moyta

Independent Sales Organization [1], Shopify for example is partnered with Stripe who is an ISO. Neither push big volume so their platform costs are much higher than their competitors.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account

So, to put this all in context, a small ISO will do at least a billion in payment processing a month, and there are more than a few hundred small ISOs. If Stripe really isn't hitting anywhere near $1 billion a month, I'm not sure how they will maintain their ISO relationship with the platform they use (First Data, Elavon, Chase Paymentech, Tsys, etc) or their relationship with their underwriting bank.

You need a large volume to break even in this industry, and even more to turn a profit, hence why I'm shocked they haven't gone under due to lack of volume if they are really only doing $8 billion annually.

0_o Why so many employees? In the context of the volume you do I don't see how you'd turn a profit with that many employees unless you get the tax credits other francophone software groups like Logivision get and more.

No clue, hopefully xal will comment on this seeing as he works for them.

That is really low, for context a teeny tiny ISO does $1 billion in processing volume a month, so your comparable to one of the hundreds of 2 to 4 employee ISOs out there.

You'd think it'd perform better, on my i5 with 16GB of ram its laggy as can be.

Edit: Keep the downvotes up, but having this site eat a full core is a bit ridiculous. Similar sites are much more performant.

Yeah, given a sizable power budget and the right benchmarks, Nvidia can outperform Radeon cards, but Apple has an exisistung relationship with AMD and there is not a compelling performance case to switch to Nvidia.

Plus with Supercomputing Clusters eating up most of Nvidia's production, Apple is not guaranteed to get the quantity & bin of GPUs they need on their schedule. This is the same reason why Apple didn't release any fusion based Macbooks, the bin of chip they wanted was not available in the quantity Apple needed by launch.

I think so, iirc Caviar is losing money as they compete with the dozen other food delivery services. The payment processing industry itself is currently very overcrowded too, with a million ISOs like Stripe, Square, Braintree, etc.

1. You can boot and use virtually all the hardware, H.265 hardware video decoding included with a fully libre stack. The Raspberry Pi is unlikely to ever be able to do that. Never tried the Allwinner Android builds, mainly cause they are unmaintained.

2. You've got space to work with, you are not limited in terms of space. Feature wise I and many others don't want to make the sacrifices [1] to use a smaller libc, I did it when developing an application on Angstrom using a BBB and I never ever want to do it again.

4. How would you get secure, verifiable images to people by default across every major platform? We all know 99% of the people who both the C.H.I.P. are NOT going to be bothered to verify the signatures by hand, and even then how do you ensure the signatures are from Next Thing Co? A Chrome Extension solves this.

[1] - http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html

I mean, if I could just get a nice Maemo Phone I'd be happy, like throw that on a Lumia 920 and I'd be content. There is definitely room for innovation in the mobile space, and both MS and Nokia have the hardware side of it down, they just need to choose a platform that people can get behind and make it easy to move to it (eg. have a preinstalled app compatibility layer).

Windows Phone is a burning platform at this point, Microsoft canned most of the people working on it and left a few dozen interns working on it, hence why the Windows 10 images for the Lumia as of late have been very unstable.

Sadly, its time to migrate off Windows Phone.

It is. Commenter doesn't understand that Microsoft is just trying to regain lost ground & mindshare at this point, hence why you can get Office on your Android device for free, and it works better than it does on Windows.

Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically.

Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?

I take issue with quite a bit of what you are saying, as;

1. The Allwinner chipset is 100% libre at this point [1], and they chose a cheap chip (the R8) so they could not have to subsidize their board unlike the Rpi Zero. If you want a more powerful board, buy an OrangePi PC Plus for $20.

2. "Full Fat" Debian is not very heavy, and you can easily disable what you don't need. The only "fat" is used disk space, which you can easily free up with a quick apt remove.

3. Can't comment much on the PocketCHIP, as I don't own one.

4. You want a secure way to get your OS onto your device, right? Even Signal for Desktop relies on Chrome, its virtually the only universally installable, secure way to distribute an application.

5. I have other A13 based boards and I've yet to encounter package breakage. The architecture is plain jane ARMv7, nothing specifically needs to be changed from the main Debian repos unlike the Raspberry Pi.

>At best (and without some serious work) the CHIP is destined to be a footnote amongst closed and partially broken Pi clones.

Its definitely far from closed, and it has decent software support unlike Pine64 and other failed boards, with the people behind the board writing eMMC drivers and working to build a better BBB. Compared to the BBB it is basically all there at this point.

Whether or not other cheaper boards like the OrangePi Zero wipe it out is yet to be seen though. The Pi ecosystem seems very caustic from what little I've seen with my Pi 3, reminds me of the Android modding community, hence why I've yet to build anything useful with my Pi 3.

[1] - http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix

And a problem with workers rights, our citizens are not fighting for a better working environment.

I've personally met with quite a few AMD employees over the past few years (hell, they bought me quite a bit of alcohol at times :P). They are not trying to compete in the high performance desktop or server arena anymore, they view it as an area that they will never win big marketshare in.

That being said, any market they can compete with Intel and cause them to have less than 100% marketshare in while making money is a market they are in or want to be in if they aren't already.

Intel literally has a half decade of chips that they could release right now that perform better and are ready to be released, but won't be until years down the road due to a desire to remain top dog in the event they have another Pentium 4 happen.

Perhaps that Joint Venture will go as well as Intel Israel went (brought the Core series out, replacing the failed Pentium 4) which then replaced Intel Oregon, but that is an iffy bet. The Israelis are particularly good at critical thinking, whereas that is generally not encouraged in China. I might be wrong though, but 2 to 3 years from now when we see first silicon for their modified Zen, we'll know.

If there is demand Xunlong will build a board (or if they think there is demand), the only sunk costs they seem to have are the minimal inventory they have on hand.

Board design is all in house, they're the original designer of quite a few non-Raspi SBCs on the market today, that being said they have just a handful of employees.

He doesn't, hence why he did not link to an article where AMD, Intel or VIA's lawyers say their cross licensing agreement allows them to be bought by another company.

> At the big 3 the unions practically took al firing capabilites away from the company. Unless the union agreed, the employee stayed.

That is 100% on the employer, if they can't be bothered to follow the firing process they have negotiated with the union, or fight for a better one, its their own damn fault. They deserve what they get and have to live with the outcomes of their actions, just like any other company or person.

> And no, unless an employee has a case, they can't sue an employer to keep their job. Not unless they have the cash to keep paying lawyers.

Sure, but you'd have a case if your employer can't be bothered to document your dereliction of your job, and employers in cases like the one I linked to often work for a cut of the judgment due to how clear cut a case like that is.

I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5 in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order.

Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.

That is on the employer, they need to be written up if they do not perform their duties, then fired after repeated failures, just like any well run business would do.

The employee could easily sue and retain their job if there was no union and the company doesn't bother to document an employee failing to do their job.

Uhh, have fun with that belief, AMD's lawyers say otherwise:

http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clari...

Sure, I'm not saying its something with huge margins, just like how Allwinner isn't getting rich with their dirt cheap SOCs. That being said, they have a few markets like that, and that is what sustains a company.

I highly doubt Microsoft or anyone will buy AMD, as it would not make financial sense, AMD already builds these chips cheaper than any of them could build them on their own, and any kind of merger would revoke AMD's x86 license, and Intel's x86-64 license, thus destroying the ecosystem.

On another note, a razor thin margin might not be glamorous, but you can run a business like that, though it will not be glamorous.

You have obviously never had to work in a unionized environment, here in Seattle Seattle Public Utilities will show union protected employees the door in a heartbeat if they cannot perform their duties or if management doesn't like them. I've seen & heard it repeatedly, here is a recent example [1]. The only people I've heard of being protected are the barely literate middle management at SPU and Oracle despite the tens of millions of dollars they have billed the city over what they quoted for a broken billing system to replace the maxed out billing system we currently have.

Get some facts & experience before commenting on things your unfamiliar with. Unionized employees nearly always vote for their interests, the number of unionized employees has collapsed under union busting tactics over the past few decades.

[1] - http://sheridanlawfirm.com/johnson-v-city-of-seattle-plainti...

[2] - http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/city-light...

Its disingenuous and in other countries would get the labor board on their ass, they are using FUD to stop their employees from organizing.

Here in the US we have very weak labor law enforcement, thus Trump can have managers dodge a certified union [1] approved by his employees in a vote, and not even get a slap on the wrist for refusing to bargain with the union as his company is legally required to.

[1] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/las-vegas-hotel-wor...

Nvidia has taken over a newer segment, cars, and they have a stronghold in the HPC market due to the sheer number of academic compute clusters that have based their setups on Nvidia hardware.

Intel has forced Nvidia out of the mobile and lowend/midrange desktop space, eliminating what used to be their bread and butter, so this pivot by Nvidia to markets where they either control the whole stack with their custom ARM cores, or where Intel can't lock them out by getting rid of PCIE lanes like on laptops/desktops (AMD would get subbed in cause PCIE lanes are all that matter) has definitely put them in a stronger position, justifying that valuation.

Huh? AMD is too important to Intel to let them fail, if AMD ever went broke, Intel would give them money just so they didn't have to deal with every country going at them for anti-trust law violations.

Eh, AMD has been doing that and custom cores as their bread and butter, seeing as they design the chips that power all the >$100 consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, they have a good market niche that provides them with a decent market to keep the company viable.

I'm not sure of cracking a new market space would be a good idea either, just like how they aren't trying to go toe to toe with Allwinner offering H3 SOCs for $1ea with a quadcore and H.265 hardware decoding, it might not make sense to get into a 3 way war with Intel, Nvidia, etc.

Retaking or getting into another market with a single vendor or none presently would likely be more profitable, just as VIA did with their point of sale motherboards with crypto accelerators and tons of serial ports.

AMD only has so much money and talent, getting into a pissing contest is not something they are looking to do. Intel can piss harder and longer than them (just look at the contra-revenue they did with the HP Stream 7 and the $50 Walmart android tablet, Intel charged the manufacturer for the chip $X and paid them $X+Y for using said chip to compete with ARM).

That and getting mindshare in the academic compute space. Where Supermicro is cleaning out all of Nvidia's higher end SKUs to build these academic compute clusters, Intel needs to insert itself and try to take the market. Currently they pair a mid-range Xeon with a couple GPUs, Intel needs to change that model if they want to win the market that has kept Nvidia in business.

Above 32 gigs, 16gb has been limiting on my current thinkpad.