This didn't get traction but this is big news, mostly for reasons not mentioned in this article:
1. It's a RISC-V chip, which means freedom from licensing fees.
2. It is built on 28nm nodes, which is a far cry from the 180nm fabrication SCL was capable of till very recently.
Now, 28nm is not the state of the art, but it is not very far either. I'm excited about getting to sub-10nm nodes in not too distant future, which may make this viable for daily desktop and mobile experience. Although I'm hoping to see some more progress on the software-side with RISC-V in that period.
Thanks for taking a look! You are correct that we are not competing with the cheapest offerings available there are two key things that are different with us compared to some low-cost providers (like Hetzner):
1. Our prices are in CAD and we bill in CAD, not USD. For Canadian residents this saves on exchange-rate uncertainty. Although sometimes people miss the C$ part and compare it with USD pricing - looking to make this more visible.
2. We don't have limits on transfers, but bandwidth. Hetzner, for example gives you limited amount of transfer for your money. They probably want to stop abuse but it limits legitimate users as well, even though it costs them no more money to transfer the extra bits.
(I use and like Hetzner, not trying to throw shade on them, just using as an example).
> Are there any legal or other reasons I, a resident of Canada, should host my services in Canada rather than in Europe or US?
Certain industries in Canada are regulated and need to be hosted locally. However, we are not trying to appeal to that. Instead, we want to focus on physically-local hosting because we believe that the world needs more small-scale ISPs, not centralization into big hyper-scalers. The collateral benefits are incidental: like being able to sue in Canada, and being subject to Canadian digital privacy laws (e.g. the DPA).
Trying to build a small-scale ISP/hosting provider domiciled in Canada. We really want to be able to rent real rack space to enthusiasts who would like to benefit from having stuff in the datacenter but don't want to take on the opportunity cost to get started. It came out of my own desire to have a machine in a DC rack.
This week we've been writing a bunch of "reviews" of self-hostable software since a lot of our friends are curious about this space but don't have a good understanding of how to get started. https://blog.colocataires.dev.
It didn't really come out of academia in that way. It was an innovation borne out of necessity during Covid. I don't think I've seen anybody using a box design for it. If you have a source, I'll be happy to be corrected.
Regardless technology is often named after people who made it popular, especially when original inventors are unknown or too diffuse.
Of course, but I know people who live in the UK who are not white. Some have lived there all their lives, even. Perhaps this drivel doesn't upset them but I can imagine how it might.
Unfortunately DHH is not going to be focused on the UK only. He'll lend his voice to the next rightwing ragebait without consideration of people who he works with on the daily. He had some very strong but entirely misinformed opinions about my hometown a few years ago and it was extremely annoying to read that from an ostensibly intelligent person while being in the middle of everything.
If he was some random guy, it wouldn't be such an issue but given he's the leader of a big open source project, everything he says gets a lot of publicity and frankly causes a lot of distraction for people just trying to do work on or with Rails.
I think framework made a misstep with this spornsorship deal. I still think they should be supported in their mission and you don't have to regret your purchase.
That article spends a lot of words in trying to paint DHH's "native Brits" in a positive light but never mentions the following sentence from the article:
> A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
How is DHH able to determine nativity as defined by "being born and brought up" simply walking the streets of London if it has nothing to do with what you look like?
Plus he even links to a Wikipedia page about white vs non-white British population in London and uses the non-white number. If he wanted to, he could've referred to the foreign-born vs local-born numbers too but he did not.
I don't think DHH is racist, but he's so infected by the anti-woke mind virus that he's happy to parrot racist talking points to "own the libs". Whether that's any better, I'm not sure.
It seems like the author has infinite rope to extend to DHH. That's not being nice, that's being oblivious.
There is a lot of incoherence in this reply but I'll just address the second last: that less well-off people were more likely to vote for Brexit. Not only is this narrative just a thin veneer over the "sons of the soil", anti-immigrant narrative, the peddlers of Brexit were handing out, there is actual data showing that in fact the opposite was true.
From a Bank of England study:
> People living in left-behind areas were more likely to support Brexit than those living in prosperous areas. The gains of Brexit were perceived to be greater in areas of the country that had experienced economic decline. But within those areas, given people's preferences, we show that wealthier individuals were more likely to vote for Brexit, and poorer individuals were more likely to vote for Remain.
> One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that small UK firms appear to be more adversely affected than larger ones.
>
> They have been less able to cope with the new post-Brexit cross-border bureaucracy. That's supported by surveys of small firms.
All this is not hard to reason yourself out of. The wealthy can afford to go to Europe regardless of whether UK remains integrated with the EU. They are the least affected by decision either way. The less well-to-do have significant costs imposed now that the integration is over - both monetary and bureaucratic whenever they want to deal with the EU. This is despite the free trade deal.
I see you created the account to just post this so you're highly likely to not be worth the response but "native brit" is vague not because British people don't exist - there is a legal definition for that - but because Britain has been invaded and seen migration for millenia. Are Normans less native than Anglo-Saxons? Are the Celts the most native? Why do the Vikings and Franks get to assimilate into nativity but not the non-white? The answer to that is very clear - however people tend to hide it behind terms like "native".
You can treat DoomEmacs or Spacemacs similarly. They provide an opinionated and streamlined way to interacting with Emacs. Doom is closer to "vanilla" than Spacemacs but I have used Spacemacs for over 10 years now.
Like OJFord mentions, it is a bit far from amenities despite the straight line distance to them not being great because it's built on an island in the river and you have to cross the bridge to get to the downtown area.
But more importantly for me, my usual life is not in Montreal. I love Montreal but moving there would require quite a few sacrifices in personal relationships that I don't feel like making. And government services in Quebec are also worse than in Ontario (where I am now).
1. It's a RISC-V chip, which means freedom from licensing fees. 2. It is built on 28nm nodes, which is a far cry from the 180nm fabrication SCL was capable of till very recently.
Now, 28nm is not the state of the art, but it is not very far either. I'm excited about getting to sub-10nm nodes in not too distant future, which may make this viable for daily desktop and mobile experience. Although I'm hoping to see some more progress on the software-side with RISC-V in that period.