So if you were to run Linux on one of these, then you could run all of your software natively at full speed instead of with performance crippling emulation...
I can see why not including an ethernet port in a laptop makes sense, most users (Especially end users) these days will be using wireless, even corporate users will generally use wireless unless they're sat at their desk where there will usually be a docking station which contains its own ethernet port. Same for removal of optical media, my last laptops that had optical drives NEVER used them and i ended up removing them to install additional HDDs in the space.
How do you connect to the internet? Does it not require a subscription of some kind? How do you power your devices? Does it not require a subscription of some kind?
Your ipad touch turns into a brick very quickly if you don't pay for a monthly recurring power service...
Intel tried that with IA64, an architecture that depends on compiler optimizations to get good performance... IA64 could be extremely quick with properly targeted code, but compilers weren't up to the job and the chips were too expensive.
Another problem you have with x86, is that a lot of code is compiled to target the lowest common denominator, not to target the current model cpu, so even the latest processors have to be designed to optimize code thats been compiled to run on a 386. If you're precompiling code for wide distribution you have to set the lowest supported cpu somewhere, and if you set it too recent you'll improve performance but exclude lots of potential users.
Alternative architectures fail because of closed source code... All of those architectures failed on NT primarily because there was little or no software available for them, whereas there are millions of (usually embedded) PPC and MIPS systems running Linux even today.
Software vendors won't port to an architecture that has no users, and users won't buy an architecture that has no software.
There have been many architectures which don't do speculative execution, IA64 for example, and high performance is certainly possible... But for that to work, you need well written code (or well written compiler) to take advantage of it, and the code needs to target the specific processor revision, not be generically compiled code.
Processors in games consoles (eg Cell in PS3) were built this way because there was never any need to run the code on a different model of processor for example.
It would make Intel and AMD file lawsuits against whoever was making the clone chips, while also charging more to cover the cost of the lawsuits. Only the lawyers would benefit.
The world is becoming more paranoid, governments are starting to worry about foreign influence... The US has already banned Russian antivirus software, do you think the Russians are especially happy about using processors designed in the US and manufactured in China, running software also written in the US? Larger countries like Russia, China and the US can afford to do things inhouse, but smaller ones can't and an open collaborative model is the next best option. Even for larger countries, it's much cheaper. So you'd have not just large cloud providers, but also governments potentially contributing towards open hardware.
I was looking at these a while ago, and tried to get hold of one... Even went so far as to get a chinese speaking friend to contact them directly, but to no avail.
Depends on how much of a head start someone will give... SPARC is relatively open and oracle seem to have lost interest in developing it, perhaps they would donate the latest designs to the community... IBM have been pushing POWER as an open design too? There's also abandoned architectures like IA64 and Alpha.. An Alpha EV7 built on a modern fab process and clocked a bit higher could work well, and they did have unfinished designs that were going to be among the first multicore chips (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21464)
So if you're up to any suspicious activity, you just back up all your data to an encrypted backup on a cloud server located outside of the US and wipe your phone before you travel... All this does is invades the privacy of ordinary people who desire privacy but don't have anything important enough to go to these lengths to hide it.
IE6 would also work with standards compliant sites, assuming you stick to the very small subset of standards that IE6 supported. Chrome supports a much wider set of standards that's all.
Depends where you are... In many instances it's less convenient, or slower especially when you consider the full journey time (ie time getting to/from the stations, time spent waiting for the train etc, not just the time spent on the train). I've found very few instances where trains were more convenient than driving (or having someone else drive a taxi)...
If the train is cheaper, that's often the reason why the poor use it, although in many cases its more expensive than driving assuming you already have access to a car. The up front costs of a car are spread over how much you use it, whereas the costs of a train only increase as you use it more.
Building infrastructure is expensive, it's only profitable if you have economies of scale... You have to bulk build the infrastructure past every property even if those properties won't sign up as customers... The more competition in a given area, the more properties you'll pass who won't use your service and the more the build out will cost. If multiple companies are building their own infrastructure then competition will actually increase prices. You will also get areas which are not profitable to provide any service whatsoever.
Of course with a government run service, you are stuck with whatever they provide... If their service is poor then thats what you get.
What's really needed is a non profit to build the physical infrastructure, and then provide a dumb pipe which other companies can use to provide services to end users. After the initial build out, whatever rental fees are charged to the consumer facing companies can be used to maintain the physical infrastructure.
It is a malware target, same as the similar feature in windows... There is plenty of windows malware that uses the system protection features to make removal difficult.
It can and will be fixed at the hypervisor layer, but this will incur a performance hit (potentially up to 30%?)... That means for the same level of performance, your cloud provider now has to buy 30% more servers, pay for 30% more power, 30% more rackspace, 30% more cooling and 30% more maintenance... Those costs will be passed on to the customers.
Plastic bags are convenient to carry if you're on foot or taking public transport, and they're available from the store whenever you go there.
Paper bags are better in some cases, but they will fall apart if they get wet (eg in the rain).
A few years ago the stores used to provide cardboard boxes to customers for free, the same boxes that much of their stock was delivered in. If you've travelled to the store on foot then these boxes are useless, but if you've travelled by car then it's actually much easier to put your goods in the boxes and load them into your car. Once bags are in the trunk of your car they have a habit of falling over and spilling their contents, boxes don't do that. The boxes were also a waste product to the shop, if customers didn't take them then they had to be disposed of. Now the boxes are just disposed of and not made available to customers.
If you make a conscious plan to visit the shop on foot you can take bags with you and reuse them, but sometimes you just visit the shop on a whim and don't have a bag with you. Carrying bags with you at all times in case you might want to buy something is annoying and stupid.
And yes existing containers should be usable for certain goods, but this requires infrastructure both to physically supply the product and to handle charging for arbitrary quantities instead of fixed size units.
The problem is caused by the ridiculous packaging that most items come in... More than 90% of my weekly trash is made up of plastic packaging, usually the packaging is much larger than the item it contained and is designed to look pretty on the shelf.
Packaging should be more sensible... Plain cardboard that can biodegrade or be easily recycled, glass bottles that can be cleaned and reused (not melted down and recycled as that's a hugely energy intensive process).
The rich people who live in the suburbs are unlikely to use the train as they can afford to own cars. It's pointless to spend a large amount of money building stations that will never get used.
I went to las vegas and didn't even realise there was a monorail... Given the route it's not surprising, why go through a casino to the back and pay to get on the monorail when you could just walk along the strip or through the casinos? If you've going to pay, you could just take a taxi along the strip instead.
If the monorail ran along the strip it would be more visible to tourists and get more users. Where it is currently, many visitors have no idea it even exists.
Depends on your reputation, the quality and price of your product, the quality and price of the clones etc..
If your product is high quality and you have a good reputation, you can charge a premium for it even if cheaper options are available. If your product is sufficiently cheap it won't be profitable to make clones of it, as the clones would only be marginally cheaper at best, or might even be more expensive due to economies of scale.
Most people will pay a little extra for a quality item from a reputable brand, and those people who always go only for the cheapest available generally do so because thats all they can afford.
A russian company makes software for analyzing fingerprints...
The FBI have a need to analyze fingerprints, which makes sense given the nature of the organization. The FSB performs similar roles to the FBI, and thus they have similar requirements.
It makes sense that this company would try to sell their software to as many potential customers as possible. Chances are they are at least trying to sell it to law enforcement and intelligence services in all manner of other countries too.
You just have to do your own sensible due diligence during the procurement process. Insist on buildable sourcecode, thoroughly review what the code does and what else it tries to interact with. If you detect anything nefarious or the company refuses to provide full buildable source, don't do business with them.
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So if you were to run Linux on one of these, then you could run all of your software natively at full speed instead of with performance crippling emulation...
I can see why not including an ethernet port in a laptop makes sense, most users (Especially end users) these days will be using wireless, even corporate users will generally use wireless unless they're sat at their desk where there will usually be a docking station which contains its own ethernet port.
Same for removal of optical media, my last laptops that had optical drives NEVER used them and i ended up removing them to install additional HDDs in the space.
How do you connect to the internet? Does it not require a subscription of some kind?
How do you power your devices? Does it not require a subscription of some kind?
Your ipad touch turns into a brick very quickly if you don't pay for a monthly recurring power service...
Intel tried that with IA64, an architecture that depends on compiler optimizations to get good performance...
IA64 could be extremely quick with properly targeted code, but compilers weren't up to the job and the chips were too expensive.
Another problem you have with x86, is that a lot of code is compiled to target the lowest common denominator, not to target the current model cpu, so even the latest processors have to be designed to optimize code thats been compiled to run on a 386. If you're precompiling code for wide distribution you have to set the lowest supported cpu somewhere, and if you set it too recent you'll improve performance but exclude lots of potential users.
Alternative architectures fail because of closed source code...
All of those architectures failed on NT primarily because there was little or no software available for them, whereas there are millions of (usually embedded) PPC and MIPS systems running Linux even today.
Software vendors won't port to an architecture that has no users, and users won't buy an architecture that has no software.
There have been many architectures which don't do speculative execution, IA64 for example, and high performance is certainly possible... But for that to work, you need well written code (or well written compiler) to take advantage of it, and the code needs to target the specific processor revision, not be generically compiled code.
Processors in games consoles (eg Cell in PS3) were built this way because there was never any need to run the code on a different model of processor for example.
It would make Intel and AMD file lawsuits against whoever was making the clone chips, while also charging more to cover the cost of the lawsuits. Only the lawyers would benefit.
The world is becoming more paranoid, governments are starting to worry about foreign influence...
The US has already banned Russian antivirus software, do you think the Russians are especially happy about using processors designed in the US and manufactured in China, running software also written in the US?
Larger countries like Russia, China and the US can afford to do things inhouse, but smaller ones can't and an open collaborative model is the next best option. Even for larger countries, it's much cheaper.
So you'd have not just large cloud providers, but also governments potentially contributing towards open hardware.
I was looking at these a while ago, and tried to get hold of one... Even went so far as to get a chinese speaking friend to contact them directly, but to no avail.
Depends on how much of a head start someone will give...
SPARC is relatively open and oracle seem to have lost interest in developing it, perhaps they would donate the latest designs to the community...
IBM have been pushing POWER as an open design too?
There's also abandoned architectures like IA64 and Alpha.. An Alpha EV7 built on a modern fab process and clocked a bit higher could work well, and they did have unfinished designs that were going to be among the first multicore chips (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21464)
Many people claiming to want equality actually don't want equality at all, they want inequality which favors them.
So we need global warming in order to combat racism, better go burn some more coal!
So if you're up to any suspicious activity, you just back up all your data to an encrypted backup on a cloud server located outside of the US and wipe your phone before you travel...
All this does is invades the privacy of ordinary people who desire privacy but don't have anything important enough to go to these lengths to hide it.
IE6 would also work with standards compliant sites, assuming you stick to the very small subset of standards that IE6 supported.
Chrome supports a much wider set of standards that's all.
Depends where you are...
In many instances it's less convenient, or slower especially when you consider the full journey time (ie time getting to/from the stations, time spent waiting for the train etc, not just the time spent on the train).
I've found very few instances where trains were more convenient than driving (or having someone else drive a taxi)...
If the train is cheaper, that's often the reason why the poor use it, although in many cases its more expensive than driving assuming you already have access to a car. The up front costs of a car are spread over how much you use it, whereas the costs of a train only increase as you use it more.
Building infrastructure is expensive, it's only profitable if you have economies of scale... You have to bulk build the infrastructure past every property even if those properties won't sign up as customers...
The more competition in a given area, the more properties you'll pass who won't use your service and the more the build out will cost. If multiple companies are building their own infrastructure then competition will actually increase prices.
You will also get areas which are not profitable to provide any service whatsoever.
Of course with a government run service, you are stuck with whatever they provide... If their service is poor then thats what you get.
What's really needed is a non profit to build the physical infrastructure, and then provide a dumb pipe which other companies can use to provide services to end users. After the initial build out, whatever rental fees are charged to the consumer facing companies can be used to maintain the physical infrastructure.
It is a malware target, same as the similar feature in windows... There is plenty of windows malware that uses the system protection features to make removal difficult.
They're not forcing anything, they're providing options for users who bought a defective product.
It can and will be fixed at the hypervisor layer, but this will incur a performance hit (potentially up to 30%?)...
That means for the same level of performance, your cloud provider now has to buy 30% more servers, pay for 30% more power, 30% more rackspace, 30% more cooling and 30% more maintenance... Those costs will be passed on to the customers.
Plastic bags are convenient to carry if you're on foot or taking public transport, and they're available from the store whenever you go there.
Paper bags are better in some cases, but they will fall apart if they get wet (eg in the rain).
A few years ago the stores used to provide cardboard boxes to customers for free, the same boxes that much of their stock was delivered in. If you've travelled to the store on foot then these boxes are useless, but if you've travelled by car then it's actually much easier to put your goods in the boxes and load them into your car. Once bags are in the trunk of your car they have a habit of falling over and spilling their contents, boxes don't do that. The boxes were also a waste product to the shop, if customers didn't take them then they had to be disposed of.
Now the boxes are just disposed of and not made available to customers.
If you make a conscious plan to visit the shop on foot you can take bags with you and reuse them, but sometimes you just visit the shop on a whim and don't have a bag with you. Carrying bags with you at all times in case you might want to buy something is annoying and stupid.
And yes existing containers should be usable for certain goods, but this requires infrastructure both to physically supply the product and to handle charging for arbitrary quantities instead of fixed size units.
The problem is caused by the ridiculous packaging that most items come in...
More than 90% of my weekly trash is made up of plastic packaging, usually the packaging is much larger than the item it contained and is designed to look pretty on the shelf.
Packaging should be more sensible... Plain cardboard that can biodegrade or be easily recycled, glass bottles that can be cleaned and reused (not melted down and recycled as that's a hugely energy intensive process).
The rich people who live in the suburbs are unlikely to use the train as they can afford to own cars. It's pointless to spend a large amount of money building stations that will never get used.
I went to las vegas and didn't even realise there was a monorail...
Given the route it's not surprising, why go through a casino to the back and pay to get on the monorail when you could just walk along the strip or through the casinos?
If you've going to pay, you could just take a taxi along the strip instead.
If the monorail ran along the strip it would be more visible to tourists and get more users. Where it is currently, many visitors have no idea it even exists.
Depends on your reputation, the quality and price of your product, the quality and price of the clones etc..
If your product is high quality and you have a good reputation, you can charge a premium for it even if cheaper options are available.
If your product is sufficiently cheap it won't be profitable to make clones of it, as the clones would only be marginally cheaper at best, or might even be more expensive due to economies of scale.
Most people will pay a little extra for a quality item from a reputable brand, and those people who always go only for the cheapest available generally do so because thats all they can afford.
A russian company makes software for analyzing fingerprints...
The FBI have a need to analyze fingerprints, which makes sense given the nature of the organization.
The FSB performs similar roles to the FBI, and thus they have similar requirements.
It makes sense that this company would try to sell their software to as many potential customers as possible. Chances are they are at least trying to sell it to law enforcement and intelligence services in all manner of other countries too.
You just have to do your own sensible due diligence during the procurement process. Insist on buildable sourcecode, thoroughly review what the code does and what else it tries to interact with. If you detect anything nefarious or the company refuses to provide full buildable source, don't do business with them.