Speed limits

Where I work we use a fairly significant number of small microcontrollers from Microchip called PICs. Or chief workhorse is the PIC18F452 which is basically the successor to one of the most indestructible processors of all time the PIC16C877. There is actually a story from when I was in the school's solar car team; one team member had installed a PIC backwards in the socket and didn't realize it until he saw the die through the window (EPROM parts use UV to erase) glowing red. He promptly powered the device down waited a few moments and returned the PIC to the proper orientation and powered it on again, without any problems.

Now back to the topic at hand. Given that we use so many of the new part its nice to have new projects also use it for simplicity’s sake. The main issue is its been a while since Microchip last did a die shrink limiting the top end to 40MHz crystal (10MHz instruction cycle time), which is great for most tasks, but is starting to be a bit slow in this day and age.

I'm currently working on a device that is to emulate the satelite crash sensors on several different automobiles. The most recent generation of parts are using a new protocol that is significantly faster than their predecessors did. This protocol is a balanced 200kbaud pwm synchronous voltage transmit, current receive system.

The current signaling isn't difficult for it is simple level based, however the master does transmit as a pwm voltage signal. The bit time is 5 uSec and the PIC instruction time is 0.1 uSec. That means for each bit the PIC only has 50 cycles to measure the signal and determine what the bit is (a 1 or 0) and decide what the next bit to transmit is.

Sound intense? The interframe time is 4 bit times or 20 uSec which correlates to 200 cycles in which the PIC has to determine the next message to transmit having received and decided what the previous one was.

Basically after a fairly tech heavy post it really boils down to that sometimes you don't need a processor with a lot of bells and whistles, you just need it to move fast. Unfortunately there isn't much between the world of PICs and the worlds of DSPs, so when you work in that nether region in between you have situations where neither is ideal.

Google Finishes Something

I noticed this afternoon that Google had finally decided to take something out of beta. You might remember my diatribe about unfinished software that stayed beta in perpetuality.

Google and Unfinished Software

Recently one of the big problems people I know as well as myself is the slowness of gmail message delivery. Basically what happens is you send an email to a gmail account and randomly it just won't show up, for about a day. If you go back and look at logs as to when the gmail stmp server recieved it normally you get that it recieved the email shortly after you sent it, gmail just lost the email and forgot to put it in your inbox for somewhere on the order of 10-20 hours.

This is starting to become a very common occurence. I personally find this highly annoying because there are occasions where I want my email in a fairly prompt manner. Waiting a day for an email with a link that expires in 3 hours is not kosher in my book. Now it would be all fine and dandy if I didn't have something to compare it to, however, I have used yahoo email for over 10 years. I have NEVER had an email time delay problem. And when I mean never, I do mean, never.

I think I've mentioned this before but Google has this bad habbit of labeling everything beta and never taking it out of beta. This allows them to never actually have to fix the problems that crop up. So far all the google software I have tried has looked good and worked somewhat decently but there has always been a few sticky issues. Pretty much exactly like my own software.

But I really need a reliable email system.

The EU beyond Reason.

There isn't anything stopping anybody from writing a viable windows alternative at this point in time. All of Microsofts interconnects and APIs have either been released to the public or reverse engineered by the bsd/linux community.

The problem is that there is no solidly released linux distribution that meets everybody's needs, or will even nessesarily run on your machine.

Take a windows XP disk. Put it in the CD-ROM drive of ANY machine made in the last 5 years, using any hardware and install. Then either download the patches from your release disk version to what is most up to date.

Your computer now has a moderately secure, put it behind a 30 broadband router/firewall and anything bad that happens to it will be due to a dumb user. For the record, in all these years I've been involved in computers I have NEVER seen a virus, half the time I've run a virus scanner and half the time not. I have even managed one department's network at a college and still never saw a virus get flagged by the scanners.

But I digress, the point here is that the now forementioned fresh XP install will be clean and integrated and for the most part easy to understand and follow. If you need to do something the built in help system will describe exactly what steps you need to follow. While the base windows package comes will nearly everything you would want for the standard PC that will be used for email and internet browsing you don't need to go any further. If you need more you can purchase Microsoft's Office for a relatively small fee. While MSWord might have a few deficiencies it still works as one would expect it should. Excel is still unrivaled when it comes to Spreadsheet work. If you use POP or a Corporate email system the version of Outlook that comes with Office is one of the cleanest email/groupware type programs around (compare wil Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, etc)

Now try to find something that competes. There is no linux distribution that even in itself that maintains a commonized interface. Moving into the unix field the only good integrated windowing environment would be OS-X from Apple. Again OS-X is not free. OS-X has all of those same features I talked about earlier when describing Windows XP.

And by all indications it looks like Apple will start growing even faster in the close future. With Microsoft's .NET architecture gaining ground, I would even guess we will see a business model shift for Microsoft shortly.

But the point of all this really comes down to the EU's extremely agressive and utterly absurd Communistic approach to their Anti-trust dealings with Microsoft.

While the EU case started off sketchy at best, it has gone far far off into the crazy now. The people consulting on the case for the EU are paid for none less than Microsoft's own competitors. Their comments are sealed and can't be viewed by anybody, not even Micrsoft. The case is designed from the get go to extract either massive amounts of money for the EU nations or else had over to Microsoft's competitors the entire source code for Windows.

Right now the EU is getting ready to levy a fine of $5 million PER DAY back dated to December of 2005. Right now thats about $1 billion and rising. Microsoft isn't the only American company that the EU is targeting either.

At this point I would rather see Microsoft stop all opperations in the EU instead of paying any fine of any sort to the EU. That means closing all divisions and refuse to sell any software licenses to anybody in the EU.

As an interesting subnote the EU has a GDP of just slightly more than the United States (about $1 trillion more) but if you take the EU's GDP per capita and compared that to the States of the US that number is only better than THREE (3) states. Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states with worse GDP per capita numbers than the EU. Ironically with the coal boom just starting up again I wouldn't be surprised to shortly see the EU's GDP per capita barely above the two lowest states.