There was actually a noticeable tech industry presence in the Tennessee Valley and northern Alabama last time I was in the area. Lots of incentives being offered to start a business.
Now Millville, NJ? Those are the rednecks you are looking for.

Projection systems require space for throw-distance, or expensive first-surface mirrors. That adds cost. And they're a maintenance nightmare. Plus the cost of a good screen. Good, bright projectors are also usually in the $20k-$50k range.

Really, projectors weren't an option. There is literally only one inch of clearance between the wall and two of the screens in the room we built the first system in. We had to build something that fit in the space we had been provided.

At the end of the day, we got nine "acceptable" displays for less than the price of one good projector, mirror, and screen.

The first Air-Traffic Control Tower simulator I helped build used 9 73" Mitsubishi rear-projection DLPs. They weren't our first choice, but we didn't get the funding we asked for so it was either settle or get nothing.
They were awful for our purposes, except in one key factor: price. The image quality was bad: fuzzy, low contrast, inconsistent colors between displays. Their mirrors were fragile! I think we lost two displays to broken mirrors eventually. They were also prone to bending, and not well calibrated, often with significant overdraw, meaning we had to hand-tweak view frustums for each display to line up the image. And if a display was ever moved or jostled, we had to do it again.
I've seen people claim (in these comments!) that off-center viewing was better on these DLPs than on LCDs... They must have been using some other brand, because the Mitsubishi sets were just as bad as any LCDs we own. In addition, the image became darker and unfocused if you got closer to the televisions than 10ft, which was completely counter-intuitive for Controllers who were new to the system...
Like I said, though, the price couldn't be beat. We built a 270-degree system with 9 displays, at a price of something like $2400/display. Even five years later, when we built a new system out of bezel-less LCD panels, it took 24 60" NEC LCD panels at a price of $5-6k/panel to build a 288-degree system comparable to our original setup.
The NEC panels look a hell of a lot better, though, there's no comparison there...

Yes, because Israel's leaders are publicly proclaiming every day that they will see to it that Iran is cleansed from the Earth by holy fire...

Speaking as someone who works with computers in the aviation industry, that would make me so super happy I might just die of joy overdose.

Seriously.

I work in Air Traffic Control simulation, primarily Control Tower and Cockpit simulators. We've got a custom deferred renderer for very complicated lighting conditions... Like night time around an airport with literally thousands of dynamic lights.

In the past, our shaders just didn't work on ATI cards under Linux. Or they fell back to software mode. Or they gave unacceptable performance. Haven't tried them recently, but any time I look into the current quality level of AMD's open source Radeon drivers, the answers I usually get back is "Well, they mostly work, but at least they're open!"

If someone wants to point me to a Radeon card and driver combination that gives comparable performance to a GeForce GTX 580 on Fedora 16, I'll be more than happy to try and get a test rig together. I'd like to be proven wrong--I use Radeon cards (in Windows) for my home machines, after all.

In the meantime, though, nVidia's "binary blob" Linux drivers usually provide better performance than their Windows counterparts. I've never heard anything remotely similar about the open source AMD drivers.

Oh absolutely nothing technical, just Intel's refusal to give any ISA other than x86 (since Intel only makes x86 chips, unless you know something I don't) its fab advantage. Intel could easily make ARM stuff in its fab, but why would it bother if it could put out a superior x86 chip?

Because Apple might go all ARM in the near future? We're focusing on Android in this thread (my fault), but iOS devices are ARM-based, have a significant chunk of the market, and ONLY run native code. Lots of rumors flying that Apple is considering using ARM in their laptops and desktops going forward, which could make a lot of sense in the next few years for them.

Intel already makes ARM chips for at least one customer, and they have said in the past that they would license ARM and produce their own chips if it made sense.

Alright, I was mistaken about the extent of native ARM in Android. But what makes it different than the WinTel ecosystem that dominated PCs is that PC ISA lock-in involved the OS. Android, including all of its libraries, GUI, and the base Android-supplied apps, already runs on x86.

And all the base Windows NT code ran on Alpha. Developers still weren't willing to support an alternative, but more powerful, ISA for NT.

Your Chrome for x86-Android bit is just stupid - Google released it 2 weeks after the phone's release, hardly much to get upset about, wouldn't you say?

Yes, Google, the biggest, most well-funded, most dedicated Android developer took two weeks to provide an x86 compatible version of one of their flagship apps. For a phone produced by one of their own subsidiaries. How quickly do you think one and two man shops would provide alternative versions of their apps, if ever? Why would anyone (the developer, or the consumer) want to have to worry about compatibility of their phone/app?

No, it still doesn't make sense. And at this point it appears that there is no further discussion we can have as you seem to have a baseless bias against x86 regardless of any technical merits.

Bias against x86... Is that why I asked for an i7 workstation? x86 is fine for desktop computing, I just see no advantage to using it in the mobile space. Again, what's the benefit of having a phone or tablet that is compatible with 80386 software? That's the only advantage x86 gets you.

You know, I could just easily accuse you of pro-x86 bias, especially since you haven't listed any actual "technical merits" of x86, and I've managed to list several actual disadvantages of having an x86 Android device.

Intel's fabs are the advantage offered by x86. x86 processors are the only processors that can be made by Intel's fabs. If that changes, or if other fabs catch up, then great - use whatever is the best.

I guess I don't remember this as well as I thought I did, but I have been out of school for a while... And hardware never was my thing... I thought chips were burned onto silicon via some sort of lithography process? High intensity light etching the transistors onto a silicon wafer from a VHDL-type specification? What would prevent Intel from burning a 28nm ARM design in their fab?

Android apps are almost all Java - they run on any platform that has a Java runtime, which certainly includes x86.

No they're not and no they don't. They're Dalvik, which is similar enough to Java to make me sound pedantic by pointing it out, but they're not Java.

And while many android apps are written to run against the Dalvik VM, no small amount of them run native code. Opera, for instance by default ships both a ARM5 binary and an ARM7 binary (together) in the app store, and you can download the ARM7 binary by itself directly from them if you're sure your device can run it. Most performance-sensitive apps run natively, and writing native apps is well supported.

If your apps make calls into native code, that native code is shipped by the phone OEM, and you can already buy x86-based Android phones (Motorola sells one using some Intel Atom chip), so it obviously works there too.

Yes, and when that phone shipped you couldn't get Chrome for it, because there was no x86 Android build for Chrome.

In other words, the CPU's ISA is completely invisible to app developers, so I'm not sure what your complaint is there.

Sorry, that's simply not the case. It is invisible if you limit yourself solely to Dalvik apps, but that limits your options.

This makes no sense. Why would Intel have to push an ARM chip for you to be interested? What if Intel pushed a better-performing x86 chip than any ARM chip? Would you not be interested in that because you have some inherent bias against x86?

Hopefully it makes more sense now. No, a better performing x86 chip would not guarantee my interest. I'm not biased enough to completely rule out purchasing an x86-based phone in the future, but as it stands right now x86 looks like a disadvantage as opposed to an advantage.

Well, in my case, it's nVidia.

And from them (and their proxies), the explanations I have generally heard have been:

1) There are things in the code that they do not have sufficient rights to release in an open manner.
2) There are features of the "graphics hardware" implemented in software as part of the driver, and they believe these features give them a competitive advantage which would be lost by opening up the code.
3) There are workarounds for hardware defects in the code, and releasing them would embarrass the company.

I personally think the first reason is the most plausible one. I could see the second one being a possibility, but unlikely based on what I've observed between driver versions and hardware revisions. The third one I find hard to believe.

So, assuming the first one is the reason, it would cost nVidia a significant amount of energy (and probably money) to work out the licensing to release the drivers as open source. What would the benefit be to them in such an undertaking? Based on the results of AMD providing open specs for their chips, it doesn't seem likely they'd see any performance improvements from community contribution to their driver code.

Meanwhile, they provide me a driver that allows me to earn a living. Despite the roadblocks the kernel developers regularly throw in their way.

I'm sorry, but I guess I'm just driven by pragmatism when it comes to my paycheck. For the libraries we depend on in our software, I (successfully) pushed for solutions that provided the source (either by LGPL, or a source license) because having the source for them was most beneficial.

Meanwhile, there are two video card manufacturers with open source drivers I can think of off of the top of my head (Intel and AMD), and neither of them provide a solution that would allow us to do our work.

Hey Bruce, nothing but respect, but if "proprietary drivers" loaded into the kernel is the only way I can get my work done, it's kinda hard for me to jump on the "binary blobs are evil!" bandwagon...

If you think the UN could add legitimacy to anything, I think you have bigger problems.

Why do you think this is unlikely? On the contrary, Intel has a massive fab/manufacturing advantage over any ARM chipmaker

Okay, then why don't they license ARM and use that fab advantage to beat the other manufacturers at their own game. Nothing in your comment offers up any advantage offered by x86, just Intel's fabs.
I have no interest in running any legacy x86 software on any tablet or smartphone device, but now I do have a vested interest in running "legacy" ARM apps I have purchased for those devices for the foreseeable future. I don't want to have to worry about the instruction set the CPU in my next phone uses, I just want the software to work, and many of the apps I run make use of native code.
And as a developer, I don't want to bother to support two platforms. Supporting the menagerie of Android devices is already enough fun without adding an incompatible CPU instruction set.
Really, there is absolutely nothing compelling about x86 in the mobile space to me. If Intel pushed better performing and/or lower powered ARM chips, I'd see the benefit of having an Intel chip.

How is x86 software relevant on a mobile device?

No, because as the desktop becomes less and less relevant and people do more on mobile devices, backwards compatibility with software written for a 80386 just stops mattering. Even if Intel chips had exactly the same power usage as ARM (highly unlikely), what's the benefit of having an Intel chip in your mobile device?

You're forgetting that, until relatively recently, there were tons of dirt-poor people in the US

So what?

African countries haven't struck the lottery like that; there's no way for them to make their citizens wealthy the way we do here.

That's just completely untrue. There's definitely ways for them to become self sufficient. Primarily by getting educated and refusing to allow despots to run their countries. Just giving them food handouts, however, does nothing to help them move toward self-sufficiency.