Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2004
What's the most widely used operating system in the world? Windows? UNIX? How about ITRON, the embedded RTOS that's the reigning standard in Japan.
TRON (short for "The Real-time Operating system Nucleus") of which ITRON is a subproject, seemed poised for PCs in 1989 with even the Japanese government planning to incorporate the OS into school computers. But when the U.S. labeled TRON an unfair trade barrier, Japanese computer firms backed away from it, and the architecture refocused on consumer devices. Now, Ken Sakamura, the project's chief architect, estimates that TRON is used in 3 to 4 billion cell phones, digital cameras, fax machines, and other consumer devices— while Windows is only installed on some 150 million computers.
But is ITRON really the most widely used operating system in the world? Well, it depends on who's counting. It turns out that some of the TRON Association's figures are derived from a yearly survey, the most recent one—which showed ITRON controlling 39 percent of embedded development, compared to 11 percent for Linux and 7 percent for VxWorks—conducted at the Embedded Technology 2002 trade show in Tokyo. The location of the survey could be reasonably expected to skew the results toward Japanese standards, and the sample size was small, with only about 300 respondents. (Survey results are at http://www.na.assoc.tron.org/downloads/Enquetfor2003ESC.ppt.)
And while that 3 to 4 billion install base figure would eclipse VxWorks—Wind River boasts an install base similar to Microsoft's—there may actually be up to 50 billion embedded microcomputers currently in use, depending on who you ask. What's running on all those other chips? Perhaps it's time for a microprocessor census.
Northface University (http://www.northface .edu/) in Salt Lake City isn't like other universities. For one thing, it only offers two degrees—a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Business Administration in Enterprise Informatics. For another thing, it's a for-profit institution—the university's president is also its CEO.
The idea for Northface emerged in 2001 as a way to address the IT skills shortage the industry was feeling at the time. The company's founders envisioned the campus as less of a traditional university, focused on research and publications, and more of a boot camp for enterprise software developers. They chose to acquire an existing university (Northface University in Nevada, a business and accounting school) for purposes of accreditation and federal aid, but the Salt Lake City campus is entirely separate from the older institution.
Students spend 28 months at Northface—not four years—with a majority of their time spent working on actual development projects for paying clients. The school is accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), an independent agency overseeing nonpublic career schools and colleges and recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Classes commence on January 26, 2004.
The Petersberg Prize is a new award established by the not-for-profit Development Gateway Foundation (and sponsored by Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom) to recognize the "most exemplary" IT contribution to the developing world in the last 10 years. The prize of 100,000 Euros will be awarded at the Development Gateway Forum in Bonn, Germany, in the spring of 2004. (The prize is named for the first Development Gateway Forum, which was held in Petersberg.) Nominations are due by February 1, 2004. Eligibility guidelines and the nomination form are at http://www .dgfoundation.org/prize/.
Eighteen exabytes of new information flowed through electronic channels in 2002, and about five exabytes of it was committed to record, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/). The study is a follow-up to one conducted in 2000; the researchers found that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has doubled in the last three years. Since all the words ever spoken by mankind would take up about five exabytes of storage, it can be assumed that we spend a lot of time repeating ourselves.