[Wikimedia-l] Dells are backdored

[Philippe Beaudette]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 2:25 PM, Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada <
emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > Naw, it's a great idea.  Let's switch to building our own ARM-based
> > servers (by the way, which have already been a flop commercially),
> > using only unproven, low-volume available motherboards and having to
> > buy and assemble all of the rest of the components.  And then of
> > course, we need to design our own cases... and since these have such a
> > low performance, we'll need to have a lot more rack and datacenter
> > space, of course which comes with a cost... and we'll have to figure
> > out how to run our caching layers which require large amounts of
> > memory... and our storage layers which require large amounts of disk
> > space.....  At that point we'll probably need to redesign those boards
> > which are incapable of doing these things, so we'll need a team of
> > hardware engineers, plus a deal with a manufacturing plant.
> >
> > So... I think with about a 100 million dollar per year research budget
> > we can do this.  Who's ponying up? ;)
> >
> >
> Funny huh?
>
> If we use free software, I don't see why we can't move to open-source
> hardware ASAP.
>
>
>
Well, I think Leslie just listed a few, but I'll recap:
- low-availability
- Requires in house assembly
- Requires in house design capacity
- Substantially more rack and datacenter space required
- Insufficient for caching and storage layers
- Cost of manufacturing.

pb