
Work in the cloud...
... and not just any cloud, but Chinese cloud and transmitted over a home grown protocol that is probably has a back door required by the Chinese Government.
I'm sure there will be some takers for this, but not me.
Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service. Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – …
-> it's hard to imagine
It's not hard to imagine. A friend of your could involve himself, whether accidentally or on purpose, with somebody or some group that some government somewhere thinks is bad. Your friend was previously having an innocent conversation with you about adding some sweets or biscuits to your shopping list and drop them off at his place.
It turns out later that "sweets" or "biscuits" is a code word used by the "bad" group for bullets, drugs, or some other contraband. Bam! You are now in the loop. You are now a suspect. Judges in their infinite bias in favour of the police, will issue a warrant to search your premises, to look for these "biscuits". You will have a lot of explaining to do. You will be treated as a suspect, and despite the myth about being innocent unless and until proven guilty, you will have to talk your way out of it. Because it turns out the bad guys have a lot of form for using the word "biscuits".
I challenge ZTE to give this machine to an independent reviewer to test whether they can actually use a remote desktop session with 300 ms of latency. I can sort of believe the bandwidth claim, as long as the user isn't watching video. I can eventually be brought to accept the packet loss claim. I'm quite doubtful that they can deal with that level of latency without making the experience very painful. Maybe the tester they had using this was slow at typing, but the mouse needs to update quickly too. If they claim to support that bad a network, they should prove it.
This maybe the case but with so much delivered from the Internet & moving into browsers now with all the latency and refreshes that involves, ultimately this is where we will end up.
Desktop as a service. Microsoft is already there with the Azure Desktop, it just needs the thin clients.
However much hardcore techies dislike this and see it as a big step backwards, if it is pay-by-month on a subscription and includes an endpoint, then consumers will buy.
99% of consumers simply don't care.
Those who forget about the past are forced to repeat it.
I think I will pass on that one. I did work on an XTerm, twenty-odd years ago. Yes, it was usable. Mostly.
I have to admit that at some recent-ish project we used a windows terminal server for the development environment. This gave everybody a consistent base. No, it was not perfect. Yes it mostly did work. Yes, when the connection dropped we had to do other stuff, but that was a) not too often and b) that other stuff needs to get done anyways. C) if there is a deadline looming it causes too much stress...
Yeah. And X11 was used properly in the days of X terminals, with mostly protocol messages flowing between the client and server, and let the ddx layer render. Very little of this QT-style "I'll do my own rendering into a bitmap and shove it over to the server" crap.
So you didn't need nearly as much network bandwidth. And since the primitives could compress a lot of information and rendering was slow compared to today's hardware, latency was less noticeable, too. If an xterm sent 800 characters in a single XDrawString to a server, it would have a little while before the next message needed to get there.
Oh, well.
Had IBM not been forced by DoJ to divest itself of Service Bureau Corporation, and had not the FCC in Computer Inquiry I & II forced the Bell System not to provide integrated data processing services, computing would have always been done by dumbish terminals connected to time-sharing servers, and the detour through on-premises computing would have been avoided.
We now have a 21st century screen that can do nothing on its own
but this one requires an eight core processor (although speed not specified). The last dumb terminal I worked on was entirely built from TTL chips (no microprocessor) and it was highly responsive.
I thought the same, and you could probably get a suitable OS running on that processor if they've provided sufficient internal storage (which I'm sure is soldered in). However, my guess is that this won't cost that much less than a normal cheap laptop, and you don't have to fight with those to let you put your own choice on. Unless they heavily subsidize it, the materials will cost almost as much as any low-end Windows or Chrome OS machine, and if you choose the Windows one, booting Linux is usually only ten minutes of effort.
It's a chromebook, isn't it ?
If not, how is it better (or worse) ?
I'm not saying that it's bad that it's a chromebook, more interesting that someone other than google feel able to offer that partway point between local and remote processing. The 8-core processor, for example, implies that it runs a local browser rather than screen-sharing a remote one.
From the sound of it, this will do even less than a Chromebook would without a connection. That's saying a lot. Maybe they just didn't explain the features, but it sounds like it will only have terminal uses and could therefore get away with only having the local OS handle getting online, handing off to the remote machine after that.
Computers empower. Terminals disempower.
This is one step beyond the Google half-a-laptop-for-the-price-of-a-whole-one Chromebook for 'taking back control' from the user.
They may be inevitable/essential for homeworking as companies can bake in higher levels of security (and lower levels of functionality). Essentially, they offer the chance to create a virtual cubicle in an employee's home. You will still have to supply your own spider plant, coffee mug and a photo of your favourite 'TWICE' member to get you through the day.
Desktop Tourism My 20-year-old son is an aspiring athlete who spends a lot of time in the gym and thinks nothing of lifting 100 kilograms in various directions. So I was a little surprised when I handed him Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio and he declared it uncomfortably heavy.
At 1.8kg it's certainly not among today's lighter laptops. That matters, because the device's big design selling point is a split along the rear of its screen that lets it sit at an angle that covers the keyboard and places its touch-sensitive surface in a comfortable position for prodding with a pen. The screen can also fold completely flat to allow the laptop to serve as a tablet.
Below is a .GIF to show that all in action.
China's internet regulator has launched an investigation into the security regime protecting academic journal database China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), citing national security concerns.
In its announcement of the investigation, the China Cyberspace Administration (CAC) said:
China's government has outlined its vision for digital services, expected behavior standards at China's big tech companies, and how China will put data to work everywhere – with president Xi Jinping putting his imprimatur to some of the policies.
Xi's remarks were made in his role as director of China’s Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission, which met earlier this week. The subsequent communiqué states that at the meeting Xi called for "financial technology platform enterprises to return to their core business" and "support platform enterprises in playing a bigger role in serving the real economy and smoothing positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows."
The remarks outline an attempt to balance Big Tech's desire to create disruptive financial products that challenge monopolies, against efforts to ensure that only licensed and regulated entities offer financial services.
Updated Intel has said its first discrete Arc desktop GPUs will, as planned, go on sale this month. But only in China.
The x86 giant's foray into discrete graphics processors has been difficult. Intel has baked 2D and 3D acceleration into its chipsets for years but watched as AMD and Nvidia swept the market with more powerful discrete GPU cards.
Intel announced it would offer discrete GPUs of its own in 2018 and promised shipments would start in 2020. But it was not until 2021 that Intel launched the Arc brand for its GPU efforts and promised discrete graphics silicon for desktops and laptops would appear in Q1 2022.
The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced a policy requiring all comments made to websites to be approved before publication.
Outlined in a document published last Friday and titled "Provisions on the Administration of Internet Thread Commenting Services", the policy is aimed at making China's internet safer, and better represent citizens' interests. The Administration believes this can only happen if comments are reviewed so that only posts that promote socialist values and do not stir dissent make it online.
To stop the nasties being published, the policy outlines requirements for publishers to hire "a review and editing team suitable for the scale of services".
The US Department of Defense said it's investigating Chinese disinformation campaigns against rare earth mining and processing companies — including one targeting Lynas Rare Earths, which has a $30 million contract with the Pentagon to build a plant in Texas.
Earlier today, Mandiant published research that analyzed a Beijing-linked influence operation, dubbed Dragonbridge, that used thousands of fake accounts across dozens of social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok and Twitter, to spread misinformation about rare earth companies seeking to expand production in the US to the detriment of China, which wants to maintain its global dominance in that industry.
"The Department of Defense is aware of the recent disinformation campaign, first reported by Mandiant, against Lynas Rare Earth Ltd., a rare earth element firm seeking to establish production capacity in the United States and partner nations, as well as other rare earth mining companies," according to a statement by Uncle Sam. "The department has engaged the relevant interagency stakeholders and partner nations to assist in reviewing the matter.
The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.
Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.
The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.
A Chinese state-backed startup has hired legendary Japanese chip exec Yukio Sakamoto as part of a strategy to launch a local DRAM industry.
Chinese press last week reported that Sakamoto has joined an outfit named SwaySure, also known as Shenzhen Sheng Weixu Technology Company or Sheng Weixu for brevity.
Sakamoto's last gig was as senior vice president of Chinese company Tsinghua Unigroup, where he was hired to build up a 100-employee team in Japan with the aim of making DRAM products in Chongqing, China. That effort reportedly faced challenges along the way – some related to US sanctions, others from recruitment.
As the world continues to grapple with unrelenting inflation for many products and services, the trend of rising prices is expected to have the opposite impact on memory chips for PCs, servers, smartphones, graphics processors, and other devices.
Taiwanese research firm TrendForce said Monday that DRAM pricing for commercial buyers is forecast to drop around three to eight percent across those markets in the third quarter compared to the previous three months. Even prices for DDR5 modules in the PC market could drop as much as five percent from July to September.
This could result in DRAM buyers, such as system vendors and distributors, reducing prices for end users if they hope to stimulate demand in markets like PC and smartphones where sales have waned. We suppose they could try to profit on the decreased memory prices, but with many people tightening their budgets, we hope this won't be the case.
Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.
The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.
Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.
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