how do you manage key exchange? waiit til you see your trusted friend in person?
i think schneiers main point still stands; its easy to create a crypto system that you cant defeat; much different story to create one that others cant....
How can those "stooge politicians"do anything? I mean, between the NSA and the DEA horizon program, it'll pretty much go like this:
Politician: you know, I think our laws have been broken and the intelligence community needs to be reformed.
NSA: that's nice. You know all those calls to your mistress? Want them leaked, because we've got them recorded. Heck we don't have them recorded, but since the public thinks we do, we could just splice together your previous conversations and make them sound damning enough
DEA: and 23 years ago you made phone calls to the girlfriend of someone we now know turned out to be a drug dealer or worse, a communist sympathizer. Your kids, too, appear heavily involved in the drug trade based on not who they call, but who their friends call.
Face it, anyone, even mother Theresa, can have their name dragged through the dirt from these guys. The amount of data they could feasibly have is just that damning of an amount... I just can't expect any meaningful reform when every politician knows full well that any skeleton from their lifelong closet could be turned loose on them at a moments notice...
On one hand, you could say that the auto dealer lobby succeeded in preventing tesla from selling their cars directly in Texas;
On the other, you could say that tesla refuses to sell their cars through the dealer networks already in place.
There's the argument about free markets, but if tesla did what every other car manufacturer does and declares a list price and suggested sticker price, and let dealers compete for customers based on either price (by selling for less than sticker, or throwing in accessories, or service) they're not willing to allow a free market to function, with one uniform price in place through out the country...
It doesn't revert to yahoo. It would be his estates property. And his estates responsibility to fight for it. If he left any money to tie up loose ends with?
Heck, if there's a mirror I'd host it. The question is who knows his dns settings?
It's not regulating bitcoin. It's impossible to. But they can regulate us domiciled companies doing business in the state of New York with customers based in New York and other states that New York has reciprocating agreements with (which is probably all. Maybe not Wyoming, but probably them too)
How many school lunches are served with a quarter cup of ketsup? Because that's what the argument was about, ketchup being a vegetable so schools wouldn't have to serve real veggies. A quarter cup of ketchup may have real nutrients, but no one actually eats that much on their cafeteria hamburger.
The designated market makers do a lot of trading, yes, as part of their function, which is a special roll. But the HFT crowd are not market makers - when people talk about High Frequency Trading, they're not referring to market makers, they're referring to the crowd that throws 1000 orders out there only to cancel them a tenth of second later.
I don't pat myself on the back over slashdot ratings.... But since you're hung up on it, even without this +5, i got two others in this thread. Maybe I'll sleep better tonight.
But to the topic, a 0.03% tax on the dollar value of the transaction IS a tax on volume. And there's no fairer way to do it. A per share tax will disproportionately hit, yes, lower priced issues, just as another poster alluded to. And HFT is not centered on low dollar priced issues, it's centered on highly liquid shares, which can have any price. So you'd want a tax on the dollar volume, whether someones HFT'ing penny stocks or Berkshire Hathaway, it's all the same, adds the same noise for all the other investors and traders.
Your example is just regular trading, not high frequency trading. There is frequently no human involvement at all in HFT. It's just scanning bids and asks and offering just a hair above each.
Johnny wants to buy an apple and is willing to pay up to 51 cents for it, and Chris is wiling to sell one for 50 cents. Chris goes reaching into his pocket to take out 50 cents, but while hes in the process of doing so, Mike the HFT guy jumps inline and puts in an order for 10 apples for $5.01, only takes one of the apples and sells it to Chris for 51 cents. Now the seller moves on to sell more of his Apples, and sees offers for 100 apples for $50.20, another 100 apples for $50.30, and so forth. So he keeps going to each person who'se putting out an offer only to find that every changes their mind right before he knocks on the door.
I could keep running down the road with this analogy, but it's not really worth it.
High frequency traders like to say that they are helping the markets by providing liquidity. THat's false - it's fake liquidity. They're not market makers who must post bids and asks at all times, it's fake liquidity that's only there when its convienenty. As soon as there's a spike or crash, that liquidity vaporizes. Same with your bids and asks that you're pointing out - a HUGE percentage of HFT orders are cancelled within microseconds of being placed - those bids and asks might look like they're there, but most of the time, they're not there at all.
High frequency trading is one of the few activities out there that trully provides zero benefit for society, and in fact creates expenses that the rest of us have to pay for. Exchanges need to beef up their computer systems in order to handle all the volume that could be unleashed by the HFT crowd; that's an expense that's getting passed on to all of us, not just them. The extra liquidity promises are false. And the whole system can fall apart and wreak havoc, either on the markets as a whole or to participants, just due to shoddy programming (think flash crash, think Knight Capital). Meanwhile, it prevents real price discovery from occuring, no one can discerne which bids are real bids by interested investors versus which ones might disappear the second you try to fill them.
I'm sorry. I'll defend derivatitves, hedge funds, mortgage backed securities and nearly anything else in the capital markets, but high frequency trading is not anywhere on that list.
a 0.03% isn't a tax per share it's a tax on the dollar value of the final trade when executed - whether it's one share at $100,000 per share or 100,000 shares at $1 per share, the tax would be the same. There'd be no incentive by anyone to favor more expensive shares over cheaper ones.
It seems far from a "the rich are too rich" type of tax. It would apply evenly to a hedge fund manager or a 20 year old making their first IRA contibution. A 0.03% tax would go unfelt by that 20 year old and it would also go mostly unnoticed by a Warren Buffett. Heck it would go unnoticed by a trader sitting at home. The rules would be the same across the board, but someone executing a hundred trades per second would be the only one who would feel an impact.
Rubbish. I am far from a bitcoin cheerleader, but i can't imagine that this is the government firing an opening salvo at bitcoin.
Why would they cut off only Dwolla, but leave Mt.Gox standing? US clients can still wire funds to and from Gox, and can transfer their bitcoin balances anywhere they choose.
Why wouldn't they call in a favor from Japan and raid Mt.Gox's offices there and shutdown their computers - that would freeze all of the money that Gox is holding AND freeze all of their clients Bitcoin balances? Think about what the gov't did to Kim Dotcom and attempts with the Pirate Bay.
Why would the lead be taken by the DHS rather than the Treasury or Office of Controlled Foreign Assets?
Why would they leave the mt.gox domain name operating as normal? They pull domains that are linked to illegal activity at the snap of a finger, why leave Mt.Gox up and running?
And why go after Mt.Gox first - I mean, yes, they're the biggest, but with a few swieps of the pen, the government could shutdown every bitcoin exchange and transmitter in the US. It would take just about no effort to accomplish that, and then they could focus on the big fish.
And would they really need to go through that effort? they've got the NSA - i'm certain that those fellows could direct enough resources at the bitcoin network that they could overtake the collective hashing power that the network now has. Maybe not immediately, but in a relatively short period of time. All they would have to do is broadcast they they now have the majority of the hashing power, and there goes all confidence in Bitcoin. Who would tie up any capital in there at all if they know that any single entity could suddenly decide to start overwriting transactions and generally causing all sorts of havoc to the network?
So no. As much as I don't think bitcoins have a long-term future, or even a medium term one, this isn't an opening shot of a bigger war.
Where have you been? Clearly not readings articles and comments on slashdot. Because if you were, you'd know that open source is the only way to go. Not just that, but information wants to be free, besides which, piracy impliesv"theft" which can only occur if you deprive someone of their bits when you acquire those bits of your own. So if your tool is any good, it will be copied rampantly. The drm mechanism will be cracked, and 9 out of every 10 users will be using copies for which you'll receive zero compensation. That leaves providing support as your only option. Which is useless for a simple tool that presumably would y need much support.
That leaves your best option as making the program incredibly complicated, so that e en If someone gets their hands on your program, it'll be useless without a support contract.
Because everyone here knows - those bits you create are just bits. App, music or movie, the creator of them shou,d expect no control or compensation once they go on the Internet. Right guys?
what if the court finds that there is actual infringement going on and orders damages not be paid until piratebay ceases providing magnet links to other infringing material on their website?
I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for piratebay. It's piracy plain and simple. People ought to own up to what they're doing, stealing, not saying information wants to be free or what not. And enjoy it while it lasts. Which will be a much shorter period of time if piratebay instists on instead of trying to stay one step ahead of the law and technology, instead decides they want to fight out such trivial cases in the courtrooms...
this is a great big fuckup on piratebays part... they're high on confidence or what not. WHat do they want to prove? That copying copyrighted material is illegal? Do they really want to go there?
Very silly idea, and not at all thought through. Unless they did think it through and still determine that this was something worth pretending to pursue.
There wasn't much of a market for that I'm guessing, as who wants to crank a radio non-stop just to listen? So the company he worked with created a radio whose battery was powered by the hand crank, and that was the one that sold, not his design.
If HE was Microsoft and the company was him, you'd all be championing them for successfully working around the patent, and making a better product to boot. If he'd patented the hand crank to generate DC power alone, then he'd have had a defendable patent, but he patented a complicated device and someone else came along and created a different device that was similar and improved.
Again, reverse the rolls and the company in the story would be the hero and he'd be the villian for trying to apply a form of patent creep to his original invention...
"“I was very foolish. I didn’t protect my product properly and allowed other people to take my product away."
He was foolish. Enough said. If you don't take advantage of the laws and protections that you're afforded, and then you get screwed, it's not a failing of the laws, it's a failing of the inventor.
I was just discussing this the other day, how so many companies overlook the importance of marketing, because it isn't easily quantifiable. A business owner can be far too tempted to think that their sales are organic, word of mouth generated and cease writing further checks to whoever does their marketing. That, at least, is what has occurred at a restaurant I like a lot - and since the marketing dollars have disappeared, so has crowd. All other things being equal, marketing is was separates a successful business or product launch from a poor one or a failure. Taken to an extreme, marketing is what separates a successful bad product over an unsuccessful good product. I'm glad that you realized this too.
As for how to go about doing it. I'd say you're correct in wanting to not bring Ina non performing marketing partner. So keep them separate, outside of thie business. Take in money from one of the many investors that wants in and start working with a person or firm. If you don't like them, you're not married to them.
Considering that for the first one or two decades of Photoshops existance, the print industry was the main purchaser of photoshop (or the design industry, which would then send finished files to the print industry), it's been a pretty important feature. OK, it wasn't there in version 1.0, but soon thereafter. Yes, now more and more design work is done for online audiences, but many companies do in fact blend their online and offline marketing pieces.
CMYK is an incredibly important feature; maybe slashdotters overlook it, but releasing an image editor without CMYK was like introducing a database without the ability to sort the data. Pantone important too, but not nearly as much as CMYK.
As for GIMP. I've tried it again and again over the years, and even for free, i can't imagine replacing Photoshop with it. It might just be that I've used Photoshop so long that it's completely ingrained in me, but i've always failed to see why people are all excited about GIMP. It seems like a great free program to get you feet wet with, but once you start pushing forward, Photoshop has been the place to be.
Albeit, I haven't touched GIMP in a couple of years, but I can't imagine that they re-envisioned the program since the last time I looked.
It's definetly not apples to apples, as there is no aquisition cost stated for the home server, just the upgrades that will make it serve its new life. Which is fine for him, but not good for anyone else trying to objectively figure out the same for their own circumstance.
That said - I investigated the same, and ultimately wound up setting up a server at home as well. I actually invested money into it, buying a new Intel i7 machine, a pair of 2 TB hard drives to go along with the 1 TB driver it came with, and boosted the RAM to 16 GB. Yes, it was an investment, comparitively speaking. But for that investment, I've got:
A Fileserver from Turnkey Linux, which I look at as a Dropbox replacement, except the space is essentially unlimited and the data resides on my own computer rather than on Amazon's; I can access it via the web or via an iPhone app, though.
An SSH Gateway to the rest of my house. Currently, it runs CentOS, but will be creating an OpenBSD VM specifically for that purpose (yes, I know that Theo would disapprove, but it seems to me that all things being equal, if a VM is going to be used anyway, may as well go with the one that's likely more secure, even though it would seem from the dated conversations I've read, that he'd say the security of the system is shot for running in a VM).
Several other instances that I can spin up as desired; a Windows 7 VM (by recyling the OEM original license that came with the machine, which I assume is legal), so I can access Quickbooks when needed from anywhere, a dedicated Centos Solr Server which is running for a test project, and several other dedicated VM's that I need from time to time..
And lots of spare capacity to boot. I'd hate to see what my monthly charges would be for this many dedicated VM's from a cloud provider. And I definitely appreciate KVM's ability to compartmentalize processes, while sharing the underlying hardware. Much cheaper this way, I think, than having 7 or 8 VM's at Amazon, some always on, others turning on and off as needed. And far cheaper than dedicating a different machine to each task, both up front and in terms of recurring (electricity) charges.
But basically - I'd think it would be expecting something for nothing to think that you could take a 24/7 computer and make your costs go down by putting it in the cloud. The provider has the same costs as you, maybe the negotiate cheaper rates for electricity, but after that, they then have to pay staff and turn a profit. That probably changes some once you're talking tens or hundreds of servers, and especially does once you're using them on demand rather than having your instances run 24/7. But for a single server, I don't think you'd find a cost savings going to the cloud if you look at it over the long run. The downside is you need to pay your fixed costs up front, rather than amortizing them across the life of your VM usage if you went to the cloud.
I tend to think that unless the degree is required for a certification or license you're going for, it's most likely an overrated piece of paper that's extremely expensive and time consuming to obtain.
I have zero college under my belt, entered the workforce straight from high school and by the time my friends started graduating, I was getting hired over them And earning more to boot, as I actually had 4 years of experience and a portfolio of real world work. Fast forward 20 years later (where I am now) and I wouldn't have done it any differently. Not once in my life have I been turned down for lack of degree or lack of diploma. Nor did I have college debt to pay off.
The flip side is you need to be self motivated. I can't even start to list off how many books and manuals I've read. I was probably 17 and wanted to get my feet wet video editing, so I read the manual for adobe premiere 4.0 (or maybe 4.2) cover to cover. And even today, I'm awaiting my delivery from amazon of a book about solr and another about Hadoop.
If you're motivated you can do it. Getting started is the hardest - with no education or experience it'll be had to break in. I offered my services free originally, and once I was hired spent countless hours at the office after hours fiddling around and learning. And now, again, no complaints
At least for ios updates, ignore the version number and just consider it a dot update. Really, everything has been so slow and incremental, it's hard looking back to name which features came from which ipdate. Not like it matters, and there's no cause for disappointment - the updates are provided free and incrementally add new feature to your iPhone whether its2 months old or 2 years old. Ios 6.1 could have been ios 4.7 for all I care - even version numbers are marketing gimmick at this point. For everyone, not just apple. But what can you expect, so many of these technologies are now matured, it's not like major revisions are in order for any platform at this point, I don't think.
Slashdot Mirror
how do you manage key exchange? waiit til you see your trusted friend in person?
i think schneiers main point still stands; its easy to create a crypto system that you cant defeat; much different story to create one that others cant....
A) for the rest of us that arent math geniuses, that gives us no help....
B) how many refinements were added during the peer review process?
How can those "stooge politicians"do anything? I mean, between the NSA and the DEA horizon program, it'll pretty much go like this:
Politician: you know, I think our laws have been broken and the intelligence community needs to be reformed.
NSA: that's nice. You know all those calls to your mistress? Want them leaked, because we've got them recorded. Heck we don't have them recorded, but since the public thinks we do, we could just splice together your previous conversations and make them sound damning enough
DEA: and 23 years ago you made phone calls to the girlfriend of someone we now know turned out to be a drug dealer or worse, a communist sympathizer. Your kids, too, appear heavily involved in the drug trade based on not who they call, but who their friends call.
Face it, anyone, even mother Theresa, can have their name dragged through the dirt from these guys. The amount of data they could feasibly have is just that damning of an amount... I just can't expect any meaningful reform when every politician knows full well that any skeleton from their lifelong closet could be turned loose on them at a moments notice...
On one hand, you could say that the auto dealer lobby succeeded in preventing tesla from selling their cars directly in Texas;
On the other, you could say that tesla refuses to sell their cars through the dealer networks already in place.
There's the argument about free markets, but if tesla did what every other car manufacturer does and declares a list price and suggested sticker price, and let dealers compete for customers based on either price (by selling for less than sticker, or throwing in accessories, or service) they're not willing to allow a free market to function, with one uniform price in place through out the country...
Just to take the contrarian view...
It doesn't revert to yahoo. It would be his estates property. And his estates responsibility to fight for it. If he left any money to tie up loose ends with?
Heck, if there's a mirror I'd host it. The question is who knows his dns settings?
It's not regulating bitcoin. It's impossible to. But they can regulate us domiciled companies doing business in the state of New York with customers based in New York and other states that New York has reciprocating agreements with (which is probably all. Maybe not Wyoming, but probably them too)
It doesn't even seem so extreme. I mean, all we have to do is print up 60 trillion then there's no more problem, right?
Now, if the problem would cost 21,000,001 bitcoins to fix, we would have a horrendous situation! :)
How many school lunches are served with a quarter cup of ketsup? Because that's what the argument was about, ketchup being a vegetable so schools wouldn't have to serve real veggies. A quarter cup of ketchup may have real nutrients, but no one actually eats that much on their cafeteria hamburger.
The designated market makers do a lot of trading, yes, as part of their function, which is a special roll. But the HFT crowd are not market makers - when people talk about High Frequency Trading, they're not referring to market makers, they're referring to the crowd that throws 1000 orders out there only to cancel them a tenth of second later.
I don't pat myself on the back over slashdot ratings.... But since you're hung up on it, even without this +5, i got two others in this thread. Maybe I'll sleep better tonight.
But to the topic, a 0.03% tax on the dollar value of the transaction IS a tax on volume. And there's no fairer way to do it. A per share tax will disproportionately hit, yes, lower priced issues, just as another poster alluded to. And HFT is not centered on low dollar priced issues, it's centered on highly liquid shares, which can have any price. So you'd want a tax on the dollar volume, whether someones HFT'ing penny stocks or Berkshire Hathaway, it's all the same, adds the same noise for all the other investors and traders.
Your example is just regular trading, not high frequency trading. There is frequently no human involvement at all in HFT. It's just scanning bids and asks and offering just a hair above each.
Johnny wants to buy an apple and is willing to pay up to 51 cents for it, and Chris is wiling to sell one for 50 cents. Chris goes reaching into his pocket to take out 50 cents, but while hes in the process of doing so, Mike the HFT guy jumps inline and puts in an order for 10 apples for $5.01, only takes one of the apples and sells it to Chris for 51 cents. Now the seller moves on to sell more of his Apples, and sees offers for 100 apples for $50.20, another 100 apples for $50.30, and so forth. So he keeps going to each person who'se putting out an offer only to find that every changes their mind right before he knocks on the door.
I could keep running down the road with this analogy, but it's not really worth it.
High frequency traders like to say that they are helping the markets by providing liquidity. THat's false - it's fake liquidity. They're not market makers who must post bids and asks at all times, it's fake liquidity that's only there when its convienenty. As soon as there's a spike or crash, that liquidity vaporizes. Same with your bids and asks that you're pointing out - a HUGE percentage of HFT orders are cancelled within microseconds of being placed - those bids and asks might look like they're there, but most of the time, they're not there at all.
High frequency trading is one of the few activities out there that trully provides zero benefit for society, and in fact creates expenses that the rest of us have to pay for. Exchanges need to beef up their computer systems in order to handle all the volume that could be unleashed by the HFT crowd; that's an expense that's getting passed on to all of us, not just them. The extra liquidity promises are false. And the whole system can fall apart and wreak havoc, either on the markets as a whole or to participants, just due to shoddy programming (think flash crash, think Knight Capital). Meanwhile, it prevents real price discovery from occuring, no one can discerne which bids are real bids by interested investors versus which ones might disappear the second you try to fill them.
I'm sorry. I'll defend derivatitves, hedge funds, mortgage backed securities and nearly anything else in the capital markets, but high frequency trading is not anywhere on that list.
a 0.03% isn't a tax per share it's a tax on the dollar value of the final trade when executed - whether it's one share at $100,000 per share or 100,000 shares at $1 per share, the tax would be the same. There'd be no incentive by anyone to favor more expensive shares over cheaper ones.
It seems far from a "the rich are too rich" type of tax. It would apply evenly to a hedge fund manager or a 20 year old making their first IRA contibution. A 0.03% tax would go unfelt by that 20 year old and it would also go mostly unnoticed by a Warren Buffett. Heck it would go unnoticed by a trader sitting at home. The rules would be the same across the board, but someone executing a hundred trades per second would be the only one who would feel an impact.
Rubbish. I am far from a bitcoin cheerleader, but i can't imagine that this is the government firing an opening salvo at bitcoin.
Why would they cut off only Dwolla, but leave Mt.Gox standing? US clients can still wire funds to and from Gox, and can transfer their bitcoin balances anywhere they choose.
Why wouldn't they call in a favor from Japan and raid Mt.Gox's offices there and shutdown their computers - that would freeze all of the money that Gox is holding AND freeze all of their clients Bitcoin balances? Think about what the gov't did to Kim Dotcom and attempts with the Pirate Bay.
Why would the lead be taken by the DHS rather than the Treasury or Office of Controlled Foreign Assets?
Why would they leave the mt.gox domain name operating as normal? They pull domains that are linked to illegal activity at the snap of a finger, why leave Mt.Gox up and running?
And why go after Mt.Gox first - I mean, yes, they're the biggest, but with a few swieps of the pen, the government could shutdown every bitcoin exchange and transmitter in the US. It would take just about no effort to accomplish that, and then they could focus on the big fish.
And would they really need to go through that effort? they've got the NSA - i'm certain that those fellows could direct enough resources at the bitcoin network that they could overtake the collective hashing power that the network now has. Maybe not immediately, but in a relatively short period of time. All they would have to do is broadcast they they now have the majority of the hashing power, and there goes all confidence in Bitcoin. Who would tie up any capital in there at all if they know that any single entity could suddenly decide to start overwriting transactions and generally causing all sorts of havoc to the network?
So no. As much as I don't think bitcoins have a long-term future, or even a medium term one, this isn't an opening shot of a bigger war.
Where have you been? Clearly not readings articles and comments on slashdot. Because if you were, you'd know that open source is the only way to go. Not just that, but information wants to be free, besides which, piracy impliesv"theft" which can only occur if you deprive someone of their bits when you acquire those bits of your own. So if your tool is any good, it will be copied rampantly. The drm mechanism will be cracked, and 9 out of every 10 users will be using copies for which you'll receive zero compensation. That leaves providing support as your only option. Which is useless for a simple tool that presumably would y need much support.
That leaves your best option as making the program incredibly complicated, so that e en If someone gets their hands on your program, it'll be useless without a support contract.
Because everyone here knows - those bits you create are just bits. App, music or movie, the creator of them shou,d expect no control or compensation once they go on the Internet. Right guys?
what if the court finds that there is actual infringement going on and orders damages not be paid until piratebay ceases providing magnet links to other infringing material on their website?
I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for piratebay. It's piracy plain and simple. People ought to own up to what they're doing, stealing, not saying information wants to be free or what not. And enjoy it while it lasts. Which will be a much shorter period of time if piratebay instists on instead of trying to stay one step ahead of the law and technology, instead decides they want to fight out such trivial cases in the courtrooms...
this is a great big fuckup on piratebays part... they're high on confidence or what not. WHat do they want to prove? That copying copyrighted material is illegal? Do they really want to go there?
Very silly idea, and not at all thought through. Unless they did think it through and still determine that this was something worth pretending to pursue.
I'm not an inventor nor do I pretend to be.
But the guy created a hand-crank powered radio.
There wasn't much of a market for that I'm guessing, as who wants to crank a radio non-stop just to listen? So the company he worked with created a radio whose battery was powered by the hand crank, and that was the one that sold, not his design.
If HE was Microsoft and the company was him, you'd all be championing them for successfully working around the patent, and making a better product to boot. If he'd patented the hand crank to generate DC power alone, then he'd have had a defendable patent, but he patented a complicated device and someone else came along and created a different device that was similar and improved.
Again, reverse the rolls and the company in the story would be the hero and he'd be the villian for trying to apply a form of patent creep to his original invention...
He said it himself:
"“I was very foolish. I didn’t protect my product properly and allowed other people to take my product away."
He was foolish. Enough said. If you don't take advantage of the laws and protections that you're afforded, and then you get screwed, it's not a failing of the laws, it's a failing of the inventor.
I was just discussing this the other day, how so many companies overlook the importance of marketing, because it isn't easily quantifiable. A business owner can be far too tempted to think that their sales are organic, word of mouth generated and cease writing further checks to whoever does their marketing. That, at least, is what has occurred at a restaurant I like a lot - and since the marketing dollars have disappeared, so has crowd. All other things being equal, marketing is was separates a successful business or product launch from a poor one or a failure. Taken to an extreme, marketing is what separates a successful bad product over an unsuccessful good product. I'm glad that you realized this too.
As for how to go about doing it. I'd say you're correct in wanting to not bring Ina non performing marketing partner. So keep them separate, outside of thie business. Take in money from one of the many investors that wants in and start working with a person or firm. If you don't like them, you're not married to them.
Considering that for the first one or two decades of Photoshops existance, the print industry was the main purchaser of photoshop (or the design industry, which would then send finished files to the print industry), it's been a pretty important feature. OK, it wasn't there in version 1.0, but soon thereafter. Yes, now more and more design work is done for online audiences, but many companies do in fact blend their online and offline marketing pieces.
CMYK is an incredibly important feature; maybe slashdotters overlook it, but releasing an image editor without CMYK was like introducing a database without the ability to sort the data. Pantone important too, but not nearly as much as CMYK.
As for GIMP. I've tried it again and again over the years, and even for free, i can't imagine replacing Photoshop with it. It might just be that I've used Photoshop so long that it's completely ingrained in me, but i've always failed to see why people are all excited about GIMP. It seems like a great free program to get you feet wet with, but once you start pushing forward, Photoshop has been the place to be.
Albeit, I haven't touched GIMP in a couple of years, but I can't imagine that they re-envisioned the program since the last time I looked.
It's definetly not apples to apples, as there is no aquisition cost stated for the home server, just the upgrades that will make it serve its new life. Which is fine for him, but not good for anyone else trying to objectively figure out the same for their own circumstance.
That said - I investigated the same, and ultimately wound up setting up a server at home as well. I actually invested money into it, buying a new Intel i7 machine, a pair of 2 TB hard drives to go along with the 1 TB driver it came with, and boosted the RAM to 16 GB. Yes, it was an investment, comparitively speaking. But for that investment, I've got:
A Fileserver from Turnkey Linux, which I look at as a Dropbox replacement, except the space is essentially unlimited and the data resides on my own computer rather than on Amazon's; I can access it via the web or via an iPhone app, though.
An SSH Gateway to the rest of my house. Currently, it runs CentOS, but will be creating an OpenBSD VM specifically for that purpose (yes, I know that Theo would disapprove, but it seems to me that all things being equal, if a VM is going to be used anyway, may as well go with the one that's likely more secure, even though it would seem from the dated conversations I've read, that he'd say the security of the system is shot for running in a VM).
Several other instances that I can spin up as desired; a Windows 7 VM (by recyling the OEM original license that came with the machine, which I assume is legal), so I can access Quickbooks when needed from anywhere, a dedicated Centos Solr Server which is running for a test project, and several other dedicated VM's that I need from time to time..
And lots of spare capacity to boot. I'd hate to see what my monthly charges would be for this many dedicated VM's from a cloud provider. And I definitely appreciate KVM's ability to compartmentalize processes, while sharing the underlying hardware. Much cheaper this way, I think, than having 7 or 8 VM's at Amazon, some always on, others turning on and off as needed. And far cheaper than dedicating a different machine to each task, both up front and in terms of recurring (electricity) charges.
But basically - I'd think it would be expecting something for nothing to think that you could take a 24/7 computer and make your costs go down by putting it in the cloud. The provider has the same costs as you, maybe the negotiate cheaper rates for electricity, but after that, they then have to pay staff and turn a profit. That probably changes some once you're talking tens or hundreds of servers, and especially does once you're using them on demand rather than having your instances run 24/7. But for a single server, I don't think you'd find a cost savings going to the cloud if you look at it over the long run. The downside is you need to pay your fixed costs up front, rather than amortizing them across the life of your VM usage if you went to the cloud.
I tend to think that unless the degree is required for a certification or license you're going for, it's most likely an overrated piece of paper that's extremely expensive and time consuming to obtain.
I have zero college under my belt, entered the workforce straight from high school and by the time my friends started graduating, I was getting hired over them And earning more to boot, as I actually had 4 years of experience and a portfolio of real world work. Fast forward 20 years later (where I am now) and I wouldn't have done it any differently. Not once in my life have I been turned down for lack of degree or lack of diploma. Nor did I have college debt to pay off.
The flip side is you need to be self motivated. I can't even start to list off how many books and manuals I've read. I was probably 17 and wanted to get my feet wet video editing, so I read the manual for adobe premiere 4.0 (or maybe 4.2) cover to cover. And even today, I'm awaiting my delivery from amazon of a book about solr and another about Hadoop.
If you're motivated you can do it. Getting started is the hardest - with no education or experience it'll be had to break in. I offered my services free originally, and once I was hired spent countless hours at the office after hours fiddling around and learning. And now, again, no complaints
At least for ios updates, ignore the version number and just consider it a dot update. Really, everything has been so slow and incremental, it's hard looking back to name which features came from which ipdate. Not like it matters, and there's no cause for disappointment - the updates are provided free and incrementally add new feature to your iPhone whether its2 months old or 2 years old. Ios 6.1 could have been ios 4.7 for all I care - even version numbers are marketing gimmick at this point. For everyone, not just apple. But what can you expect, so many of these technologies are now matured, it's not like major revisions are in order for any platform at this point, I don't think.