On 12/12/2016 03:27 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> The coreboot project is pretty much dead in the water without it, the only
> real choices for further development are either super low power crappy ARM
> devices or always going to be expensive IBM/TYAN POWER servers, so what do we
> do?
Maybe we should ask ourselfs do we really need high performance computers?
> I am wondering, how come they didn't bark up some government or corporate
> trees for TALOS funding? AFIAK there are various government agencies
> interested in secure hardware and assured computing; I have always wondered
> what the NSA uses for their own computing needs, maybe they paid intel for
> firmware source code and a system that doesn't need ME to run.
Have anybody approached goverment? They don't take initiative by themselves. I
suspect that it wold be possible to get funding from EU. But there is one more
problem It's US company that can just decide "We'll make POWER10 with POWER-ME".
> The way things are going: (...)
Our hope is(should be) in fully open systems like lowRISC. Invest in making
them fast enough to power a basic laptop.
> It seems that so many linux people just don't really care about libre
> anything, (...)
Many(most) 'linux people' are 'open source' not 'free software'.
> (...) considering that the average linux sysadmin makes over $100K per year
> the community could have easily funded the project.
In Germany, US, France... Not in Poland, Ukraine... many hackers there.
> If I wasn't unemployed I would happily pay $5K for a high performance libre
> computer, but not everyone is me.
Me too. If I had work that gave me $60K a year. For me (a student in Poland)
$5K is enough to live for a year.
Setting a price tag so high reduces size of the community.
> People went nuts for the faux libre purism laptop but talos gets hardly any
> comparative publicity/hype - why? - "We'll get intel to open up ME one day,
> we promise!"
Because it was viable 'solution':
It's amd64: Everything will just work!
It's not underpowered: It will not suck!
Maybe even more importantly: What people? I highly doubt that those were highly
informed people like us.
I think that people don't believe that this would succeed. Including me.
Let me ask a different question: Why so many free hardware projects are so
impractical?
Let's look at novena, it's supposed to be a laptop. But it can't be practical
because of it's size.
Layout of motherboard makes it impossible to craft a comfortable chassis.
It's got built-in fpga that makes it ~$40 more expensive (In my opinion
needlessly -- not many people use fpga.). [Lot's of text here].
The pros is that even I could afford laptop at this prize tag (if it wasn't a
toy).
I had an idea to make a usable* laptop and talked with people from my
HackerSpace.
We've given up after realizing how difficult it would be to pull it off. (We
would likely be able to make a prototype but producing this is out of reach.)
* underpowered but it would be enough to browse simple sites and use ssh --
seems enough for sys admin away from stationary pc.
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