[Arm-netbook] I Have An Possible Chance To Meet An ARM Senior Manager

[Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross]

Tried to included as much as I remember that is relevantish. Ask me any 
questions in-case they remind me of anything I have forgotten. Hope this 
is of use. In no particular order and in a list style brain dump, here 
is my write up... finally! :)

Had the chat with him. A lot of this is not exactly what he said but my 
summary memory.

He did marketing, I don't remember his name.

He has heard of Rhombus-Tech and the Qi-Hardware Nano Note.

Foolishly , I think I didn't get as far as opening my mouth to ask what 
he thought of rhombus-tech. :/ X[.

The future of there sales they see is "The Internet of Things", The 
little computer in each room, which one hocks up home things, like 
lights for remote control. Other future sales are things like the cheap 
little computers that hackers/techies/artists/internet/WWW people use 
for projects. For example the A10 sticks and RPI.

I asked about Open/Copyleft Hardware.
He didn't know of the name Copyleft Hardware but did know of the term 
Open Hardware but he knows that you can hock stuff up to the card slot 
on a Nano Note using the SD . The term "Copyleft Hardware" comes from 
Qi-Hardware who made the Nano Notes. I thought this was an interesting 
observation. Perhaps he skimmed over the Qi Hardware wiki if at all. 
Maybe he only read the news articles. Perhaps not that familial with 
Copyleft? I don't know.

Didn't ask about chrome book and opencomput as I didn't know much if any 
thing about them. Nor had the internet connecting at home to find out. I 
failed to use an opportunity I had, of an internet connection before 
meeting him. I sinned by doing something else instead that was not 
necessary.

He had a very slim ithing mob.

Rough Quote:
"
if your doing one thing for one com and there is another company that
wants something similar but with a few differences then the company that 
pays
you more gets what they want and the other com has to make do. The 
losing companies
engineers have to .... mod....? (Can't remember.)
"

With AMAB bus he said there wasn't a problem. All vendors are compliant, 
they have to be.

Brought up the GPL violating idiots that are gone the next week. He said 
they are unreliable. That’s why in pro things there be open source gate 
keepers. They only use kernels approved by the gate keepers. Not being 
sure what he means by gate keepers. I ask something like "the ones that 
comply with the licences?" he roughly says yes but more than that its 
quality control. Simply A prober job is done.


He's not keen/does not support FLOSS drivers nor firmware. His response 
was something like: "Manufacturers need to hide how too talk to GPU to 
make competition harder." I think I did say something like :/ : "but 
hangon you want you customers to talk to the GPU!" I can't remember his 
response, I think it was again similar to his proprietary drivers and 
firmware response.
I give more(Or was it only? Can't remember.) practical reasons than 
philosophical ones. Partly on purpose, partly a fall back to practical 
things = safer X( .

Software reverse-engineering (Like drivers and firmware) was something 
like a err problem, it was negative not positive.
You keep hardware locked down to stop the support blood suckers.

CISO got into trouble and so had to release there source code like they 
should. Then Blood suckers send back there cockups. Who have mucked up 
there rooting/changing of firmware/mod. My impression from him is that 
proprietary is the only way to stop the blood suckers. Which I disagree. 
I asked about having verification (I gave checksums for a example.) to 
tell if it's a users cockup but that's not practical I was informed. I 
did say I was getting out of depth btw. I failed to mention but if it's 
free with doc and tools included to help with avoid cockup then these 
blood suckers could mostly be avoided, no?


He gave a positive mention "A great website" to sparkfun.

RPI came up. I said ant going to work with the latest software due to 
proprietary GPU junk to just boot them thing. He says "yea but" its for 
just messing about with or some thing like that.

So my understanding is that the disposable though-a-way hardware after a 
few years is ok with him or arm (?). Well he did say that arm processors 
are made, 1 for each person on planet earth each *year* :O.

I think we had 50mins with him.

btw he can see what I scribe too due to the FSF, GNU, Internet Defence 
League, Stupid - Dam non-free BOIS, Open Rights Group and Eliminate DRM 
stickers on my portable computer (netbook). Don't think that affected 
what he said.


My personal summary memoires are:

They and/or he (?) don't scribe to free software. Open Source all the 
way cus it's ok with non-free junk. No surprises there.

Don't hope for free graphics from arm (there working on there own gpu.) 
or with arms help. If your prepared to buy it currently then that's good 
enough for them. Rickard MS is right. Complete, out right rejection of 
proprietary/non-free junk is the only way to go.


Copyright © 2013 Alexander .S.T. Ross http://www.aross.me
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 
3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/.