I think the person the questioner was talking to was a tad out of touch. And we see that regularly on Slashdot with people absolutely convinced that $TECHNOLOGY is never used because they don't see it used in their circle of technology acquaintances.
The four most commonly used platforms right now are LAMP with PHP (not Perl, not Python, Goddamnedfuckingawful PHP), JEE,.NET, and "front-end web (Javascript/HTML/DOM/CSS)". Coming up the rear are Objective C on iOS, Java on Android, and Native (non-.NET) C++ on Windows. Anyone who claims any of these seven (well, six and a half - Java on Android and JEE obviously share quite a bit, including an entire programming language) platforms are "legacy" are completely out of touch.
JEE and.NET are big in the corporate world and usually one or the other is the core platform for their modern web-based business software infrastructure, usually built as web applications (that is, servlets and.NET's equivalents serving HTML and Javascript for standard browsers, we're not talking not applets) accessing backends via web services.
LAMP is generally used for a lot of new projects that end up phenomenally successful but start as essentially hacks where someone wanted something and didn't know much about coding, but knew enough PHP to put something together that did what they needed.
Objective C on iOS and Java on Android are, obviously, the two major mobile platforms. And C++ is used on Windows because it's what was, until recently, the only standard Windows platform and a large number of Windows developers are still wary of.NET.
Even outside of the golden seven, we have languages like C that still serve a critical purpose in some domains such as kernel level systems software. And what remains is mostly a set of platforms that aren't "legacy", just not as popular. Python, Perl, node.js, Coldfusion (another platform I'd wish would die already, even more than PHP), Ruby, and others.
Legacy? I guess nobody's doing new COBOL development to the best of my knowledge, or new Fortran. Some would dearly like Adobe Flash to be legacy, but until a viable cross-platform DRM scheme gets added to HTML5, I don't see it going away.
Congratulations. You're the fourth (fifth, if we count hypothetical Nakamoto) person (maybe more, if we assume the moderators currently modding me back down also share the same misconception) who seems to have no understanding of how the Internet works and what the effect is has on privacy.
You are correct that logging, by itself, makes no difference. But logging is one of the key components of Bitcoin that destroys the ability to be genuinely anonymous on it. For more details, I suggest you read the response I made to the second of your sibling posts. But essentially, to re-iterate, the more you use a wallet, the more information "leaks" about you because the logging exists, is public, and will, from time to time, involve you making transactions with people who know you. Without the use of an extremely trustworthy Bitcoin laundering service, it will be the case that ultimately any well connected retailer or employer can find out what you've been spending your money on.
Comparing it to posting AC on Slashdot is inane and absurd. Indeed, even posting under a pseudonym on Slashdot, as I do, grants me more privacy than my attempting to use Bitcoin to buy both Samizdat and food.
I think both you and the sibling poster, quibblings about "pseudonymous" aside, both make the same mistake "Hypothetical Nakamoto" make, namely a failure to understand what privacy means when the Internet gets involved.
Transactions in Bitcoindom are logged, and effectively logged eternally (how easily this can scale is open to question, Bitcoin's advocates argue the blockchain can be truncated at some point, but it isn't right now and I suspect there's a lot of agreement that will have to go on to make that happen.) The logging is public - anyone can read it. From the Blockchain, you - and everyone else - can determine every single transaction that's affected a specific coin or a specific wallet. To actively isolate transactions from a wallet you'd have to do an enormous amount of work and receive help from a third party that's laundering transactions for so many people it's close to impossible to link them, and, of course, that third party would know what you're up to.
Does this mean you can tell that "squiggleslash" spent 0.1BTC on coke, hookers, and gambling last week? That depends. Without the laundering service, it's relatively easy to tell that someone who's your customer (or your employee...) did that. And as more and more information leaks from you about you and your wallet, more and more information becomes available as to what you're doing.
By comparison, whenever Google logs what you're doing, most people here are up in arms. But the funny thing is that Google doesn't publish logs of every single browser's history to the Internet. It keeps that information to itself. So for most of us, Google invading our privacy means a handful of Google employees might be able to do the research.
The concept, as I understand it, is that at the moment in order to write a device driver for X11 you have to separately manage code that implements 2D and 3D graphic primitives. Given 2D operations are themselves a subset of 3D operations (even if the API doesn't reflect that), it makes sense to simply have device drivers implement the 3D parts. Then common wrapper code can implement the 2D, alleviating the driver developer of the burden of building and testing an entirely new block of code.
It should make X.org more reliable, as the same 2D code will be used for all drivers, and should end up being pretty solid. In the mean time, driver developers have more time to polish their 3D driver implementations. Win win. Maybe a slight performance hit, but probably not a significant one.
The original Bitcoin paper claims that the currency described by the protocol is "anonymous" ("Participants can be anonymous") yet it's a protocol where every transaction is logged. Can't get much less anonymous than that. So yeah, while it's unlikely this is the Mr Bitcoin Nakamoto, if it were the lack of understanding of personal privacy would fit in at all levels.
Friedman? Tom Friedman? Seriously?! Who the hell takes him seriously?
Good journalists exist, you choose to ignore them, but just look at, say, The Guardian's handling of Wikileaks to get some idea of how the concept hasn't gone away. Now, as always, we have the same mixture of good and bad as we've always had. Thompson and Murrow are not representative of their peers at the times they operated. And there exist journalists today who are the Thompsons and Murrows of today.
Well, I guess you can argue that Bitcoin is as "real" as witchcraft, but the problem with that is that right now a large number of people are actually trading with Bitcoins and as a result is has some trading value and is a real thing, no matter how stupid.
I'm a Bitcoin critic. I consider it a stupid idea that's based upon a naive view of money, and the recent problems that highlight the cons of being unregulated simply add fuel to the fire. But it's one thing to claim it's a bad idea, and another to claim it doesn't exist. People have enormous sums of money invested in the project. Nakamoto is in a privileged position to abuse that. He hasn't yet (to the best of my knowledge) so there's no reason to out him at this stage. But if he did...
Are you under the impression that in the last 2-300 years of journalism, Hunter S Thompson or Edward Murrow are representative of the vast majority of journalists?
Hell, even the supposedly famous "Did a great job on that one famous story" types are rarely as great as their reputations suggest. Look at Bob Woodward. Is he really the Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein, or a hack who reports any old crap to sell newspapers (and books)?
Technically Nakamoto has significant power, and as such it's arguable a case can be made that if he were to exploit that power (there's no evidence he's done so, and one thing that's positive about Bitcoin is that it would be extremely easy to tell if Nakamoto were to, say, flood the exchanges with his own million or so BTC) then he'd need to be held to account, which cannot be done anonymously.
But in general I agree, and at this point, despite my misgivings about his work, believe he should have his privacy respected.
I'm pretty sure it's legal in both countries. The only question here is supposedly whether Dell is violating the Firefox trademark. Dell argues they're not because they're charging for installation. I don't know if that m
But minus the trademark issue, Dell certainly can charge for copies of Firefox, even if it ends up having to install Iceweasel instead. So can I. It's Free Software/Open Source, shipped under a Free Software/Open Source license, and as long as Dell complies with, for example, any copyleft provisions, it can do whatever it wants and charge whatever it wants. There's a myth that you can't charge for Free Software/Open Source software. That's never been true. Indeed, that's one of the ways the FSF originally funded itself, selling tapes containing copies of GNU.
X11 is the technically superior choice. #getoffmylawn
Still, from that point of view, the Mir thing has been a success for all those itching to replace a stable, mature, well known and tested, versatile, and powerful windowing system with a new and untested stripped down windowing system simply because they don't understand why someone would want some of the features X11 has, and are under the impression it's bloated because it's bigger than Windows 2.0 was in 1989.
Mir has helped create the illusion the decision has been made already. We are transitioning, no more debate is needed (or will be accepted) as to whether we should, and the question is what we should transition to.
Much the same mistake was made with GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, a transition that Ubuntu helped along in the same way with Unity. Users rebelled, with forks like Mint attempting to roll back the damage, but the end result was a deterioration in the perception of GNU/Linux as a potential replacement for Windows. Distributions based upon GNOME 3 and Unity got the "slick", "professional", treatment, with users finding fast that it wasn't what they actually wanted. The GNOME 2 hold-outs didn't have the resources to ensure GNOME 2's forks had the same level of support, and so ended up with systems that looked to new users dated and ugly.
We will see the same with Mir/Wayland, except worse. We'll have five to ten years of having to deal with an immature windowing system that, by the end of the process, has just as many hacks and quirks as X11 but will almost certainly still lack key features X11 offers. X11 holdouts will find themselves using an increasingly unreliable and unstable platform as newer hardware requires new device drivers, without the level of support needed within the X.org X11 community to support them.
We're all going to lose. The best free software users can hope for now is that Google continues to extend Android to eventually offer a decent desktop experience. I don't know why they would, perhaps to replace ChromeOS, but at least you're looking at something mature there. But that's not here now, and the next five years will be rough for GNU/Linux users. We'll likely be as mainstream as FreeBSD by the end of it.
Re:Wake me they fix namespaces
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The New PHP
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Yes, they've done it once or twice, with a tiny number of the headline issues, took an age to do so, and only did so because people were screaming about it.
This is a perverse argument for claiming that something isn't open.
Android is open. Period. The fact Google creates massive incentives to manufacturers to use proprietary middleware on Android is neither here nor there. You might just as well argue that the PC architecture isn't open, because Microsoft creates incentives for PC manufacturers to install Windows.
I seriously doubt any governments feel threatened by Bitcoin, also known as a set of securities owned by clueless nerds. Insofar as we've seen negative responses to Bitcoin by governments, its been in relation to their use as systems of money laundering or as systems to transfer money without a paper trail that fits into the government's existing systems (which is generally important, for governments that is, when trying to follow-the-money in investigations of serious crimes.) Yes, China and Russia have "banned" it, but because of that, not due to some concern about it being a competing currency.
I believe, indeed, that Britain actually proposed some pro-Bitcoin rule making earlier this week.
Honestly, this government conspiracy crap more closely represents the neuroses of Bitcoin's advocates than it does reality.
Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel what means Linux kernel is the complete operating system. There is no other software needed to add to have full operating system than just the Linux kernel.
Bollocks. At the very least you need a shell.
Linux is a complete operating system kernel. It is not a complete operating system. If you have any doubts about this, perhaps you should look back at this obscure operating system called "Unix" that GNU/Linux is more or less a clone of. Back then the creators of Unix created some terms to define different components of the operating system, like, uh "Kernel", "User-land", "Shell", etc. If "Kernel" described "the operating system", then why invent the term in the first place? Why did they continue to use the word "Operating system" afterwards and why did they use it to describe "Unix" which included so much more than just the kernel?
I know people are upset about this because RMS is a horrib... actually, I really don't know why you guys hate RMS, we really wouldn't have Ubuntu, CentOS, et al, without his work, but you hate him and I get that - but the "GNU/Linux" thing is entirely reasonable. What people have installed on their desktops is an operating system that includes both Linux and the GNU userland. Without the GNU userland you'd either have to build an operating system with a different userland (in which case you'd have Busybox/Linux, or BSD/Linux), or you'd have a brick.
However, a "safe" way to manage your bitcoins is to keep them in multiple distributed wallets that you control.
OK, but would you describe this as an straightforward solution that most people would instinctively do, and find easy to set up, use, and maintain?
(Yes I'm aware there's a missing "not" in the sentence where I asked for a solution to this - my bad, it was supposed to be there, I'm hoping the condition that immediately followed made that clear - and so it probably seems unfair to suddenly impose this condition on something that was supposedly a solution for the "technically inclined", but I'm hoping you'll understand that to keep the conversation useful, we need to look at solutions that work for the widest possible audience, otherwise we can't really determine what can make Bitcoin viable.)
I'm not sure it's the most likely explanation, but yes, it's kinda a good one. The issue with it though is that it relies upon Mt. Gox making one of the mistakes the author of the linked article addressed and debunked as seriously unlikely. Which is why it's more likely that Mt. Gox are either telling the truth, or serious fraud occurred.
If your aim was to portray Bitcoin advocates as a bunch of out of touch extremists who argue only against strawmen, you couldn't have done a better job. I "apologize [endlessly] for big government and the status quo" huh? And despite no signs it's relevent, you're refusing to accept either that Mt. Gox is telling the truth, or that it's engaged in fraud, and instead prefering to believe that a foreign government is involved?
This is a large part of why I don't take Bitcoin particularly seriously. Between wild swings of value, a deflationary end point (and a deliberately failure to link money supply and money demand), the eye-swivling tirades against any government action, good or bad, simply because governments do bad things on occasion (therefore all government is bad? You should see corporate behavior! We should immediately switch to an anarcho-trotskyite economy right now!) by Bitcoin's staunchest defenders, and the refusal of Bitcoin's largest defenders to even see problems that need fixing, let alone actually attempt to fix them, the entire concept is essentially a wash. It's not even useful: the only real application people have suggested it could be good at is as a transaction system, and the free market's found plenty of ways that are infinitely more user-friendly to do that already.
I really don't get the impression Bitcoin's fans are the paragons of rationality you're painting them as. And in particular, I take exception with the quote "don't throw money at companies that look shady as hell like MtGox did before it blew."
Some observations:
1. I've read numerous op-eds (op-eds!) over the past week suggesting Mt. Gox's collapse has made everything safer because there's one less bad actor, and those who remain in the Bitcoin world are more mature.
2. There's no recognition that Mt. Gox was, until 6-9 months ago, a highly regarded exchange that was frequently recommended, cited, and so on. It didn't corner the percentage of the market it got to despite everyone thinking it was "sleazy". It got there because of word of mouth. Suddenly it "always sleazy", "everyone knew", and "OMG it was originally something to do with Magic: The Gathering, right?"
3. Many now claiming they "always knew" and are citing things they said 6-9 months ago, after Mt. Gox had already started collapsing and after it had started to become problematic getting money out. Presumably the same people would have said "I always knew the Titanic was badly designed, look at this transcript of a conversation I had on the deck at 12.30am on 15th April 1912. This is what represents "doing research" in the Bitcoin community?
4. Many are now pretending that Mt. Gox provided an unnecessary service and are finding other reasons to blame the victim. What exactly is a "safe" way to manage Bitcoins if you're technically skilled (or are generally technically skilled but also more than aware that you frequently overestimate your own competence?)
5. Where, seriously, are the serious proposals to make Mt. Gox style collapses impossible in the future? In the regulated dollar world, we have the FDIC, and we have each bank subject to minimum standards of security so that the vast majority of customers will not face problems if a bank fails. Or are you seriously going to tell me that the magic fairies of the invisible hand of the market are going to prevent these collapses in the future?
Good link, and well written analysis by the author. Thank you for drawing our attention to it.
Must admit I've been surprised to the extent to which the "Immediate reasons why Mt. Gox collapsed" speculation has gone beyond "What Mt. Gox themselves claimed" (transaction malleability/hackers) and "Fraud". It would seem to me there's no reason whatsoever to look at any other reasons. The "Obama closed them down" thing in particular just seems to confirm the views I have about how Bitcoin advocates/users think.
A lot of the free to play model games basically let you pay to win, does this 0.15% number line up with the percent of the general population that is incapable of delaying gratification? I bet you could correlate this number with the result of some psychology study on the topic....
One of the most prolific Freemium vendors is a company called GameInsight, which sounds more like a company performing some kind of study of gamers than a publisher of games. I've been wondering for a while if that's their actual origin, and their "games" are actually based upon the results of some kind of psychological research, especially as those I've tried seem to largely follow the same pattern and have the same key components in terms of what they're trying to get you to spend money on.
You're not really helping your case. Gambling, is, actually subject to a massive amount of regulation precisely because it's the kind of thing that people endup losing their shirts because of a combination of rather normal (that is, most people in the same position would misjudge the odds) poor judgement on their part, and predatory behavior on the parts of others. Casinos and bookies have long been subject to heavy regulation where they are legal, and are outright banned in much of the world.
On the other hand, Bitcoins aren't regulated yet, so there's that.
Not if it were established in a jurisdiction that doesn't much care what you do as a bank. I bet you the fifty-first a-national US-dollar bank of Somalia would...
...only be dealing with a scarce commodity that isn't a state supported currency in the jurisdiction in question. Y'know, like Bitcoin users use Bitcoins.;-)
Obviously I was comparing the conventional dollar system with the conventional Bitcoin system. You can deliberately go out of your way to avoid having the protection of government when trading dollars. You then end up in a similar position to those trading Bitcoins. And we'd probably see eye to eye in saying that someone who loses money when investing in an unregulated off-shore bank dollars is demonstrating a problem with "unregulated off-shore bank dollars".
In this case, there's only one type of Bitcoin, so we don't need to say there's a problem with "unregulated on-shore and off-shore bitcoin exchanges", they all fit that description. We just say a "Bitcoin problem". It'll cease to be a "Bitcoin problem" and become an "Unregulated on-shore and off-shore bitcoin exchanges problem" when the happy liberatarians behind Bitcoin demand government backed regulation of Bitcoin exchanges.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the person the questioner was talking to was a tad out of touch. And we see that regularly on Slashdot with people absolutely convinced that $TECHNOLOGY is never used because they don't see it used in their circle of technology acquaintances.
The four most commonly used platforms right now are LAMP with PHP (not Perl, not Python, Goddamnedfuckingawful PHP), JEE, .NET, and "front-end web (Javascript/HTML/DOM/CSS)". Coming up the rear are Objective C on iOS, Java on Android, and Native (non-.NET) C++ on Windows. Anyone who claims any of these seven (well, six and a half - Java on Android and JEE obviously share quite a bit, including an entire programming language) platforms are "legacy" are completely out of touch.
JEE and .NET are big in the corporate world and usually one or the other is the core platform for their modern web-based business software infrastructure, usually built as web applications (that is, servlets and .NET's equivalents serving HTML and Javascript for standard browsers, we're not talking not applets) accessing backends via web services.
LAMP is generally used for a lot of new projects that end up phenomenally successful but start as essentially hacks where someone wanted something and didn't know much about coding, but knew enough PHP to put something together that did what they needed.
Objective C on iOS and Java on Android are, obviously, the two major mobile platforms. And C++ is used on Windows because it's what was, until recently, the only standard Windows platform and a large number of Windows developers are still wary of .NET.
Even outside of the golden seven, we have languages like C that still serve a critical purpose in some domains such as kernel level systems software. And what remains is mostly a set of platforms that aren't "legacy", just not as popular. Python, Perl, node.js, Coldfusion (another platform I'd wish would die already, even more than PHP), Ruby, and others.
Legacy? I guess nobody's doing new COBOL development to the best of my knowledge, or new Fortran. Some would dearly like Adobe Flash to be legacy, but until a viable cross-platform DRM scheme gets added to HTML5, I don't see it going away.
But .NET? Claiming it's legacy shows astonishing ignorance.
Congratulations. You're the fourth (fifth, if we count hypothetical Nakamoto) person (maybe more, if we assume the moderators currently modding me back down also share the same misconception) who seems to have no understanding of how the Internet works and what the effect is has on privacy.
You are correct that logging, by itself, makes no difference. But logging is one of the key components of Bitcoin that destroys the ability to be genuinely anonymous on it. For more details, I suggest you read the response I made to the second of your sibling posts. But essentially, to re-iterate, the more you use a wallet, the more information "leaks" about you because the logging exists, is public, and will, from time to time, involve you making transactions with people who know you. Without the use of an extremely trustworthy Bitcoin laundering service, it will be the case that ultimately any well connected retailer or employer can find out what you've been spending your money on.
Comparing it to posting AC on Slashdot is inane and absurd. Indeed, even posting under a pseudonym on Slashdot, as I do, grants me more privacy than my attempting to use Bitcoin to buy both Samizdat and food.
I think both you and the sibling poster, quibblings about "pseudonymous" aside, both make the same mistake "Hypothetical Nakamoto" make, namely a failure to understand what privacy means when the Internet gets involved.
Transactions in Bitcoindom are logged, and effectively logged eternally (how easily this can scale is open to question, Bitcoin's advocates argue the blockchain can be truncated at some point, but it isn't right now and I suspect there's a lot of agreement that will have to go on to make that happen.) The logging is public - anyone can read it. From the Blockchain, you - and everyone else - can determine every single transaction that's affected a specific coin or a specific wallet. To actively isolate transactions from a wallet you'd have to do an enormous amount of work and receive help from a third party that's laundering transactions for so many people it's close to impossible to link them, and, of course, that third party would know what you're up to.
Does this mean you can tell that "squiggleslash" spent 0.1BTC on coke, hookers, and gambling last week? That depends. Without the laundering service, it's relatively easy to tell that someone who's your customer (or your employee...) did that. And as more and more information leaks from you about you and your wallet, more and more information becomes available as to what you're doing.
By comparison, whenever Google logs what you're doing, most people here are up in arms. But the funny thing is that Google doesn't publish logs of every single browser's history to the Internet. It keeps that information to itself. So for most of us, Google invading our privacy means a handful of Google employees might be able to do the research.
The Blockchain, however, is public.
The concept, as I understand it, is that at the moment in order to write a device driver for X11 you have to separately manage code that implements 2D and 3D graphic primitives. Given 2D operations are themselves a subset of 3D operations (even if the API doesn't reflect that), it makes sense to simply have device drivers implement the 3D parts. Then common wrapper code can implement the 2D, alleviating the driver developer of the burden of building and testing an entirely new block of code.
It should make X.org more reliable, as the same 2D code will be used for all drivers, and should end up being pretty solid. In the mean time, driver developers have more time to polish their 3D driver implementations. Win win. Maybe a slight performance hit, but probably not a significant one.
The original Bitcoin paper claims that the currency described by the protocol is "anonymous" ("Participants can be anonymous") yet it's a protocol where every transaction is logged. Can't get much less anonymous than that. So yeah, while it's unlikely this is the Mr Bitcoin Nakamoto, if it were the lack of understanding of personal privacy would fit in at all levels.
Friedman? Tom Friedman? Seriously?! Who the hell takes him seriously?
Good journalists exist, you choose to ignore them, but just look at, say, The Guardian's handling of Wikileaks to get some idea of how the concept hasn't gone away. Now, as always, we have the same mixture of good and bad as we've always had. Thompson and Murrow are not representative of their peers at the times they operated. And there exist journalists today who are the Thompsons and Murrows of today.
Well, I guess you can argue that Bitcoin is as "real" as witchcraft, but the problem with that is that right now a large number of people are actually trading with Bitcoins and as a result is has some trading value and is a real thing, no matter how stupid.
I'm a Bitcoin critic. I consider it a stupid idea that's based upon a naive view of money, and the recent problems that highlight the cons of being unregulated simply add fuel to the fire. But it's one thing to claim it's a bad idea, and another to claim it doesn't exist. People have enormous sums of money invested in the project. Nakamoto is in a privileged position to abuse that. He hasn't yet (to the best of my knowledge) so there's no reason to out him at this stage. But if he did...
Are you under the impression that in the last 2-300 years of journalism, Hunter S Thompson or Edward Murrow are representative of the vast majority of journalists?
Hell, even the supposedly famous "Did a great job on that one famous story" types are rarely as great as their reputations suggest. Look at Bob Woodward. Is he really the Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein, or a hack who reports any old crap to sell newspapers (and books)?
Technically Nakamoto has significant power, and as such it's arguable a case can be made that if he were to exploit that power (there's no evidence he's done so, and one thing that's positive about Bitcoin is that it would be extremely easy to tell if Nakamoto were to, say, flood the exchanges with his own million or so BTC) then he'd need to be held to account, which cannot be done anonymously.
But in general I agree, and at this point, despite my misgivings about his work, believe he should have his privacy respected.
I'm pretty sure it's legal in both countries. The only question here is supposedly whether Dell is violating the Firefox trademark. Dell argues they're not because they're charging for installation. I don't know if that m
But minus the trademark issue, Dell certainly can charge for copies of Firefox, even if it ends up having to install Iceweasel instead. So can I. It's Free Software/Open Source, shipped under a Free Software/Open Source license, and as long as Dell complies with, for example, any copyleft provisions, it can do whatever it wants and charge whatever it wants. There's a myth that you can't charge for Free Software/Open Source software. That's never been true. Indeed, that's one of the ways the FSF originally funded itself, selling tapes containing copies of GNU.
This ELER might help answer your question.
X11 is the technically superior choice. #getoffmylawn
Still, from that point of view, the Mir thing has been a success for all those itching to replace a stable, mature, well known and tested, versatile, and powerful windowing system with a new and untested stripped down windowing system simply because they don't understand why someone would want some of the features X11 has, and are under the impression it's bloated because it's bigger than Windows 2.0 was in 1989.
Mir has helped create the illusion the decision has been made already. We are transitioning, no more debate is needed (or will be accepted) as to whether we should, and the question is what we should transition to.
Much the same mistake was made with GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, a transition that Ubuntu helped along in the same way with Unity. Users rebelled, with forks like Mint attempting to roll back the damage, but the end result was a deterioration in the perception of GNU/Linux as a potential replacement for Windows. Distributions based upon GNOME 3 and Unity got the "slick", "professional", treatment, with users finding fast that it wasn't what they actually wanted. The GNOME 2 hold-outs didn't have the resources to ensure GNOME 2's forks had the same level of support, and so ended up with systems that looked to new users dated and ugly.
We will see the same with Mir/Wayland, except worse. We'll have five to ten years of having to deal with an immature windowing system that, by the end of the process, has just as many hacks and quirks as X11 but will almost certainly still lack key features X11 offers. X11 holdouts will find themselves using an increasingly unreliable and unstable platform as newer hardware requires new device drivers, without the level of support needed within the X.org X11 community to support them.
We're all going to lose. The best free software users can hope for now is that Google continues to extend Android to eventually offer a decent desktop experience. I don't know why they would, perhaps to replace ChromeOS, but at least you're looking at something mature there. But that's not here now, and the next five years will be rough for GNU/Linux users. We'll likely be as mainstream as FreeBSD by the end of it.
Yes, they've done it once or twice, with a tiny number of the headline issues, took an age to do so, and only did so because people were screaming about it.
This is a perverse argument for claiming that something isn't open.
Android is open. Period. The fact Google creates massive incentives to manufacturers to use proprietary middleware on Android is neither here nor there. You might just as well argue that the PC architecture isn't open, because Microsoft creates incentives for PC manufacturers to install Windows.
I seriously doubt any governments feel threatened by Bitcoin, also known as a set of securities owned by clueless nerds. Insofar as we've seen negative responses to Bitcoin by governments, its been in relation to their use as systems of money laundering or as systems to transfer money without a paper trail that fits into the government's existing systems (which is generally important, for governments that is, when trying to follow-the-money in investigations of serious crimes.) Yes, China and Russia have "banned" it, but because of that, not due to some concern about it being a competing currency.
I believe, indeed, that Britain actually proposed some pro-Bitcoin rule making earlier this week.
Honestly, this government conspiracy crap more closely represents the neuroses of Bitcoin's advocates than it does reality.
Bollocks. At the very least you need a shell.
Linux is a complete operating system kernel. It is not a complete operating system. If you have any doubts about this, perhaps you should look back at this obscure operating system called "Unix" that GNU/Linux is more or less a clone of. Back then the creators of Unix created some terms to define different components of the operating system, like, uh "Kernel", "User-land", "Shell", etc. If "Kernel" described "the operating system", then why invent the term in the first place? Why did they continue to use the word "Operating system" afterwards and why did they use it to describe "Unix" which included so much more than just the kernel?
I know people are upset about this because RMS is a horrib... actually, I really don't know why you guys hate RMS, we really wouldn't have Ubuntu, CentOS, et al, without his work, but you hate him and I get that - but the "GNU/Linux" thing is entirely reasonable. What people have installed on their desktops is an operating system that includes both Linux and the GNU userland. Without the GNU userland you'd either have to build an operating system with a different userland (in which case you'd have Busybox/Linux, or BSD/Linux), or you'd have a brick.
I changed the link both because I'm a deeply horrible person underneath, and to kinda sorta explain my reservations with what you just said...
OK, but would you describe this as an straightforward solution that most people would instinctively do, and find easy to set up, use, and maintain?
(Yes I'm aware there's a missing "not" in the sentence where I asked for a solution to this - my bad, it was supposed to be there, I'm hoping the condition that immediately followed made that clear - and so it probably seems unfair to suddenly impose this condition on something that was supposedly a solution for the "technically inclined", but I'm hoping you'll understand that to keep the conversation useful, we need to look at solutions that work for the widest possible audience, otherwise we can't really determine what can make Bitcoin viable.)
I'm not sure it's the most likely explanation, but yes, it's kinda a good one. The issue with it though is that it relies upon Mt. Gox making one of the mistakes the author of the linked article addressed and debunked as seriously unlikely. Which is why it's more likely that Mt. Gox are either telling the truth, or serious fraud occurred.
If your aim was to portray Bitcoin advocates as a bunch of out of touch extremists who argue only against strawmen, you couldn't have done a better job. I "apologize [endlessly] for big government and the status quo" huh? And despite no signs it's relevent, you're refusing to accept either that Mt. Gox is telling the truth, or that it's engaged in fraud, and instead prefering to believe that a foreign government is involved?
This is a large part of why I don't take Bitcoin particularly seriously. Between wild swings of value, a deflationary end point (and a deliberately failure to link money supply and money demand), the eye-swivling tirades against any government action, good or bad, simply because governments do bad things on occasion (therefore all government is bad? You should see corporate behavior! We should immediately switch to an anarcho-trotskyite economy right now!) by Bitcoin's staunchest defenders, and the refusal of Bitcoin's largest defenders to even see problems that need fixing, let alone actually attempt to fix them, the entire concept is essentially a wash. It's not even useful: the only real application people have suggested it could be good at is as a transaction system, and the free market's found plenty of ways that are infinitely more user-friendly to do that already.
I really don't get the impression Bitcoin's fans are the paragons of rationality you're painting them as. And in particular, I take exception with the quote "don't throw money at companies that look shady as hell like MtGox did before it blew."
Some observations:
1. I've read numerous op-eds (op-eds!) over the past week suggesting Mt. Gox's collapse has made everything safer because there's one less bad actor, and those who remain in the Bitcoin world are more mature.
2. There's no recognition that Mt. Gox was, until 6-9 months ago, a highly regarded exchange that was frequently recommended, cited, and so on. It didn't corner the percentage of the market it got to despite everyone thinking it was "sleazy". It got there because of word of mouth. Suddenly it "always sleazy", "everyone knew", and "OMG it was originally something to do with Magic: The Gathering, right?"
3. Many now claiming they "always knew" and are citing things they said 6-9 months ago, after Mt. Gox had already started collapsing and after it had started to become problematic getting money out. Presumably the same people would have said "I always knew the Titanic was badly designed, look at this transcript of a conversation I had on the deck at 12.30am on 15th April 1912. This is what represents "doing research" in the Bitcoin community?
4. Many are now pretending that Mt. Gox provided an unnecessary service and are finding other reasons to blame the victim. What exactly is a "safe" way to manage Bitcoins if you're technically skilled (or are generally technically skilled but also more than aware that you frequently overestimate your own competence?)
5. Where, seriously, are the serious proposals to make Mt. Gox style collapses impossible in the future? In the regulated dollar world, we have the FDIC, and we have each bank subject to minimum standards of security so that the vast majority of customers will not face problems if a bank fails. Or are you seriously going to tell me that the magic fairies of the invisible hand of the market are going to prevent these collapses in the future?
Good link, and well written analysis by the author. Thank you for drawing our attention to it.
Must admit I've been surprised to the extent to which the "Immediate reasons why Mt. Gox collapsed" speculation has gone beyond "What Mt. Gox themselves claimed" (transaction malleability/hackers) and "Fraud". It would seem to me there's no reason whatsoever to look at any other reasons. The "Obama closed them down" thing in particular just seems to confirm the views I have about how Bitcoin advocates/users think.
One of the most prolific Freemium vendors is a company called GameInsight, which sounds more like a company performing some kind of study of gamers than a publisher of games. I've been wondering for a while if that's their actual origin, and their "games" are actually based upon the results of some kind of psychological research, especially as those I've tried seem to largely follow the same pattern and have the same key components in terms of what they're trying to get you to spend money on.
You're not really helping your case. Gambling, is, actually subject to a massive amount of regulation precisely because it's the kind of thing that people endup losing their shirts because of a combination of rather normal (that is, most people in the same position would misjudge the odds) poor judgement on their part, and predatory behavior on the parts of others. Casinos and bookies have long been subject to heavy regulation where they are legal, and are outright banned in much of the world.
On the other hand, Bitcoins aren't regulated yet, so there's that.
Obviously I was comparing the conventional dollar system with the conventional Bitcoin system. You can deliberately go out of your way to avoid having the protection of government when trading dollars. You then end up in a similar position to those trading Bitcoins. And we'd probably see eye to eye in saying that someone who loses money when investing in an unregulated off-shore bank dollars is demonstrating a problem with "unregulated off-shore bank dollars".
In this case, there's only one type of Bitcoin, so we don't need to say there's a problem with "unregulated on-shore and off-shore bitcoin exchanges", they all fit that description. We just say a "Bitcoin problem". It'll cease to be a "Bitcoin problem" and become an "Unregulated on-shore and off-shore bitcoin exchanges problem" when the happy liberatarians behind Bitcoin demand government backed regulation of Bitcoin exchanges.