Yggdrasil was the one that came with an instillation video tape that was so dry, it would put one to sleep.
Not that I ever saw. I bought a CD-ROM, that was it. It booted from the CD-ROM, it asked for very basic things like where to install on the hard drive, username, password, that was about it. I guess it would be boring to sit and watch it install but you could mostly walk away and it would install and configure hardware without much if any interaction from the user. It was years ahead of its time with respect to a simple Linux installation. Again, I benefited from popular motherboards and cards so auto detection worked fine.
If your recollection is correct it wouldn't matter. You could take a nap and awake later to find Yggdrasil installed, rebooted and waiting for you to login.
I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.
On my 486DX2-66 I installed Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux from a cd-rom. Graphics, audio, networking, etc all just worked automatically, it really was plug and play, as easy as a MS Windows install. Only later did I try slackware and learn the more typical cluster-f that was Linux installation, entering various technical parameters for your monitor in order to get graphics to work. To be fair my video was a popular ATI, my audio a popular Soundblaster, my networking a popular...
Some kind of bug that only affects 24/7 usage of the software or hardware (temperature reliability issues)?
It might involve the pricing and shortages of NVIDIA GPUs in the consumer market? Locally GTX 1060 and above are out of stock, 1050s are heading that way.
iOS is run by ARM.
Half of Android is.
Rasbery Pi are run on ARM.
Sure, but I was responding to the "desktop arena" mentioned by AC.
Haven't tried Pi as a desktop, for me its just replaced the headless Linux boxes (retired PCs) in the closet. Assuming a console environment no longer counts as a desktop.
as ubiquitous as Arm is in the embedded market, it still remains a non-player in the productivity consumer and desktop arena. Why no standard form factor MBs with Arm or MIPS that could be popped into a standard case or rack. I'm not talking about $10,000 high end "solutions". I'm talking buisiness, SOHO, and consumer pricing.
You realize some chromebooks run ARM?
And that they are running the Linux kernel?
And that it is possible to install Desktop Linux to those chromebooks if the owner chooses to?
Apple's newest Chicago store garnered earlier attention for its roof design that mimics a MacBook Air, but one clear oversight is that there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice.
Doesn't the same thing also apply to most, if not all, of the precious metal ad spammers on television?
Yes. However some things are more foolish than others.
Does gold or silver have any intrinsic value over what another person is willing to pay you for it? Sure, both can be used in the manufacturing of some products but there are alternatives to both gold and silver.
Alternatives depend on the application, sometimes yes, sometimes no. However bitcoins have no other application at all. Tulips at least looked and smelled nice.:-)
So long as you protect your private keys, no one can take your Bitcoin from you.
That's why the context of my comment was not backing up your wallet or not recording your passphrase. Again, we know how good people are at such things.:-)
Remembering the wallet seed suffers from the same problems as remembering a password or passphrase. The solutions you offer could largely be applied to passwords or passphrase yet problems remain. We know how good people are at recording their passwords, that's why we have password resets.
Its not "ponzi", its "greater fool".
"The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
People are buying bitcoins because of the increase in price. However, bitcoin has a lot of similarities to a Ponzi scheme. When the value of bitcoins plummets, that trust will go away.
"To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer"
Or their wallet gets lost or corrupted and they have no backup (we know how good people are at backups)
Or they forget their wallet passphrase.
These things are irrecoverable. There is no one to appeal to in order to recover your coins. Its not like you can take your ID and visit the bank manager or government agency to regain control of an account.
Or their exchange or online wallet provider gets hacked.
No too big to fail government bailouts. You wanted independence from governments, here is the downside.
Or a 51% attack occurs, one mining pool got to 50% a few years ago.
Or a government intervenes, 70% of miners are in a single country not known for a hands off approach.
Bitcoin has deviated from its design, its security compromised as a result. It assumed a large group of decentralized miners, we don't have that. Bitcoin must abandon its currently proof-of-work algorithm which is dominated by specialized and expensive ASIC hardware, it needs to switch to a GPU friendly ASIC resistant alrgorithm (repeat as necessary) or switch to proof-of-state as etherium will do. Only such changes can decentralize mining and get security back on the designed path.
Wish I had points, because this is the first time I would have used them in a decade. I know, you can't get more than 5, but sometimes you should! Thank you.
I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks,... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.
Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.
Oh no, since when is ETH the only mineable cryptocurrency out there?
Its not, but in general its one of the few coins people might want. If they think GPU mining is a way to get ETH at a discount they might want to know about the switch. Could they mine other coins, yes, but then its questionable if they can sell those and get ETH at a discount. They might be better off spending the money that would go to GPU and electricity to buy ETH directly given how ETH is growing faster than other alt-coins.
If you have a nice GPU for other reasons then mining alt-coins can be a useful thing to do when you're not using the GPU for those other reasons. If you are buying the GPU for only mining then things get a lot more complicated.
There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree. You know, those who just invested millions of dollars in ASICs. Good luck with that. Maybe Bitcoin Cash could do it, though? Or a new fork?
ASICs loose value and become unprofitable to operate as the difficulty increases. With an algorithm change scheduled sufficiently in advance ASIC operators can simply plan to not replace/upgrade their current hardware as it becomes unprofitable.
This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point.:-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
In your examples currencies were not destroyed. Assets merely dropped in value, much like bitcoin has done on numerous occasions, losing 75+% of its value.
Hence the interest in switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake for digital currencies.
Whose interests? Yours? If you live in Europe, no doubt you have an "interest" in that because Bitcoin mining isn't economically feasible for you given Europe's artificially inflated electricity prices. I assure you that people in China or the US who mine Bitcoins have no interest in abandoning Bitcoin because they, unlike you, are actually making a profit.
Switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake does not mean abandoning bitcoin. It means a software update to bitcoin. As etherium is scheduled to do. Nor does it mean abandoning mining, you can mine (mint) under proof-of-stake.
In addition to wasting less energy it would also correct a current problem with bitcoin. Blockchain theory assumes decentralized mining, many individuals mining with their computers. As ASICs have replaced CPUs and GPUs for mining, bitcoin mining has become highly centralized into a handful of mining pools, one of which hit 50% of the hashrate demonstrating the plausibility of a 51% attack, and 70+% of the total hashrate is located in a single country not known for a hands off policy towards business and finance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yggdrasil was the one that came with an instillation video tape that was so dry, it would put one to sleep.
Not that I ever saw. I bought a CD-ROM, that was it. It booted from the CD-ROM, it asked for very basic things like where to install on the hard drive, username, password, that was about it. I guess it would be boring to sit and watch it install but you could mostly walk away and it would install and configure hardware without much if any interaction from the user. It was years ahead of its time with respect to a simple Linux installation. Again, I benefited from popular motherboards and cards so auto detection worked fine.
If your recollection is correct it wouldn't matter. You could take a nap and awake later to find Yggdrasil installed, rebooted and waiting for you to login.
I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.
On my 486DX2-66 I installed Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux from a cd-rom. Graphics, audio, networking, etc all just worked automatically, it really was plug and play, as easy as a MS Windows install. Only later did I try slackware and learn the more typical cluster-f that was Linux installation, entering various technical parameters for your monitor in order to get graphics to work. To be fair my video was a popular ATI, my audio a popular Soundblaster, my networking a popular ...
What could you possibly do with this?
Probably all your programming assignments in a Computer Science degree program. :-)
Datacenter might include a cryptocurrency mining farm?
Some kind of bug that only affects 24/7 usage of the software or hardware (temperature reliability issues)?
It might involve the pricing and shortages of NVIDIA GPUs in the consumer market? Locally GTX 1060 and above are out of stock, 1050s are heading that way.
iOS is run by ARM. Half of Android is. Rasbery Pi are run on ARM.
Sure, but I was responding to the "desktop arena" mentioned by AC.
Haven't tried Pi as a desktop, for me its just replaced the headless Linux boxes (retired PCs) in the closet. Assuming a console environment no longer counts as a desktop.
as ubiquitous as Arm is in the embedded market, it still remains a non-player in the productivity consumer and desktop arena. Why no standard form factor MBs with Arm or MIPS that could be popped into a standard case or rack. I'm not talking about $10,000 high end "solutions". I'm talking buisiness, SOHO, and consumer pricing.
You realize some chromebooks run ARM?
And that they are running the Linux kernel?
And that it is possible to install Desktop Linux to those chromebooks if the owner chooses to?
I expect Apples design was a bit too different for the engineers to really evaluate.
What is hard to evaluate about flat, slick, unobstructed?
Apple's newest Chicago store garnered earlier attention for its roof design that mimics a MacBook Air, but one clear oversight is that there are no gutters to catch snow or ice. Furthermore, as the multi-level store sits along the Chicago River, the roof is sloped downward, meaning that anyone standing on the walkway along the river gets hit with falling snow and ice.
Designed by Apple in California ;-)
However bitcoins have no other application at all.
To be clear, its the blockchain that may be revolutionary. Bitcoin may just be an early adopter of blockchain that gets displaced by some other coin.
Doesn't the same thing also apply to most, if not all, of the precious metal ad spammers on television?
Yes. However some things are more foolish than others.
Does gold or silver have any intrinsic value over what another person is willing to pay you for it? Sure, both can be used in the manufacturing of some products but there are alternatives to both gold and silver.
Alternatives depend on the application, sometimes yes, sometimes no. However bitcoins have no other application at all. Tulips at least looked and smelled nice. :-)
So long as you protect your private keys, no one can take your Bitcoin from you.
That's why the context of my comment was not backing up your wallet or not recording your passphrase. Again, we know how good people are at such things. :-)
Remembering the wallet seed suffers from the same problems as remembering a password or passphrase. The solutions you offer could largely be applied to passwords or passphrase yet problems remain. We know how good people are at recording their passwords, that's why we have password resets.
Its not "ponzi", its "greater fool".
"The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
People are buying bitcoins because of the increase in price. However, bitcoin has a lot of similarities to a Ponzi scheme. When the value of bitcoins plummets, that trust will go away.
"To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer"
Or their wallet gets lost or corrupted and they have no backup (we know how good people are at backups)
Or they forget their wallet passphrase.
These things are irrecoverable. There is no one to appeal to in order to recover your coins. Its not like you can take your ID and visit the bank manager or government agency to regain control of an account.
Or their exchange or online wallet provider gets hacked.
No too big to fail government bailouts. You wanted independence from governments, here is the downside.
Or a 51% attack occurs, one mining pool got to 50% a few years ago.
Or a government intervenes, 70% of miners are in a single country not known for a hands off approach.
Bitcoin has deviated from its design, its security compromised as a result. It assumed a large group of decentralized miners, we don't have that. Bitcoin must abandon its currently proof-of-work algorithm which is dominated by specialized and expensive ASIC hardware, it needs to switch to a GPU friendly ASIC resistant alrgorithm (repeat as necessary) or switch to proof-of-state as etherium will do. Only such changes can decentralize mining and get security back on the designed path.
Yeah I charge a lot, but that's for my own personal reasons
Sorry, your bitcoin mining rig will have to leave the trunk and find a new source of power. :-)
Wish I had points, because this is the first time I would have used them in a decade. I know, you can't get more than 5, but sometimes you should! Thank you.
Thank my CS 101 professor from the 1980s. :-)
I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks, ... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.
Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.
Oh no, since when is ETH the only mineable cryptocurrency out there?
Its not, but in general its one of the few coins people might want. If they think GPU mining is a way to get ETH at a discount they might want to know about the switch. Could they mine other coins, yes, but then its questionable if they can sell those and get ETH at a discount. They might be better off spending the money that would go to GPU and electricity to buy ETH directly given how ETH is growing faster than other alt-coins.
If you have a nice GPU for other reasons then mining alt-coins can be a useful thing to do when you're not using the GPU for those other reasons. If you are buying the GPU for only mining then things get a lot more complicated.
How long until it pays for itself?
With etherium mining ending in a few months as it switches from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, never.
But how does it perform when mining a real crypto-currency like Dogecoin?
With etherium switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in early 2018 that may be a more meaningful question than some people realize. ;-)
At 82 MH/s, 250 watts, you can pay for this puppy in just under 14.5 months!
But etherium is switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in early 2018, so in a few months there will be no more etherium mining to do. ;-)
There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree. You know, those who just invested millions of dollars in ASICs. Good luck with that. Maybe Bitcoin Cash could do it, though? Or a new fork?
ASICs loose value and become unprofitable to operate as the difficulty increases. With an algorithm change scheduled sufficiently in advance ASIC operators can simply plan to not replace/upgrade their current hardware as it becomes unprofitable.
This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
In your examples currencies were not destroyed. Assets merely dropped in value, much like bitcoin has done on numerous occasions, losing 75+% of its value.
Hence the interest in switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake for digital currencies.
Whose interests? Yours? If you live in Europe, no doubt you have an "interest" in that because Bitcoin mining isn't economically feasible for you given Europe's artificially inflated electricity prices. I assure you that people in China or the US who mine Bitcoins have no interest in abandoning Bitcoin because they, unlike you, are actually making a profit.
Switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake does not mean abandoning bitcoin. It means a software update to bitcoin. As etherium is scheduled to do. Nor does it mean abandoning mining, you can mine (mint) under proof-of-stake.
In addition to wasting less energy it would also correct a current problem with bitcoin. Blockchain theory assumes decentralized mining, many individuals mining with their computers. As ASICs have replaced CPUs and GPUs for mining, bitcoin mining has become highly centralized into a handful of mining pools, one of which hit 50% of the hashrate demonstrating the plausibility of a 51% attack, and 70+% of the total hashrate is located in a single country not known for a hands off policy towards business and finance.