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Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

arstechnica.com

191–198 of 198 posts

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#191

> With a Snapdragon inside your PC, you'll no longer need Wi-Fi to fetch your latest e-mail and catch up on Twitter. Instead, you'll be able to get online wherever there's cellular connectivity. I'm not buying the optimism, especially not in the US. The cellular data is still horribly limited. In Canada it is even worse. The "unlimited" plan is surging back, but it has automatic throttling at varying points. Oh and s…

Three years ago, our local Spanish operator Movistar deployed the 4G mobile network and started offering an impressive 75 Mbps download speed and 25 Mbps upload speed. At that point, the largest data plan you could get from them was 1 Gb per month (now I think you can get 2 or 3 Gb, not more). This meant that if you used the connection to its capacity, you would hit the monthly cap in around 1 minute 50 seconds. With…

Around here they started offering unlimited uncapped traffic (up to 1 TB) - BUT - after you go over 5GB daily your connection is disabled and you have to send an SMS to enable extra 2GB - you can do this unlimited ammount of time (up to theoretically 1TB).

So this makes streaming, torrenting and stuff awkward but for daily internet use it's a decent option (it's a relatively inexpensive plan) - for eg. I could work remotely on this plan.

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#192
WiFi is to cellular connectivity what local storage is to the cloud. Apparently it's all fine and dandy, then one day someone on the other side change their mind and you lose this or that feature, in other words control.

Cellular connectivity can be useful as cloud storage can be, but I'd never ever use anything that depends on either for connectivity or storage. Moving every resource behind a tap the user cannot control is not the way to go, although I'm sure IT companies will keep pushing in that direction for obvious reasons.

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#193
post #53

I'm really excited about ARM laptops, but only if: * They have laptop-class performance, not tablet class performance * They can have more than 4GB of RAM * You can put reasonable sized standard SATA SSDs in them, or user-replaceable M.2 drives. * You can easily wipe Windows off them and put Linux on it.

Why wouldn't they have more than 4 GB of RAM? Current Android flagships are shipping with 6 GB of RAM, and 8 GB phones have been announced. I'm not sure about the laptop-class performance requirement, you mean for light browsing and office tasks, they should be there already (even with the emulation penalty). Edit: 8 GB phone announcement: http://bgr.com/2017/01/05/asus-zenfone-ar-release-date/

Lots of Chromebooks don't come with more than 4GB of RAM, theres no reason why they couldn't have more too. But the mostly don't because the target market is not seen as needing it.

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider how annoyed people have been at the Apple dongle situation. Sure they'll grunt through it but they want something better and less complicated. To the HN crowd, a phone tied to a computer to access all of the world's information is a large bit of genius (I used to dream about it when I was a kid... before everybody had cellphones), but to most users its just another thing dangling about that they have to conn…

> Consider how annoyed people have been at the Apple dongle situation. Do you mean the USB-C with the gazillion required adapters or new cables? It's relevant you bring up Apple, because if you have a MacBook and an iPhone, and pair it via Bluetooth, the a tethering option shows up in your WiFi menu that you can easily select, same as any other WiFi network. The advantage of it being an easy, yet manual process is th…

Good point. I really enjoy how easy it is on a mac when I'm on the train or something.

The difficulty for average users is the knowledge that you can tether, setting it up, and remembering to turn it off. The UI's are good at reminding you, but even I've forgotten if I've had to run off the train because I got caught up in work.

Metering (with overrides) would help absolutely!

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#195
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Shim requires that your kernel is also signed, and also disables support for kernel modules.

And this shows why forcing that in shim was a bad idea. They should have made a version breaking the chain, and allowing to boot unsigned kernel.

No, this shows why (forcing) Secure Boot was a bad idea. Allowing Shim to load unsigned kernels would be equivalent to having it bypass SB in the first place, which Microsoft would presumably never sign.

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to stop any company from making its own laptops with ARM processors, designing them to run Linux, and pre-installing Linux. You could do it yourself. Maybe this is your chance to become rich and famous. Not sure why your first thought is to ride on the back of Microsoft's work...

Having access to a large target market gives you advantageous pricing negotiation and support from SoC designers, board manufacturers, etc. Sure, you could create a brand new electronics brand and try to market it. But it would be super expensive and take a long time to get off the ground.

Which simply avoids the issue I raised. How long has Linux been going?

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#197

I look forward to learning more about this product. I love that we're moving non-x86 into mainstream consumer products like this (and not limited to low-end chromebooks, e.g.). ARM SoCs lack the backward compatible x86 BIOS-style bootstrap. This is great because it's kinda crazy to think about booting into stuff like MBR, real mode, etc in 2017. But this is bad because without good standards it's really tricky to hav…

Yeah, that's my biggest fear for this computer. I would snap up two or three in a heartbeat if I could put my favorite Linux distro on it. My little 10" ARM chromebook has already left my more powerful laptop gathering dust. It seems like 'just a browser' at first glance, but it becomes so much more when you add a chroot which can launch X sessions into Chrome tabs. These Microsoft ARM machines are encouraging, since…

But you know what you really want. Full fledged linux experience with all the drivers backed by Google for 12 hr battery life. ChromeOS isn't even scratching the surface of how linux can maximize use of the hardware. I mean you expect to actually do productive work on tabs that load javascripts on an ARM machine?

Re: Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

#198
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are set-top boxes, from ISPs that are also mobile operators, which embed femtocells. When a mobile subscriber is using such a femtocell, it doesn't count towards the mobile data cap.

Imagine the convenience of having a wireless network in your own home!

Although of limited range, the femtocell is public, not limited to the landline customer's use. This handily covers shadowed areas in cities as well as remote areas, reduces load on main cells, and Tx power needed both ways.
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