Meanwhile...
Blog hits and comment counts are down across the interwebs as various reputation management programs undergo thorough review.
2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
The modern computing workstation is just too horribly complex to secure. Anybody with Windows, IE and Office is going to be vulnerable to a targeted exploit from time to time. The company and its staff can hardly be held liable for this inherent complexity in integrated enterprise IT solutions.
Er... Wait a minute...
You can already install full Ubuntu or Fedora on a number of ARM platforms, including mobile. There are server ports for most common sevices, and most of the business logic for these things is in scripting languages anyway, which generally don't care what the architecture is.
ARM on servers has what it needs to take off. So now it's time for Microsoft to announce they fear it, in their own unique way.
>Particularly as (for Valve titles at least) I wouldn't need to rebuy the software
This can't be said enough. Play it on Windows, Linux, Steambox. Buy a new PC or console version? It still plays. Lost it? Just download it. No need to buy it again. Valve has no reason to make their games not play on the new version. Beats hell out of having to toss your games library for the new generation Xbox.
Makers were a little too eager with the all-in-one Android devices, and put out some when the mobile CPUs and Android weren't ready yet. Now that we have amazing devices like the Nexus 7 and Android 4.4 to show the way they can be awesome. Android got slimmed down and sped up in 4.4. Quad core 2.2 GHz processors with credible GPU are now common and a negligible portion of the BOM. The price and performance should now be where it needs to be. That is why they call the first launch of any new tech segment "the bleeding edge". Remember the early Android tablets like the Supersonic with resistive touch? The experience was poor but you could tell they were very close to awesome. A few months later came the TF101 and it was off to the races.
Some of the things I would like to see. The subject. 12" 300 DPI Android tablet at a decent price, preferably a Nexus. More wearables. Better Android sticks. More of those tiny things like NUC. Wireless display dongles for your TV that let you add screens for an Android device or Chrome book. An Affordable projector.
The first couple years were interesting. But lately it just seems morbid. Here we have the zombie of what was once a friend, chained to a stump. It is still moaning weakly for brains as we watch it slowly decompose. Really, turn away. We know the story ends with it transforming into an incorporeal patent troll eventually. We don't have to watch the sad stages of decomposition.
In 2013 nearly 1 billion Android devices were sold. Not 1 billion so far for all years - 1 billion for one year. Roughly 800 million phones and 200 million tablets. One device for every seven living humans. Made of a billion lithium batteries, a billion circuit boards and touchscreens, over a billion tiny cameras. Made in hundreds of factories and sold in hundreds of thousands of retail establishments all over the world. Designed in dozens of high-rise office buildings by busy engineers.
Pick an average selling price: $100, $150, $200? That is a lot of money.
And you would have us believe that nobody but Samsung managed to skim a profit off of all this activity? Where did the money to hire the engineers, build the factories, stock the shelves, hire the sales and delivery men come from? More importantly, why? Why would hundreds of competing business interests all over the world conspire to create the greatest technology shift the world has ever known - and exactly break even? Altruism?
It makes no sense. A more likely explanation is that profit is being made and you aren't being told about it.
In one of the more humorous incidents of the IP wars, once upon a time one division of Xerox sued another division of Xerox before the head office stepped in and put a stop to their shenanigans. They are not the only company to do so. None as funny as this joke on Apple though: http://thedailypixel.com/2012/09/13/apple-sues-itself-for-infringing-all-of-its-own-patents/
Not a grass roots sentiment at all. The corporate wars have progressed beyond lawsuit shenanigans, industrial espionage and sabotage to hiring agents provocateurs to create this nonsense. No doubt the next step is armed conflict with mercenary armies of "security guards".
Yeah, but AMD doesn't need Calxeda for that. AMD has taken an ARM license. With Calxeda dead AMD doesn't have to let their ARM server be anything more than a low volume premium niche product to protect their Opteron sales. Calxeda was hoping to generate real volume with breakthrough performance per watt AND density AND dollar, turning the server world on its head. Disruptive. It is not so often that we see the synchronous activities of such bitter rivals arrive at the happy - and completely coincidental - demise of a threat to them both.
So this is probably related to the dual stories from the last few days where both Google and Facebook are looking at having their own ARM server chips built to spec. Because they aren't going to get that disruptive deal from Calxeda.
More WMD for patent trolls on the auction block.
Hard to not see it coming though with HP Moonshot coming slow, switching to Intel for "strategic" reasons, and SeaMicro bought out by AMD it appears that the legacy data center chip providers have put a temporary delay on the ARM server chip threat.
Now it is time for Facebook and Google to form a joint venture to capture the IP assets before the patent trolls seal off this path forever. Hope they learned their lesson after what happened with Sun and Novell and don't let this fall into the wrong hands.
WebTV was created by Andy Rubin and sold to Microsoft for $500m, and ruined. Rubin's next invention, Danger Inc, was bought by Microsoft for $1B and ruined. Rubin has money now. Guess what his next invention was? He sold it to Google for only $50m, and they definitely did not ruin it.
What you are missing is that the AV vendors utterly rely on their customers not being savvy enough to know this. So anybody who can spot the obvious flaw in their claim was never going to be a customer anyway. Think of it like how 419 scammers filter out people who are to smart for them, to save time.
You start with 8 core 64bit ARM silicon with a nice GPGPU, and layer into the SOC 32GB or 64GB of LPDDR4. Lead length for the RAM is 0.2mm so go ahead and use a wide low latency memory bus and reduce the cache. Use the BGA for power and FDR infiniband only. Put 4 of these and an infiniband mesh ASIC on each side of a high profile DIMM sized fin. Six fins and more network ASIC on each side of a daughter card, 20 daughter cards in a 2U chassis. Mix in some Magic clustering software, and it's all sorted. 7680 cores per RU, 307,200 per rack, same power and cooling.
Thank goodness I never took the trouble to become addicted to this nonsense. If I want to run one VM or a million and access them from anything anywhere the price is $0 and there will be no audit. As if I would let some stranger poke about on my computer. What nonsense is this?
Completely unrelated: is IIS still licensed per user? I always found that hilarious.