Talos II
raptorcs.com
raptorcs.com
That is fkin nice to be honest. There is so few which do this. totally already worth the price. (open source bios/boot procedures etc.). It's a total mess trying to get such a setup on a x86 server machine. i think there is a grand total of 1 server board which support coreboot (?)
HTTPS://puri.sm
Coreboot based laptops...
Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.
I used to think Purism was a sham, but now that the ME can be neutered I find it an acceptable compromise.
Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?
This is unique. Of course, it's a machine targeted by Libreboot:
https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html
I guess that if you install GuixSD, given all binary packages can be verified against the source, and there are some decent sandboxing facilities you can get pretty great security.
If you wear a tinfoil hat then you're going to be better off with a libreboot laptop, but you have to accept that you will never use a computer made after 2008.
I think that the niche that a Purism laptop fills isn't worth the price premium. A laptop from a main vendor plus a security conscious OS install (full disk encryption, two factor authentication) is fine for me.
It is literally safe to assume that every single device is 100% compromised and the 5eyes, can if they wish, monitor every single thing you do, based on these issues, correct?
But then, you also have to think that every service that you use, outside of your own 100% controlled purview (I.e. Literally any cloud service) is also summarily compromised to the point that you cannot say that one is completely secure...
Would this be safe to say?
I'm personally not worried about the 5eyes (but anti-gov activists should be). I'm worried about the smart kid who can use metasploit to take the banking info off my laptop in the middle of the night without me knowing it. A Purism laptop doesn't protect me from the smart teenager any more than an HP does. Full disk encryption and a Yubikey probably does, along with a decent firewall. Using cloud services where I encrypt my data before uploading is better than one where I transmit unencrypted (or where the cloud service controls the key).
A company willing to drop several thousand dollars on a Talos II might be worried about corporate espionage, so they might be willing to pay for a verifiable bios.
The NSA has to worry about thousands of hackers from dozens of countries around the world, so they are willing to pay for custom silicon.
Of course, you also need to consider physical security, which is like this: https://xkcd.com/538/
(Of course they don't solve the problem of firmware on disk controllers or network chips, but there is no such project yet.)
Their laptops have been gutted of the Intel Management Engine/AMD PSP, they ship with coreboot on them, and (I think) they're without binary blobs(?).
Similar notebooks with Libreboot are offered by vikings.net, tehnoetic.com, and zerocat.de; minifree.org is the business of Libreboot's main developer and former lead, so buying from them directly supports development of Libreboot.
Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is anyone selling POWER9 in retail quantities (preferably in Europe).
Another question that isn't answered on their page is the payment options. Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.
I wonder how much power this system will consume on idle? I read IBM significantly improved the power management with POWER9, so here's hoping 8 cores of this won't take significantly more than the 110W idle of my 8-core Piledriver system.
Why would that be the only option? Never seen a shop accept credit cards only. I only have a debit card and have never had any problems.
I think the distinction between credit and debit cards is more commonly made in Europe.
That being said, YMMV.
Maestro is technically a MasterCard debit card, but I'm not aware of a possibility to use it for online payments. VPay (i.e. "proper" VISA debit) is starting to make inroads.
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s...
The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly.
Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine.
I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases
Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well.
basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though..
hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm
That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.
If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.
It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.
If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd gen.
Oh wait, wrong company.
I personally run OpenBSD on all my (Apple) PowerPC hardware; it seems to work a lot more reliably than the Linux distros I've tried (in particular, I remember the install process for Debian being rather painful on PowerPC due to OpenFirmware, while OpenBSD is just as easy as it is on x86: mash the Enter key until you have a working system; at most, I sometimes need to tweak some boot settings at the OF prompt, namely if it was previously running OS X).
Debian PowerPC version has a few bugs but at least the desktop package selection has been decent, shame that the port lost the official status.
The XServe and Power Mac are in storage right now, but I'd like to get the Powerbook upgraded to 6.1 eventually (I want to stick full-disk encryption on it, too, so I'll probably just blow away the existing install and start from scratch).
I mean, if I had too much cash, I'd be tempted to get one, but I'd probably be even.more likely if I could see some blender rendering benchmarks and Linux kernel compile timings etc...
[ed: That is to say, if they couldn't get the one tested because it didn't exist, they should be twice as hard at work getting the mk II tested - and I can't see any evidence of that either.]
Even a bare bones motherboard costs more than $2,000.
I have no doubt this an awesome machine, but that price puts it outside my budget range. :(
I bet it will fail as Talos 1 did, for the same reason: way too expensive for what it is, for the concerned/hobbyist audience, leaving it for a tiny part of the professional audience... which is not ready either to put their trust in an unreliable project and prefers safe bets.
Compared to the RISC based propietary Unix workstations of 20 years ago, the price is really good.
At work, our CAD people have machines that are in the € 1,000 - € 1,500 price range. Those machines are fairly big and powerful, at least compared to our regular desktop PCs.
It is possible to spend more money on a workstation, if one wants or needs to, and get a more powerful machine. Far more.
Depending on your use case, our CAD machines might be lightweights. But the amount of computing power you can get for € 1,000-1,500 these days is insane compared to the landscape 20 or even 10 years ago.
I am certain the Talos II offers good performance for its price. My point was that I would like to have a machine that comes without any opaque blobs or "management engine", but I am not going to spend that much money on it. I'd be happy go get such a machine in the € 500-1,000 price range at correspondingly lower performance.
However I'm concerned by desktop Linux support and graphics driver support. It would be really miserable to get this kind of machine and then have a lacklustre desktop experience (though I'd be using it as a high-horsepower workstation, it would need to be able to dump computations onto the GPU and use ordinary free productivity software on the side).
As long as a card with Open Source driver support gets used it should work mostly fine. Back then they need a 4line patch to play ut4.
I don't think that's the entire picture..
If you're running systems at full capacity, throughput vs power consumption becomes a relevant equation - e.g. if the chip runs code 2x faster but is 1.5x less power efficient, I'm still saving .5 of power to get the same data processed.. Not sure of power consumption specifics for POWER, but they've been about to 4x faster than PC for some workloads.. E.g. 4GHz CPU + giant cache and 4x the registers will tear through matrices like a hot knife in butter... Also, there's the question of density vs performance - e.g. I only need X sq units of datacenter to process this dataset within the timewindow..
Also, historically the only people 'needing' power and willing to pay for it were companies with deeper pockets who wouldn't mind shelling out for AIX and the rest of the IBM stuff that goes along; linux is to some extent an 'afterthought'/'second tier' OS for this market though that has been changing in last few years. People using IBM or AIX have typically tended towards being risk averse and have been on POWER for ages; for everyone else, people haven't wanted to spend the money to migrate to a platform controlled by one company, etc.
I don't know if those numbers are upped with a POWER9 CPUs (I wasn't even sure if POWER9 was really shipping yet?)
I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.
Edit: there are also 2 other sibling comments that are about the same topic and left behind.
edit: According to the Austrian National Bank the number of issued credit cards in Austria was 2,85 mio. in 2012, compared to 8,5 mio. debit cards (population: 8.747 million (2016)), and the amount of credit cards was growing rapidly. Seems like there are more people with credit cards than I thought.
https://www.oenb.at/en/Payment-Processing/Card-Payments/Card...
edit2: Statistics Austria has the percentage of households with credit cards at 53% in 2014
http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gese... (German, it's the bottom row)
The real problem here has nothing to do with credit cards though, but with the unavailability of Visa/Mastercards debit cards in many European countries. For example, in my home country, Romania, very few people have credit cards, possibly even less than in Austria (edit: after your edit, definitely less), but everybody has a Visa/Mastecard debit card. No such thing in Austria. I heard that even in Germany it's hard to get a Visa/Mastercard debit card.
People don't want credit cards for various reasons, that's fine, although personally I don't agree with their reasoning, but Visa/Mastercard should still be available as a platform rather than being restricted to credit cards.
The advantage of that over an actual credit card is security and cost control: I have a separate bank account only for my Visa debit card. This account has overdraft disabled and will bounce payments instead at no cost to me. I keep a balance close to zero on this account. When I want to pay something online, I quickly do a transfer in that amount from my main account to my "Visa account", then pay. This will immediately subtract funds from my account, or the payment will immediately fail if there isn't enough (but there will be as I just transferred it).
This means my card is fraud-proof except in the unlikely case of someone managing to make a payment during the couple of seconds between me pressing transfer in my bank app and pressing pay wherever I'm paying. And even if they did that, they'd be limited to the amount of my intended purchase.
Apart from that very low worldwide acceptance, and even when it's accepted in theory, it rarely works in practice in countries not accustomed to them. For example when I go to the US I often see the Maestro logo on various retail shops or PoS machine, but I have never been able to successfully make a transaction, ever. In fact, even ATMs are sometimes hit and miss, though those usually work.
Oh yeah, and they are in general unusable with hotels and car rentals, even in Europe.
It's the same with Amex in Europe. Almost all big supermarkets (Spar, Merkur, etc) display Amex sign on their entrance, but I have never met an employee that knew what to do with Amex cards. At least Amex cards, unlike Maestro cards, have, or can have good benefits like airline miles and whatever. You get nothing with Maestro.
Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.
Because credit cards provide a valuable service that other cards don't and I see everyone around me using them because of it, either directly or through a virtual credit card service. The biggest advantages are wide acceptance throughout the world and the ability to arbitrate disputes.
>Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.
This is usually against the merchant rules and I've never seen anyone do it.
Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of that.
There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.
That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.
I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.
This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.
Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.