RE: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

["Robert C. Leif" <rleif@rleif.com>]

From: Bob Leif
To: Richard Riehle et al.
Firstly, I do not have any information to argue with you about
"Microsoft seized an opportunity by deceiving a friend, Tim Patterson,
and through a series of evil deeds that no one in the technological part
of our industry admires." I should point out that SUN deceived virtually
the entire software industry into believing that Java is a new, modern,
safe technology. This act will hurt many individuals as opposed to one. 
Frankly, we could loose many American military because of this. To add
to the problem, I suspect most of the readers of Comp.Lang.Ada have, as
I do, a great respect for the work of Dewar et al. on GNAT and would
recommend it for mission critical uses including weapons. Wearing my
microbiologist-biomedical engineer hat, I have heard intelligent talks
about the inadvisability of publishing certain material. I hope that the
wrong people are not benefiting from availability of Ada technology
including GNAT. Frankly, I do not have a solution to this problem.
Parenthetically, if Martin Carlisle's work on "Weaving Ada95 into the
.NET Environment works, then the ARM processor should run under Windows
CE and probably eventually on Windows XP embedded. These operating
systems, hopefully, could be a very large Ada market. 
Each outside compiler vendor on the Microsoft 3rd party page has a
paragraph to describe their product. I suspect that Microsoft people
might be amused if someone posted a truthful comparison of Ada versus
Java.
 
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Embedded/ce.NET/evaluation/hardware/pro
videdbsp.asp

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org] On Behalf Of Richard Riehle
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 10:30 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

tmoran@acm.org wrote:

> > The list of  dead Silicon Valley companies who spread themselves too
> > thin by failing to concentrate on their core business and their
paying
> > customers is long and depressing.
>   OTOH, Intel went off their core semiconductor RAM business to build
> a chip for somebody's calculator, and then overengineered that.  Apple
> forgot its core business was hobbyists, and Microsoft forgot its core
> business was BASIC.  Sticking with your core business leaves you with
> nothing more than your core business.

Thanks Tom.  Of course it is important to know when your core business
is no longer relevant.    It is also important to take well-reasoned
risks.
I suppose I did oversimplify.   However, when a company has limited
resources and its core business is still emerging, or trying to
re-emerge
(as with Ada),  there is some virtue in not straying too far from the
core business.

As to your examples, Intel did take risks, but those risks did not
detract
from its core business.   Apple is a different story, as you know.  They
had an opportunity to win the marketplace and threw it away through
their arrogance.  Microsoft seized an opportunity by deceiving a
friend, Tim Patterson, and through a series of evil deeds that no one
in the technological part of our industry admires.  Their core business
was, and still is, marketing, not software innovation.

Richard Riehle