I really hope that "proud to declare that we are at the cusp of a reclaiming our heritage of being connected to each other and connected to the world." made a lot more sense before some translator mangled it; because otherwise it seems like absurd nonsense. If people were connected long enough and far enough back in time for it to count as 'heritage', the technology behind those connections must have been comparatively primitive. Is he saying that communications have regressed since that time? What golden age of connectedness is he talking about?

No, I'm pretty sure that corporate marriage is the old-school kind, where you get legally subsumed under the principle of coverture and become a wholly owned subsidiary

According to the chart, there was not a single day in 2015 yet when Poland net-exported electricity to Germany, but every day, there was some significant net-export of electricity from Germany to Poland. So when does the big business for polish coal plants happen?

Well, getting screwed by corporations is pretty common; but I've never heard of anyone trying to marry one just because of its personhood...

I'm guessing that their decision to pitch rev. 2 at the 'people who propped up the blackberry holster market' demographic suggests that the Glass team was not entirely successful at coming up with a version that isn't socially alienating and ridiculous looking?

It's a bit hard to get outraged at MSFT when GOOG has been doing the exact same thing for the last three or four Android versions.

With Google you are for sure giving up privacy, support, and the product may be suspended at any minute. With MS at least you have a chance. The default setting are troublesome, but at least they be changed. That said MS generally will sacrifice security for ease. Does everyone remember when entire hard disks were by default shared on the Internet?

I didn't make it suitably clear; but the 'complexity' is really more of a historical issue. The fact that you can get power transistors, digital logic, and similar solid-state goodness for peanuts, possibly even less than the carbon brushes or other electromechanical alternatives, is a comparatively recent thing in historical terms.

Now that you can, doing so is pretty compelling for any but the highest-power tasks; but it has not always been the case that you can throw semiconductors at a problem for astonishingly tiny amounts of money. Today it is; but a lot of very clever electromechanical, inductive, and similar tricks were developed during the time that it was not.

What I find a bit weird about SPARC's near-total obscurity is that(please correct me if I'm wrong on the details; but to the best of my understanding from what I've read) the ISA is available for use on a royalty-free basis, and there are even a few BSD or GPL verilog implementations out there. That's even less encumbered than MIPS(which has some patents that the owners like to wave around on a couple of useful instructions).

My naive expectation would have been that SPARC on such liberal terms would show up a bit more often embedded in various chips that need some sort of CPU to do housekeeping, as the ISA of security and/or nationalism driven 'indigenous technology' efforts, and potentially even as the cheaper-than-ARM option for application processors.

Clearly that hasn't actually happened, and it's mostly ARM in SoCs and application processors(with PPC holding out in certain automotive and networking niches for some reason; and MIPS in router SoCs and the occasional Chinese vanity project); so ARM's license fees must just not sting that much.

Building SPARC parts that go toe to toe with Xeons would obviously be a much more ambitious project(as well as an act of directly fucking with Intel's juciest margins, which they probably won't take very kindly); but I am surprised by the fact that SPARC is so rare among the zillions of devices that have no need for x86 compatibility and are mostly about delivering performance in the gap between beefy microcontrollers and weak desktops for as little money as possible.

It is possible to play games that are only free software on PCs powered only by free software. There just aren't many of them. We seem to be getting closer being able to replicate that niche with Android game consoles, but we're obviously not there yet, both because most Android set top boxes available aren't sufficiently open and because of the lack of console games that are free software.

The competition for good DC-DC conversion is reasonably fierce(given the existence of DC telco and datacenter operations, and the fact that even 'AC' shops are really just doing the conversion in each chassis(and unlike the old AT PSU days, an ever larger chunk of the output power is 12v going directly to a DC-DC converter on the motherboard to feed the CPU and RAM, with fewer and fewer components, aside from HDD motors, being sufficiently high voltage to feed directly from the PSU); so even modest improvements in DC-DC efficiency would make you quite wealthy indeed.

I haven't kept a close eye; but I think that the present standard for DC-DC modules still uses a number of off-chip components(whether because the needed capacitance and such simply can't be done in silicon, or are cheaper as discretes, I don't know); but you can get some very, very, dense little modules.

Especially if you are dealing with solar-derived DC, which is going to be (reasonably) steady. For some purposes, it doesn't matter that much whether or not the voltage actually crosses zero; but the ripple is essential if you want the magnetics to work correctly. If you have to go to the trouble of switching the DC to get that working, odds are that it's time for a pure DC design.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of complexity(such as basically all software); but at least for motors small enough that solid state switching isn't heroically expensive and/or practically disposable, 'complex' and 'digital' also mean 'has convenient ways to monitor and control the motor's activity in some detail'. Simple is good; but when the complexity is in solid-state parts you get a serious discount and sometimes some cool features.

Certainly possible; but probably only efficient or sufficiently cheap for some items.

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that motors are one of the parts where you can get a relatively refined and mature design for almost any remotely normal flavor of electrical input; but the design of the motor is going to reflect your choice, and work either inefficiently or not at all from some other input. Since AC units are basically all motor(some fans, a compressor, maybe a pump), that is a problem.

Some devices just don't care very much(resistive heating works for basically anything except voltages too much lower than the system was designed for); and others(pretty much all modern electronics) always use DC internally, so you can re-use almost the entire design; but need to choose the correct PSU. Some hardware makes swapping one after the fact really obnoxious; but at very least it's an easy thing to choose at assembly time.

Did he have anything against DC period, or just take the position that it wasn't so hot for transmission systems, especially since high efficiency DC-DC converters weren't exactly off the shelf items at the time?