The code war: Russia plans to free itself from iOS and Andro

[Rain Dog]

I like this. I one owned a nokia n900 which ran on a Maemo ... a predecessor to MeeGo.

The growth markets are in -- time to sell your apple sock.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... ailfish-os

Finland’s Sailfish operating system is the platform for Russia’s latest fight for independence from US technology

The cold war may have ended in the 90s but Russia is still fighting to free itself from American influence over its technology sector, with the country’s minister for communications announcing plans to create a new mobile operating system to challenge iOS and Android across all the Brics nations.

Meanwhile, another Russian company is designing its own central processing units to take on Intel and AMD.

According to Russia’s RBC financial newspaper, the country’s ministry of communications instigated the project to replace Android and iOS, meeting with Finnish developer Jolla to discuss the creation of a new mobile operating system based on Jolla’s open-source Sailfish OS.

Russia’s minister of communications and mass media, Nikolai Nikiforov, told RBC that he wants to see the use of non-Russian mobile operating systems drop to just 50% by 2025. Android alone accounts for 81% of the country’s OS market share, according to analysts at Gartner, while iOS picks up another 15%.

Sailfish OS has just 0.5% of the market in Russia at present, below even Windows Mobile and Blackberry. But the open-source nature of the operating system, which lets any interested party use it as the basis of their own software, as well as the lack of ties to the US (unlike Android, which, while also open-source, is heavily controlled by Google), makes it a strong contender for a future Russian open system.

The company is formed around a core of former Nokia employees, who left after Nokia decided to abandon its fledgling MeeGo operating system in favour of working exclusively with Microsoft on smartphones. The core components of MeeGo were open source and Jolla’s new employees built Sailfish around it.

In the long run, Nikiforov hopes to expand Sailfish into a fully international effort. Shortly after the meeting with Jolla, he tweeted that the operating system “creates a Finnish-Russian-Chinese company”, which could one day include “India, Brazil and South Africa”, involving all members of the Brics group of developing nations. To that extent, he hopes to involve IT companies from other Brics nations, he told RBC, encouraging their employees to give 20% of their time, paid for by the state, to work on pan-Brics initiatives like the new operating system.
Processors

In other areas, Russian companies have already begun to ship their homegrown alternatives to foreign technology products. MCST, a processor company set up in 1992 as a direct descendent of the Soviet-era state-run Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies – SPARC is short for scalable processor architecture – recently shipped the Elbrus-4C computer, the latest in a line of hardware dating back to the 70s.

But unlike previous Elbrus models, the 4C includes a feature known as “x86 emulation”, allowing it to run software written for the hardware found in most western computers that contain processors made by companies such as AMD and Intel. According to technology news site Ars Technica, the new chip “is probably a few years behind western chips, but it’s difficult to make a direct comparison”.

The Elbrus computers still work primarily using their own sui generis instruction set, but are capable of translating software written for the more common x86 hardware in real time. That means the computer can run software such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and the company is selling a complete computer that comes with a version of open-source operating system Linux, also called Elbrus.

Cheers,

RD

[BOFH]

This is not the first development in terms of freeing themselves from American technologies. The Russian Elbrus-4C with x86 emulation makes me happy in my pants.

The Russian company MCST (Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies) has released the Elbrus-4C, a reasonably high-performance quad-core CPU that may grant Russia some technological independence from American chip-making giants Intel and AMD.

Despite the company's name, the Elbrus-4C uses the Elbrus ISA (instruction set architecture), not SPARC. Elbrus is a closed and proprietary architecture, so exact details are hard to come by, but we do know about one particularly interesting feature: x86 emulation. If you remember the Transmeta Crusoe, it sounds like the Elbrus architecture does something very similar: at run-time, x86 program code can be translated and executed through a virtual machine. This method isn't as fast as providing x86 support in hardware, but it gets the job done.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/05/ ... emulation/

[Rain Dog]

This is not the first development in terms of freeing themselves from American technologies. The Russian Elbrus-4C with x86 emulation makes me happy in my pants.

The Russian company MCST (Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies) has released the Elbrus-4C, a reasonably high-performance quad-core CPU that may grant Russia some technological independence from American chip-making giants Intel and AMD.

Despite the company's name, the Elbrus-4C uses the Elbrus ISA (instruction set architecture), not SPARC. Elbrus is a closed and proprietary architecture, so exact details are hard to come by, but we do know about one particularly interesting feature: x86 emulation. If you remember the Transmeta Crusoe, it sounds like the Elbrus architecture does something very similar: at run-time, x86 program code can be translated and executed through a virtual machine. This method isn't as fast as providing x86 support in hardware, but it gets the job done.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/05/ ... emulation/

Yes, I was vaguely ware of this too. Quite fascinating if all the NSA snooping results in the USA tech sector crashing, Russia might be leading the way, but China is right there too and a lot of other "developing" countries share the same interest.

Cheers,

RD

[BOFH]

Yes, I was vaguely ware of this too. Quite fascinating if all the NSA snooping results in the USA tech sector crashing, Russia might be leading the way, but China is right there too and a lot of other "developing" countries share the same interest.

Cheers,

RD

Remember weeks before the Snowden allegations when the intelligence communities in America and Europe banned the usage of Lenovo and Huawei products because of backdoors? It was hillarious. Then it turns out the NSA is hijacking Cisco shipments to insert chips into unknowing customers' gear. Of course nothing was ever found in Chinese hardware, it was the American all along. Surprise!

I wouldn't go as far as saying that the American tech sector is crashing. This innovation has been going on in China and Russia for a long time, I think either journalists or PR people are using the NSA revelations as a marketing excuse.

[Rain Dog]

Yes, I was vaguely ware of this too. Quite fascinating if all the NSA snooping results in the USA tech sector crashing, Russia might be leading the way, but China is right there too and a lot of other "developing" countries share the same interest.

Cheers,

RD

Remember weeks before the Snowden allegations when the intelligence communities in America and Europe banned the usage of Lenovo and Huawei products because of backdoors? It was hillarious. Then it turns out the NSA is hijacking Cisco shipments to insert chips into unknowing customers' gear. Of course nothing was ever found in Chinese hardware, it was the American all along. Surprise!

I wouldn't go as far as saying that the American tech sector is crashing. This innovation has been going on in China and Russia for a long time, I think either journalists or PR people are using the NSA revelations as a marketing excuse.

Yes, "crashing" is too strong a term -- but if these countries really start turning away from Intel, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Apple -- it will certainly have a negative impact on their growth opportunities, and I suspect a lot of countries would be happy to follow the lead of Russia and China assuming they can offer quality and affordability.

More likely to affect B2B and Public Sector areas first. The masses will still want theie I-phones.

Cheers,

RD

[BOFH]

I don't think Chinese companies will be competing with Cisco anytime soon. Cisco's R&D is very impressive. Intel is holding back releasing functionality to take AMD by surprise, they've got plenty of aces up their sleeves. But then again, China is a master of corporate espionage. They can probably not catch up quickly, but they can mimic and be good enough for a cheaper price. They're light years from IBM's capacity, I don't think we'll see a Chinese Watson (or even S/370).

Reminds me of when I recently had to replace the water tap for my bathroom sink. One was American, for $50, and one was Chinese, for $12. Same shape, weight and function. Guess which one I bought.

I can't help but ponder on the idea that we'll be doing today's CPU executions on tomorrow's GPU. The acceleration of GPUs because of modern gaming is just incredible, with nVidia CUDA et al. But it's going to be a slow development now that everybody stopped writing assembly. This may however be the death to Intel and AMD as we know them, with or without the Chinese.