Many SoCs support more features than the device they end up in. Some SoCs even require the manufacturer purchase and preload license keys onto the device in order to enable functionality so that it is locked otherwise.

I have no idea what it costs for HP to throw a antenna and bluetooth license in these devices but even if it were .30 cents, they might prefer that money be in their pockets than enable it.

Go to Alibaba.com. The place is FILLED with similar specced tablets in the sub $100 bracket. Most of them are Allwinner devices with a similar res screen and form factor. I suspect that all HP is doing is bulk ordering a bunch of these, putting its badge on the front, applying some quality control and polish to the product and throwing it out at a higher price.

The PS2 and XBox were vulnerable to modchips. The PSP suffered exploits and custom firmware took over. The 360 too was modded although Microsoft bans people from XBL to keep it under control. Nintendo seems to treat copy protection as an afterthought which may explain why their systems are all cracked.

About the only console to withstand attack is the PS3, although Sony had to shut off some features and move code into higher kernel rings to secure it. All that whining over OtherOS being removed and Geohot being prosecuted was Sony protecting their platform from piracy.

If you turned that Trabant into an electric vehicle, you'd have to rebuild the frame and suspension to cope with the weight of the batteries which could add 200-300Kg of weight. And you can bet if you drove in snow that you'd be stuck right next to that Range Rover and even more screwed because of the 2 wheel drive, high torque, and potential problems with range and cold weather.

If a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is almost always "no". e.g."Is this an image of Jesus in a Danish pastry?" No. "Does this medieval painting prove UFOs?" No. "Could red wine be the cure for cancer?" No. etc.

Says who? Other operating systems including popular dists of Linux have well defined end of lifes on their products. Why should Microsoft be expected to support their product indefinitely?

XP was supported for 13 years. A pretty generous term by any measure. At some point a line has to be drawn and further issues should be ignored.

It should be pretty obvious this is what Valve is aiming with all this stuff. I'm sure some of the twitchiest games are unsuitable for streaming but the vast bulk would play just fine. If SteamOS survives at all as a platform it'll probably be as a stick like device which streams games from somewhere else.

On Windows I can login into a PC, walk over to another machine and remote login to that same session. For that you probably want the window manager to host the remote session. But if you have headless machine that is only used in a specific way then perhaps something simpler will do. I don't see that either is precluded.

Wayland is just the API and protocol for clients and servers to allocate & release buffers and pass input and display events around. It doesn't say how those buffers get shown to the user - that's the compositor's job. Weston provides a a reference implementation of remoting demonstrating it is possible. It doesn't mean it's perfect, or comes with a pile of advanced options.

I expect it will improve and there will also be dedicated compositors for headless servers and the like.

It's a reference implementation, a proof of concept to demonstrate to people complaining that yes wayland can in fact be remoted assuming a compositor provides with the support. It's not wayland's job to do the remoting, it's the compositor's. I see no reason to think that once wayland is switched on by default in a dist or two that compositors will explicitly support remoting, or there will be dedicated compositors for that purpose.

Quite obviously yes.

Wayland is the protocol that clients talk with the compositor, not the compositor itself. The reference compositor Weston already implements an RDP server and does so in a remarkably small amount of source code.

As for it's performance, it will be no worse than X (or Xvnc) on modern apps because as everyone has stated, most modern apps are pushing pixmaps around anyway. If anything performance has the potential to be better because the remoting protocol can be asynchronous (unlike X) and the server doesn't have a handful of X and extensions processes with all their context switches to worry about.

There is already a reference RDP implementation in Weston. So to answer your question, it's happened already.

It does support remote display (and not just one protocol either) and widget sets will support X backend as long as there are volunteers to maintain it.