That's marketing for you; a good proportion of Electric Imp are brits, and we generally don't get "really excited" by anything short of the prospect of a good curry and a nice pint.
Having been through other chains of acquisitions (empeg was acquired by Rio who then went chapter 11 and were acquired by DNNA who sold the engineering team to Sigmatel) where the plot was lost entirely over the passage of time, I'm entitled to play the "meh" card if necessary.
In this case though, I'm personally really excited about the possibilities. Watch this space :)
There may be argument about the BBS software being "definitive", but it was certainly used to run some of the most popular Acorn BBSes - there were installs with 16 dial-in modems in Hong Kong, for example. It has also been decades since I wrote a terminal emulator... simpler times!
As with most things the empeg was a team effort as were all the iPhones I worked on at Apple (the first one through to the 4S) and the Nest... lots of amazing engineers doing incredible work, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to work with them. Ditto for Electric Imp, which was a fresh look at the problem of exchanging data between the cloud and the real world.
I grew up in rural Somerset in the UK and never imagined I'd get to work at Apple and be wrangling power budgets with Wendell Sander. Almost everything in life revolves around being at the right place at the right time and being willing to take risks.
I have one similar to this. I don't think it is an R900, but it's an older 1U rack mount. I forget if it's a 12 or 24 core xeon, but it was dirt cheap, came with 72 gigs of RAM, and sounds like a jet engine turning it on. I recently built a Ryzen box with 128 gigs of RAM and it's much quieter...
We used to use an ELK cluster but it was always breaking - I'm sure this stuff can be reliable but we just wanted an easy way to search ~300GB of logs (10GB/day)
Somehow I came across scalyr and it's just phenomenally fast - and cost less than our ELK cluster. Definitely worth trying if it provides the features you need.
You should probably look at our stuff - electricimp.com
There are over a million commercial devices on our platform, which is essentially a mass production platform that's excessively well documented, tested, scalable, and free to prototype with. Been in the market for 5 years now.
Critically, we take security very seriously and maintain the security stack on every device for its lifetime - whether or not the product owner has cycles to spend on security, we keep it up to date. We're also the first and currently only platform which has been UL2900-2-2 certified - yes an arbitrary standard but it's all sensible stuff.
It doesn't look like an Arduino, but that architecture is not well suited to IoT in our collective opinions, and individual customers with hundreds of thousands of devices on our platform agree.
A silicon vendor's interest generally dies off once they have a design win...
Yeah, I did. He did shout at Apple too, and people in his software teams (ie, non-iOS iPods) did work ridiculous hours 7 days a week for months before each iPod shipped. It was less of an issue because less things went wrong, though.
IMO this was because Apple knew how to make hardware, generally, and hence things didn't go far off the rails - he got a lot of support from Apple.
However, Tony didn't know the first thing about software and appeared to assume that it was something you threw new grads at because they'd hammer at it until it got through QA. Each year the teetering pile of crap grew higher and harder to ship...
Now he's master of all he surveys, he's worked out that actually consistently delivering complex projects (which have rather more complex software than an iPod) is damn hard. Shouting is his reflex reaction when this doesn't go well.
Having been through other chains of acquisitions (empeg was acquired by Rio who then went chapter 11 and were acquired by DNNA who sold the engineering team to Sigmatel) where the plot was lost entirely over the passage of time, I'm entitled to play the "meh" card if necessary.
In this case though, I'm personally really excited about the possibilities. Watch this space :)