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Comment Re:Late to the market....need to be special (Score 3, Interesting) 133

Xeons aren't really the competitors for those, they're replacements for Cavium's existing MIPS64 offerings that end up in filer and network appliances. Apparently (according to a somewhat biased source at Cavium) they're competitive with current Xeons in aggregate performance per Watt, doing better on parallel workloads but less well on single-threaded ones. They really shine on anything I/O-intensive though, due to the integration of the ethernet and SATA controllers on the die (and the design of the DMA engines). They're not likely to be in general-purpose servers, but companies in the same markets as NetApp and Juniper are very interested in them (hence Cavium's investment in getting FreeBSD supported on them).

Comment Re:Late to the market....need to be special (Score 2) 133

8 core 64 bit ARM chips with GPU built in are fairly common and 10 core chips already announced (Mediatek), with 16-48 core vaguely hinted at for servers by other vendors

A bit more than hinting: Cavium is selling 24-48 core ThunderX (ARMv8) chips. I think the first one shipped a month or two ago.

Comment Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot (Score 1) 192

I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago. I periodically check Bing and Google (adding !bing or !google to the DDG search line will send you to either) if I don't find results that I want. On one occasion in the last year, I've found a useful result on Bing that I didn't get with DDG or Google. The last time I had anything useful from Google was about 18 months ago. Note that Google and Bing may be fine for most searches - I only try either if I don't quickly find what I'm looking for on DDG. I had one fairly obscure search a couple of days ago (FPGA synthesis problem) where DDG only returned six results (one of which was helpful), so I tried the others to see if there was something more useful. Google gave 10 completely irrelevant results (pages that didn't even include my search term), Bing returned no results at all.

Comment Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot (Score 2) 192

The EU also fines more EU companies than US ones, but those tend not to make the news in the US either. Actually, most of them don't make the news anywhere, it's only when it's a household name that it is considered newsworthy at all, and when it's a household name that's considered American then it becomes more newsworthy in the US press because they can run with the tired old 'EU picking on US companies and jealous of their success' narrative rather than bothering with any real journalism.

Comment Re:I'd Like To See Electronic Voting Work (Score 1) 105

There have been allegations in the UK of voter intimidation after postal ballots became easy to obtain: people would require dependents to hand over their ballots, fill them all in, and post them back. Now, it may be that this didn't happen or wasn't statistically significant, but if people are not required to turn up and vote in such a way that they can't prove to someone else how they voted then there's the potential for doing this on a large scale.

Of course one solution would be to allow individuals to vote repeatedly but only count their last vote, though if you capture someone else's voting credentials then it's very easy to vote en mass with everyone's details at one second to the closing deadline...

Comment Re:Android without Google (Score 1) 245

Mobile phones that run Android make up the majority of new mobile phones sold. Mobile phones that run Android and don't have the Play Store installed are such a tiny fraction that they're effectively a rounding error. If your microbrewery provides beer for 70% of all restaurants and enforces a contract that, if you want to stock their beer, you can't sell any other beer and must also sell their line of soft drinks then (first, it's not really very micro, and second) I'd expect it to come under antitrust scrutiny.

Comment Re:Nokia (Score 2) 245

None of their competitors even OFFER the option to have an "F-Droid" or to remove their respective equivalents of play services

I'm not sure what your point is. 'Other people are worse' is not a defence in an antitrust investigation, unless those others have enough of a market impact that you're probably not going to be in the antitrust regulator's jurisdiction anyway.

Comment Re:Nokia (Score 4, Interesting) 245

Simple example: I want to sell an Android phone. Not a problem, I can download AOSP and run it. Except that a lot of apps (e.g. almost all mobile banking apps) are only available via Google Play. Okay, so I'll license Google Play for my device. Here's where the problems start: I can only license Google Play if I also preinstall a load of other Google apps (and don't install any competing apps in a few categories and in a way that allows the user to hide them from the UI, but not actually remove them and reclaim the space).

Google is using the fact that they effectively have a monopoly on application distribution (yes, I know about F-Droid and the Amazon store. Most apps I want come from F-Droid, but I'm hardly a typical user and the rest come from Play because they're not in the Amazon store) to gain market share in other areas.

Comment Re:Android without Google (Score -1) 245

Someone else who doesn't understand antitrust law. WinPhone: trivial market share, no impact on the market. iPhone: larger market share, due to Apple's marketing able to influence the market to a larger degree than market share alone would imply, but still not a dominant player. Android: As a result of controlling the app distribution channel that almost everyone uses, Google is able to force vendors to install other Google apps and services, thereby exploiting one near monopoly to gain market share in other areas.

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