On my main laptop that I bought a year ago, it's already bye-bye Windows, and no going back. It's now almost a year that I've been using PC-BSD w/ few hitches. Yeah, there are the odd thing or 2 that must have Windows, and for those special cases, such as a Brother label maker or a GoToMeeting or JoinMe session, it's been useful to get a Winbook. Not for general use, but just for those marginal cases where I can't use PC-BSD like I'm doing now

That might have happened during the bald Steve's reign, but Nadella is actually making decisions that make sense. Instead of being a high profile in your face guy, he's listening to customers. The Windows 10 Preview project is very well thought out, so far

Not apples to apples. X terminals were typically terminals w/o CPU, memory, storage or anything - everything had to be done remotely on a server, and access to those things over a network, at the time, was slow. Workstations were fast, but an X terminal connected to a server over ethernet was pretty slow due to all that latency.

In the case of tablets, it's not the same. Yeah, there is backup on servers (viz cloud), but it's not essential: one can have one's needed apps and data on one's own tablet. The CPUs are powerful enough to support pretty compute intense applications, while both memory and storage is cheap, unlike in the X terminals, that didn't have any. The cloud is just there as backup in case something crashes, or a tablet gets lost or stolen or broken, and a replacement needs to be quickly configured to the last working state. That's all it is.

If you are talking about Core2 and Xeon chips, you're right. But something like an Itanium is unusable in even PCs, much less laptops, tablets or phones. I'm imagining that Elbruz would be even hotter, being as it is on an older process node, as well as being even more complex internally than an Itanium (referring to on-board x86 emulation). That's what I meant by it's a server/workstation CPU: not that it's great performance, but that it's a power guzzler

Mongolia, culturally, has more in common w/ Korea or China, and somewhat w/ Russia, than it has w/ countries that were once part of its vast empire, such as Uzbekistan, Iran or Syria. As far as people go, even Siberian Russians (I'm using the term Siberia to refer to everything east of the Urals, and not just the Siberian Federal district) are culturally 'European' - racially speaking (no matter how different Russia's political culture is from today's extra-sanitized EU). Correct point is that Russia is the only Eurasian country, accurately speaking. The stans, Azerbaijan & Turkey are more a part of Afro-Asia (due to Islam) and Georgia and Armenia are European (due to being Christian).

Right, and if someone does want to reach me after coming to my website, how am I supposed to get back to him?

I doubt that this will be used to make Russian versions of Android tablets. More likely, it would be useful for Russian supercomputing projects, particularly ones useful to their military, which doesn't look good being unable to grab Donbass from Ukraine in the same way it devoured Crimea

Ever heard about Intel, and its fabs in AZ, OR, NM? IIRC, even Micron has some memory fabs in ID. Not all chips are made in Taiwan, Korea and China

Yeah, but FSB has nothing going on in the US (the SVR is). If the GP is an American who has nothing to do w/ Russia on his day to day computing, the NSA may profile him and go after him for a variety of reasons, but the FSB most likely won't care - unless he's working say w/ Chechen separatists or Ukraine. So an American having a computer that the NSA can't touch makes perfect sense, and conversely, if Russians had American made PCs that the NSA had access to but the Kremlin didn't, that'd be good as well.

Only if one tries to build it on the latest process technology. But if the target customer is not average Russian citizens but rather the Russian military industrial complex, then they could build it on fabs that are behind by even 5 generations. They're in any case not likely to make a huge top line on volumes, and their target customers - the Russian government, or other Russian military institutions or Gazprom - are not likely to turn them down in favor of companies from countries that have sanctions running against Russia

VLIW/EPIC? The Russians should just buy up the Itanium from Intel, in return from a deal by Intel to build a fab in Russia where these could be fabbed. Would be a win-win for both.

But then the story headline is wrong - this is not a PC chip: it's a server, or at minimum, a UnixStation chip

What's there to stop the Russkies from building fabs? They may not be as advanced as Intel's or TSMC's, but they can surely build a 50nm fab?

Actually, correct answer is money AND people with skills AND people who are subservient despite having those skills

Pick up Hindi or Tamil, while you're at it. People in almost all the Indian states understand Hindi, while in Chennai, people understand only Tamil. So pick up one of these, and make it your second language. They'll not talk behind your backs if they know that you know what they're saying about you

The positive in this is that you'll die quickly, and then not have to worry about where your next job will come from