Windows support is still a little unpolished but these days you don't need Cygwin. You install msysgit which is natively compiled and comes with a bunch of Unix tools for running scripts and so on. Then you install TortoiseGit which invokes msysgit and presents things in dialogs for pushing, pulling, cloning, diffs etc. It works much the same way as TortoiseSVN.
There is also Eclipse Git which is implemented over JGit. So if you develop in Eclipse it's basically what you would expect of any source control system and very nicely integrated. Eclipse is moving to Git for development so it's likely to gain a lot more prominence in Java land.
However I don't believe the "real"* value of a bitcoin is at the current exchange rate, it's probably closer to $12. I think the bitcoin market has been in a bubble for the past few weeks. A story such as this might help to bring down the price, long enough for an investor to buy, and whatever forces are driving the bubble would (possibly) continue and the value would go up again.
Here is a graph of a boom and bust cycle (full article here). Here is a graph of Bitcoin exchange rates. Anyone with common sense should be hugely alarmed by the bubble which is forming or the likely outcome that will follow on from it.
The problems here are threefold in the normal bitcoin client:
The wallet in bitcoin is not encrypted. It's plaintext.
The wallet is stored in a predictable location, %APPDATA%/bitcoin/wallet.dat
There is nothing tying the wallet to a particular machine (e.g. encryption).
As such all one would need to do is steal the wallet, either through a trojan or possibly even a browser exploit (which guessed the APPDATA path by trying someone's likely login id) and that is that. Their copy of the wallet can initiate the transaction as readily as the original.
Frankly this is shoddy security and makes you think what else is not right about Bitcoin. At the very least the wallet should consist of a plain text receivables tray and an encrypted savings tray(s). When money is received it sits in receivables until the user types the password and the money moves over to the encrypted portion. Stealing the file only exposes what is in the receivables which hopefully isn't much for most people. But also the path name to the wallet should be randomized (like in a Firefox profile) and some other measures could be employed to strengthen the software such as second level security about all send operations.
Bitcoin also runs in an RPC server mode for people running Bitcoin miners. The server hands out work to the miners and they report back. Unfortunately the RPC also contains handy APIs that let the miner transfer arbitrary chunks of money even when it runs on a separate machine. I wonder if this theft is just small potatoes to what could happen. How hard would it be to con people to try out a new bitcoin miner? Maybe it would even play nice for a fixed period of time (for word of mouth to spread) before switching to robbery mode.
These sorts of things are not a surprise either. Anyone who has looked at the code could tell in an instant how bad it is in places.
Well not in this case if thieves attempt to cash out with $500,000 of real money and the entire Bitcoin economy slumps. Of course it would be interesting to see that in action since it will act as a dress rehearsal for when the real slump comes.
Git is great but the Windows tools are still a bit poor with msysgit & TortoiseGit being about 95% the way but still a bit flakey compared to TortoiseSVN. Fortunately for Java development, EGit is coming along very nicely and supposedly part of Eclipse 3.7.
When real stores have sales and they can be compared to Steam sales the price is cheaper there too. It may be that Steam (being digital) can reach back in time to sell stuff which is out of print in physical formats but that is no what I'm talking about here. I am talking about new games, games where the price on Steam can be compared to the exact same product in a physical format.
For example Duke Nukem Forever is €49.99 on Steam and €33.99 on Play.com, 32% cheaper. Dungeon Siege is €49.99 on Steam and €37.49 on Play.com (for limited edition with 4 bits of DLC), 25% cheaper. Portal 2 on Steam is €49.99 and €16.49 on Play.com, 67% cheaper.
Valve's own game which has only been out a month or so is 1/3 the price in a physical format. That's even with an middleman, postage, returns, production costs included Even if it Portal 2 goes on sale tomorrow I expect they'll flog it at ~€35. It'll only be after it's shelf life has expired (literally) that Steam starts to offer good value on titles.
Yes exactly. XBox sold a separate remote demonstrating a working solution. If Nintendo devices were so packed with technology they couldn't possibly afford to DVD enable the things, then sell a licence pack or a remote. Problem solved. More than solved since they'd probably money off the deal by rounding the price up a bit.
This sounds like so much bullshit really. The Wii is more than capable of playing DVDs and there are homebrew DVD players for the device. Given the Wii U is backwards compatible one can assume it is capable of playing DVDs too.
So what cost are they talking about? A couple of dollars in licensing? Well sell the DVD playback from the online store and that's that.
Perhaps they have more of a case for not implementing Blu Ray but absolutely not for DVD.
You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
Oh stop with this bullshit please. Valve's own games sell for 30% less in retail even when they must manufacture a box & DVD, ship it to a retailer, the retailer takes their cut, and things like returns / unsold stock must be taken into account. 30% cheaper and the bloody games ending up using Steam anyway.
The price of games on Steam is pure greed and Valve is as guilty as every other publisher. Why aren't they setting an example? Valve is in strong a position to change the landscape but they choose not to. Therefore they deserve as much blame as the publishers if not more.
Furthermore, why should publishers be in such a strong position to dictate prices anyway? In physical retail they can recommend an RRP / MSRP but they cannot enforce it and merchants will sell somewhere between the MSRP and their wholesale prices. A publisher should be entitled to set a wholesale price and an MSRP but they should have no right to choose the price a merchant sells their product for. Because when they do competition ceases to matter, it's the same damned price everywhere.
Their hand is going to be forced on the matter whether they like it or not. WOW apparently lost 600,000 subscribers since last year which is a drop of 5.5% or ~ $108 million in revenue. I don't think they can sustain their current model if subscribers continue to drop like that.
That's physical games. I'm talking about download games. Amazon et al could sell Steam games from their own store paying Valve $2 to sign and package a game. User benefits from competition, vendors benefit from sales and Steam benefits from a steady revenue stream and defacto dominance of the platform.
But concerning physical, the very fact that you can purchase a physical title for 30% less than it is on steam including middleman's cut and P&P more or less highlights the point what a scam the store is. Even Portal 2 was cheaper by 30% than it was online.
This of course assumes electronic downloads were governed by the same rules of retail as physical products. Sadly they're not and I wish the EU would do something about it. In physical land the RRP / MSRP is advice, whereas the price sold electronically appears to be contractual with every major vendor more or less engaged in a price cartel through mutually assured destruction style clauses which means the publisher dictates the price and there is very little room for competition.
The hate for steam most likely comes from the fact that Steam the service is tied to Steam the store. It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles. If the two were split apart (e.g. you could buy & download Steam powered games through Amazon, Play, etc. etc.) I doubt anyone would care so much if it allowed proper competition.
I can only speak of LOTRO but the difference between not paying anything and paying is grind and extra constraints that require you be a really good manager of inventory / character slots. You could probably work through to the upper levels by shunning some zones, killing everything that walks in front of you, completing all the achievements (for points), not spending points on frivolous things, and continuing in this fashion all the way through. You wouldn't be disadvantaged vs someone of the same level. You'll just take longer to reach the top.
I don't see any reason at all to disable shutdown. Any rational administrative system should be able to a) push updates to a box, b) apply them when the machine boots or out of hours, c) disable power saving temporarily so that a machine doesn't suspend when a patch is imminent. Leaving all machines on just for some patches is a pretty grotesque hack and IMO that's why govs should be regulating this stuff to make out of hours energy cost a lot more than in hours.
Companies, computer manufacturers and software providers would suddenly find the motivation to make administration work properly in such an environment.
Yep I think Bitcoin appeals to the Ron Paul libertarian mindset. The kind of geek who thinks Liberty Dollars are too low tech or something. The funny part is even Liberty Dollars (which is an MLM scam) are at least made from silver & gold which means they have a base value. Even if that value goes up or down vs the dollar it's still a value and could be seen as an investment.
Bitcoin is an artifice. It might have some really clever ideas, it may have been started with good intentions. But now it's a shell game. It will collapse and when it does people dumb enough to have sunk their savings in it will be left with so many bytes to show for it.
A class Ponzi might be organized but Bitcoin can be regarded as hivemind ponzi / pyramid. All those people with mined coins and early investors are simply trying to boost the scheme because they want to get out with as much money as possible. Real money, not bitcoins. At some point it will be recognized that the scheme is worthless (e.g. because of regulation, or a hack, or because next-best-thing appears) and the whole thing will collapse. The people left in the system when the music stops will have nothing to show for it. The latecomers are literally paying the early comers.
I've seen people trying to justify MLMs and pyramids and the mindset is virtually identical. The allure of large returns promotes the worst kind of greed and gullibility in people and its no different this time around.
It's vastly different. If all the gold were dug up or if it became increasingly difficult to extract it, companies wouldn't be able to invent a sucessor material called Gold2, GoldNG, Goyld etc. to repeat the cycle of mining. When BitCoin "matures" someone will produce something analogous to a new BitCoin with a promise that people who "get in early" can profit and the original Bitcoin will collapse in a heap.
Bitcoin only benefits people who get in early, hype the thing to high heavens and take the (real) money and run before it all collapses. Whether it was invented with the intention of being a pyramid / ponzi scheme is debateable but that's what it has become. It's a scam.
It's probably casuals who benefit most from Free To Play games. I play Lord of the Rings Online in fits and starts, maybe a couple of hours a week. I bought the game when it first came out but couldn't justify a monthly sub for such low intensity gameplay so I cancelled. Now it's FTP I've gone back and the new model suits me a lot better. I go weeks without buying something and when I do need something that requires points it tends to cost less far less than paying on a sub. I expect if you were really hardcore that it might go the other way (though there is a premium service which is sub based), but on balance I think more people benefit than lose out. It also means the game becomes more popular which benefits Turbine because even if they're earning less $$$ per player they're still gaining more players to make up for it.
I think the subscription model is going to decline severely the more games that exist which are FTP. I would not be surprised if even Blizzard is starting to see their subscriber numbers dip and are beginning to wonder what to do about it. Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
A bond is a security that represents a loan. It usually has a maturation period and can be traded. When the bond matures, the debtor is supposed to repay the bond holder (the creditor) with interest. Just like all loans, the liklihood the debtor will repay affects the interest rate and rating (risk) of the loan. Governments tend to have good ratings for bonds unless their economy is down the toilet which affects the interest return investors want to cover the risk. It's not a currency even if its backed by one. Furthermore, there isn't just one bond but countless bonds which trade hands on various exchanges which are backed by real money.
It's not remotely comparable to bitcoin which is a currency, not a security. Bonds could even be traded over bitcoin though it would be lunacy to do it at present given the lack of any legal status for bitcoins.
Your steps in logic broke the moment you invoked tu quoque. It doesn't even matter that your cut and paste job is grossly wrong (which it is), but that you didn't address the criticisms.
No it isn't a valid defense. Bitcoin has been criticised for particular characterstics and rather than addressing them, you do a pathetic cut and paste about bonds and ergo Bitcoin. Or something. It's a non defense.
Exactly, it's a pyramid scheme. All the proponents of it are simply boosting their holdings with the very real intent of getting the hell out at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also Eclipse Git which is implemented over JGit. So if you develop in Eclipse it's basically what you would expect of any source control system and very nicely integrated. Eclipse is moving to Git for development so it's likely to gain a lot more prominence in Java land.
Tu quoque arguments appear to be very common when the subject of Bitcoin comes up.
However I don't believe the "real"* value of a bitcoin is at the current exchange rate, it's probably closer to $12. I think the bitcoin market has been in a bubble for the past few weeks. A story such as this might help to bring down the price, long enough for an investor to buy, and whatever forces are driving the bubble would (possibly) continue and the value would go up again.
Here is a graph of a boom and bust cycle (full article here). Here is a graph of Bitcoin exchange rates. Anyone with common sense should be hugely alarmed by the bubble which is forming or the likely outcome that will follow on from it.
As such all one would need to do is steal the wallet, either through a trojan or possibly even a browser exploit (which guessed the APPDATA path by trying someone's likely login id) and that is that. Their copy of the wallet can initiate the transaction as readily as the original.
Frankly this is shoddy security and makes you think what else is not right about Bitcoin. At the very least the wallet should consist of a plain text receivables tray and an encrypted savings tray(s). When money is received it sits in receivables until the user types the password and the money moves over to the encrypted portion. Stealing the file only exposes what is in the receivables which hopefully isn't much for most people. But also the path name to the wallet should be randomized (like in a Firefox profile) and some other measures could be employed to strengthen the software such as second level security about all send operations.
Bitcoin also runs in an RPC server mode for people running Bitcoin miners. The server hands out work to the miners and they report back. Unfortunately the RPC also contains handy APIs that let the miner transfer arbitrary chunks of money even when it runs on a separate machine. I wonder if this theft is just small potatoes to what could happen. How hard would it be to con people to try out a new bitcoin miner? Maybe it would even play nice for a fixed period of time (for word of mouth to spread) before switching to robbery mode.
These sorts of things are not a surprise either. Anyone who has looked at the code could tell in an instant how bad it is in places.
Well not in this case if thieves attempt to cash out with $500,000 of real money and the entire Bitcoin economy slumps. Of course it would be interesting to see that in action since it will act as a dress rehearsal for when the real slump comes.
Git is great but the Windows tools are still a bit poor with msysgit & TortoiseGit being about 95% the way but still a bit flakey compared to TortoiseSVN. Fortunately for Java development, EGit is coming along very nicely and supposedly part of Eclipse 3.7.
For example Duke Nukem Forever is €49.99 on Steam and €33.99 on Play.com, 32% cheaper. Dungeon Siege is €49.99 on Steam and €37.49 on Play.com (for limited edition with 4 bits of DLC), 25% cheaper. Portal 2 on Steam is €49.99 and €16.49 on Play.com, 67% cheaper.
Valve's own game which has only been out a month or so is 1/3 the price in a physical format. That's even with an middleman, postage, returns, production costs included Even if it Portal 2 goes on sale tomorrow I expect they'll flog it at ~€35. It'll only be after it's shelf life has expired (literally) that Steam starts to offer good value on titles.
Yes exactly. XBox sold a separate remote demonstrating a working solution. If Nintendo devices were so packed with technology they couldn't possibly afford to DVD enable the things, then sell a licence pack or a remote. Problem solved. More than solved since they'd probably money off the deal by rounding the price up a bit.
So what cost are they talking about? A couple of dollars in licensing? Well sell the DVD playback from the online store and that's that.
Perhaps they have more of a case for not implementing Blu Ray but absolutely not for DVD.
You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
Oh stop with this bullshit please. Valve's own games sell for 30% less in retail even when they must manufacture a box & DVD, ship it to a retailer, the retailer takes their cut, and things like returns / unsold stock must be taken into account. 30% cheaper and the bloody games ending up using Steam anyway.
The price of games on Steam is pure greed and Valve is as guilty as every other publisher. Why aren't they setting an example? Valve is in strong a position to change the landscape but they choose not to. Therefore they deserve as much blame as the publishers if not more.
Furthermore, why should publishers be in such a strong position to dictate prices anyway? In physical retail they can recommend an RRP / MSRP but they cannot enforce it and merchants will sell somewhere between the MSRP and their wholesale prices. A publisher should be entitled to set a wholesale price and an MSRP but they should have no right to choose the price a merchant sells their product for. Because when they do competition ceases to matter, it's the same damned price everywhere.
Their hand is going to be forced on the matter whether they like it or not. WOW apparently lost 600,000 subscribers since last year which is a drop of 5.5% or ~ $108 million in revenue. I don't think they can sustain their current model if subscribers continue to drop like that.
But concerning physical, the very fact that you can purchase a physical title for 30% less than it is on steam including middleman's cut and P&P more or less highlights the point what a scam the store is. Even Portal 2 was cheaper by 30% than it was online.
This of course assumes electronic downloads were governed by the same rules of retail as physical products. Sadly they're not and I wish the EU would do something about it. In physical land the RRP / MSRP is advice, whereas the price sold electronically appears to be contractual with every major vendor more or less engaged in a price cartel through mutually assured destruction style clauses which means the publisher dictates the price and there is very little room for competition.
The hate for steam most likely comes from the fact that Steam the service is tied to Steam the store. It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles. If the two were split apart (e.g. you could buy & download Steam powered games through Amazon, Play, etc. etc.) I doubt anyone would care so much if it allowed proper competition.
I can only speak of LOTRO but the difference between not paying anything and paying is grind and extra constraints that require you be a really good manager of inventory / character slots. You could probably work through to the upper levels by shunning some zones, killing everything that walks in front of you, completing all the achievements (for points), not spending points on frivolous things, and continuing in this fashion all the way through. You wouldn't be disadvantaged vs someone of the same level. You'll just take longer to reach the top.
Companies, computer manufacturers and software providers would suddenly find the motivation to make administration work properly in such an environment.
Bitcoin is an artifice. It might have some really clever ideas, it may have been started with good intentions. But now it's a shell game. It will collapse and when it does people dumb enough to have sunk their savings in it will be left with so many bytes to show for it.
I've seen people trying to justify MLMs and pyramids and the mindset is virtually identical. The allure of large returns promotes the worst kind of greed and gullibility in people and its no different this time around.
Bitcoin only benefits people who get in early, hype the thing to high heavens and take the (real) money and run before it all collapses. Whether it was invented with the intention of being a pyramid / ponzi scheme is debateable but that's what it has become. It's a scam.
I think the subscription model is going to decline severely the more games that exist which are FTP. I would not be surprised if even Blizzard is starting to see their subscriber numbers dip and are beginning to wonder what to do about it. Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
It's not remotely comparable to bitcoin which is a currency, not a security. Bonds could even be traded over bitcoin though it would be lunacy to do it at present given the lack of any legal status for bitcoins.
Uhuh, now you can throw in ad hominems into your list of logical fallacies.
Your steps in logic broke the moment you invoked tu quoque. It doesn't even matter that your cut and paste job is grossly wrong (which it is), but that you didn't address the criticisms.
No it isn't a valid defense. Bitcoin has been criticised for particular characterstics and rather than addressing them, you do a pathetic cut and paste about bonds and ergo Bitcoin. Or something. It's a non defense.
Exactly, it's a pyramid scheme. All the proponents of it are simply boosting their holdings with the very real intent of getting the hell out at some point.
Yeah right. A classic tu quoque non defence.