Have you tried: Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Zones for virtualization? Anyway Oracle and Cloud Sigma both offer Solaris in the cloud. And of course there is nothing stopping you from upgrading him to a modern Solaris box.

This was exclusively for workstations but in terms of multi processor there definitely were multi-processor 486s sold. I had a buddy with 4x486. SCO was the typical OS for these boxes. OS/2 and Linux were both working on it and would achieve it.

Also also with SCO the x86/i860 combo was popular (for an exotic workstation). The 486 while having good floating point math sucked at vector math. The i860 while good at vector math was bad at multi-tasking. There were both motherboards and compilers to take advantage of this combo which was a winner. It allowed you to build a workstation for under $10k that was a bad version of MIPS style workstations.

No you couldn't. 16mb RAM was out the but was very expensive and many motherboards wouldn't support more than 4MB SIMMs (1 and 2MB SIMMS were still the norm for PCs). Good motherboards (in full tower cases) had at most 8 slots. So I'm going with 128MB as an upper limit.

Sun wasn't that. The 128 RAM wasn't cheap but the 2G HD meant they were skimping. I bet those systems were around $5-7k or so well under double what an x86 workstation would cost.

As for getting professors to give up old equipment, start metering the electricity and billing the department.

I'd take that bet. Don't forget how much faster the ARM chips are. For example the A7 is twice the speed of the A6 which is almost 3x the speed of the A5. Admittedly the A8 is only a 20% speed burst but that's not bad relative to x86 especially for an off year. We'll find out over the next decade plus: can you make ARM faster more easily than you can x86 more efficient? But I'd bet on ARM.

So does this mean that I wouldn't be able to say remotely display a desktop environment which uses QT and within that click a shortcut to a GTK app and expect it to open and be managed by that QT desktop environment.

Remember KDE and Gnome cooperate and there is dbus. What would likely happen is something like this:

a) KDE desktop is running and you click on a Gnome application.
b) KDE passes a message to the local Gnome to handle remoting
c) local Gnome establishes a session with remote Gnome.
d) Those two communicate making the application effectively local
e) The Gnome applications displays on the KDE desktop using the tools they use today to do this sort of thing (dbus...)

So from an end user standpoint nothing changes

Once you have your desktop environment displaying remotely everything you do looks and feels local. How can you have that when each app may have a different remote implementation?

You could get a local feel, its up to the toolkit. You could get something much better. Each application and each toolkit makes intelligent choices about how to handle latency issues. So for example one application might very aggressively cache if latencies are high, while another might be more worried about processing delays and thus might keep intermediate buffers shallow to reduce the effective latency as much as possible even though this means the buffer runs dry. Apple incidentally is currently doing some brilliant work on buffers taking ideas that Linux invented and making them practical. With Wayland Linux applications and thus users will be able to take advantage of these advances.

Yes it is. In my previous statement I chose QT and GTK as examples because they are so common. A user could have any number of applications using any number of GUI toolkits. Assuming they will all bother to implement their own remote access would way over-optimistic.

If an application is written using a toolkit that doesn't support remoting then the application doesn't support remoting by design. The major Linux toolkits are already working with the Wayland team they fully intend to support it. I'd assume that highly specialized toolkits which don't remote, don't remote because they can't tolerate latency. For example good touch toolkits might fail at 1ms latency, 1ms is too fast even for almost all LANs to keep up.

So let's use this example. Human brains aren't designed for touch latency... you are using a touch toolkit that would be unusable remotely. What's the problem if it doesn't remote?

If I can watch a high definition video feed in real time over the internet then I should be able to remotely display a desktop or a user should be able to remotely display a game. The two should not be mutually exclusive. Surely it is possible to fix this in a way that pleases the gamer without screwing it up for the remote desktop user.

It isn't possible to do both. I'll just repeat what I wrote in the post directly above, " There are advantages to splitting application and video buffers for network transparency. There are advantages to unifying application and video buffers for performance." You have to pick. Either the person who wants performance has to lose or the person who wants network transparency has to lose. There are lots of either / or choices in life, there are lots of either / or choices in designing a windowing system. You cannot build a system where everyone gets everything. And even if I were wrong, X11 most certainly is not such a system. In the world of 2015 X11 mostly sucks at everything but via. hacks is painfully being kept alive. The low level choices you keep dismissing fundamentally alter what the system is capable of doing. For you to get feature F Mr G has to not get feature H.

Wayland people are not taking away stuff to be mean or because they are lazy. They are taking away things because they are balancing out the greatest good for the greatest number. Given the 2015 computing environment* the feature set Wayland choose was arguably the best choice. There is no question that X11's feature set is a dreadful choice.

* or more accurately given the 2008 computing environment, Wayland itself is falling behind.

I should be able to see my favorite desktop manager and click shortcuts within it without worrying about which toolkit each uses. It should just work.. just like it does now.

And you will be able to do that. And most likely it will be far better than now.

The recent OED has 171.5k words in it. Native speakers have a vocabulary of about 20k-35k words. Finally at least now you want to use 4 words not 3 and possibly one substitution trick.

lowest figure: 20k^3 = 8 trillion ~ 2^43 ~ 7 character random password
highest figure: 171.5k^4 = 8.65^10^20 > 2^69 ~ 11 character random password

Humans generally don't remember random passwords very well. This ain't bad.

What purpose does the municipality serve other than to serve its inhabitants?

Well government's primary purpose is law enforcement and public essentials (like fire). In general America, particularly our red states like services to be provided by private organizations. But again the laws here don't prohibit a municipality from offering those services. You cited Tennessee. Tennessee prohibited public electric companies from offering those services without running it like a public utility. Which meant no cherry picking. They were however free to use another structure, like setting up a public corporation or a separate agency. Your description of USA laws are simply not true.

hese markets weren't served by anybody else, and still isn't) .. Legislating against the electric company pulling the fibre

And that's not true either. In Tennessee it is perfectly legal for an electric company to operate an internet service in an area where private cable companies do not want to provide broadband. What they weren't allowed to do was cherry pick off areas that the cable companies did want. And in fact Tennessee just recently passed a law allowing electric companies to provide dark fiber without having to meet public standards, which is exactly what you are talking about with having multiple players. Municipalities even in Tennessee can operate dark fiber network they just can't provide a consumer level service.

But as that would lead to real competition, at a lower total cost, not crony capitalism, I don't have high hopes for you...

You are simply mischaracterizing American law and talking about how things that are perfectly legal and quite easy to do are impossible under American law. I'm not saying the situation is Europe may not be better, utilities work better with a more powerful and more coercive government. But I am saying that you are mischaracterizing the problems in the USA.

LA and Seattle don't have densities close to HK or Tokyo. HK is $200 / home to wire. But you are absolutely right those cities have densities that make replacement plausible.

New York has even better densities, it does has geological problems and incredibly old infrastructure. New York still has some of the public water using wooden pipes, I have no idea when they stopped using wood but.... However we are lucky because New York is right now doing a major build out in the poorer areas starting. The preliminary wiring for FIOS (that's not all the way to the door but having an access point for buildings) was $3.5b. So you are at several thousand / home. Over say 60 months $2k even without interest is going to have to be an extra $33/mo. Which is generally too much for to pool for poorer people which lengthens the payoff time, which slows down the rate of improvement which... The people living in poorer areas of New York could have FIOS in under a year (with some much sooner) if the city would mandate that building owners had to cooperate.

There is no question we have the technical ability to put in gigabit or heck potentially 10gigabit internet to every home if we were starting a network from scratch. If we were starting from scratch in 2015 we would likely do that. What I was arguing is the system we have in the USA is not the result or stupidity or corruption.

If you read the article it is a bit more nuanced:

FTTP, the fiber is Title II
FIOS the service is Title I

Which makes sense. But I don' see how that proves that the public has paid for the fiber that exists on modern broadband connections. You certainly could argue in a well populated area that's had broadband for 20 years that something like 3mb/sec broadband connections were semi-public (since things like the colo to remix signal were never public). If that's what you mean by copper... I guess one could grant that to smaller operators if it is still functioning and in the ground. But I'd assume that's sort of what happens it probably being sold to players like XO who are using it for lower cost business connections.

Everyone does that, even you. Only problem is you only do it for phone service, which used to be important. We've said that internet service is equally important, while you don't. That's the gist of the problem.

We do subsidize rural internet. There are several dollars per month used to pay for rural connections. Also LEC charges are designed to encourage telco expansion into rural areas and thus move money from the phone system to the business internet.

As for 3.52 MBps that's 2 T1s. In lots of rural areas the extra copper lying around make that sort of connection a potential, though generally the cost might be almost nothing to install but a 3 year commit at $300/mo. Again aimed more at business than residential but a farm could buy that sort of connection. Still more expensive but there is nothing like the EU to subsidize. You all get stuff for the taxes you pay.

And that's where your regulatory capture comes in. There have been numerous stories here on slasdot on states that have explicitly forbidden local municipalities to be involved in fibre/broadband, instead legislating that that can only be done by corporations. Who then don't actually deliver any infrastructure.

There is nothing to prevent a municipality from forming a public corporation and offering services that way. That is they can do it providing they are upfront about how much it is costing and how it is being paid for. We do that commonly for road systems which cost far more than internet. What the Republican states are concerned about is that there is not a situation where the municipality is hiding the cost of broadband by embedding it in other budget items that use the tax system to subsidize while at the same time pricing corporations out of the market.

In other words they don't want socialized internet. They also of course allow for subsidies to private companies to get them to build out. I may not agree but the situation is not quite what you say. Co-ops BTW are perfectly legal in the USA everywhere to the best of my knowledge.

So I'm disagreeing with you on the state of American law.

$50 for 100/100 is about what Americans pay in almost all areas. Certainly it is well above what Americans pay just for port excluding line. The issue of EU subsidies I think is important because I was trying to look at total cost not cost to consumer. A taxpayer subsidy is just cost shifting. That would be like Americans talking about how much cheaper cell phones are in the USA excluding the fact that $20 / mo of their bill goes to subsidizing the purchase price of the phone.

$2500 for a rural connection seems very cheap. I'd be curious how that is pricing out. I suspect that's being heavily subsidized somewhere. Again American consumers don't pay anywhere near that but they pay a higher monthly bill to cover the connection charge.

I'm not sure what a coop means. Fiber costs about $300/m to fully install. But 1km is still within the range of a fast local ethernet connection and that can be done in a way that's durable for about $10/m. Those are the sorts of prices American businesses pay for getting access from an access point. Possibly rural Sweden is more like the USA business market. Which BTW has lots of competition but the prices are way higher.

As for government subsidy, we don't have subsidy for internet in urban areas. We do have a tax (of a few dollars per months) that's collected in profitable area to help provide it in rural areas. Its possible that the numbers are being distorted by government in Sweden. As for oligarchy and regulatory capture.. I'm assuming you mean monopoly and regulatory capture. We don't have monopoly or much regulation for the business market and prices are much higher than residential cable companies. So for that explanation to work you would need to explain why in the absence of those two factors the same house has a higher cost of business ethernet. Or why small business ethernet (provided by the cable companies usually for about $10/mo more than residential) is so much cheaper than the business service. So for example

So for example in Verizon territory for $380 / mo you can get 500mb of FIOS business internet with QoS for phone and static IPs. That's about $100 more expensive than the residential version. It also is somewhere between 2x and 20x less expensive than buying a 500mb ethernet circuit (say for MPLS) from Verizon in the same areas. I.e. where we don't have monopoly or regulatory capture it costs more to buy the noncaptured service.

http://www.statista.com/statis...
http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/f...

Also the dinosaurs they weren't preventing access in the sense we were talking about. If the municipality was being blocked from offering wifi then a local company had wired up the area. No one prevents access where they can't or won't provide service.

Fios was until recently not Title II. The FCC classified it as such, potentially not Verizon. Verizon wanted FIOS private. As for the fees on the bills, they haven't been able to keep that. That's a tax collected by the FCC and used as a subsidy for rural access. It was working well until a few years ago and now is starting to fail as the FCC keeps raising the minimum bandwidth.