At the recent RTECC conference, Jim Ready, founder of Montavista (which has been part of fast-growing but profit-challenged Cavium since 2009) said that there really isn't much need for RTOSes anymore, as Linux can be used instead.

Ironically, Jim created VRTX, one of the very first commercial real-time operating systems back in 1980. Not a week goes by that I don't hear a similar statement from some pundit, or get email from an engineer wondering if sticking with an RTOS is a bad idea in view of Linux's many virtues.

Apart from the whole hard- or soft-real-t......

Intervention is needed for my wife.

She's the sort who never slows down. She is always creating some form of art. The house is overflowing with her stained glass creations. Everything is decorated with mosaics or her paintings. Even rocks in the yard are mosaic victims.

But a few years ago she discovered beading, and, well, let's just say those beaders are nuts. Her bead society is full of similarly-minded women (to a first approximation, all women). They can't go for more than a few microseconds without stringing bits of shiny glass or other materials toget......

A few months ago, Xilinx released their Zynq line of FPGAs. Initial versions comprise a pair of hard-IP Cortex-A9 processors surrounded by a sea of programmable logic.

They're sort of like a super-sized version of Microchip's PIC10F32X family, which is an 8 bit microcontroller with a small amount of programmable logic (what they calls a "puddle of gates"). Both companies push a new kind of product: instead of an FPGA that happens to have a microprocessor or two, these parts are complete microcontrollers with some (in Xilinx's case, rather a lot) progra......

I believe in absolute honesty in an engineering environment. Difficult truths become much harder if left unspoken, and it's impossible to hide from reality. An example is scheduling: in fact, the IEEE code of ethics says, among other things, that we promise to be accurate in our estimates. Even though the boss might not want to face the truth.

Les Chambers wrote a fascinating account of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill which places at least some of the blame on one manager who was unwilling to step in and accept the unpleasant truths.

Sound familiar? Do you remember Rog......

One of the gateway drugs into electronics has traditionally been ham radio. In the past I've commented on its decline. But things have changed. The ARRL (www.arrl.org) reports that as of late last year there are now 700,000 licensed hams in the United States, an all-time high. That's up from 285,000 in 1971.

How much of the increase can be attributed to the relaxed licensing requirements? Morse code is no longer needed. The test questions come from pools that are on-line, making it easier to master the material than of yore.

I got my Novice license as a teenager; ba......

As written in Ogilvy On Advertising, David Ogilvy says there are three magic words in the ad world. Put one in the headline of your ad and people will read it. The magic words are new, free, and sex.

But the one sure way to get my attention when flipping through a magazine is to have a schematic diagram. Any kind. A radio. Vacuum tube circuits. Logic. Piles of op amps. For some reason I find schematics arresting and always stop and take a closer look.

Clicking around the web recently I stumbled across some vacuum tube sites, which brought back fond high school memories of building......

Resumes come in different forms. I wish had saved the the quirky ones I have encountered over the decades. One was printed on bright pink paper, an obvious gambit to make it stand out from the rest of the pile. Others were long... really long, sometimes over 100 pages.

One that I did save twenty years ago (the rest is equally priceless) contains this nugget:

Do you think this person got an interview?

A job opening often results in a deluge of resumes. If you've never hired anyone you might think that the evaluator would carefully dig through the......

Nomophobia is a bitter curse. It is a disease that cripples those affected. Perhaps you have a friend or relative who suffers from this condition. I'm sure the United States we'll soon have a Huge Federal Program in place to address the issue.

The mostly-incompetent PR zombies of the world send me hundreds of press releases a week, usually with topics tremendously germane to Embedded.com readers like hair treatments and ED cures. Today a gem from SecurEnvoy, another one of those annoying companies with camel-case names, warns that two thirds of us suffer from nomophobi......

In Finksburg, Maryland, Route 140 is heavily patrolled. Breaking the speed limit would likely lead to a fine.

But some speed limits can't be exceeded, no matter how much one wishes to. The speed of light comes to mind. As does the speed at which a teenager's brain matures.

Then there are multiprocessor limits. Amdahl's Law tells us that the max speedup achievable is:

where f is the percentage of a problem that cannot be parallelized, and n is the number of processors. In a system, where, say, only 50% of the problem can be executed in p......

[Continued from My favorite quirky chips (Part 1)]

The first bit of strangeness was the package, an enormous 50-pin DIP (old-timers will remember the first 68000, which was in an equally-huge 64-pin DIP). That allowed for separate instruction and data buses, and some claim that this was the first micro with a Harvard architecture. Instructions were 16 bits, with 13 address bits, and the data bus was just a byte wide.

It gets odder. The data bus was called the "Interface Vector bus," or IV for short, and bit 7 was the LSB! IV0 to IV7 were multiplexed with both addre......