Microsoft recently announced at the launch of the WindowsXP Embedded operating system that more than 15 industry-leading companies have committed to shipping their next-generation devices based on Windows XP Embedded within the first half of 2002. WindowsXP Embedded, the componentized version of the WindowsXP operating system, enables rapid development of the most reliable and full-featured connected devices including retail point-of-sale devices, thin clients, gaming systems, self-service kiosks, industrial automation, residential gateways, and advanced set-top boxes. In addition, Microsoft announced a free evaluation kit, as well as a 90-day promotional price of $995 USD (estimated retail price) for the WindowsXP Embedded tool suite.
Microsoft Announces Availability of WindowsXP Embedded
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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it’s one thing to announce an official release, it is another to make false publicity …
How can they put only and $995 in one sentence ?
Well they will have hard time here, because company who want reliable transactions for example use systems by Wind River Systems for example. And not Windows because for example HRT systems in hospitals need to be 99.9% reliable windows isn’t that, and prolly never will be. The kernel is improved but kernel is still not that reliable. Also u also prolly need better hardware, means many hw upgrades. And why change a winning team?
just my 2 cents
winning team my ass…
i dont care for any more wincrap…
after what they have dont i quit… i mean i am tired of thier games and thier lawsuits…
im just tired…
after my win2000 goes down the tubes (get old which it is showing signs of) i will get rid of MicroCrap and swich to linux full time…
all the MS bashers in one thread. amazing. throw a party or something.
Microsoft’s NT based OS’s are excellent to say the least. As for reliability, we have STB’s at the office running NTE that have been solid for over a year now.
Any troubles that one might endure can usually be traced back to drivers, or bad application code. And for those who say that it sucks because it can’t catch all the bad stuff: i’ve seen linux and freebsd fall over this way too.
After all, the guys writing it aren’t stupid, and neither is microsoft. They are many things, but they are not stupid. Its not a conspiracy to screw everyone by writing bad software, stop treating it like one. Read the facts and quit giving into the peer pressure of the “linux is best” hype. Be your own man.
All that being said, i’m looking forward to XPE as i like Windows XP very much.
As far as i know where I work Microsoft servers need to be rebooted often. I find that unreliable and unacceptable don’t you?
While the Linux servers are going for months without a single reboot.
QNX and windriver are the kings of embedded systems. No one is going to use windows, and if they do they won’t have a viable product for long when their medical devices start killiy people.
I ment Killing people. got to read before posting.
Gives a whole new meaning to Blue screen of death huh?
>As far as i know where I work Microsoft servers need to be rebooted often. I >find that unreliable and unacceptable don’t you?
>While the Linux servers are going for months without a single reboot.
It mostly depends on the purpose of those machines and who configures the machine.
greets
quickie
Microsoft’s NT based OS’s are excellent to say the least. As for reliability, we have STB’s at the office running NTE that have been solid for over a year now.
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Well, let’s put it this way:
The NT kernel makes 9x/ME look like quicksand. I’d say Win2k and NT are “stable” operating systems (haven’t tried xp, but I have no reason to believe it will be any less stable), but it’s a different kettle of fish when you’re using the kernel in “retail point-of-sale devices, thin clients, gaming systems, self-service kiosks, industrial automation, residential gateways, and advanced set-top boxes”. I hope they’ve done their sums right, because I’m too often reminded of train station monitors happily displaying blue screens for hours to thousands of commuters. Not acceptable.
But then again, I have the same ‘blue screen’ fears with the xbox. Something about MS and reliability that I really need convincing with, even though I’m generally happy with Win2k. Maybe they’re finally taking reliability and stability seriously. They have to.
they should put those warning in BSOD likr they do in quebec on the cigarette pack. “you could have avoided this by buying a non-Microsoft operating system”.
The problem is not that M$ do stable or not OS. The real problem is that a company that do app should not tie them to the OS.
Look at it this way: Microsoft add software and feature all the time to window and never remove any. This mean that the reliability always goes down.
I never bought any microsoft product of my life and i will never buy one. I hate microsoft with all my heart but i hate even more those that KNOW microsoft is bad for the industry and continue to buy their stuff. I put them in the same bag as those that go sex hunting child in tailand.
I’m not mad at the cluless joe blow that buy XP because the vendor say it’s good. I’m not even angry at this vendor because he do is job and is as cluless as the custommer.
Another batch that piss me a lot are those that know they would have less expence with linux and still buy micro-crap.
I really hope a country (please germany please) stop completly to use M$ product. That alone would trigger a lot a event in that country that would spread to other country. M$ could end up like Enron in 1 year of time if that would happen. M$ cannot scale down, they are a walmart and a mcdonald that exist in on the bacteria model: expand or die.
What killed commodore was the C64 closet syndrome. Once user were done with computer they put them in closet. It took LOT of time before company started to upgrade their PC junior. What started all that fuzz back was the 486DX2 clone market.
Now we enter another computing dark age of no upgrade (new gameconsole help that a lot like the genesis/SNES helped to kill comodore market). By it’s size M$ will not be able to last long enough this time and will die.
XP is jsut a purdy version of Win2K, oh, and abit of bloat and manditory registration. Making an OS for embeded machines based on XP is stupid. Restart from scratch for goodness sakes! People are so scared to start new oses these days. While NT is a shitload better than 9x, i still think that NT doesnt match up against *NIX kernels.
There is a subtle approach to OS design & implementation that I have felt has been lacking with MS operating systems for many years.
For a good OS to work and feel right, you basically want it to be vulnerable to anything that applications can throw at it, even poorly coded ones. This goes to the heart of what kind of API’s the OS gives and how applications are meant to do particular tasks.
Now while there is strong ground for criticism of the Win9x range of OS stability, there is a harsh reality that even the WinNT range while being a major improvement still has issues of stability when it comes down to what the application developer is *allowed* to do. This I see as being a fundamental problems with API design and such. For example, it is relatively easy to write a complex server application which could deadlock major parts of the system or generally crash in ways that are difficult to trace or prevent. You can use things like exception handling and stuff, but when an application has a flat address space where it can potentially share data areas with system libraries you are ultimately going to end up with trouble.
For example, we had an untraceable system error occur on a WinNT 4.0 platform that caused it to crash within the system ODBC library. While I can theoretically use a catch all exception block to trap such errors & work around them, why should I have to when the system library should be more vulnerable than that. We think it has something to do with a scheduled defrag occuring at the time but can’t be sure. I have seen similar problems occur when system resources get exhausted so I suspect the may be an inherent OS instability in there somewhere.
Sometimes the server applications are complicated by having to manage GUI issues with the many resultant problems associated with that. The end result is that in my opinion, it is much harder to write stable applications for the Win32 platforms than for other platforms for the following reasons.
1) the APIs are not always logical, often over complicated and poorly thought out. It requires many years of experience and wading through developer notes to figure out how to do something which on the surface seems simple.
2) Often the published APIs are feature poor, or can’t be guaranteed to work across all multiple win32 platforms. This leads to compromises in application design and often leads to instability.
3) Sometimes the APIs are dangerously exposed and written to run in ring 3 which offers little protection in times of program disaster or resource starvation.
4) windows programmers come from a culture of having to accept that programs could crash for operating system reasons regardless of how much care one takes to code for disasters. This leads to a kind of fatalism that you can never achieve the perfectly stable program so why should you bother. The corollary to this is that such a programmer is more likely to switch their mission cirtical application to a unix framework because at least they have a reasonable degree of confidence that any crashes are application generated.
A classic example of the unix way vs the windows way is that I would have far far greater confidence of running apache as a web server on unix than I would running IIS on NT. Both types of OS are technically stable, but the servers are written in totally different ways to deal with inefficiencies of the underlying OS architecture. The end result is that one type of server is perceived as less stable than the other, which in recent months has been proven clearly many times by the various attacks which IIS has been prone to.
Getting back to my original point, I feel you have to take a holistic view to the OS, not just look at the fundamental OS architecture of how it’s put together and what kind of goodies it provides, but also what kind of APIs are exposed and how well they do their job. Perhaps for this very reason, unix platforms are more preferred because although their APIs may not be as feature rich as Win32 or other windows APIs, they are better thought out and a more well defined than those of their Windows cousins.
P