Friday, July 05, 2002

Europe Could Stand Improvement 7:00:28 PM • • comment [] • Google It! Independence Day. Third irritation: bathrooms. Europe must be a land of midgets. I could apply for a position as circus contortionist after what I've subjected myself to just to get under shower heads here. Hotel bathrooms have odd steps, odd tubs, odd sinks, odd showers, all designed so badly that the mind boggles. And what is it with the toilets here? Flushing a toilet is like watching Niagara Falls in miniature. It doesn't take that much water to flush a toilet. Sigh. [Confessions of a Mozillian] Wait until you get to the UK, where you have a HOT tap and a COLD tap, each on its on side of the sink!

Should Microsoft Listen More to Robert Scoble? 6:44:36 PM • • comment [] • Google It! How does Microsoft grow its size? Certainly not by listening to Robert Scoble. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog] Sometimes, in a large pile of gems, one gem is sufficiently brighter to catch your eye. Well said! (The permalink to that quote is this, but Radio has a bizzare habit of not making this page available as soon as the front page (and RSS feed) are updated, so I kept a pointer to the home page instead.)

Hard Real-Time with Venturcom RTX on Microsoft Windows XP and Windows XP Embedded 6:29:04 PM • • comment [] • Google It! MSDN has an interesting article about Venturcom's realtime extension for Windows XP. I still think that Dave Cutler's decision that Windows NT would not be realtime was a mistake that cost Microsoft an entire market ("large" embedded systems). Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is a comparison of response times between Windows XP, Windows CE, and Windows XP with RTX. These numbers show why Windows CE is almost nowhere to be found in the non-device realtime market: it sucks. (So much so, that a combination of the huge Windows XP OS with the RTX realtime extensions runs rings around it!)

© Copyright 2002 Ziv Caspi.