instrumentation and gadgets of all kinds. But the driver of microprocessor technology is what we call "either end of the Internet." The infrastructure equipment guys - the Ciscos and Alcatels and Nortels and fiber optic people - those are a very strong component of our business. Then the third cagegory is things like the Kerbango radio: things that attach. Appliances and all that. God bless Linux, it looks real good all over the place. You'd think, given the diversity here, that one kernel would have a hard time stretching over all these different applications and situations, but Linux is doing it. There's a communications revolution going on. The Internet is part of that and Linux is part of that, and both are driving requirements that are falling out in to general purpose embedded. It's very interesting: the two earliest customers were one infrastructure company and one appliance company: Kerbango. Both drove us to make Linux better in the same fundamental ways.
Bryan Sparks, Lineo
What got you guys into this business?
Two ways. The first is that we started Caldera back in '94. Back then we bought some business from Novell and started selling DR-DOS. We intended to use it as a thin client for cash registers and applications like that.
You own the original DR-DOS, then.
Caldera bought that in '96. We had a lot of interest in embedded, and DOS looked interesting to us for that. There was a need in single-board computers and non-PC-like devices.We ended up finding kind of a business there, and that's where I ended up betting my career. We spun off two companies. Caldera systems, which you know, then Lineo, then we collapsed Caldera, so there are just the two companies. It was confusing. For a while Lineo went by the awkward name of Caldera Thin Clients. We did some DOS and Linux stuff, but got more and more interest in Linux. Clearly there was something going on here. So we said "let's turn the ship here." Which we did. You won't see anything about DR-DOS on our Web site. We just don't do it anymore. Our whole business is embedded Linux.
What was the time frame here?
This was around late '98. That's when we said this is it, and picked a new name and started moving forward seriously.
Good timing.
A lot of it was luck, and being in the right place at the right time, and having revenues from the DOS business to fuel the early stages of our embedded Linux product.
You were the first out of the gate with Linux distributions too, in a way.
We were.
And you got kinda snookered by Red Hat. I take it you're not going to let that happen again.
It's not gonna happen here. I learned a tremendous amount. It was very humbling. We were the leader. I made a lot of mistakes. We got passed in the last lap and somebody else took the checkered flag. Pick your metaphor. Boy, that's not going to happen here.
What exactly did you learn?
One was that we did not have a culture that pointed at a competitor. We were leading in the space and not looking out for our back, where everybody else's guns were pointed.
You had the pioneer's problem.
There are two strategies, of course. One says that first movers always win. The other says second movers win because they take advantage of the first mover's mistakes. The second is what happened here.
Happened with DOS, too. DR-DOS was first, but MS-DOS won that race.
Here I feel like this is my second chance. And it's not just me. There are a lot of second-generation Linux people here. People from Linuxcare, even Red Hat. They've been there, done it the first time, and made mistakes we can all learn from.
And you're applying what you learned.
Absolutely. I feel that we are executing about as well as any company can. I am so proud of the people we have and the job that they're doing. Ultimately that's what wins. You can have a great pitch - our pitch is okay - but you have to execute. You need top-line growth every quarter. You need good customers who come back because you do what you say you're going to do. We have that. It's real simple stuff.
I'd like to look at the embedded space we've had for twenty or so years, and how Linux is changing that.
It's amazing. We're growing and assimilating employees as fast as we can, yet the demand placed on us by semiconductor manufacturers, and their customers, still overwhelms us. So that tells me that, well, maybe Linux hasn't won, but it's certainly in extreme demand.
So it's still early.
Yes, and you have to look at Wind River. If you saw their last quarter's revenue... holy flippin' mackerel. They made a ton of money.
How many people do you have now?
Two hundred sixty. About half are here in Utah. The rest are outside.
A bunch would be in your acquisitions.
We did six acquisitions this year. And we have grown staff at most of those acquisitions as well. And we don't run them as separate companies. We run them as part of our company. But the offices represented by those aquisitions have grown. We bought technology, some of which was in embryo. We had to kind of beef up that technology, but in every case the opportunity is just huge.
And you've attracted a lot of attention.
Oh yes. You'd expect me to be optimistic, but I think: gosh, if one tenth of what comes to our door pans out, we're in great shape. Linux is going to make huge inroads in this space.
Tell me more about the demand from the semiconductor guys. Does it sort out to their customers categories? Or is it something that comes out of your working relationships? Or both?
We are extremely close to our customers. Our strategy from the start has been to establish the strongest possible relationships with semiconductor manufacturers, so we get into their roadmap, and target what would be most interesting for their customers to run Linux on.
How do you adapt to the verticals?
We verticalize some of our solutions. We're already doing that internally. But the main idea is to provide ubiquity on embedded platforms.
Which platforms in particular?
SH 3,4, StrongARM, ARM in several variations, almost all the Motorola chips - MCORE, ColdFire, Dragonball, PowerPC… Of course the X86 kind of comes for free. That comes to ten, I believe.
So your horizontal product is Embedix.
You say you work closely with your customers, which are primarily the semiconductor companies. Tell me more about how that works.
We are literally part of their team. Their wins are our wins. Their customers are our customers. We want direct relaitionships with their customers, the OEM device manufacturers.
So if Motorola sells to GM or Ford, you want to be in there with them, so those companies are your customers too.
Yes. And this is the relationship we have with all the semiconductor manufacturers.
Who's showing the most interest in Linux?
It's across the board. But there are some surprises. If you asked me a year ago, I would have told you the sweet spot for Linux was Internet appliances, routers, gateways...
Stuff close to the Net.
Right. Stuff that takes advantage of the core competencies of the Linux communities. But the areas that have been surprising for us - and we're pretty much the only ones who do this - have been in consumer electronics. I'm talking about Dragonball, MCORE ColdFire, ARM and those devices, which run in digital cameras, cell phones, handheld devices and other consumables. We are working with a lot of companies in those areas. We can really run Linux on those devices. You don't have an MMU? You constrained by 200k of RAM? We can fit in that. The interest is extremely high in that space. When you consider that our competitors in that space - CE and Palm - lead with a GUI, we're looking good with Linux, which doesn't have an inherent GUI. So we manufacture one with a browser, Java, whatever.
But the demand is for Linux in this segment.
Exactly. It starts with customers wanting to run Linux down at this tiny scale. It's fascinating.
What about process control, industrial automation and stuff like that?
It's a market, but it's not growing, and it doesn't turn over very fast. For those spaces we offer VXworks and Psoft migration toolkits, to make the switching costs easy. Our hard real time plays real well there, too. In fact, we're doing big contracts with the government on that kind of thing. We're doing a big contract with NASA for flight simulators, weather monitoring for the FAA... things like that, through one of our acquisitions. But these aren't the surprises. The big surprises are at the bottom of the pyramid where the parts are small, the demand is high and the volumes are enormous. Things you see everywhere. So obviously those are big for us, and I think they're big for Linux too.
What's your key offering there?
An interesting road map. When you buy into Linux, you buy into a fast moving technological roadmap. We augment that with technologies we either acquire or build to make more interesting to those verticals. It's a fascinating thing. Previously they were either buying from Palm or CE, which are proprietary RTOSes with no road map at all.
What is your position among your competitors, in respect to customers.
I can't imagine anybody talking to more customers and partners than we are, just because we're large. We get a lot of feedback on what customers are asking for. Right now we're busy just backfilling customer requests on a road map. We have to get ahead of that. We need to lead in embedded Linux, from the customer's perspective. Right now we're just satisfying customer requests. That kind of drives our road map. But eventually we'll have to do more R as well as D. I think we'll get to the R in six months or so when we get ahead of the curve a bit.
I would imagine that the D kind of pulls the R along.
The customers are telling us "we need this," and we have a choice to make. Is it on our road map? No? What do we do? Build? Buy? License?
What's an example of that?
Bluetooth - the hundred-meter wireless Ethernet speed system. The question was, do we build a bluetooth stack? Because we were thinking about building one. Then out of nowhere IBM announced an open source Bluetooth stack. Thank you very much.
How do you contrast what you're doing with what MontaVista is doing?
First, we're not a pure open source play. We license third party products with IP - intellectual property. We have our own IP. We don't open source our browser. It's really good, and we don't see any reason to open source it. The benefits don't outweigh the liabilities. But I guess the main differentiation is that we lead with product and backfill with service. We are highly motivated to build a Wind River-like tool chain.
What you're about, really, is tools.
You will see an ever-increasing series of tool chain enhancements coming out of Lineo. A bigger and bigger SDK.
So your orientation to open source is to cherry-pick those products and tools that are useful to you and building a suite of products, primarily tools, for shaping Linux into something useful for your customers.
Those tools we build. But what I'm talking about are design automation tools. Graphic configurators. Things that run on the device. Embedded apps. Our question constantly is, "How can we make the time-to market for our customers as short as possible?" To the degree that we're successful there, we will steal business away from Wind River.
It sounds to me like you're building a Cisco.
We're not doing hardware.
I was thinking of the kinds of customers you're working with, your approach to acquisitions, your determination to lead the market no matter what, your customer focus. I'm amazed, for example, at Cisco's ability to acquire companies and not have trouble swallowing them.
Right. You can imagine that we had a strategy for acquiring companies while we were private. We wanted to learn how to integrate. And you know what? Buying companies is hard. Signing the document is easy. Integrating personalities, cultures, ownership responsibilities, technologies, all those grungy things, is hard. We learned a lot. We didn't lose anybody in the process, but it was a lot harder than I thought. It took us two months more than I thought it would take.
It seems to me you went about your acquisition strategy based on target device size scale, from small to large.
That's exactly right. We said "We want to do that. How do we get there?" We had holes, just working with a generic embedded OS. We didn't have anybody at Lineo with real time experience. We needed to go acquire that expertise.
How do you integrate Linux and your hard real-time capability. Do you have a name for that?
It's folded into our Embedix product, and it's a feature of our tool chain. You want real time on this device? Here's how you select and configure it.
So when an engineer goes about designing for a particular processor, application and board, and real time is one of the things he wants, he implements it through Embedix tools. But it's not Linux, necessarily.
Yes. But that, by the way, we open source. That whole thing is available to everybody. We followed the RTAI - real time application interface - standard. We open sourced all of that. You'll be seeing more from us there. Actually we were ahead in real time for a while, but let others move in and define the market.
Jim (Ready). He talks about it all the time. And he doesn't even do hard real time.
They announced their preëmptive kernel yesterday, which they're vetting with the Linux development commmunity.
Yeah, he's kind of defining that space, but we're going to fix that. That's why we acquired Xentropics, because they're the ones who did our hard real time.
Where do you see Linux moving the embedded space?
I think by offering Linux on embedded devices we raise the bar on functionality that customers will now require. There is this dichotomy in the world where a lot of companies say they are customer driven, but in fact customers only ask for what they are aware of. They don't know their necessities until they become aware of what's really available. The context changes. Adding Linux to Internet devices of all types will seriously raise the bar in functionality that people will demand. An example. In our first release of Embedix early this year, we matched VXworks in functionality. In our fist release.
I'd like to go back to the power of invention. The real marketing principle isn't "necessity is the mother of invention," but "invention is the mother of necessity."
That's right. We want to show customers what they're missing out on. Linux does that on a huge scale.
It also seems to me that Linux has the same network effect that the Net has had, only starting a bit later. It's kind of the other shoe dropping. Same phenomenon, just a later stage.
Our mission statement is, "we unleash the imagination of our customers to innovate for their customers." That means we want our customers to innnovate in ways they didn't even think they could before.
So your inventions lower the thresholds of their inventions.
Yes. There's another thing. We are going to provide a flexibility that these guys have never seen before. Before Linux came along, and a customer needed a feature, they went to Wind River and eighteen months later they might get it. The whole thing is way too stymied. Between Linux and our SDK we're really going to unleash the imagination of our customers. And they will only demand more and more features, which we will be in the best position to provide. We want their time to market requirements set the pace. Not ours.
You mentioned doing this surprising work with small consumable devices. Are you working with some of the Asian consumer electronics guys?
Nearly all of them. We have fifty people in Asia. A large presence in Japan, plus another fifteen or so in Taiwan. Most of the investments we did in our round of financing came from Asain manufacturers. Acer, Samsung, Mitsubishi, a bunch of others. And we are working with a bunch of people. I go to Asia a lot. Fortunately we're kind of all alone over there. It's hard to get in. We got in partly by acquiring a company in Japan that was doing embedded custom engineering. Then we organically grew a Taiwanese office with native personnel.
I'm interested in scale. A huge company like Hitachi might have a huge relationship with a customer like Sega. How is there room for guys like you in there? I guess there was room for Wind River, though.
I don't think our business model is all that different from Wind River's. They, being such a dominant supplier, were able to extract more money from the semiconductor manufacturers than we can; but that's part of our strategy - to commoditize the space a little bit. When they talk to investors, they talk about raising per-unit value. When I talk to investors, I say we're here to commoditize system software for interenet devices. The model is the same, but we're really putting price pressure on them. We not only give them real competition, but make it much harder by coming in at a lower price.
You still have enough room in there to make money on tools and services.
We do request a small royalty, adding our own third party intellectural property on the device. But again our strategy is customer acquisition through commoditization of the space, sell tools, and grow. But in terms of what we sell, we're similar to Wind River. It's just that a smaller percentage comes from royalties.
You charge on a per-workstation basis for the SDK.
Yes, and we have royalty-bearing components in there.
You pass those costs through.
That's right. And that's very standard for the industry. We may do more licensing. We may do more acquisitions in the area so we can keep the price low but still provide the functionality so we don't have to carry the royalties back.
How big do you expect this category to get?
There are a bunch of analysts who say big, big, big. We want to grow faster than the market as well. Just keeping pace with the growth of the pie, we're at a rate of 60%
Do you see The Smart Home finally coming, because of Linux's standardization properties? Or will the firewalls of ignorance that surrounds every specialty going to still prevent that from happening?
I don't know. I brought a bunch of CAT-5 cable to the drop point at my house and the phone guy made such a hairball of it that I had to redo it myself. But some of the standards are helping a bit. HPNA, a home networking protocol that runs over twisted pair, helps. Bluetooth helps. We're working with a company we're hoping to close that is doing stuff with home gateways like I never imagined. We have a TV set top solution that we've sold quite a bit. But this is something else. We're talking about something wired to appliances that does far more than turn them on and off. It does service and warranty control. Your AC unit can say its compressor is going and to send for a guy to avoid the insurance hit. That kind of stuff. I'm crossing my fingers that we get that one closed because it's just so cool.
That's part of the promise of XML. Devices can talk to devices, live, in an XML stream.
Can you imagine this little control box calling a technician without the customer knowing what's happening until the technician says "I'm here to fix your fridge." This isn't ten years out. It's next year. We giggled a couple years ago that somebody in Japan put a browser on a fridge. Now, so what? We can put one on the microwave. There's your recipe. Your documentation. There was a piece out of Xerox PARC a long time ago that was right on. We are living that now. And Linux will only help there. Great internet infrastructure. Remote diagnostics. Network management. VPNs built in. If you're a telecommuter, Linux is great. We actually sell a little hardware box that's a VPN router. We sell it like candy. It's unbelievable.
You sell a lot of set top boxes?
Yeah. You can browse the Web on these things, watch enhanced TV, get your email, or whatever. We sell a boatload of that.
What else do you open source besides your real time component?
Go to www.opensource.lineo.com. There's quite a bit there. Utilities that run on an embedded device, like BusyBox. A bunch of drivers that we think would be interesting to others. We have a pile of open source projects.
Are your fingerprints going back on the Linux kernel?
Oh yeah. We give a lot of patches back. We want them to take more. But sometimes the patches we have, to fit on very small devices, aren't very mainstream.
What has Linus done for the embedded Linux space, by talking up mobile and other forms of development, and working with Transmeta?
I think he's done a tremendous amount. He's helped Transmeta a great deal too, giving them branding and recognition. And he really seems to enjoy it there.
Last question: What kinds of companies will survive and what kinds will not?
I think there will be tremendous revenue opportunities in this space. I cannot imagine that we'll be the only ones succeeding here. Lots of new companies seem to be rushing in, but it will be tough for a lot of those. We think we have found an interesting model that investors and investment bankers like, and we'll see if we can keep executing on it. But we won't be alone. And don't count out the larger companies - Red Hat and others - will make some moves.
Any last thing you'd want to add?
You'll like this one. The cluetrain stopped at Lineo, and by God, we got on.
Doc Searls (email@example.com) is senior editor of Linux Journal and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
email: email@example.com


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Another year, another superlative Met apparently departing because of ownership's cheapness. Last year it was Jose Reyes, Flushing's fan favorite, who high-tailed it to Miami after winning the National League batting title. This year, to hear ESPN (and others tell it), it's R.A. Dickey, the reigning Cy Young Award winner, bestselling author, and Tennessee folk hero.
The prospect of a Dickey deal is, though, far more galling than Reyes's free-agent departure. When Reyes left, the Mets had no intention of paying him what the Marlins ultimately did. They could have hammered out an extension before 2011, or during the season, but they didn't. This was possibly prudent, given his injury history.
But things are different with Dickey, who was the best pitcher in the NL last year. He wants two years and $26 million tacked onto his 2013 deal. The Mets want him to settle for two years and $20 million. This is a six-million-dollar difference, spread over two years. This ought to be a pittance to any major-league team, but it most assuredly ought to be a pittance to a big-market major-league team, a team that owns a billion-dollar cable network.
Then there are the Mets, a team that followed the new-era-sports-biz script as closely as it could (consider their cable outfit, or the new stadium ringed by luxury boxes) while the owners simultaneously took part in low-level white-collar crime. The Wilpons' racket eventually went bust and so did the national economy, but they got to keep the team as their piggybank.
They hired Sandy Alderson for cover—he was in Moneyball! Can't doubt him!—and let all their best players walk away. Since this year's offseason commenced, they re-signed David Wright but did it with plenty of deferred money, and without adding anyone else. (The Mets' opening day outfield, if they can't win the Scott Hairston sweepstakes: Mike Baxter, Kirk Nieuwenhuis, and Lucas Duda.) And now they're planning to trade R.A. Dickey to save six million bucks.
Readers are subjected to corny metaphors of American decline far too often, but this'll be a good one: The two most popular players to dress for a team that plays our nation's pastime in its biggest and wealthiest city may very well be playing in Toronto next year, not at a field or at a stadium or a park, but at a centre. And it's all the Wilpons' fault.
Source: R.A. Dickey could be dealt [ESPN NY]


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Statement by NEA President Weaver on Senator Kennedy's Diagnosis
WASHINGTON - May 20, 2008 -
Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, expressed the sympathies of the NEA's 3.2 million members today at news that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has a malignant brain tumor.
The following can be attributed to NEA President Reg Weaver:
"Sen. Ted Kennedy stands as a long-time friend of public education, and strong supporter of public school students and teachers. He provides consistent and courageous leadership in the effort to ensure the basic right of all children to attend great public schools. And because of that, he has been the recipient of NEA's highest honor, the Friend of Education Award, for his leadership in raising the level of excellence in American public education.
"Every major education law passed since the 1960s has borne Kennedy's imprint, from Head Start to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. He has proven himself, time and again, to be a fighter for children and educators. We pray that the senator and his family will be strengthened and encouraged by the thoughts, prayers, and well wishes of millions of educators and students across the nation."
# # #The National Education Association is the nation's largest professional employee organization, representing 3.2 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators and students preparing to become teachers.
CONTACT: Will Potter (202) 822-7823


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Mayor's Office
The public is invited to an open house on the revised Digital Flood Insurance Rate Maps and Flood Insurance Study for Lancaster County and incorporated communities. The open house is from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 7 at the Lower Platte South Natural Resource District office, 3125 Portia St., with a presentation beginning at 5:30 p.m.
A representative from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will attend the open house to discuss the revised maps and study. Representatives from the City of Lincoln and the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources will also be in attendance.
The majority of the flood map revisions are in Lancaster County communities other than Lincoln. Creeks in and adjacent to Lincoln, including Beal Slough, Cardwell Branch, Stevens Creek, Deadman's Run and Salt Creek (within the City limits); were revised during the last FEMA floodplain map update in February 2011 and there are no additional changes in these creeks with this latest floodplain map revision.
For more information, contact Ben Higgins with Public Works at 402-441-7589 or visit lincoln.ne.gov (keyword: watershed).


text:
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text:
Offshore Investing
Investing Offshore can be a very attractive option for the discerning investor that would like to explore other markets, shield his investments from onerous capital lawsuits, or grow his assets in a confidential, secure investment not governed by the rules and regulations of his home jurisdiction.
While Offshore investments might be, at first glance or to the uninitiated, associated with a tremendous amount of risk in low-sophistication environments or jurisdictions, these assumptions would be grossly incorrect. Offshore investment vehicles are usually found in jurisdictions that have quite sophisticated rules, regulations, and policies that direct how deposits and investments are handled and managed within their jurisdictions. Let's remember that these are often the same jurisdictions that rely upon Offshore capital for their banking institutions and are hence quite concerned that they maintain their hard-earned reputations as low-regulation, high-confidentiality tax havens.
Benefits of Offshore Investing
Most American investors look to these Offshore investments for purposes of diversifying their investment portfolios, spreading their risk in a wide an arc as possible, and also very importantly, shield assets from lawsuits.
Citizens of other countries may look for these same benefits in Offshore investments, and many times also look for the stability afforded in these Offshore jurisdictions. They may already bank in an Offshore institution in order to safeguard their assets from political or economic turmoil in their home country, and investing in these same haven jurisdictions is the next logical step in maintaining and growing their assets.
Tax is the driving force behind 'offshore', but for the great majority of well-off individuals considering offshore investment, tax is not directly an issue. They reside in high-tax areas such as the EU, the US, Canada or Japan, they pay their taxes, and if they make 'offshore' investments, it is in pursuit of higher returns, and without any intention to evade taxes in their home countries.
Some investors are outside the catchment of the high-tax areas, either because they live elsewhere, or because they are temporarily non-resident for work reasons. Such investors can often avoid having to pay taxes on their investments, whether on- or offshore, but that is due to the investor's circumstances, not the location of the investment.
So why might an 'offshore' investment be superior to an onshore investment?
The first answer is because it is more lightly regulated, and the behaviour of the offshore investment provider, whether he be a banker, fund manager, trustee or stock-broker, is freer than it could be in a more regulated environment. Any G7 regulator will immediately say, oh, of course, if it's unregulated, then it is riskier. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?
Offshore investments can be as sound and secure as any home-based investment, with the same inherent risk-benefit scales. They provide added value to any investment strategy or portfolio by lending said portfolio added diversification, flexible investment vehicles not available in the home jurisdiction, and substantial lawsuit protection.
Our company registered in the Public Registry of Panama is an offshore investment company operating.
The Government of Panama does not tax income produced from sources outside the country. Other factors have also played a part, including the absence of any currency restrictions, the free international movement of capital and convenient taxation law focused on the offshore businesses. Long recognized as a commercial hub, Panama has developed into a banking and foreign exchange center.


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To be honest, if you ready to design your own board, you shouldn't need to ask these questions. But I don't have the Mega schematic with me since I am on my tablet. I will get back here tomorrow with the answers.On a side note most of those are statements, not questions.
CADSOFT EAGLE or Altium Designer
Both have free versions.
there is fritzing and PCBWEB , 123d.circuits.io , EasyEDA
my designs are too complex for that.


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Yesterday after walking to the Marina Mall, I decided to take a load off and enjoy a ride back on the water bus...
Sunday, February 10, 2013
[ weekending ]
Yesterday after walking to the Marina Mall, I decided to take a load off and enjoy a ride back on the water bus...
9 comments:
- Leanne said...
your tuna pasta salad looks just like MY TUNA PASTA SALAD!! :) now i want it for lunch! lol ...but i'm a teenburger girl...btw, since you asked, i found the sofa, tray and velvet painting at our new re-store and rest at the sally ann. elsie is so upset that i want to re-cover the sofa, but i think it's seen better days! xo
- February 10, 2013 at 10:54 AM
- Vintage Home said...
oh yummy that looks good, and I can't wait to see what you are up to with that curtain panel!
It looks very beautiful where you are! It is sunny here today but not as warm as where you are!
Glad you hubs is safe and home to you soon!
- February 10, 2013 at 2:45 PM
- Formerly known as Frau said...
Water Taxi one way is the way to go! My hubby use to text me pictures of yummy dishes too...brat is right! Enjoy the tuna salad and sleeping in the middle of the bed! Nice quiet weekend here....loved it!
- February 10, 2013 at 6:06 PM
- Meeling said...
Water taxi-ing sounds like fun! Always neat to see where you live from another vantage point.
Can't wait to see what you made!!
- February 11, 2013 at 9:47 AM
- Carolyn@Sweet Chaos Home said...
It's so cold and windy here, and your pics are making me very jealous! Your salad looks delish, and I can't wait to see what you've done with that curtain panel!
- February 11, 2013 at 8:55 PM
- Carol@TheDesignPages said...
I think you're better off in Dubai eating tuna salad than being in Canada with the lousy weather the east coast was getting. You are a tease and I can't wait to see it.
- February 12, 2013 at 12:26 AM
- Janell @ House of Fifty said...
Very curious what the future holds for those curtain panels!! Janell
- February 12, 2013 at 10:32 AM
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Prior to the advent of the Microcomputer (of which the Personal Computer is a subset), computing meant getting a slice of time at a communal computer. Wait in line, sign up, book your time at the console; adjust your pocket protector while waiting. Multiuser was the rule because these machines were so costly to make; computing was primarily an institutional phenomenon, complete with its own institutional gatekeepers.
A limited analogy: in the early days of computing, practically all you could buy were the equivalent of buses, built and designed for carrying people. Only the rich and the crazy would have bought such buses for personal use. In this analogy, when the PC came along, it was like suddenly finding cars for sale on the bus lot. And they were a fraction of the cost and comparatively user-friendly.
The history of personal computing is well known. IBM's PC took the world by storm, was effectively reverse engineered, and the x86-based "PC Compatible" became, after some years, the de facto personal computer. You can see how messy this has become terminologically: there is IBM's original "PC" brand, there's the rise of "PC Compatible" machines, and the all-encompassing term "PC."
Some people treat "PC" as a kind of country club, keeping membership in the group narrow and therefore constraining the definition of a PC. Others would go so far as to say that anything that does real computing, is personal, and is powered by a central processing unit is a PC. And then there's a whole lot of us in between. So that brings us to our poll, and hopefully a great discussion: is the iPad a PC or not?
Look into your inner geek heart and ask yourself, is the iPad part of the ever-growing family of "PCs," the first to fully adopt a "tablet" approach? Or is the iPad "not from 'round these here parts!"? (This poll is non-scientific, and so I don't feel bad saying that I also hope people consider recent Android tablets in this mix as well, such as the Galaxy Tab. Yes, there are important differences. If they affect your answer, please share your views in the comments!)
My take: the iPad is a PC
The PC's appearance was epochal: here, amazingly, was a computer whose costs were such that it finally became feasible to produce them for use by a single individual at a time, in a non-institutional environment. The PC was a marriage of a new lower-cost, personalized computing architecture with a personalized computing software philosophy aimed at putting computing power in the hands of non-computer scientists. The personalized nature of this revolution cannot be emphasized enough.
I view the PC as an expression of technological development modeled after the Microcomputer, not as a strict category of "PC Compatible architecture." In hindsight, I consider the TRS-80 MC-10 and the iMac to be "PCs." Some would argue that the TRS-80 is a microcomputer but not a PC, and the iMac is an Apple microcomputer and not a PC, but I would respond that a PC is all about using centralized computing power in a noninstitutional environment, with open-ended possibilities thanks to software.
I consider the iPad a PC because, in my view, a PC (Personal Computer) is just that: a personal computing device.
In my Big Sky view, the PC is best understood as a bundled trajectory of technologies, of which the iPad is a significant plot point in the development of mobile computing. That is to say, I view iPads in the same vein as laptops, believing that for 98 percent of the world, the iPad is equivalent to a laptop, in terms of intended uses. When we fast forward 15 years, I expect that today's laptop will seem most antiquated to us, having been replaced by tablet-based experiences. I do not think the home PC will feel quite so antiquated.
When I look at a Galaxy Tab or an iPad, I see a Personal Computer. From the outside, I see something that carries the PC's technical genome at just about every level. On the inside, I see an architecture that is decidedly that of the PC. And then there's the software: when the iTunes App Store mimics Micro Center's software aisle layout—Gaming, Business, Reference, etc.—I feel like the software is decidedly PC, too. For all of the talk of how radically different the iPad is, it looks and feels like a PC to me.
Yes, tablets have popularized many things, such as virtual keyboards, gestures, and instant-on, to name a few. The tablets are not the origins of these technologies, however. They can all be found in PC products—some successful, but many failures—that predate the iPad.
Still, many people can and will argue that tablets are not PCs. Some of the usual arguments:
- Real PCs require real keyboards
- Real PCs have preemptive multitasking
- Real PCs can be directly programmed at their own consoles
- Real PCs require an open architecture and open operating environments.
The first two are red herrings. The first PCs didn't multitask at all, and multitasking cannot be an essential part of the definition of a PC. And I can't figure out why a real keyboard is somehow different from a virtual keyboard. The latter two issues are, however, more interesting to consider. When we write the history of the PC revolution, will it be limited to fully user-programmable devices? Should it be? Should the PC be something only made in a multivendor environment?
In the end, I see siblings when I sit my iPad next to my Sony Vaio. They are both children of Father PC, and they both reflect their father's genes. And ultimately, one of them will win, and one of them will die. Or to be more Hegelian, the dialectical process will clearly favor the tablet.
When the history of this age is written, forgot, rewritten, fought-over, "rediscovered," and then rewritten again with the "master narrative" subverted, the questions and categories used will be decidedly different and probably unrecognizable to us today.
Still, we in the Orbiting HQ found this to be a fun discussion, even if views on it were polarized and it quickly became clear that we weren't going to see eye-to-eye on this issue. Still, in the wake of yesterday's news regarding Steve Jobs, now is as good a time as any to pause and consider where the tablet-based revolution he inaugurated is headed and how we collectively understand it.


text: Latest News VisionWeb Enters EHR/Practice Management Space With Debut of Cloud-Based Uprise By Staff Wednesday, June 26, 2013 12:36 AM AUSTIN, Texas – VisionWeb, a leading provider of technology solutions to the eyecare industry, is entering the EHR and practice management space with the debut today of a comprehensive cloud-based practice management and EHR solution called Uprise. "We recognized that there was a need in the practice management and EHR space for a solution that offered more accessibility, interoperability, and more enhanced work-flow than ever before," said Ken Engelhart, president and CEO of VisionWeb. "VisionWeb has been providing productivity improving, software-as-a-service solutions in the cloud for years. Working to fill the gap that existed in the practice management/EHR space with a cloud-based solution was a natural response for us and is something we are excited to take on with this introduction." Engelhart will unveil Uprise at "The State of Optometry: Present and Future" summit later today at Optometry's Meeting in San Diego. Uprise, the company said, is "the next generation in VisionWeb's mission to make online solutions that improve day-to-day business processes more affordable and accessible for independent eyecare practitioners. Uprise is easy to implement, to afford and easy for any practice to use," the statement added, "and it is a true cloud-based solution which users can access by logging in via Internet browser. Uprise is also designed to be friendly with both tablet and PC devices, giving users freedom to choose the hardware devices most suitable for their practices. Uprise users will not be burdened with upfront investments in hardware and servers, or the long-term investments in IT infrastructure that is needed to support a client-server solution." Uprise functionality includes core practice management as well as a state of the art EHR solutions developed in partnership with VitalHealth Software to meet the specialized needs of optometric practitioners, VisionWeb said. VitalHealth Software was founded in 2006 by Mayo Clinic and the Noaber Foundation "to develop next generation of cloud-based EHRs for specialty care." In addition to the VisionWeb network for online ordering and claim filing, Uprise will feature embedded educational video content from ECHO by Eyemaginations, product catalogs with wholesale pricing information from Frames Data, and CPT and ICD-9 code process and rule verification by CodeSAFE from ReimbursementPLUS, making them native to the system. Uprise will feature monthly subscription pricing, VisionWeb said, adding that "it is HIPAA compliant, and has taken all necessary measures to ensure that Uprise meets regulatory requirements for protecting the transmission and storage of patient data." Started in 2001, the VisionWeb portal's online ordering and claim filing solutions are currently used by 17,000 eyecare providers. It offers a range of additional services for eyecare providers, ophthalmic product manufacturers, distributors, laboratories and payers. Eyecare providers can learn more about Uprise at startyouruprise.com or can call 1-855-8UPRISE (1-855-887-7473) toll-free to speak to an Uprise representative. A demo is also available at Optometry's Meeting at the VisionWeb Booth #1339.


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Small Plant News: Volume 5, Number 5
|Small Plant News Archive Page. This is an archive page. No new content is being added. While these newsletters remain available for reference purposes, the documents do not reflect changes to Agency policy that may have been instituted since the newsletters were published. Also note that resources and websites mentioned in older issues may have moved or may no longer be available. Points of contact for various initiatives may have changed.
In This Issue:
- Make Sure Your Label Application Is Correct
- Let the Small Plant Help Desk Help You!
- Commonly Asked Questions & Answers
Make Sure Your Label Application Is Correct
By Kurtis Calhoun
The Small Plant Help Desk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has been receiving a significant number of questions on labeling issues. One of the most common questions is why many establishments are still having problems when submitting their product's label application for approval. Here is a recap of the simple steps you can take, as previously discussed in Small Plant News, Volume 2, Number 9, to ensure that your label application is approved.
To start, make sure you complete all of the 12 sections required on the application, FSIS Form 7234-1, Application for Approval of Labels, Marking or Device. The sections may be handwritten as long as it is legible; however, it is strongly recommended that the form be typed. Remember to sign in the designated areas.
Along with your application, you will need to prepare a "sketch label" and any supporting documentation about the product's required labeling features. A "sketch label" is a reasonable duplicate of the proposed label.
If the label is being submitted for temporary approval, the actual label or copy of the actual label must to be submitted. A printer's proof or copy of the sketch-approved label is not acceptable.
There are (up to) eight required features on the proposed label. These features are:
- product name,
- USDA inspection legend,
- net weight,
- handling statement,
- manufacturer's address (signature line),
- ingredients statement,
- nutrition facts, and
- safe handling instructions.
If the label includes other non-mandatory information, such as label claims, you may need to include supporting documentation to verify that the claims or statements are validated.
For imported products that remain in their original packaging to retail, the country of origin needs to be placed directly under the product name on the label.
The "sketch label" must include all the features that apply to your product. If the application is not accurate or is missing something, it will be returned to you.
After you complete your application, review it for any errors. Simply taking an extra 10 minutes to review your label before submitting it can save you a significant amount of time.
Listed below are the 10 most common mistakes that the FSIS Labeling and Program Delivery Division has found when reviewing label applications.
- There are problems with ingredient statements.
- The formulation, processing procedure, or supporting documentation does not agree with, or validate, the information or claims on the label.
- The entire label is illegible or portions of the label are illegible.
- The label is incomplete because all required labeling features are not provided.
- Product standards are not met.
- The product name is incorrect.
- The word size of the product name is incorrect.
- A geographical claim is used on the label, but the product is not actually produced in the claimed location.
- There are problems with the nutrition facts.
- Undefined nutrient content claims are used.
After you review your application carefully, staple the completed FSIS Form 7234-1 and the "sketch label" together. Two copies of both documents are required. (Three copies are needed for child nutrition labels.) Send the complete application package to FSIS' Labeling and Program Delivery Division.
If you send the application through the U.S. Postal Service (including regular mail, U.S. Priority Mail, and U.S. Overnight Mail), the package should be sent to:
Labeling Distribution Unit
5601 Sunnyside Avenue, STOP 5273
Beltsville, MD 20705
If you send your label application via UPS or FedEx, or have it hand delivered by a company representative, the address is:
Labeling Distribution Unit
5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Rm. 2-2279
Beltsville, MD 20705
If your label application is 15 pages or less, you can fax it to (301) 504-0873 or (301) 504-0875.
Contact USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service's (AMS) Child Nutrition Labeling Program if you are interested in marketing your product to schools participating in the Child Nutrition (CN) program, a voluntary program run by AMS, in cooperation with FSIS.
Having a CN label on your product ensures accurate nutrition claims and clearly identifies the nutritional contribution of a product toward the AMS meal pattern requirements. The program also provides a warranty to CN programs that purchase CN-labeled products. Products bearing the CN label offer greater potential for marketing to CN programs.
To carry a CN label, your product must be inspected by FSIS or your State inspection program. Also, your product's nutritional contribution must be determined using yields set forth in USDA's Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs (www.fns.usda.gov/tn/Resources/foodbuyingguide.html). Upon applying, your product's formulation is evaluated to determine its nutritional contribution to school meals. This contribution can then be stated on your label.
CN-labeled products are required to be produced under a partial quality control program to monitor formulation control, raw and cooked weights, and other aspects of the formulation that affect the crediting of the product. A CN-labeled product can cost a little more than a non-CN-labeled product because of inspection costs, special labeling requirements, and additional quality controls. For more information, contact AMS at (202) 720-9939 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
For questions and concerns regarding labeling, contact the Labeling and Program Delivery Division at (301) 504-0878 or submit your questions to askfsis.custhelp.com. For all other inquiries, contact the Small Plant Help Desk at 1-877-FSISHelp (1-877-374-7435) or email firstname.lastname@example.com.
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Let the Small Plant Help Desk Help You!
By Ida Phillips
"If I sell chicken and pork products, can I ship them together in the same box?"
"How do I appeal a non-compliance record?"
"I just received a form in the mail from the USDA; can you help me understand it?"
These are just a few of the nearly 4,000 calls and emails received by the Small Plant Help Desk since its launch in December 2009. The Help Desk, operated by the FSIS Office of Outreach, Employee Education, and Training's (OOEET) State Outreach and Technical Assistance staff (SOTA) is a "one stop" call center where owners and/or operators of small and very small plants can call (or email) about anything relating to the regulation of meat, poultry, and processed egg products.
All callers speak directly to an individual staff officer, who works one-on-one with the small and very small plant owner/operator about their concerns. Often, the Help Desk staff will have materials or resources that can be sent to respond to a problem. In other cases, the staff may have to research a question and call back with an answer.
In the 2 years that the Small Plant Help Desk has been available, many questions have been answered and many problems have been alleviated. Mike Ardeljan, owner of Irish Valley Farms, a slaughter and pork sausage and smoked turkey processing plant, calls the Help Desk regularly. "The Small Plant Help Desk is always responsive and fast with the answers to my questions. The operators are very smart, and they are one of the only resources I ever use when I have a problem or a question," Ardeljan said. "When I need help, I turn to the Small Plant Help Desk!"
The Small Plant Help Desk was established because feedback from owners and/or operators of small and very small plants revealed that more assistance was needed to address concerns of these valuable stakeholders. Many small and very small plant owners expressed concern that the agency wasn't as responsive as it could be to help the smaller establishments understand and comply with FSIS regulatory requirements.
The Help Desk's staff officers enjoy one-on-one contact with callers and the opportunity to share their knowledge of FSIS' organization, policies, and resources. According to Staff Officer Beth McKew, D.V.M., "Every one of us who answers the phone has spent several years in the plant environment, so we understand the challenges out there." She adds, "Our goal is simple: to strengthen small and very small plants by taking the time to help them understand regulations and other agency requirements. If we can't answer their question, we make sure that we send them to someone who can."
Small and very small plants make up more than 90 percent of the 6,000 meat, poultry, and processed egg products establishments inspected by FSIS. In addition to Federal plants, the Help Desk also supports State meat and poultry inspection programs and State meat and poultry plants, all of which are small or very small businesses. Small and very small plants are vital to our economy and food supply, and FSIS is committed to giving their operators the information and guidance they need to meet inspection requirements.
Ardeljan encourages his colleagues to utilize the Small Plant Help Desk whenever they are in need of assistance. "If you are uncertain of something or just want clarification when the Web site is too confusing, just give the Help Desk a call," he said. "They will find you what you need to know."
Let the Small Plant Help Desk assist you when you have a question or need guidance by calling 1-877-FSISHelp (1-877-374-7435) or emailing email@example.com. Staff officers are available from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday.
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Commonly Asked Questions & Answers
Q. For the 2010 nutrition labeling final rule, is there a required format for the nutrition facts panel? For example, can nutrition information be presented in script?
A. The nutrition facts panel format is regulated in 9 Code of Federal Regulations 317.309(c)-(f) and 381.409(c)-(f). Single-ingredient, raw meat and poultry products will qualify to use the simplified format in most circumstances. Additionally, if the total square inches of labeling space (for the entire package) is less than 40 square inches, then the tabular format may be used.
Nutrition information cannot be presented in script, however, because the regulations stipulate that letters in the nutrition facts panel should never touch (9 CFR 317.309(d)(1)(ii)(D) and 381.409(d)(1)(ii)(D)).
Q. Will a full-service meat counter, where none of the meat is packaged until a customer selects the product and then it is weighed and wrapped for the customer, have to comply with the 2010 nutrition labeling final rule?
A. Yes, if the full-service meat counter sells the major cuts of single-ingredient, raw meat and poultry products listed in the nutrition labeling final rule, it will need to provide point-of-purchase materials for the "major cuts" it sells. Ground product, unless it is ground at a customer's request, will require on-package nutrition facts panels, unless the business qualifies for the small business exemption or other exemptions.
Q. With regard to the new cooperative interstate shipment program, can an establishment temporarily employ more than 25 employees during the busy season if the average number of employees remains fewer than 25?
A. An establishment can temporarily employ more than 25 employees during the busy season if the average number of employees remains fewer than 25, but it can not employ more than 35 individuals at any given time.
Example: For each 2-week pay period, an establishment that operates 3 months out of the year had the following number of employees for each pay period (based on the standards for counting employees in 9 CFR 332.3(b) and 381.513(b)).
Pay Period 1: 23 employees
Pay Period 2: 30 employees
Pay Period 3: 31 employees
Pay Period 4: 25 employees
Pay Period 5: 20 employees
Pay Period 6: 10 employees
To verify that the establishment had the appropriate number of employees, add the number of employees for each pay period.
Divide that number by the number of pay periods.
139÷6= 23.2
The establishment has the appropriate number of employees to participate in the cooperative interstate shipment program because the average number of employees is fewer than 25 and the number of employees for any given pay period never exceeds 35.
Q. Can States that do not have cooperative agreements for an "at least equal to" State meat or poultry inspection (MPI) program participate in the new cooperative interstate shipment program?
A. No. The cooperative interstate shipment program is only available to those 27 States that have an "at least equal to" State MPI program. States that do not currently have a State MPI program would need to first implement a cooperative State MPI program before they could enter into a cooperative interstate shipment program agreement. See FSIS Directive 5720.2 for the FSIS policy and procedures.
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Small Plant NEWS
Editor: Keith Payne
Managing Editor: Jane Johnson, DVM
Production: Joan Lindenberger, Sally Fernandez
Design: Gordon Wilson, Duane Robinson
Contact: Small Plant News, USDA/FSIS, Patriots Plaza III, Rm. 9-267A, Mailstop 3778, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250
Email: email@example.com


text:
10 Feb Tell Us Why Your Chili Is The Best & Win!
With National Chili Day coming up on Thursday, February 23rd and with the winter's "chili" weather hitting us hard, it seems like now is the perfect time to host a chili recipe contest!
People can be very particular and territorial about their chili. Depending on where you live, some people say that real chili isn't made with beans, while in other parts of town they'll say it's not chili unless it has beans. And then there are the people who like to have fun with traditional recipes and add a new twist ingredient to them like cinnamon or even chocolate!
But no chili is complete without the main staples like meat, onions and tomatoes – all of which are ingredients that require a whole lot of prep work. That's why the winner of the contest will be awarded their very own personalized You Name It Bamboo Cutting Board so that they have a beautiful place that they can use to create their masterpiece!
Since all "chili purists" seem to claim that their masterpiece recipe is the best in the world … we want to hear why your recipe really is the best for the PersonalizationMall.com "My Chili is the Best Because …" Recipe Contest!
To enter, all you have to do is send an email with the subject line, "Chili Contest" to firstname.lastname@example.com with the following information:
– In a few sentences, tell us what it is about your chili recipe that sets it apart from all the rest.
– Please include your full name and email address so we know how to contact you if you're the winner.
Just make sure to have your emails sent to us before the deadline at midnight on Thursday, February 23rd. We will announce the winner of the contest, who will be judged by creativity and uniqueness and selected by the A Personal Touch Staff, here at the blog on February 24th.
We look forward to hearing all your special recipes … our mouths are already drooling!
Good luck!


text:
One might say, "a random subset of $\mathbb{R}$ is not Lebesgue measurable" without really thinking about it. But if we unpack the standard definitions of all those terms (and work in ZFC), it's not so clear.
Let $\Sigma \subset 2^\mathbb{R}$ be the sigma-algebra of all Lebesgue measurable sets. Give $2^\mathbb{R}$ the product measure. (It's a product of continuum many copies of the two-point set.) We want to say that $\Sigma$ is a null set in $2^\mathbb{R}$...but is $\Sigma$ even measurable?
Laci Babai posed this question casually several years ago, and no one present knew how to go about it, but it might be easy for a set theorist.
Also, a related question: Think of $2^\mathbb{R}$ as a vector space over the field with two elements and $\Sigma$ as a subspace. (Addition is xor, that is, symmetric set difference.) What is $\dim\left(2^\mathbb{R}/\Sigma\right)$?
It's not hard to see that $\dim\left(2^\mathbb{R}/\Sigma\right)$ is at least countable, so if $\Sigma$ were measurable, it would be a null set. But that's as far as I made it.