But you SHOULD try it APK, after all it is free and runs in Virtualbox and frankly the whole "WTF are they high?" moments you'll get when running it make it VERY entertaining. Hell you've got an i7 so its not like running a VM is even gonna make that chip sweat, so try running it for just a half an hour and see what a difference it makes. i can tell you it was like tying a boat anchor to my workflow, it just doesn't have any consistency and it feels like you are getting slapped around between the desktop and metro (which you can't turn off BTW, it runs even when you are just using the desktop) so its REALLY entertaining, in a MST3K bad movie kinda way.
I mean good lord man they ripped off the UI for the mid 90s AOL crapfest so how can you NOT try it just to laugh your fucking ass off?
My board is an AM3 that is about 4 months old and it don't have it either, they didn't start on the desktop until Liano. I haven't had the chance to put one together yet (still scoring good deals on AM3 and AM3+ so I've been using those instead) but from what I understand the FM1s are already using it, as is later E series chips. I have one of the first Brazos E350 and Asus used EFI and NOT UEFI so it has none of the locks like secureboot. Its quite possible some of the OEMs might just go that way instead as the only advantage UEFI over EFI is secureboot which I'm sure will just cause more support calls so I can see many just using EFI.
But according to AMD's press releases they are committed to CoreBoot and all chips going forward will be built with Coreboot. as another said one COULD tie Coreboot into UEFI but from what I've seen its gonna be a very basic EFI that works as a BIOS (So they can support larger HDDs) which quickly hands off to Coreboot which takes care of the rest. what really pisses me off is Asus offers Expressgate with their machines but frankly its become so crippled its not worth messing with if you aren't a 14 year old girl. its pretty much designed around FB and chat now and it doesn't even have Skype anymore, and no easy way to add any apps to it. That is a shame as having an OS that boots in 6 seconds and gives me full Wifi is nice, but without being able to even add support for any video other than Flash it just too crippled to make a difference.
So as long as AMD is going with Coreboot there is nothing wintel can do, not unless they want to risk another antitrust. But you are right that AMD rules, I have been selling AMDs exclusively for 2 years with nothing but happy customers and I eat my own dog food, me and my boys are rocking two hexacores and a quad and they do anything we can think up and are crazy fast. I even sold my full size for a EEE E350 netbook and having a machine that plays 720P for 6 hours on a charge or does basic office work for 7 is damned nice.
If your board supports it might want to look into snatching a Thuban while they are cheap, I went from a 925 to a 1035T and I can tell you that Turbocore kicks ass and take names. If you watch their email fliers Tiger has been selling Thuban for as low as $100 which is damned cheap for a 6 core. I paired mine with a $30 Hyper N520 cooler and it runs around 95f idle and barely reaches 122 under load, just a great chip. Oh and 1 final note, if you don't know about them Starmicro sells chips for all the older sockets cheap, its a great way to max out that older AMD PC.
Hate to break the news to ya sparky but most machines are laptops now and having crap sucking resources KILLS THE BATTERY which most people WILL care about. Sure on my desktop, where I have 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM? Who gives a crap. But on my dual core laptop running on the 6 cell? You're damned right I care, I care a hell of a lot!
This is the same bullshit attitude by MSFT that caused Vista to be a failwhale, they thought they could just throw more cycles at it and completely missed the fact that netbooks and laptops were all going thin and light. Nobody is gonna want Win 8 if it kills a good hour+ on the battery compared to Win 7.
Oh there was nothing wrong with the LOOK of Vista, in fact I'm using a Vista Black theme on my Win 7 as it uses less resources than the Aero bling see through crap and I just fine it nicer. The problem with Vista was the BUGS, oh lord was that thing buggy as hell! I personally got bit by the "media slows down the network" bug which considering I love to have music playing in the background REALLY pissed me off, I also got bit by the "Vista loses network shares" bug which since I keep a nettop as a file server and download box having to reboot every time I wanted to access the shares because Vista would have a "senior moment" and lose access was irritating as hell. Neither of those bugs were present in Win 7 RTM so that alone was worth the upgrade for me.
As for VirtualPC...why? One of the biggest problems Ballmer has is NOBODY is developing for WinRT and WinPhone 7, which means nobody is developing for Metro. Hell even MS Office is gonna be a desktop and not a Metro app so odds are there really won't be a need for you to have Metro on Win 7. I suppose if you really want to VirtualBox already supports Win 8 if you have hardware VT so if you want to you can, I just don't see much of a point.
BTW did you know there is NO WAY to kill Metro, even if you use just the classic desktop (which sucks and is crippled BTW, no expanding start menu or list of most used programs for instance) that Metro is STILL RUNNING in the background 24/7? You can't stop it, its always sucking resources even if you don't use nor want it. While this might be fine on a desktop with a shitload of cores and memory on a laptop or netbook it blows giant chunks.
In the end after running Win 8 CP for nearly a month and having it in my shop for my customers to try I have to say I honestly can't find any positives about the experience and a whole lot of negatives. It really is pointless without a touchscreen (watch any of Sinofsky's talks on Win 8 and count how many times he says touchscreen) and since the vast majority, including my new netbook and desktop, don't have touchscreens it just isn't an upgrade over Win 7, in fact like Vista was a downgrade from my XP X64 I'd say Win 8 is a downgrade from Win 7. Its just not made for the desktop, anybody that uses it for a few weeks will see that.
Not gonna happen Billy, and here is why: 1.-Jobs NEVER wanted the low end market, he made that clear, and Cook is following the Jobs playbook. The majority of PC sales are in the under $700 segment, the vast majority under $500. Apple will never offer an X86 product in that line and even for just average users an iPad simply can't replace a PC. 2.-Even with just my back of a napkin math Ballmer has pissed away a several BILLION dollars on mistakes, rushing the X360 to market with a known flaw alone cost them 2 billion in repairs. With any other CEO he would have been fired years ago, but being Billy's little buddy saved his ass. Not this time, I seriously doubt after Vista and the nearly 1 billion blown on Nokia that came up with NO growth will another massive failure be tolerated. You look at the man's track record and it just stinks.
So here is what I think is gonna happen: Win 8 bombs, OEMs keep selling 7 almost from day 1. Ballmer tries to cover, making it look like a win but is kicked off the board along with Sinofsky (sorry if I didn't get his name correct) and one of the office guys is brought in, possible Ray Ozzie is brought back. Win 9 goes back to the Win 7 base along with some nice new features and improvements and mobile is basically cut loose, given total freedom but having to pass/fail on their own. Whether this will work on not will be seen but its obvious you can't push into ARM sales by pushing Windows, nobody wants WOA because you can't run X86 programs.
In the end there is no way in hell the board is gonna let Ballmer give away the desktop monopoly that took Bill so many years to gain because he wants to be Apple. Yes desktops and laptops are pretty flat but even flat you are talking hundreds of millions of units, that kind of cash cow you don't just waltz away from. I have a feeling Ballmer is being given this last chance to show he can take a market like Bill did with desktops and when he shits out a failwhale that's it, the board will cut him loose and use Win 7 to shore up the company until they can fast track a Win 9 based on Win 7 out of the door. After all Win 7 is good until 2020 so even if it takes a year or two they'll still have product. Personally I can see MSFT going back to a 5 year release schedule, as this gives them time to build buzz and momentum which Win 7 just wasn't given time to do. Just as people started to warm to Win 7 the monkey was screaming about apps.
So Apple won't gain as they don't want the market, Win 8 will flop, and Win 7 will carry them through the transition to a new CEO. Frankly they won't have any choice because after Win 8 flops the stock is gonna stay dead as long as Ballmer is CEO, there just won't be any investor confidence in the man.
I hate the uninformed...YES YOU DO sparky, yes you do. With Metro the classic desktop is TREATED AS AN APP which means that even if you NEVER use Metro its still being drug along like a dead elephant on the back of your PC sucking resources.
Don't believe me, fire up process explorer and TRY to kill Metro, you can't do it. They've tied it in so tight with the display it simply can't be killed. it can be hidden, but just like minimizing a program that doesn't actually stop anything, just hides it.
Uhhhh...isn't this pot scraming at kettle because its black? After all Googles DOES own Motorola mobile, which has been filing patent trolling lawsuits left and right, yes? Frankly I think all three of the major players, Apple, Google, and MSFT should be forced to open up any and all patents related to hardware. Let them fight it out over software if they want but mobile hardware needs a chance to become standardized like desktops so that one can run whatever you want on them and won't be trapped by lock in.
Hell look at the posts after you and you'll LYAO, they've full on jumped from "MSFT will make Linux a felony ZOMFG!" right into "MSFT is gonna move the OS into the cloud and you'll get arrested if you don't pay your $699 license fee ZOMFG!" full on batshit.
Ya wanna know what the REALLY sad part is to me? Most of the normal folks like me that were using Linux in 05 and 06 have frankly moved away simply BECAUSE of all the batshit. Its like being a normal person around total weirdos, its just creepy. Hell I know every time I had a problem and went to the forums I always got works for me and Ur a M$ Ninja!
I don't know what happened because i swear it did NOT used to be like this. Guys used to actually care about problems and wanted Linux to get better, and would bitch when things were broken or got worse. Now i swear its like a damned religion, where ALL comments that aren't simply praise of "the one true god" causes the nutters to come down like flies on shit, and all the FOSS posts or articles, hell even articles that don't have a damned thing to do with FOSS, end up with nothing but conspiracy theories and pointless "just use Linux!" posts. No wonder so many look at FOSSies like this. Hell I'm starting to wonder if that isn't an accurate description myself.
Thanks but frankly Metro just pisses me off. hell it doesn't even follow cell phone UI conventions as you point out with iPad and Safari, and I watched time and time again as normal users, smart people that do complex tasks on and off a PC daily, ALL ended up just frustrated and upset. Upset with themselves that they couldn't just "pick it up" which i told them the thing is so screwy and unintuitive NOBODY is just gonna "pick it up" without a HELL of a lot of trial and error, and frustrated with the OS that tasks that they have found trivial to do for years and years were suddenly as alien to them as if I dropped them in front of a CP/M machine's blinking cursor.
For another good take on metro just read this article where he goes step by step through what is wrong with the UI, but his number one reason i agree with completely, the entire OS is made for touch and touch above all...when was the last time you saw a touch screen desktop in the average home? How many touch screen laptops have you seen lately? Is YOUR desktop or laptop a touch screen? Mine isn't yet without a touch screen it feels like you are fighting it every damned step of the way. Hell I wish I had the link because one of the articles praising Metro started with "And here I'll show that you can even use it on old hardware! Right now i have loaded it onto this touch screen AMD Athlon laptop and I had to LMAO because even when he was plugging metro he had to dig up a laptop with a fricking touch screen!
In the end if you aren't one of the 3-4% that have a touch screen desktop or laptop Win 8 is pointless and will just irritate the living hell out of you. I honestly tried to like it, I really did, in fact i used it as my main OS for nearly a month. But the constant switching between metro and desktop, the constant feeling of fighting the OS, the major step backwards in multitasking...it was just too much. I've run the beta of every MSFT OS since Win2K and I even fought Vista for nearly a year before giving up (I was one of those bit by the file transfer and the lost network shares bugs) but Metro is just too much of an unintuitive PITA for me to deal with anymore, I'll pass MSFT and so will my customers.
Nope, sorry, Linux still has major issues with driver, upgrades breaking shit, and with the DE wars and pulseaudio being flaky. Instead it'll be Vista all over again where even SJVN said Vista's failure hurt Linux as people just bought XP instead. In case you didn't hear MSFT quietly boosted the EOL for ALL version of Win 7 from 2014 for the non business versions to 2020 so anybody who doesn't want Win 8 will be able to buy Win 7 no problem and it'll last longer than most keep their systems for. I know my customers have been buying up quads with plenty of upgrade-ability so they can just bypass Win 8 completely.
So sorry, it won't be enough for MSFT to put out a bad product, not with their long support cycles. Linux would have to make a major breakthrough but instead according to one of the big cheese at Red hat Linux desktop is instead in its death cries due to design mistakes made 20 years ago. and hey, guess what? He also said it needs a fricking driver ABI! Nice to see even the guys at RH know a bad design when they see one.
You wanna see how REAL people deal with Win 8? Well here you go and as a retailer that set up a Win 8 CP for customers to try I can say that is pretty typical...the only difference I saw was more frustration and cursing.
I'm sure Win 8 is GREAT for cell phones and tablets, along with touch screen PCs...the problem is that is less than 5% of MSFT's market. in fact if you take out POS and Kiosks last numbers I saw had touch enabled X86 units at less than 2% of the market.
So you take a giant shit on 95% of the market.,...for 5% of the market and around 2% of the touch screen X86 units because POS and Kiosks run their own custom software. yep, no chance of a flop at all here. BTW Win 8 DID help my business, i had a lot of folks that were sitting on the fence buy Win 7! Thanks MSFT! Oh and thanks again for the year and a half of extra money as I get paid to wipe it off like i did Vista, that was a GREAT time for me, Thanks MSFT!
And if netflix spent that 10 million again you'd have a TiVo and NOT a general purpose OS. And the OS simply can't not touch the decrypted stream because its the kernel that has to deal with caches, timings, and schedulers. If you have access to the kernel then by the very fact that for an OS to function (and for your video to not be a slideshow) the kernel HAS to have access to determine when the buffer, when to lower the priority of other tasks, and when additional resources is needed the DRM simply wouldn't hold.
Its like how many games and videos will use the Readyboost on my Win 7 system. there is NO worry about using that, even though it can be simply unplugged at any time, because the entire cache is encrypted and the user doesn't have the key...but the kernel does. if one could reprogram the kernel one could lie and simply tell it to buffer onto this SSD that is "encrypted" but in reality would be encrypted with say all zeroes for the key. Again there is no way for the DRM to know this without layers of checks that would slow the whole system to a crawl and even then it would only work on a tiny subset on Linux distros and even then in only certain releases because the amount of testing would be insane.
With Windows and OSX they only have one release every 3 or so years, only one version (all the higher versions of Windows are just supersets with the same core) and most importantly it restricts the user from the core files so that one can't simply substitute core files or the kernel after installation so those extra checks simply aren't needed.
If you look at the way kernel are built and behave what you are asking for simply can't be done on an open monolithic kernel, it just won't work. it MIGHT work on a microkernel, where nearly everything is done as a module on a higher level than the core but Linux isn't a microkernel and to design the system around that idea would basically mean starting over from scratch. I mean do you honestly think in the entire 20 years of Linux development that someone hasn't wanted to add a DRM module? The reason it hasn't been done isn't a question of money, its a question of design. Its like saying you could build an economy car that could pull the same load as a full size dualie pickup. Sure you could eventually bolt in a big enough motor, transmission, suspension, etc but by the time you are done its really not gonna have anything in common with an economy car is it? I bet if you wrote Linus himself he'd tell you the same thing, there just isn't a way to put protected path into Linux, it just can't be done.
Then you were one of the lucky ones friend, in most of the places I worked any new MBA that wanted to "make his mark" usually targeted IT because "it isn't making us a profit" while ignoring that if their workers are sitting on ass because the network is down or email fucked they are LOSING money by the minute.
Hell the reason i quit is my kids staged an actual intervention on me. I had raised them practically since birth because right after the second one was born my sis was diagnosed with a terminal illness and her husband couldn't deal and became a junkie so it was up to me. I was determined they'd never do without anything but one day I came in and they sat down in front of me and said "We already lost our mom this year, dad is long gone and grandma is sick...we can't lose you too. you look like death and you NEVER smile anymore, we don't care if we have to live on hot dogs and kool aid...just stop"
And that is what I did and while I maybe make half what I did before at least I'm happy and have color back in my skin, the constant stress of trying to keep a pile of PCs running with practically no budget and no help was just too much. The reason so many can't fill that job is they want someone who will work 24/7/365 for 30k and whose budget they will slash anytime an MBA wants a bonus and fuck over at the first opportunity, no thanks.
Except now you have the problem that many of the ISPs are overselling like mad and are not rolling out the lines to compensate. so unless you are one of the ones lucky enough to have your business in a FIOS area you could find your shit slowing to a crawl at random times.
I've dealt with plenty of businesses with business connections and frankly many of the ISP are so damned overloaded that no matter what you pay unless you have the $$$ to have private lines run to the backbone you WILL be looking at random slowdowns, which considering doing everything in the cloud will boost your line usage by 1000% any slowdowns are gonna seriously hurt.
This might work in EU and Asia, where 100Mbps full duplex is becoming common, but here in the USA the backbones like everything else is falling apart and just can't take the strain. personally I blame Wall street, which rewards short term thinking and punishes long term, but no matter what the cause if you are gonna be in the cloud you better have a shitload of bandwidth and in many areas of the USA that bandwidth simply isn't there 24/7/365.
But WHICH version of HTML? I've seen 5 different browsers load a page 5 different ways. sure it wasn't a BIG difference, but when you are using it for applications i imagine that difference WILL matter. that is how we ended up stuck with IE 6 for so many years ya know.
But considering I've had to do rollbacks on certain browsers because a customer couldn't get a certain FB app to work in the new version i have a feeling we'll be in for the same old headaches unless someone designs their apps for browsers from half a decade ago, because nobody truly supports the "standards" but just variants that can change with each release, which as I'm sure you know in browsers has been breakneck for everyone but IE.
I wonder why they can't ship it? I don't see why they couldn't just package the pieces in boxes and take a price hit, which I bet is what it REALLY comes down to, artificially keeping the prices high. But I'm sure people that like that cheese (can't stand the smell myself, it turns my stomach) would be happy to buy it, busted up or not.
And as I replied o another poster AMD has decided to go with Coreboot and has been using it since brazos so there is NO slippery slop here. if you don't like the Wintel UEFI you can buy AMD and use Coreboot which supports the 4 freedoms so if it doesn't do what you want you can simply download the source and reflash the chip.
I SERIOUSLY doubt MSFT is gonna risk another antitrust by blocking AMD systems from running Win 9, don't you? So this is simply a case of voting with your wallet, don't like UEFI and Secureboot? Buy AMD and go Coreboot. Its REALLY that simple. I've been building AMD exclusively for a couple of years now and I can tell you X86 is so overpowered that there isn't hardly any job a normal user can come up with that is gonna stress even a low end AMD dual and since they've opened their specs Linux users would be wise to support them anyway.
So no slope friend, just good old fashioned FUD, just not being cranked out by MSFT for once.
Uhhh...where have you been friend? All AMD machines are coming with Coreboot now, which is a open EFI style BIOS that you can download and modify to your heart's content.
So if UEFI truly bothers you simply buy AMD, which lets be honest the average user won't notice the difference between a Liano and a Sandy bridge anyway, they simply don't stress either one. I've been building AMD exclusively for the past two years and not a single complaint, not one.
If you are running Linux you'd be better off with AMD anyway, as they have opened the specs on all their hardware and even paid for devs to help the open driver guys get up to parity so if you truly want to support FOSS and care about UEFI you can just support AMD and Coreboot. It seems like a simple and easy way to vote with your wallet to me.
I ran the CP in my shop for nearly a month and that is what my customers said as well. in fact I've NEVER seen such a negative reaction, not even with Vista. with Vista they were curious about it but after 5 minutes with Win 8 the ONLY question I got asked is "But YOU will still be able to get me Win 7 if I need it, right?"
I have a feeling this is gonna make WinME look like XP, hell I wouldn't be surprised if this is the release that FINALLY gets the board to punt the sweaty monkey, its just a giant fail. Why oh why didn't they just improve Win 7 for the desktop and keep Metro for mobile devices? because it seriously sucks ass on the desktop and laptop. Even Gabe from valve said "Not just the worst Windows MSFT has ever come up with but the worst software PERIOD". When a guy that is making a fortune off your OS not only slams it but is seriously looking at going to all the trouble and expense of making a "Steambox" Linux to avoid it? you KNOW you're in trouble!
Oh Lord, paranoia the destroya...Riddle me this SETIguy...WTF would be the POINT of secure boot if you just handed it out to anybody? After all if they just handed it out because it was Fedora they could get sued for showing favoritism when "Bob's distro" came along and they wouldn't hand THEM the keys. What Fedora is paying for is the whole song and dance of being checked for key security compliance and as a barrier to entry, otherwise any malware writer could just start his own distro and demand a key thus making the whole damned thing pointless.
The fact you got modded insightful for a conspiracy theory just shows how damned batshit the FOSSie mods are here on/., sometimes the groupthink here is as thick as the smell of feet in a lockerroom and anything that says "MSFT is evil and burns babies ZOMFG!" is assured to get a +5 even with zero proof.
As a final note before i move away from the batshit crazy fest I'd just point out that bypassing UEFI secure boot is as simple as pressing a button and that you will have to go in there anyway if you are installing an OS because OEM machines generally aren't set to boot from CD out of the factory. Considering the ability to bypass secure boot is MANDATORY and part of the spec this whole thing is just an exercise in FUD and crazy. Anybody that would give a shit about secure boot sure as hell isn't gonna be running a test bed alpha distro like Fedora, they would be running a workstation OS like Red Hat if they wanted Linux. Hell there isn't even a point in having fedora secure boot, because you are gonna be doing enough work on it that you won't be keeping a stock install anyway. hell that is the whole damned point of Fedora, to let the beta testers work out the bugs before they can get into RHEL. So this whole argument is stupid, pointless, and FUD. I'm outta here.
Has Linux sudenly been infected by rootkits? Did I miss a memo? the point of secure booting is to block rootkits, most Linux bugs i've seen are Java based or get in through PEBKAC so there really isn't a point in secure boot for Linux. Sure it might make a bullet point for workstations but workstations ain't running Fedora so the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
I'm sorry but its FUD. The simple fact is all X86 machines are required to allow bypassing secure boot which is as simple as flipping a single setting in BIOS, that's it, that's all. No harder than telling a PC to choose CD as first boot (which one is gonna have to do to install an OS anyway) so this is just FUD. Are they SERIOUSLY saying Fedora users wouldn't have enough common sense to flip a single switch in UEFI? Really? because i find that pretty much impossible to believe. This IS Fedora we are talking about here, an OS so bleeding edge its CDs have stigmata and not the kind of thing Joe Dumbass would be trying for shits and giggles. They even admit in the very first paragraph that ALL X86 are required to allow the simple bypass of secure boot!
So I'm sorry but FUD is FUD and this is FUD. there is no way in hell someone that is intelligent enough to 1.-Know what Fedora is, 2.-Knows how to download and burn an ISO will be 3.-Too stupid to push Del at boot and choose "Turn off Secure Boot" which is only being turned on by default because rootkits are still a serious problem. Isn't it the Linux community that is always bitching about windows security? why aren't you cheering that they are doing something about it?
Surely to God the geeks here are seriously fucking dumb enough to believe that a person who would know what Linux is and download and burn an ISO would be too fucking retarded to flip a setting in UEFI, surely not. Hell if they are THAT fucking stupid how would they be expected to even run Linux? Especially a bleeding edge alpha distro like Fedora where being able to do forum lookups and Google their way past problems and do bug reports is the order of the day? There is simply no way in hell to have a user smart enough to do that but too retarded to flip a switch, no fucking way. Its FUD, pure and simple FUD.
Yes and No. Yes on the electronic gifting part, as people have been sending eCards and gifts of music long before 2008 (hell I remember when napster first went legit you could gift someone a month of service) but no on the "delay payment until they accept and cancel if they don't" part. Because AFAIK nobody has made it to where the payment of the gift was tied to whether or not they would accept your gift so that's pretty novel.
In the end though I think all these patents and copyrights are gonna do is drive more business and innovation to the east while the west stagnates. As our minefields of patents and copyrights get ever thicker it simply becomes easier to do it in China than to deal with the legal mess that is the states. For an example take a look at what loongson has been cooking up with their MIPS CPUs, where they have been working to solve the problem of legacy X86 apps by cooking up some hardware support for X86 emulation on chip with the eventual goal of a near native X86 emulation layer. this would allow you to have the low power draw of ARM and MIPS but when you need X86 for a legacy app you would still be able to run it, similar to what Apple did with Classic emulation only in hardware. Cool stuff but you'd never be able to build something like that in the states because of the legal minefield.
Personally I'm starting to wonder if this is inevitable, after all the USA exploded by basically ignoring Europe's copyrights and patents which let us stand on the shoulders of giants without being hampered by the minefield, but as the corps become big and fat they care less and less about innovation and more and more about putting up barriers to keep competition out so some other place ignores the minefield, stands on the shoulders of giants, and the dance starts anew. Kinda a shame really, as the USA has plenty of really smart folks but I certainly wouldn't want to try to build a new product here, not if it came within a mile of the minefields set up by the megacorps. hell you'd get sued into oblivion before your product even made it to the shelves.
Which is why I said a combo of molten salt solar and wind as 1.-They don't need as much land as it would take to power with solar panels which are still horribly inefficient and 2.-The salt becomes its own battery pack for power at night and the wind can power not only batteries but the heater to keep the salt hot on non sunny days thus making the system more self reliant.
Like I said for an office building, where everyone is coming in and leaving in daylight? Then solar panels would probably work. but in every place I've ever been servers weren't just switched off at dark and started at dawn, they had all sorts of jobs running during that time from backups to scans to allowing VPN access. trying to power that with solar panels is just dumb.
Ya know, I never did understand that either, it was like the thin client companies WANTED to fail. I mean you look at one of the thin clients from the heyday of thin clients, the Sun Ray...what was in it? A small ARM CPU, a small amount of flash, basic video and audio...that's it. hell the same hardware is used in those $40 PMP/Game players you pick up on China Mart yet they wanted nearly $400 for the thing!
It seems like for the limited niche case of cloud/thin client somebody would cook up a sub $100 unit and still be able to make a decent profit. After all ARM and NAND is cheap, you can use linux to bootstrap the hardware and call terminal services so no cost there, hell it should be easy peasy to get something small enough you can VESA mount the whole shebang and call it a day. Sadly for thin and lights its cheaper for me to simply slap a stick of RAM and a HDD into one of those E350 nettop kits than it is to get a thin client new even in this day and age, it just don't make sense!
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But you SHOULD try it APK, after all it is free and runs in Virtualbox and frankly the whole "WTF are they high?" moments you'll get when running it make it VERY entertaining. Hell you've got an i7 so its not like running a VM is even gonna make that chip sweat, so try running it for just a half an hour and see what a difference it makes. i can tell you it was like tying a boat anchor to my workflow, it just doesn't have any consistency and it feels like you are getting slapped around between the desktop and metro (which you can't turn off BTW, it runs even when you are just using the desktop) so its REALLY entertaining, in a MST3K bad movie kinda way.
I mean good lord man they ripped off the UI for the mid 90s AOL crapfest so how can you NOT try it just to laugh your fucking ass off?
My board is an AM3 that is about 4 months old and it don't have it either, they didn't start on the desktop until Liano. I haven't had the chance to put one together yet (still scoring good deals on AM3 and AM3+ so I've been using those instead) but from what I understand the FM1s are already using it, as is later E series chips. I have one of the first Brazos E350 and Asus used EFI and NOT UEFI so it has none of the locks like secureboot. Its quite possible some of the OEMs might just go that way instead as the only advantage UEFI over EFI is secureboot which I'm sure will just cause more support calls so I can see many just using EFI.
But according to AMD's press releases they are committed to CoreBoot and all chips going forward will be built with Coreboot. as another said one COULD tie Coreboot into UEFI but from what I've seen its gonna be a very basic EFI that works as a BIOS (So they can support larger HDDs) which quickly hands off to Coreboot which takes care of the rest. what really pisses me off is Asus offers Expressgate with their machines but frankly its become so crippled its not worth messing with if you aren't a 14 year old girl. its pretty much designed around FB and chat now and it doesn't even have Skype anymore, and no easy way to add any apps to it. That is a shame as having an OS that boots in 6 seconds and gives me full Wifi is nice, but without being able to even add support for any video other than Flash it just too crippled to make a difference.
So as long as AMD is going with Coreboot there is nothing wintel can do, not unless they want to risk another antitrust. But you are right that AMD rules, I have been selling AMDs exclusively for 2 years with nothing but happy customers and I eat my own dog food, me and my boys are rocking two hexacores and a quad and they do anything we can think up and are crazy fast. I even sold my full size for a EEE E350 netbook and having a machine that plays 720P for 6 hours on a charge or does basic office work for 7 is damned nice.
If your board supports it might want to look into snatching a Thuban while they are cheap, I went from a 925 to a 1035T and I can tell you that Turbocore kicks ass and take names. If you watch their email fliers Tiger has been selling Thuban for as low as $100 which is damned cheap for a 6 core. I paired mine with a $30 Hyper N520 cooler and it runs around 95f idle and barely reaches 122 under load, just a great chip. Oh and 1 final note, if you don't know about them Starmicro sells chips for all the older sockets cheap, its a great way to max out that older AMD PC.
Hate to break the news to ya sparky but most machines are laptops now and having crap sucking resources KILLS THE BATTERY which most people WILL care about. Sure on my desktop, where I have 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM? Who gives a crap. But on my dual core laptop running on the 6 cell? You're damned right I care, I care a hell of a lot!
This is the same bullshit attitude by MSFT that caused Vista to be a failwhale, they thought they could just throw more cycles at it and completely missed the fact that netbooks and laptops were all going thin and light. Nobody is gonna want Win 8 if it kills a good hour+ on the battery compared to Win 7.
Oh there was nothing wrong with the LOOK of Vista, in fact I'm using a Vista Black theme on my Win 7 as it uses less resources than the Aero bling see through crap and I just fine it nicer. The problem with Vista was the BUGS, oh lord was that thing buggy as hell! I personally got bit by the "media slows down the network" bug which considering I love to have music playing in the background REALLY pissed me off, I also got bit by the "Vista loses network shares" bug which since I keep a nettop as a file server and download box having to reboot every time I wanted to access the shares because Vista would have a "senior moment" and lose access was irritating as hell. Neither of those bugs were present in Win 7 RTM so that alone was worth the upgrade for me.
As for VirtualPC...why? One of the biggest problems Ballmer has is NOBODY is developing for WinRT and WinPhone 7, which means nobody is developing for Metro. Hell even MS Office is gonna be a desktop and not a Metro app so odds are there really won't be a need for you to have Metro on Win 7. I suppose if you really want to VirtualBox already supports Win 8 if you have hardware VT so if you want to you can, I just don't see much of a point.
BTW did you know there is NO WAY to kill Metro, even if you use just the classic desktop (which sucks and is crippled BTW, no expanding start menu or list of most used programs for instance) that Metro is STILL RUNNING in the background 24/7? You can't stop it, its always sucking resources even if you don't use nor want it. While this might be fine on a desktop with a shitload of cores and memory on a laptop or netbook it blows giant chunks.
In the end after running Win 8 CP for nearly a month and having it in my shop for my customers to try I have to say I honestly can't find any positives about the experience and a whole lot of negatives. It really is pointless without a touchscreen (watch any of Sinofsky's talks on Win 8 and count how many times he says touchscreen) and since the vast majority, including my new netbook and desktop, don't have touchscreens it just isn't an upgrade over Win 7, in fact like Vista was a downgrade from my XP X64 I'd say Win 8 is a downgrade from Win 7. Its just not made for the desktop, anybody that uses it for a few weeks will see that.
Not gonna happen Billy, and here is why: 1.-Jobs NEVER wanted the low end market, he made that clear, and Cook is following the Jobs playbook. The majority of PC sales are in the under $700 segment, the vast majority under $500. Apple will never offer an X86 product in that line and even for just average users an iPad simply can't replace a PC. 2.-Even with just my back of a napkin math Ballmer has pissed away a several BILLION dollars on mistakes, rushing the X360 to market with a known flaw alone cost them 2 billion in repairs. With any other CEO he would have been fired years ago, but being Billy's little buddy saved his ass. Not this time, I seriously doubt after Vista and the nearly 1 billion blown on Nokia that came up with NO growth will another massive failure be tolerated. You look at the man's track record and it just stinks.
So here is what I think is gonna happen: Win 8 bombs, OEMs keep selling 7 almost from day 1. Ballmer tries to cover, making it look like a win but is kicked off the board along with Sinofsky (sorry if I didn't get his name correct) and one of the office guys is brought in, possible Ray Ozzie is brought back. Win 9 goes back to the Win 7 base along with some nice new features and improvements and mobile is basically cut loose, given total freedom but having to pass/fail on their own. Whether this will work on not will be seen but its obvious you can't push into ARM sales by pushing Windows, nobody wants WOA because you can't run X86 programs.
In the end there is no way in hell the board is gonna let Ballmer give away the desktop monopoly that took Bill so many years to gain because he wants to be Apple. Yes desktops and laptops are pretty flat but even flat you are talking hundreds of millions of units, that kind of cash cow you don't just waltz away from. I have a feeling Ballmer is being given this last chance to show he can take a market like Bill did with desktops and when he shits out a failwhale that's it, the board will cut him loose and use Win 7 to shore up the company until they can fast track a Win 9 based on Win 7 out of the door. After all Win 7 is good until 2020 so even if it takes a year or two they'll still have product. Personally I can see MSFT going back to a 5 year release schedule, as this gives them time to build buzz and momentum which Win 7 just wasn't given time to do. Just as people started to warm to Win 7 the monkey was screaming about apps.
So Apple won't gain as they don't want the market, Win 8 will flop, and Win 7 will carry them through the transition to a new CEO. Frankly they won't have any choice because after Win 8 flops the stock is gonna stay dead as long as Ballmer is CEO, there just won't be any investor confidence in the man.
I hate the uninformed...YES YOU DO sparky, yes you do. With Metro the classic desktop is TREATED AS AN APP which means that even if you NEVER use Metro its still being drug along like a dead elephant on the back of your PC sucking resources.
Don't believe me, fire up process explorer and TRY to kill Metro, you can't do it. They've tied it in so tight with the display it simply can't be killed. it can be hidden, but just like minimizing a program that doesn't actually stop anything, just hides it.
Uhhhh...isn't this pot scraming at kettle because its black? After all Googles DOES own Motorola mobile, which has been filing patent trolling lawsuits left and right, yes? Frankly I think all three of the major players, Apple, Google, and MSFT should be forced to open up any and all patents related to hardware. Let them fight it out over software if they want but mobile hardware needs a chance to become standardized like desktops so that one can run whatever you want on them and won't be trapped by lock in.
Hell look at the posts after you and you'll LYAO, they've full on jumped from "MSFT will make Linux a felony ZOMFG!" right into "MSFT is gonna move the OS into the cloud and you'll get arrested if you don't pay your $699 license fee ZOMFG!" full on batshit.
Ya wanna know what the REALLY sad part is to me? Most of the normal folks like me that were using Linux in 05 and 06 have frankly moved away simply BECAUSE of all the batshit. Its like being a normal person around total weirdos, its just creepy. Hell I know every time I had a problem and went to the forums I always got works for me and Ur a M$ Ninja!
I don't know what happened because i swear it did NOT used to be like this. Guys used to actually care about problems and wanted Linux to get better, and would bitch when things were broken or got worse. Now i swear its like a damned religion, where ALL comments that aren't simply praise of "the one true god" causes the nutters to come down like flies on shit, and all the FOSS posts or articles, hell even articles that don't have a damned thing to do with FOSS, end up with nothing but conspiracy theories and pointless "just use Linux!" posts. No wonder so many look at FOSSies like this. Hell I'm starting to wonder if that isn't an accurate description myself.
Thanks but frankly Metro just pisses me off. hell it doesn't even follow cell phone UI conventions as you point out with iPad and Safari, and I watched time and time again as normal users, smart people that do complex tasks on and off a PC daily, ALL ended up just frustrated and upset. Upset with themselves that they couldn't just "pick it up" which i told them the thing is so screwy and unintuitive NOBODY is just gonna "pick it up" without a HELL of a lot of trial and error, and frustrated with the OS that tasks that they have found trivial to do for years and years were suddenly as alien to them as if I dropped them in front of a CP/M machine's blinking cursor.
For another good take on metro just read this article where he goes step by step through what is wrong with the UI, but his number one reason i agree with completely, the entire OS is made for touch and touch above all...when was the last time you saw a touch screen desktop in the average home? How many touch screen laptops have you seen lately? Is YOUR desktop or laptop a touch screen? Mine isn't yet without a touch screen it feels like you are fighting it every damned step of the way. Hell I wish I had the link because one of the articles praising Metro started with "And here I'll show that you can even use it on old hardware! Right now i have loaded it onto this touch screen AMD Athlon laptop and I had to LMAO because even when he was plugging metro he had to dig up a laptop with a fricking touch screen!
In the end if you aren't one of the 3-4% that have a touch screen desktop or laptop Win 8 is pointless and will just irritate the living hell out of you. I honestly tried to like it, I really did, in fact i used it as my main OS for nearly a month. But the constant switching between metro and desktop, the constant feeling of fighting the OS, the major step backwards in multitasking...it was just too much. I've run the beta of every MSFT OS since Win2K and I even fought Vista for nearly a year before giving up (I was one of those bit by the file transfer and the lost network shares bugs) but Metro is just too much of an unintuitive PITA for me to deal with anymore, I'll pass MSFT and so will my customers.
Nope, sorry, Linux still has major issues with driver, upgrades breaking shit, and with the DE wars and pulseaudio being flaky. Instead it'll be Vista all over again where even SJVN said Vista's failure hurt Linux as people just bought XP instead. In case you didn't hear MSFT quietly boosted the EOL for ALL version of Win 7 from 2014 for the non business versions to 2020 so anybody who doesn't want Win 8 will be able to buy Win 7 no problem and it'll last longer than most keep their systems for. I know my customers have been buying up quads with plenty of upgrade-ability so they can just bypass Win 8 completely.
So sorry, it won't be enough for MSFT to put out a bad product, not with their long support cycles. Linux would have to make a major breakthrough but instead according to one of the big cheese at Red hat Linux desktop is instead in its death cries due to design mistakes made 20 years ago. and hey, guess what? He also said it needs a fricking driver ABI! Nice to see even the guys at RH know a bad design when they see one.
You wanna see how REAL people deal with Win 8? Well here you go and as a retailer that set up a Win 8 CP for customers to try I can say that is pretty typical...the only difference I saw was more frustration and cursing.
I'm sure Win 8 is GREAT for cell phones and tablets, along with touch screen PCs...the problem is that is less than 5% of MSFT's market. in fact if you take out POS and Kiosks last numbers I saw had touch enabled X86 units at less than 2% of the market.
So you take a giant shit on 95% of the market.,...for 5% of the market and around 2% of the touch screen X86 units because POS and Kiosks run their own custom software. yep, no chance of a flop at all here. BTW Win 8 DID help my business, i had a lot of folks that were sitting on the fence buy Win 7! Thanks MSFT! Oh and thanks again for the year and a half of extra money as I get paid to wipe it off like i did Vista, that was a GREAT time for me, Thanks MSFT!
And if netflix spent that 10 million again you'd have a TiVo and NOT a general purpose OS. And the OS simply can't not touch the decrypted stream because its the kernel that has to deal with caches, timings, and schedulers. If you have access to the kernel then by the very fact that for an OS to function (and for your video to not be a slideshow) the kernel HAS to have access to determine when the buffer, when to lower the priority of other tasks, and when additional resources is needed the DRM simply wouldn't hold.
Its like how many games and videos will use the Readyboost on my Win 7 system. there is NO worry about using that, even though it can be simply unplugged at any time, because the entire cache is encrypted and the user doesn't have the key...but the kernel does. if one could reprogram the kernel one could lie and simply tell it to buffer onto this SSD that is "encrypted" but in reality would be encrypted with say all zeroes for the key. Again there is no way for the DRM to know this without layers of checks that would slow the whole system to a crawl and even then it would only work on a tiny subset on Linux distros and even then in only certain releases because the amount of testing would be insane.
With Windows and OSX they only have one release every 3 or so years, only one version (all the higher versions of Windows are just supersets with the same core) and most importantly it restricts the user from the core files so that one can't simply substitute core files or the kernel after installation so those extra checks simply aren't needed.
If you look at the way kernel are built and behave what you are asking for simply can't be done on an open monolithic kernel, it just won't work. it MIGHT work on a microkernel, where nearly everything is done as a module on a higher level than the core but Linux isn't a microkernel and to design the system around that idea would basically mean starting over from scratch. I mean do you honestly think in the entire 20 years of Linux development that someone hasn't wanted to add a DRM module? The reason it hasn't been done isn't a question of money, its a question of design. Its like saying you could build an economy car that could pull the same load as a full size dualie pickup. Sure you could eventually bolt in a big enough motor, transmission, suspension, etc but by the time you are done its really not gonna have anything in common with an economy car is it? I bet if you wrote Linus himself he'd tell you the same thing, there just isn't a way to put protected path into Linux, it just can't be done.
Then you were one of the lucky ones friend, in most of the places I worked any new MBA that wanted to "make his mark" usually targeted IT because "it isn't making us a profit" while ignoring that if their workers are sitting on ass because the network is down or email fucked they are LOSING money by the minute.
Hell the reason i quit is my kids staged an actual intervention on me. I had raised them practically since birth because right after the second one was born my sis was diagnosed with a terminal illness and her husband couldn't deal and became a junkie so it was up to me. I was determined they'd never do without anything but one day I came in and they sat down in front of me and said "We already lost our mom this year, dad is long gone and grandma is sick...we can't lose you too. you look like death and you NEVER smile anymore, we don't care if we have to live on hot dogs and kool aid...just stop"
And that is what I did and while I maybe make half what I did before at least I'm happy and have color back in my skin, the constant stress of trying to keep a pile of PCs running with practically no budget and no help was just too much. The reason so many can't fill that job is they want someone who will work 24/7/365 for 30k and whose budget they will slash anytime an MBA wants a bonus and fuck over at the first opportunity, no thanks.
Except now you have the problem that many of the ISPs are overselling like mad and are not rolling out the lines to compensate. so unless you are one of the ones lucky enough to have your business in a FIOS area you could find your shit slowing to a crawl at random times.
I've dealt with plenty of businesses with business connections and frankly many of the ISP are so damned overloaded that no matter what you pay unless you have the $$$ to have private lines run to the backbone you WILL be looking at random slowdowns, which considering doing everything in the cloud will boost your line usage by 1000% any slowdowns are gonna seriously hurt.
This might work in EU and Asia, where 100Mbps full duplex is becoming common, but here in the USA the backbones like everything else is falling apart and just can't take the strain. personally I blame Wall street, which rewards short term thinking and punishes long term, but no matter what the cause if you are gonna be in the cloud you better have a shitload of bandwidth and in many areas of the USA that bandwidth simply isn't there 24/7/365.
But WHICH version of HTML? I've seen 5 different browsers load a page 5 different ways. sure it wasn't a BIG difference, but when you are using it for applications i imagine that difference WILL matter. that is how we ended up stuck with IE 6 for so many years ya know.
But considering I've had to do rollbacks on certain browsers because a customer couldn't get a certain FB app to work in the new version i have a feeling we'll be in for the same old headaches unless someone designs their apps for browsers from half a decade ago, because nobody truly supports the "standards" but just variants that can change with each release, which as I'm sure you know in browsers has been breakneck for everyone but IE.
I wonder why they can't ship it? I don't see why they couldn't just package the pieces in boxes and take a price hit, which I bet is what it REALLY comes down to, artificially keeping the prices high. But I'm sure people that like that cheese (can't stand the smell myself, it turns my stomach) would be happy to buy it, busted up or not.
And as I replied o another poster AMD has decided to go with Coreboot and has been using it since brazos so there is NO slippery slop here. if you don't like the Wintel UEFI you can buy AMD and use Coreboot which supports the 4 freedoms so if it doesn't do what you want you can simply download the source and reflash the chip.
I SERIOUSLY doubt MSFT is gonna risk another antitrust by blocking AMD systems from running Win 9, don't you? So this is simply a case of voting with your wallet, don't like UEFI and Secureboot? Buy AMD and go Coreboot. Its REALLY that simple. I've been building AMD exclusively for a couple of years now and I can tell you X86 is so overpowered that there isn't hardly any job a normal user can come up with that is gonna stress even a low end AMD dual and since they've opened their specs Linux users would be wise to support them anyway.
So no slope friend, just good old fashioned FUD, just not being cranked out by MSFT for once.
Uhhh...where have you been friend? All AMD machines are coming with Coreboot now, which is a open EFI style BIOS that you can download and modify to your heart's content.
So if UEFI truly bothers you simply buy AMD, which lets be honest the average user won't notice the difference between a Liano and a Sandy bridge anyway, they simply don't stress either one. I've been building AMD exclusively for the past two years and not a single complaint, not one.
If you are running Linux you'd be better off with AMD anyway, as they have opened the specs on all their hardware and even paid for devs to help the open driver guys get up to parity so if you truly want to support FOSS and care about UEFI you can just support AMD and Coreboot. It seems like a simple and easy way to vote with your wallet to me.
I ran the CP in my shop for nearly a month and that is what my customers said as well. in fact I've NEVER seen such a negative reaction, not even with Vista. with Vista they were curious about it but after 5 minutes with Win 8 the ONLY question I got asked is "But YOU will still be able to get me Win 7 if I need it, right?"
I have a feeling this is gonna make WinME look like XP, hell I wouldn't be surprised if this is the release that FINALLY gets the board to punt the sweaty monkey, its just a giant fail. Why oh why didn't they just improve Win 7 for the desktop and keep Metro for mobile devices? because it seriously sucks ass on the desktop and laptop. Even Gabe from valve said "Not just the worst Windows MSFT has ever come up with but the worst software PERIOD". When a guy that is making a fortune off your OS not only slams it but is seriously looking at going to all the trouble and expense of making a "Steambox" Linux to avoid it? you KNOW you're in trouble!
Oh Lord, paranoia the destroya...Riddle me this SETIguy...WTF would be the POINT of secure boot if you just handed it out to anybody? After all if they just handed it out because it was Fedora they could get sued for showing favoritism when "Bob's distro" came along and they wouldn't hand THEM the keys. What Fedora is paying for is the whole song and dance of being checked for key security compliance and as a barrier to entry, otherwise any malware writer could just start his own distro and demand a key thus making the whole damned thing pointless.
The fact you got modded insightful for a conspiracy theory just shows how damned batshit the FOSSie mods are here on /., sometimes the groupthink here is as thick as the smell of feet in a lockerroom and anything that says "MSFT is evil and burns babies ZOMFG!" is assured to get a +5 even with zero proof.
As a final note before i move away from the batshit crazy fest I'd just point out that bypassing UEFI secure boot is as simple as pressing a button and that you will have to go in there anyway if you are installing an OS because OEM machines generally aren't set to boot from CD out of the factory. Considering the ability to bypass secure boot is MANDATORY and part of the spec this whole thing is just an exercise in FUD and crazy. Anybody that would give a shit about secure boot sure as hell isn't gonna be running a test bed alpha distro like Fedora, they would be running a workstation OS like Red Hat if they wanted Linux. Hell there isn't even a point in having fedora secure boot, because you are gonna be doing enough work on it that you won't be keeping a stock install anyway. hell that is the whole damned point of Fedora, to let the beta testers work out the bugs before they can get into RHEL. So this whole argument is stupid, pointless, and FUD. I'm outta here.
Has Linux sudenly been infected by rootkits? Did I miss a memo? the point of secure booting is to block rootkits, most Linux bugs i've seen are Java based or get in through PEBKAC so there really isn't a point in secure boot for Linux. Sure it might make a bullet point for workstations but workstations ain't running Fedora so the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
I'm sorry but its FUD. The simple fact is all X86 machines are required to allow bypassing secure boot which is as simple as flipping a single setting in BIOS, that's it, that's all. No harder than telling a PC to choose CD as first boot (which one is gonna have to do to install an OS anyway) so this is just FUD. Are they SERIOUSLY saying Fedora users wouldn't have enough common sense to flip a single switch in UEFI? Really? because i find that pretty much impossible to believe. This IS Fedora we are talking about here, an OS so bleeding edge its CDs have stigmata and not the kind of thing Joe Dumbass would be trying for shits and giggles. They even admit in the very first paragraph that ALL X86 are required to allow the simple bypass of secure boot!
So I'm sorry but FUD is FUD and this is FUD. there is no way in hell someone that is intelligent enough to 1.-Know what Fedora is, 2.-Knows how to download and burn an ISO will be 3.-Too stupid to push Del at boot and choose "Turn off Secure Boot" which is only being turned on by default because rootkits are still a serious problem. Isn't it the Linux community that is always bitching about windows security? why aren't you cheering that they are doing something about it?
Surely to God the geeks here are seriously fucking dumb enough to believe that a person who would know what Linux is and download and burn an ISO would be too fucking retarded to flip a setting in UEFI, surely not. Hell if they are THAT fucking stupid how would they be expected to even run Linux? Especially a bleeding edge alpha distro like Fedora where being able to do forum lookups and Google their way past problems and do bug reports is the order of the day? There is simply no way in hell to have a user smart enough to do that but too retarded to flip a switch, no fucking way. Its FUD, pure and simple FUD.
Yes and No. Yes on the electronic gifting part, as people have been sending eCards and gifts of music long before 2008 (hell I remember when napster first went legit you could gift someone a month of service) but no on the "delay payment until they accept and cancel if they don't" part. Because AFAIK nobody has made it to where the payment of the gift was tied to whether or not they would accept your gift so that's pretty novel.
In the end though I think all these patents and copyrights are gonna do is drive more business and innovation to the east while the west stagnates. As our minefields of patents and copyrights get ever thicker it simply becomes easier to do it in China than to deal with the legal mess that is the states. For an example take a look at what loongson has been cooking up with their MIPS CPUs, where they have been working to solve the problem of legacy X86 apps by cooking up some hardware support for X86 emulation on chip with the eventual goal of a near native X86 emulation layer. this would allow you to have the low power draw of ARM and MIPS but when you need X86 for a legacy app you would still be able to run it, similar to what Apple did with Classic emulation only in hardware. Cool stuff but you'd never be able to build something like that in the states because of the legal minefield.
Personally I'm starting to wonder if this is inevitable, after all the USA exploded by basically ignoring Europe's copyrights and patents which let us stand on the shoulders of giants without being hampered by the minefield, but as the corps become big and fat they care less and less about innovation and more and more about putting up barriers to keep competition out so some other place ignores the minefield, stands on the shoulders of giants, and the dance starts anew. Kinda a shame really, as the USA has plenty of really smart folks but I certainly wouldn't want to try to build a new product here, not if it came within a mile of the minefields set up by the megacorps. hell you'd get sued into oblivion before your product even made it to the shelves.
Which is why I said a combo of molten salt solar and wind as 1.-They don't need as much land as it would take to power with solar panels which are still horribly inefficient and 2.-The salt becomes its own battery pack for power at night and the wind can power not only batteries but the heater to keep the salt hot on non sunny days thus making the system more self reliant.
Like I said for an office building, where everyone is coming in and leaving in daylight? Then solar panels would probably work. but in every place I've ever been servers weren't just switched off at dark and started at dawn, they had all sorts of jobs running during that time from backups to scans to allowing VPN access. trying to power that with solar panels is just dumb.
Ya know, I never did understand that either, it was like the thin client companies WANTED to fail. I mean you look at one of the thin clients from the heyday of thin clients, the Sun Ray...what was in it? A small ARM CPU, a small amount of flash, basic video and audio...that's it. hell the same hardware is used in those $40 PMP/Game players you pick up on China Mart yet they wanted nearly $400 for the thing!
It seems like for the limited niche case of cloud/thin client somebody would cook up a sub $100 unit and still be able to make a decent profit. After all ARM and NAND is cheap, you can use linux to bootstrap the hardware and call terminal services so no cost there, hell it should be easy peasy to get something small enough you can VESA mount the whole shebang and call it a day. Sadly for thin and lights its cheaper for me to simply slap a stick of RAM and a HDD into one of those E350 nettop kits than it is to get a thin client new even in this day and age, it just don't make sense!