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Talos II

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Re: Talos II

#51

Post by madez »

lmm wrote: post #45
madez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They surely do cost money, but you pay it indirectly. Somebody first pays the fees and the card itself, and ultimately you are going to pay. There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.

Either the merchant agreements forbid charging credit card fees, or it's just a norm that our businesses have adopted (over here we strongly believe in the advertised price being the actual price - we don't have tax-added-on-afterwards or mail-in rebates like in the US), but either way you very rarely get charged a fee directly. Some places will have a minimum spend to pay by credit card, and low-end shops won't acce…

> for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash.

That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.

Re: Talos II

#52

Post by madez »

pedrocr wrote: post #43
madez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They surely do cost money, but you pay it indirectly. Somebody first pays the fees and the card itself, and ultimately you are going to pay. There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.

>There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.

Lastschrift works fine for me.

Re: Talos II

#53

Post by X86BSD »

CrystalGamma wrote: post #21

I applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for an 8- or 12-core processor). Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is…

Power 9? Last I looked no one was even selling power 8 on the retail scale. Tyan had some finished? Systems kind of sort of available? And that was it. I thought IBM had stated they wanted to challenge and take Intel on in the data center and cloud space. But they sure are not doing a very good job. Sham because the hardware is a breath of fresh air.

Re: Talos II

#54

Post by sctb »

pedrocr wrote: post #25

>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 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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956811 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Talos II

#55

Post by vhodges »

madez wrote: post #51
lmm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either the merchant agreements forbid charging credit card fees, or it's just a norm that our businesses have adopted (over here we strongly believe in the advertised price being the actual price - we don't have tax-added-on-afterwards or mail-in rebates like in the US), but either way you very rarely get charged a fee directly. Some places will have a minimum spend to pay by credit card, and low-end shops won't acce…

> for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash. That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.

It's part of the merchant agreement not to charge a different price if using a CC (though it's common to offer a cash discount even if it does violate their agreement).

Re: Talos II

#56

Post by olympus »

samstave wrote: post #44
vectorEQ wrote: post #6

Talos™ II drives the state of the art of secure computing forward. Talos™ II gives you — and only you — full control of your machine's security. Rest assured knowing that only your authorized software and firmware are running via POWER9's secure boot features. Don't trust us? Look at the secure boot sources yourself — and modify them as you wish. That's the power of Talos™ II. That is fkin nice to be honest. There is…

I just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism HTTPS://puri.sm Coreboot based laptops...

The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs.

Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.

Re: Talos II

#57

Post by samstave »

olympus wrote: post #56
samstave wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism HTTPS://puri.sm Coreboot based laptops...

The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs. Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.

Thanks for the info... what's a better/the best option?

Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?

Re: Talos II

#58

Post by nextos »

samstave wrote: post #57
olympus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs. Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.

Thanks for the info... what's a better/the best option? Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?

The very best option right now (and dirty cheap, ~$200 new) is to get an Asus C201P / Flip Chromebook. It uses a Rockchip ARM CPU, and if you disable 3D acceleration (which is slow anyway) and use an external wireless antenna, you don't have any closed firmware in your computer. Not even CPU microcode firmware.

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.

Re: Talos II

#59

Post by olympus »

samstave wrote: post #57
olympus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs. Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.

Thanks for the info... what's a better/the best option? Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?

Don't take my comment to mean that Purism is evil, just that you aren't getting some ironclad security guarantee. This explains the "controversy" better than I can (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-...). Purism is certainly a step up from Lenovo that was shipping computers with rootkits installed.

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.

Re: Talos II

#60

Post by pedrocr »

sctb wrote: post #54
pedrocr wrote: post #25

>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 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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956811 and marked it off-topic.

This is quite surprising. I assume you mean it's offtopic for this particular discussion and not offtopic for HN in general right? Even so it seems strange to shut off a discussion like that just because it started from a tangent of a topic. What's the benefit?

Edit: there are also 2 other sibling comments that are about the same topic and left behind.

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