Real estate management companies can do to the same thing for enormous square footage of basically identical industrial flat roofs, and already are.

The US has used circuit breakers for decades. You may be thinking of "earth leakage circuit breakers" (ELCB) but those are pretty obsolete at this point. Current US code requires ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCI) extensively, which are equivalent to the residual current devices (RCD) which replaced ELCBs and have been required for quite some time in most countries, regardless of how the circuits are wired. (And arc fault circuit interrupters (AFCI) are increasingly required in habitable locations.)

None of that has anything to do with power distribution. In the US (and most places) AC is typically distributed multi-wire. Single wire is used in very isolated areas (especially, e.g., Australia). Single wire in the context of this thread refers to distribution, not household service. (Pretty much every place in the world now uses a hot/neutral/ground scheme for lighting service, with additional phases possibly utilized for high-power applications.) The economics of AC vs DC for long distance transmission have more to do with power loss and equipment costs than number of conductors.

And wouldn't it be even more effective to build solar panels on all of the "roofs" that already exist, before building new roofs just for solar panels? There are a whole heck of a lot of really big buildings with flat roofs around the world, only a small fraction of which have panels at this point. Pick the low hanging fruit before trying the kool-aid.

Yeah, it seems pretty pointless/lame. Using a speed test at all for this is kinda sketchy. A better implementation would watch for signs of network congestion (retransmits, etc) and look at the bandwidth consumption at that time, preferably checking that there are multiple congested destinations. (To try to avoid blaming the ISP for a problem on the remote side.)

Yes, and there are better tools for the job. If you're doing something network intensive, the beaglebone black has capabilities similar to the pi, but an ethernet interface that doesn't go through USB and which can max out 100Mbps for about the same price as the pi. (It's also more open, but the pi is better for graphics-intensive applications. Pick the right tool for the job.)

Yup. Why there are people who think that all of the sudden the magic box their ISP gives them won't default deny in an IPv6 world continues to mystify me.

Dryers have to be 30A. If you have some kind of older circuit with a higher rating, it should be downrated (with a lower breaker). I think the biggest reason the cord isn't included is so that the warehouse store can charge an extra $20.

well, hopefully we'll get to a point where the idiot who didn't stop will pay for the treatment and never be allowed to drive a car again

usually not until after they've killed someone

if everyone on the road stopped when they didn't know wtf they were doing, we'd have a lot fewer dead people. the real problem is that people are asshats, so they speed up and drive worse when they're confused or upset. it may not be as emotionally satisfying to stop and think, but it's actually the most sensible thing to do.

They're selling more chips for less profit--Intel still has them trounced in terms of the R&D budget regardless of how many units they ship. All you have as an argument is "ARM is better so eventually it will actually be better", but the instruction set frankly just doesn't matter very much.

Note that Intel is a fairly large ARM vendor, and had other RISC products in the past. They still design & build such chips for embedded controllers, so it's not like they don't know how to do it, but if they thought that was the best path forward for general purpose CPUs they probably wouldn't have sold that tech off to Marvell.

Sure, if we imagine that vendor X comes up with something implausibly advanced (scaling software to 1024 cores is hard, which is why single thread performance still matters), and intel actually goes backwards (you can buy a 32 core intel blade today) instead of developing new tech, then sure, vendor X can win.

Though nobody would buy it if it were tied to a single-vendor version of linux. BTDT, it sucks.

" Intel's least demand, lowest margin customers are ARM's high margin most demanding customers"

This is where I think you're wrong. The phones & the tablets are where the money is, the chromebooks are an uninteresting sideshow for the ARM vendors just as much as for Intel. There's no way they're making the same money on $200 netbooks as they are on $700 phones. They're also not putting any R&D into that segment, it just happens to move along with cobbled-together parts. It's not a path to anything.

"I can easily imagine a future generation of SOC for systems with keyboards as much as they are useful in today's tablets."

You seem to misunderstand. Of course systems are getting more integrated--the question is whether consumers are interested in buying a server whose hardware is completely different than the server they bought six months ago, which needs completely different core drivers, can't boot the same kernel, etc. It's not in the consumer's interest to have that degree of vendor customization in the desktop and server markets. I already pointed out that Intel actually derives a competitive advantage from standardized SOCs: their competitors have to be better engineered just to overcome intel's process advtantage. E.g., you need to have a singificantly better 28nm 10GBE implementation to be more power efficient than intel's 14nm implementation. Is that likely? Can the ARM server vendor outperform intel's CPU, and outperform intel's best in class networking, and outperform intel's fairly solid storage controllers, and outperform intel's pcie controllers, and outperform intel's memory controllers, etc.? That's a lot of R&D, and none of the competitors have that kind of head count.

Don't get me wrong--I'd love to see ARM as a strong competition to intel in the server space. But watching how fast intel has pivoted, how quickly and reliably they deliver on new tech, and how slow and underwhelming the ARM vendors have been, I just don't see it as likely.

But the main reason they can sell anything in step iii is that intel doesn't care about those customers. It's not clear that ARM vendors are actually making much money on those products, and if intel cut its profit margin (i.e., if they cared enough about that particular market to actually go after it) then the ARM products would be economically untenable. There simply isn't a fundamental advantage there for the ARM vendors to take advantage of: their advantage is cost, and that's because intel has *decided* not to lower prices that much. Again, ARM's marginal power advantage simply doesn't matter on a typical laptop because the CPU isn't the most power-hungry part. (Unless you're crunching numbers, but then you probably want to have a faster chip even if it uses more power.) Even on phones the advantage of ARM is less about power consumption than the fact that you can configure an ARM SOC any way you want it--while intel has basically no interest in licensing its most advanced IP so that OEMs can build custom SOCs. The limitations of that strategy are clear--ARM hardware is basically disposable once the initial OS becomes obsolete, because nobody cares about engineering updates for old products--and I just don't see custom SOC being a driver for laptops/desktops/servers. Those markets demand more standardized hardware, and that brings us back to ARM competing toe-to-toe with intel. For the niches where hardware coprocessors really matter, intel has phi for HPC and quickassist for crypto/compression/DSP/etc.

Yes, ARM is used in a lot of phones. A phone chip is very different than a server chip. The question is whether any ARM vendor has the money to do *general purpose server* R&D in competition with intel. So far, everyone who has tried has either crashed & burned or provided fairly disappointing results. What they have going for them is power efficiency, which matters in embedded solutions (think raspberry pi & smaller) but isn't that compelling on full size laptops, desktops, or servers--saving a few watts over an intel solution doesn't matter when the screen, memory, and communications consume more power than the CPU. (Side note--intel has a material advantage here by integrating some of the power-hungry components like 10GBE on silicon that's one or two generations ahead in terms of process compared to the ARM competition.) ARM seems firmly in the region of diminishing returns--they can't consume less than 0, so there just isn't that much more to cut. Intel has room to improve, and with the money they can throw at things, they will--to the extent that makes sense. In most applications single thread performance is still more relevant than a very high number of cores. So intel's current strategy is to be reasonably power efficient, integrate components in a compelling fashion, but not sacrifice too much single thread performance. So with D-1540 you get integrated 10GBE, integrated SATA, integrated DDR4, & 8 fairly powerful cores. The ARM vision is to deliver 48 slower cores, for a total package that's a little more power efficient and roughly on-par performance-wise for embarassingly parallel applications (of which there are few). Given how many distinct architectures intel has delivered over the past few years, I'm pretty confident that, if high-scaling applications actually materialize, intel will be able to crank out a new SKU faster than any ARM vendor will be able to explit the niche, bascially by scaling up avoton. (The successor to that architecture, denverton, is due out at the end of this year, probably with 16 cores & integrated 10GBE on a 14nm process.)