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