A New Beginning...

It's great to read your first post in this newly-revived blog, ITPro. I look forward to your regular contributions, and encourage any "lurkers" out there to join what I hope will be some good discussions.

i didn't see a mention of GAMES SOFTWARE there, a category i would like to see covered.

any chance you could add that too?

We can cover anything related to software that users would like to see, but content will always be tailored to predominant readership in the Blog while keeping within the parameters for Blogs as defined by GlobalSpec (as they are the owners of the content, even if only from a proprietary sense).

Hey, yes ..you can start by defining the term ...'Embedded Systems' .

I've seen the accepted definition change so much over the years I have no idea what it means anymore .

Maybe we should avoid such jargon and just say what we mean?

(Sorry if this sounds agressive, it's just a bit of a hobby horse of mine )

Del

Sure, Del. I wasn't aware there were multiple definitions. I think about them from the same aspect as recognized authorities in the industry like MIT, NASA or the Embedded Systems Conference. Embedded systems are microprocessors, chips and other programmable circuitry that is not designed to be used simply for a workstation, server or basic computer. That would encompass the circuitry used in robots, calculators, PDAs, cell phones, televisions, appliances, space shuttles, airplanes, cars or any other "non-personal/corporate computing" device. And since this Blog focuses on engineering software, EC++ and Java ME are sensible languages to discuss. Hope that's clearer for you.

Yup, it's clear to me...but maybe you need to tell the countless guys...who stick a PC motherboard into something and call it an embedded processor!

Del

I don't need to tell them anything. If they want to know, they can do like the rest of us and look it up.

Something that would be MOST helpful would be some sort of software review archive, especially with regards to Open Source or (preferably) free packages. For instance, Scilab is a pretty complete mathimatical solution similar to MathCAD that is free. NIST once offered a DataPlot package for free that is quite useful for preliminary looks at raw data (good, quick visuals, fft, etc). fityk is a curve fitting application. BrlCAD is a government-sponsored 3D rendering package. I could go on with packages that I have tried and then abandoned, and it would be nice to have somewhere to go to research specific engineering solutions. SourceForge.net is just too overwhelming, with way too many projects to make it easy to find something specific, and they are geared more to general interest applications, addressing mostly computer geeks. Computer geeks generally don't write for the real world (whoops- personal opinion- need to edit this out!)

This sounds like interesting content to write about, and I'll try to set aside time to take a deeper look at it. However, the difficult part will be to provide anything comprehensive. After all, this is a Blog (which is meant for brevity by design), and as you've pointed out in your comment regarding Sourceforge.net, reviews of such packages is best left to those with way more time than me to tackle such a massive arena. Since you have obvious expertise in the area, you might consider contacting GlobalSpec to see if they would be interested in starting a separate Blog for you.