Automotive Computing Gets a Wide-Temp Upgrade
Automotive computers come in many shapes and sizes, from consumer-oriented in-dash systems to rugged tablets on mounting arms to small form factor units mounted in the trunk or beneath a seat. Generally speaking, these are low-powered systems with at most an Intel Atom processor.
The CarC2DMV101 ups the ante, featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processor to unlock substantially more performance while maintaining a sub-35 watt TDP. Built around the wide-temperature KR900 Mini-ITX mainboard, this system offers dual LAN, up to four COM ports, and HDMI as well as legacy video support through VGA and DVI-D. This industrial feature set is served on a wide-temperature platform featuring surface-mounted components and 24-pin ATX power for maximum versatility. Continue reading
Hard Drive Shortage: Time to Go Solid State?
2011 will likely be remembered as the year of natural disasters. The earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan, a more recent earthquake in Turkey, Hurricane Irene even left a huge mark on our home state of Vermont. One of the latest environmental emergencies is having a direct impact on the PC industry. Thailand has been enduring major flooding as a result of a monsoon since July and over the past few weeks numerous reports have emerged concerning manufacturing facilities for hard disk drives and their sub components. Western Digital in particular has seen one of their largest manufacturing facilities shut down entirely due to these floods.
Don’t Let Upgrades Get You Down
Sold on the promise of unlimited connectivity to all my music on all of my devices, I bought into the iCloud. Without reading much about iCloud beyond the name and then deducing that anything Apple produces must be perfect and work exactly as my fanciful mind could imagine, I dropped some cash on OS X Lion and proceeded to upgrade my computer so it could support this new magical creation. What I soon discovered after three and a half hours of downloads, installs, and reboots on an early Sunday morning was that my head was in the cloud, not my music. And, to make the situation worse, my computer no longer functioned like the computer I once owned. It was actually about 50% of the machine I knew and loved for so long. I couldn’t even look at it without sighing heavily and bowing in defeat.
The sequence of events following my upgrade has been mentally painful and costly. I lost support for my Adobe Creative Suite and had to purchase a new version. My monitor calibration device is not supported, either. I have ceased backing up my machine because my Mac was no longer compatible with our NAS box software. Flash video plays terribly and requires a system reboot to jump-start my graphics acceleration to previous performance levels. Windows have forgotten their zip and are choppy when minimized and maximized. And worst of all? The tens of thousands of songs I had access to from our music library on our server sit unplayable and untouched because OS X Lion and our server don’t want to place nicely with each other. Continue reading
Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support Gets Longer
Standardization is both the blessing and curse of embedded suppliers and customers. It’s a tightrope walk with long drops to either side: obsolescence and the march of technology on one, redevelopment costs on the other. Generally speaking we err on the side of caution. While we love new tech and strive to bring the latest and greatest to market, the longer the lifetime of a product, the easier it is to offer a standardized solution to customers.
We spend a lot of time agonizing over the anticipated lifetime of each product, putting a lot of emphasis on Embedded Life Cycles, supplier roadmaps, and anticipated end-of-life dates. Luckily for our industry, most of our suppliers provide long-life offerings aimed specifically at the project market.
Add to the list of long-life products Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04, slated for a release in April of 2012. It has just been given an expanded LTS (Long Term Support) period of five(!) years, increased from the typical three. That means that through early 2017, enterprise users will still be able to enjoy the same support, even after Ubuntu 14.04 is released in 2014. We often get the question of why we prefer the LTS releases of Ubuntu, and why we still support 10.04 in the face of newer releases such as 11.04 and 11.10. Aside from the obvious advantage of longer support cycles and guaranteed updates, the non-LTS versions tend to innovate more but the LTS products such as 10.04 and the upcoming 12.04 offer users a more stable and predictable application environment.
According to Canonical’s press release, the overwhelming majority of their server users have standardized on Long Term Support releases of their product, and more and more organizations are migrating to Ubuntu. The ability for a developer to standardize on both hardware and software with such extended life cycles is crucial for minimizing the time and costs associated with redeveloping a new platform.
How important is the extended support period of a product to you? Let us know!