The reason datacenters use diesel generators is fuel availability. In an extended outage, you can drive your pickup to the nearest station in operation, and fill up all the 55-gallon barrels you've got. Obviously calling for a fuel truck delivery is better, but diesel still gracefully degrades better than anything else.
The cheap-ass datacenters already use natural gas generators. They're cheap, clean, and require much less maintenance or other labor. But any idiot with a backhoe can knock out the gas lines, not to mention earthquakes, floods, etc. And when you've got no electricity or gas coming in, the datacenter shuts down hard.
The future might be "unleaded"... The only way to significantly improve on current combustion efficiency is to switch to fuel cells, and there's been great progress making fuel cells that run on gasoline, getting 60%+ efficiency doing so. I know I'd like one of those in my Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt.
You could buy 10 of them, but you would keep throwing them into the wall after trying to use them for 5 minutes...
With computers, the input devices are dirt cheap... a keyboard and mouse is $5. And if the manufacturer goes too cheap, you replace it with something better. But none of that is true with a tablet/phone.
Cheap tablets have cheap touch-screens. They're infuriatingly unresponsive, and then often glitchy as well. After about the 10th time of hurting your thumb, jabbing it into the screen, and giving it a small slide to scroll down a page, only to have it fling down to the bottom, and register a click on 3 random links, you'll consider your $56 purchase to be vastly too expensive... In fact they'd have to PAY ME to take their crap tablets off their hands.
These things are digital picture frames, and nothing more... certainly nothing requiring any interaction. If you could find a ROM with a vanilla Linux installation, I'd buy a few, and use them as TVs, laptops (with bluetooth keyboards and mice), and a few other basic tasks, but NOTHING that requires EVER touching those screens... they still haunt my nightmares to this day.
And while that's the huge issue, it's not the only problem. Second on the list is low-res screens, that look as if you've got an old CRT television that you're sitting too close to, so you see every dot, and a big island of black around it... Or the frustration of slow flash and CPUs, where a little background activity makes your foreground tasks suddenly unresponsive, and when it comes back, your repeated taps suddenly register and off into bizarro world your tablet goes. And how about tiny, low capacity batteries that are running critical just moments after you un-tether yourself from the wall? Or how about that tiny footnote that says "ARM11", which hints that 15% of the Android programs you'd want to use, and maybe ALL the multimedia apps you'd want to use on a tablet (along with Firefox, Flash, and MANY others), won't run.
I anxiously await cheap portable phones and tablets, and even ARM/MIPS/etc-powered Linux netBooks. But for right now, the low-end Android market is an utter cespool of worthless crap, with no way to differentiate the good from the bad (even Samsung has put out some crap) except actually trying the stuff out, in person, or careful reading of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Walmart. But today, I consider my cheap tablet one of the worst purchases I've ever made, and my $125 EeePC one of the best purchases I've ever made. PCs still rule, and things like Hulu requiring a subscription for Android/IOS while Hulu Desktop is free for Linux, makes it clear that a netBook is a vastly better deal than a tablet, even for all the tasks tablets are supposedly strong at.
There is no way that the second core is idle because of an interrupt
He never said anything about interrupts. You invented that, and put it into his mouth.
Both the quotes are very clear: IF we had multi-threaded applications, then the 4th core would be doing more than just very light number-crunching for the idle SSH session.
I happen to disagree with him, because SSH does a non-trivial amount of computation (keep-alives, rekey interval, etc). But at no time was there any confusion about what he was saying.
Polling is horribly inefficient compared to interrupts/events, I'm not sure if you're being serious when you advocate it's use, but... yuck.
Any good networking stack, such as Linux's, switches to polling when there's heavy traffic. If you don't realize it has some serious advantages, you're an idiot, who clearly doesn't work on "embedded stuff all the time" as you claim to.
You seem to have reading comprehension issues. The discussion was about applications which are NOT multi-threaded... and therefore, some cores are sitting around idle in some cases.
And BTW, there is no "beauty" in interrupts. They cause context switches, which wastes a LOT of CPU cycles. They can be a real performance nightmare... hence: "polling" exists.
And yes, as a matter of fact I DID vote for Obama, along with 75% of everyone who could be bothered to get off their asses and get out and vote. Are you trying to say President Palin was a better choice? And brace yourself, cause we're just about guaranteed 4 more years. And demographics are changing so quickly that every expert says the Republican party will cease to be viable on a national level by 2020, so get ready for them to massively change what they pretend to stand for.
Tablets are awesome because of the form factor, the generally awesome displays, and the examples you didn't choose (like reading a book or using a variety of specialized apps to do things netbooks don't do as well).
I disagree. Smartphones are awesome... netBooks/Ultrabooks are awesome... Tablets are the bastard-child of the two, with the form-factor trade-offs putting it in no-man's land.
If I need to look-up some information quickly, I've always got my phone with me... I DON'T always have my tablet with me. Why does a huge screen make looking-up the weather, or sports scores, or news headlines, significantly better?
I'm also pretty happy reading a book on my phone. A tablet, however, is too big to hold with one hand, and really just too heavy to hold up for hours at a time at all.
What is the killer-app for tablets, in a world where everyone already has smartphones, and can access a full-fledged laptop as easily as a tablet?
"boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock
My netBook is up and running in under 10 seconds. Hit spacebar, it wakes up, connects to WiFi, and I'm ready to go.
Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is... I donno but its apparently way longer
Yes, some portables have poor battery life. Hell, you can get a cheap Android tablet that has less than 2 hours of run-time... But you can also get a netBook or Ultrabook which has battery life longer than an iPad.
Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.
A netbook will probably get "warm", yes, but it's only slightly worse than a tablet. My phone gets damn hot pretty frequently too, which doing heavy work, like Google Maps for an hour or so. I've seen that "Charging Suspended, Temperature Exceeded" popup a number of times.
I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds.
But none of that is WORK, which is what we're talking about. Your job isn't to check the weather.
The point really is that most consumers use their computers for a few functions like facebook, web surfing etc. For that, a smartphone or tablet is enough.
I'll agree that the overwhelming bulk of time people spend on their PCs can, potentially, be replaced by a phone or tablet. My own habbits have changed, and with a good RSS reader on my phone, I'm using my desktop computer perhaps only 10% as much as I used-to.
But that doesn't mean a phone or tablet can ELIMINATE a desktop computer. Every person I've come across, has at least a couple killer apps on their computers, which a phone/tablet couldn't hope to replace with any effectiveness. This may be image or video editing, typing up reports, gaming, business apps, etc.
Mobile devices are intentionally crippled. Even if you get a large tablet, with a keyboard and mouse, you're still going to have a bitch of a time taking screen-shots of DVDs, sharing your printer over the network, or a million other "little" things, which don't seem individually significant, but are killer apps to many, non-technical individuals out there.
In short, point me to ONE person who previously used a computer a decent bit, but threw it out after getting a phone/tablet. They're immensely useful devices, but they're piss poor at "work" activities, and there's a whole host of significant activities that they just can't do, without becomming full fledged computers.
Android applications don't need to be written to be multi-threaded, unless you've got a real CPU hog, like a high-end game, or maybe Firefox/Chrome.
Multitasking seems to be far more common in the Android world... I'm listening to music, have VX Connectbot idling in the background, and browsing the web (obviously), in addition to whatever background processes are running. Not exactly maxing out a quad core CPU, but it's being utilized, and providing some benefits.
The CPU matters when it comes to dog-slow apps like Firefox... My solution is to only use it when my other browsers can't handle a certain web page.
Also, with a number of video game console emulators, and MAME, I'm sure you can find cases where a nearly 2-year old phone isn't fast enough.
And as for transitioning... going from Android to IOS is probably far more involved and expensive than the other way around. Android has far more free apps in the app store, to the point I've only ever felt the need to purchase a handful. And an Android device has free SSH and SFTP (client AND server) options, so syncing your media can be as simple as rsyncing a folder from your desktop...
It's unfortunate that the trees need to be removed, but twice as many will be planted to replace them.
And we're not talking about old-growth forrests here... every other year I hear about LA losing more trees than this to disease, pollution, or invasive species (Chinese elm beetles, anyone?). The only difference is that this year it's intentional, but I wouldn't have assumed any of these trees would have survived for decades to come, anyhow.
And more to the point, if your neighborhood goes from nice to "blighted" by the loss of a few trees, you've got some serious problems which should be addressed, immediately.
I wonder how many tablets are nothing more than multimedia devices... I know that's the only appeal they have for me, and every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases. Would we be so excited about these sales figures if, when PC sales slowed down, it was portable DVD players sales that went through the roof, and started requiring a big fraction of chip production? Would we still have the same doomsday predictions for PCs?
From what I've seen, the only places where tablets replace laptops, is where folks just about only used them to launch Citrix, making it just a thin client, with some games, music, and movie watching built-in. And even there, you're buying a keyboard to go with it, and this is nothing a real laptop couldn't do, and better.
The US no longer actually builds much of anything;
The US is still #1 in manufacturing, with a commanding-lead... More than the #2 and #3 ranked countries, combined.
What's more, experts will tell you that (because of transportation/energy costs, as well as improvements in technology in manufacturing, and rising wages in Asia) it's likely the US (and Mexico) will regain an increasing portion of foreign manufacturing in the next few years.
Your statements just show a tremendous ignorance of the subject, which you never-the-less feel the need to lecture other people on...
I pointed to a specific technology, which won't "tire them out faster". The reasons for that I briefly mentioned, and can be found in detail by reading about the technology.
All remote desktop access to unix/Mac is awful. X, Vnc, no-machine.
NX works extremely well. Needing to share an SSH key for the NX user is awkward, but not a big drawback. My only compaint it that there aren't NX clients for more platforms... Namely: Android. But with a working Xserver on Anroid, somebody just needs to be interested enough to make it happen.
RDP isn't great by any means... it's a window in a box, and doesn't have anything like SSH+X11 which makes it so easy to run commands remotely, and just have the single application display locally.
And I should mention, RDP is just a pared-down Citrix MetaFrame, a service which is also available for Unix servers.
It makes all the sense in the world that Intel/AMD wouldn't put in the effort to go after Android. It's firmly entrenched as an ARMv7 platform, and using MIPS or x86 chips will mean all the CPU-intensive apps in the market won't work. Intel/AMD would have to come up with ARMv7 emulation, and at that point, why not just go with the latest, nice and cheap, ARM CPU?
Intel/AMD would need to maintain a huge advantage in performance, and price, and power requirements, for a good long time, before manufacturers would take a chance on architecture switching their devices. But with Windows 8, Intel/AMD don't have any such burden... in fact they're the incumbent architecture there, which is unlikely to be overturned by competitors. It wouldn't make sense for them to do anything else.
Your complaints really aren't relevant to the real world. Soldiers aren't in a situation of facing starvation, where burning "a few more calories" will be an issue. They would cease to be a fighting force long before that point. And besides, solar panels on everything adds weight, too.
You may be correct that the tradeoff isn't worth it. However, in order to determine that, you need both systems.
No, it's pretty damn easy to calculate the possible benefit versus the alternatives. You can also calculate 60% efficient, 70% efficient solar panels as well.
Boost and Virgin Mobile offer unlimited everything for less than $70, and that's on Sprint's nation-wide network, not just some cut-rate carrier. In fact $35-40 is more typical.
With iDEN/Nextel going away next year, Sprint's coverage should improve quite a bit as well, as they re-use those wonderful low frequencies that propogate so well, for 3G service.
Personally, I don't know why they'd want to prop-up 3G like that... I'd think they'd want to jump straight to 4G-LTE, so they get the great coverage on the most efficent, fasted, and most advanced and profitable network, and maybe replace their dumb 2G phones with LTE phones that only get a tiny LTE channel with dial-up speeds (or 3G speeds) on LTE.
To be fair, web browsers are so damn slow because they have decades of backward compatibilty, bug workarounds, special page rendering settings, and similar. It would certainly be possible to have a strict, legacy-free HTML5+js interpreter that is as fast as any other VM language (ala Java). But that still doesn't give FirefoxOS an advantage, just a fighting chance to possibly compete.
They're betting that there are a huge number of javascript programmers... more than native and java/dalvik combined, which are chomping at the bit to write phone apps. The premise seems pretty silly. But worse, they're betting that Android won't simply get an HTML5 interpreter as soon as a non-trivial number of FirefoxOS apps actually appear...
Why would the military focus so heavily on solar power? I mean, the research is a very good thing, and will be a huge boon for satellites, and maybe electric vehicles as well, but for soldiers, they have a lot more options available.
The main thing which comes to mind is the backpack which converts motion into electricity, which happens to have a side-effect of altering one's stride into a more efficient motion as well:
This could be supplemented by a set of foot-pedals, so if the soldiers are stationary, they could assign one guy to generate the power they need... If they're stationary and not marching, I'd suppose the workout might even be welcome.
These options have the added advantage of working just as well in high latitudes, bad weather, and during sandstorms, and not requiring soldiers with other concerns to deal with panels hanging off their pack, and needing to be oriented to catch the sun.
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The reason datacenters use diesel generators is fuel availability. In an extended outage, you can drive your pickup to the nearest station in operation, and fill up all the 55-gallon barrels you've got. Obviously calling for a fuel truck delivery is better, but diesel still gracefully degrades better than anything else.
The cheap-ass datacenters already use natural gas generators. They're cheap, clean, and require much less maintenance or other labor. But any idiot with a backhoe can knock out the gas lines, not to mention earthquakes, floods, etc. And when you've got no electricity or gas coming in, the datacenter shuts down hard.
The future might be "unleaded"... The only way to significantly improve on current combustion efficiency is to switch to fuel cells, and there's been great progress making fuel cells that run on gasoline, getting 60%+ efficiency doing so. I know I'd like one of those in my Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt.
You could buy 10 of them, but you would keep throwing them into the wall after trying to use them for 5 minutes...
With computers, the input devices are dirt cheap... a keyboard and mouse is $5. And if the manufacturer goes too cheap, you replace it with something better. But none of that is true with a tablet/phone.
Cheap tablets have cheap touch-screens. They're infuriatingly unresponsive, and then often glitchy as well. After about the 10th time of hurting your thumb, jabbing it into the screen, and giving it a small slide to scroll down a page, only to have it fling down to the bottom, and register a click on 3 random links, you'll consider your $56 purchase to be vastly too expensive... In fact they'd have to PAY ME to take their crap tablets off their hands.
These things are digital picture frames, and nothing more... certainly nothing requiring any interaction. If you could find a ROM with a vanilla Linux installation, I'd buy a few, and use them as TVs, laptops (with bluetooth keyboards and mice), and a few other basic tasks, but NOTHING that requires EVER touching those screens... they still haunt my nightmares to this day.
And while that's the huge issue, it's not the only problem. Second on the list is low-res screens, that look as if you've got an old CRT television that you're sitting too close to, so you see every dot, and a big island of black around it... Or the frustration of slow flash and CPUs, where a little background activity makes your foreground tasks suddenly unresponsive, and when it comes back, your repeated taps suddenly register and off into bizarro world your tablet goes. And how about tiny, low capacity batteries that are running critical just moments after you un-tether yourself from the wall? Or how about that tiny footnote that says "ARM11", which hints that 15% of the Android programs you'd want to use, and maybe ALL the multimedia apps you'd want to use on a tablet (along with Firefox, Flash, and MANY others), won't run.
I anxiously await cheap portable phones and tablets, and even ARM/MIPS/etc-powered Linux netBooks. But for right now, the low-end Android market is an utter cespool of worthless crap, with no way to differentiate the good from the bad (even Samsung has put out some crap) except actually trying the stuff out, in person, or careful reading of customer reviews on sites like Amazon and Walmart. But today, I consider my cheap tablet one of the worst purchases I've ever made, and my $125 EeePC one of the best purchases I've ever made. PCs still rule, and things like Hulu requiring a subscription for Android/IOS while Hulu Desktop is free for Linux, makes it clear that a netBook is a vastly better deal than a tablet, even for all the tasks tablets are supposedly strong at.
He never said anything about interrupts. You invented that, and put it into his mouth.
Both the quotes are very clear: IF we had multi-threaded applications, then the 4th core would be doing more than just very light number-crunching for the idle SSH session.
I happen to disagree with him, because SSH does a non-trivial amount of computation (keep-alives, rekey interval, etc). But at no time was there any confusion about what he was saying.
Any good networking stack, such as Linux's, switches to polling when there's heavy traffic. If you don't realize it has some serious advantages, you're an idiot, who clearly doesn't work on "embedded stuff all the time" as you claim to.
I briefly read about the topic over a year ago. It's not my field, and I don't recall the source at all.
With a quick search, the only thing paper I was able to find (who's summary sounds remotely close) is this one: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5887/385
You seem to have reading comprehension issues. The discussion was about applications which are NOT multi-threaded... and therefore, some cores are sitting around idle in some cases.
And BTW, there is no "beauty" in interrupts. They cause context switches, which wastes a LOT of CPU cycles. They can be a real performance nightmare... hence: "polling" exists.
I don't feed trolls... or argue with morons for that matter.
I can see why you post at -1... Try this on for size:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/03/local/la-me-shuttle-trees-20120904
And yes, as a matter of fact I DID vote for Obama, along with 75% of everyone who could be bothered to get off their asses and get out and vote. Are you trying to say President Palin was a better choice? And brace yourself, cause we're just about guaranteed 4 more years. And demographics are changing so quickly that every expert says the Republican party will cease to be viable on a national level by 2020, so get ready for them to massively change what they pretend to stand for.
I disagree. Smartphones are awesome... netBooks/Ultrabooks are awesome... Tablets are the bastard-child of the two, with the form-factor trade-offs putting it in no-man's land.
If I need to look-up some information quickly, I've always got my phone with me... I DON'T always have my tablet with me. Why does a huge screen make looking-up the weather, or sports scores, or news headlines, significantly better?
I'm also pretty happy reading a book on my phone. A tablet, however, is too big to hold with one hand, and really just too heavy to hold up for hours at a time at all.
What is the killer-app for tablets, in a world where everyone already has smartphones, and can access a full-fledged laptop as easily as a tablet?
My netBook is up and running in under 10 seconds. Hit spacebar, it wakes up, connects to WiFi, and I'm ready to go.
Yes, some portables have poor battery life. Hell, you can get a cheap Android tablet that has less than 2 hours of run-time... But you can also get a netBook or Ultrabook which has battery life longer than an iPad.
A netbook will probably get "warm", yes, but it's only slightly worse than a tablet. My phone gets damn hot pretty frequently too, which doing heavy work, like Google Maps for an hour or so. I've seen that "Charging Suspended, Temperature Exceeded" popup a number of times.
But none of that is WORK, which is what we're talking about. Your job isn't to check the weather.
I'll agree that the overwhelming bulk of time people spend on their PCs can, potentially, be replaced by a phone or tablet. My own habbits have changed, and with a good RSS reader on my phone, I'm using my desktop computer perhaps only 10% as much as I used-to.
But that doesn't mean a phone or tablet can ELIMINATE a desktop computer. Every person I've come across, has at least a couple killer apps on their computers, which a phone/tablet couldn't hope to replace with any effectiveness. This may be image or video editing, typing up reports, gaming, business apps, etc.
Mobile devices are intentionally crippled. Even if you get a large tablet, with a keyboard and mouse, you're still going to have a bitch of a time taking screen-shots of DVDs, sharing your printer over the network, or a million other "little" things, which don't seem individually significant, but are killer apps to many, non-technical individuals out there.
In short, point me to ONE person who previously used a computer a decent bit, but threw it out after getting a phone/tablet. They're immensely useful devices, but they're piss poor at "work" activities, and there's a whole host of significant activities that they just can't do, without becomming full fledged computers.
Android applications don't need to be written to be multi-threaded, unless you've got a real CPU hog, like a high-end game, or maybe Firefox/Chrome.
Multitasking seems to be far more common in the Android world... I'm listening to music, have VX Connectbot idling in the background, and browsing the web (obviously), in addition to whatever background processes are running. Not exactly maxing out a quad core CPU, but it's being utilized, and providing some benefits.
The CPU matters when it comes to dog-slow apps like Firefox... My solution is to only use it when my other browsers can't handle a certain web page.
Also, with a number of video game console emulators, and MAME, I'm sure you can find cases where a nearly 2-year old phone isn't fast enough.
And as for transitioning... going from Android to IOS is probably far more involved and expensive than the other way around. Android has far more free apps in the app store, to the point I've only ever felt the need to purchase a handful. And an Android device has free SSH and SFTP (client AND server) options, so syncing your media can be as simple as rsyncing a folder from your desktop...
It's unfortunate that the trees need to be removed, but twice as many will be planted to replace them.
And we're not talking about old-growth forrests here... every other year I hear about LA losing more trees than this to disease, pollution, or invasive species (Chinese elm beetles, anyone?). The only difference is that this year it's intentional, but I wouldn't have assumed any of these trees would have survived for decades to come, anyhow.
And more to the point, if your neighborhood goes from nice to "blighted" by the loss of a few trees, you've got some serious problems which should be addressed, immediately.
I wonder how many tablets are nothing more than multimedia devices... I know that's the only appeal they have for me, and every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases. Would we be so excited about these sales figures if, when PC sales slowed down, it was portable DVD players sales that went through the roof, and started requiring a big fraction of chip production? Would we still have the same doomsday predictions for PCs?
From what I've seen, the only places where tablets replace laptops, is where folks just about only used them to launch Citrix, making it just a thin client, with some games, music, and movie watching built-in. And even there, you're buying a keyboard to go with it, and this is nothing a real laptop couldn't do, and better.
The US is still #1 in manufacturing, with a commanding-lead... More than the #2 and #3 ranked countries, combined.
What's more, experts will tell you that (because of transportation/energy costs, as well as improvements in technology in manufacturing, and rising wages in Asia) it's likely the US (and Mexico) will regain an increasing portion of foreign manufacturing in the next few years.
Your statements just show a tremendous ignorance of the subject, which you never-the-less feel the need to lecture other people on...
I pointed to a specific technology, which won't "tire them out faster". The reasons for that I briefly mentioned, and can be found in detail by reading about the technology.
NX works extremely well. Needing to share an SSH key for the NX user is awkward, but not a big drawback. My only compaint it that there aren't NX clients for more platforms... Namely: Android. But with a working Xserver on Anroid, somebody just needs to be interested enough to make it happen.
RDP isn't great by any means... it's a window in a box, and doesn't have anything like SSH+X11 which makes it so easy to run commands remotely, and just have the single application display locally.
And I should mention, RDP is just a pared-down Citrix MetaFrame, a service which is also available for Unix servers.
Carbon nanotubes are close... But graphene is better, and more than strong enough to make a space elevator tether a real possibilty.
It makes all the sense in the world that Intel/AMD wouldn't put in the effort to go after Android. It's firmly entrenched as an ARMv7 platform, and using MIPS or x86 chips will mean all the CPU-intensive apps in the market won't work. Intel/AMD would have to come up with ARMv7 emulation, and at that point, why not just go with the latest, nice and cheap, ARM CPU?
Intel/AMD would need to maintain a huge advantage in performance, and price, and power requirements, for a good long time, before manufacturers would take a chance on architecture switching their devices. But with Windows 8, Intel/AMD don't have any such burden... in fact they're the incumbent architecture there, which is unlikely to be overturned by competitors. It wouldn't make sense for them to do anything else.
Your complaints really aren't relevant to the real world. Soldiers aren't in a situation of facing starvation, where burning "a few more calories" will be an issue. They would cease to be a fighting force long before that point. And besides, solar panels on everything adds weight, too.
No, it's pretty damn easy to calculate the possible benefit versus the alternatives. You can also calculate 60% efficient, 70% efficient solar panels as well.
Boost and Virgin Mobile offer unlimited everything for less than $70, and that's on Sprint's nation-wide network, not just some cut-rate carrier. In fact $35-40 is more typical.
With iDEN/Nextel going away next year, Sprint's coverage should improve quite a bit as well, as they re-use those wonderful low frequencies that propogate so well, for 3G service.
Personally, I don't know why they'd want to prop-up 3G like that... I'd think they'd want to jump straight to 4G-LTE, so they get the great coverage on the most efficent, fasted, and most advanced and profitable network, and maybe replace their dumb 2G phones with LTE phones that only get a tiny LTE channel with dial-up speeds (or 3G speeds) on LTE.
Why pay extra to Verizon? If you've got a (much cheaper) plan with Sprint, you get free roaming onto Verizon's network as well.
To be fair, web browsers are so damn slow because they have decades of backward compatibilty, bug workarounds, special page rendering settings, and similar. It would certainly be possible to have a strict, legacy-free HTML5+js interpreter that is as fast as any other VM language (ala Java). But that still doesn't give FirefoxOS an advantage, just a fighting chance to possibly compete.
They're betting that there are a huge number of javascript programmers... more than native and java/dalvik combined, which are chomping at the bit to write phone apps. The premise seems pretty silly. But worse, they're betting that Android won't simply get an HTML5 interpreter as soon as a non-trivial number of FirefoxOS apps actually appear...
Why would the military focus so heavily on solar power? I mean, the research is a very good thing, and will be a huge boon for satellites, and maybe electric vehicles as well, but for soldiers, they have a lot more options available.
The main thing which comes to mind is the backpack which converts motion into electricity, which happens to have a side-effect of altering one's stride into a more efficient motion as well:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9245155/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/backpack-generates-its-own-electricity/
This could be supplemented by a set of foot-pedals, so if the soldiers are stationary, they could assign one guy to generate the power they need... If they're stationary and not marching, I'd suppose the workout might even be welcome.
These options have the added advantage of working just as well in high latitudes, bad weather, and during sandstorms, and not requiring soldiers with other concerns to deal with panels hanging off their pack, and needing to be oriented to catch the sun.
Because they're the topic and focus of this story...