No big deal, there's room to grow. Back in the 90s, when the first 3D games were appearing, people also dreamed up a bunch of stuff quite prematurely. But I'm quite sure that by now we've surpassed those expectations by far, it just took a bit longer than some expected.
So I've got a CV1. Here are the issues so far:
The resolution is too low. It works for gaming, but barely so. You won't really want to even browse the web on this if you can avoid it. So that currently puts a limit on using it for any kind of non-gaming use. This is a technologically solvable problem, but it will take time.
Dual 4K displays at 90fps would be cool, if there was hardware to support such a thing. USB C + Thunderbolt 3 does two 4K displays, at 60 FPS. Almost there, but not quite yet.
Cables are limiting. While the resolution is not huge, it's big enough to be challenging even over wires. Doing it over some kind of wireless is even more of a challenge.
Control is limited. The controllers are nice, but they're nowhere near as good as my hands.
Current tech just happens to exist at the edge of reasonably available technical capacity -- while they could do dual 4K displays right now if they wanted, only really, really hardcore adherents would pay what it takes to provide that. So it'll have to wait until today's bleeding edge becomes the next normal.
Fortunately, it's nothing tech and money can't fix. The basics are already there, now all that's left is to refine existing tech and make it better. Doing last year's hardware 20% better is what's the industry has been doing all along.
The Oculus Quest seems like a promising development -- no wires, which should make it a lot easier to use in some kinds of setups, though it will have to sacrifice 3D processing power to do so. I think at the very least it'll be a good test of how big of a deal a wire is.
It's cheaper in that lithium batteries last longer if you don't fully charge, or fully discharge them.
By using a big battery and then ensuring it doesn't go below 10% or above 90%, it lasts longer, which saves money on warranty replacements. Depending on ambient conditions and driving patterns one might be able to degrade the 75 kWh battery enough, fast enough that Tesla would have to replace it at their expense. Limiting it to 60 kWh makes that a lot less likely to happen, thus it's cheaper to Tesla.
> Third, I don't see the added value. The refrigeration doesn't have to be internal (so you don't need the extra weight on board and can avoid ice buildup).
SpaceX uses densified propellant. Meaning, it's loaded at a temperature significantly below boiling point, which means simply replentishing what boils off doesn't work, as at that point it's already too warm to be useful.
That's why SpaceX needs to abort if the rocket spends too long sitting on the pad. The only solution if the propellant warms up too much is to drain all the fuel, and refuel the rocket again.
That's unless you're suggesting they should make some sort of giant cooler that wraps around the entire rocket.
> Fourth, we know from the launch of the car that the guidance systems and engine control are flaky.
If I recall correctly, given that this was a test, they simply pushed the rocket as far as it would go, and weren't aiming for an exact orbit.
It would not be trolled that heavily if the media is not that hell-bent on forcing a "cartoon" into a social commentary.
Uh, what are you on? Comics were always heavy on social commentary. X-Men are social commentary with its mutants vs non-mutants dynamics. Frank Miller does a crapload of social commentary in his comics (often awful). Iron Man is social commentary, it was created by Stan Lee to see if he could make a selfish, drunk, industrialist weapons manufacturer, "shove him down people's throats" (Stan Lee quote), and make them like him. This was in the 60s, at the height of the anti-war sentiment. Captain America is social commentary. It goes on, and on, and on.
Black Panther being social commentary is nothing new, and hails straight from the source material.
The TCP checksum is literally a sum. It's not a MD5, CRC or anything fancy like that. As a result it's not that hard for something to slip past it.
It's been a long time since then, but recall the network performance was awful, which would be consistent with packets that are detected as bad being dropped by the kernel and causing a retransmission.
The error rate was absolutely awful too, I'm not talking about something that happened once a month. I think the error happened pretty much always and in a consistent spot.
VIA is cheap. Back in the C3 days they had a bit of popularity among the people who wanted a compact server, firewall or media box. Decently fast but cool running CPUs, and good silent fans were all a pretty new development back then, so there wasn't that much choice.
So I tried.
The Nehemiah CPU was a dog. The network card corrupted some of the outgoing packets, and it was visible by naked eye by just refreshing a page served by the box and seeing how a character was wrong somewhere. Sticking a system in a small box looked pretty, but the tiny fan was noisy as hell, and it killed the hard disk from the overheating after a while. There was some kind of trouble with the power supply. Accounting for the time I spent screwing around with that junk, it would have been far cheaper to just buy a normal board with a normal CPU.
With the luck I've had with this specific product line, I'm amazed some of it is still alive today.
That is dangerous in this day and age. Where does this data you need to munge come from? Where does it go to? How does your tool manipulate that data exactly? This munging is going to be one of the layers inside some kind of system, so you still need to consider how it fits into it.
And then we have to consider other issues, like: does Perl even fit well into this system? Are you causing scalability issues by executing an external command? Are you creating a security problem or a bug by passing commandline arguments wrong?
So let's take your Perl example, try "perl -e 'print uc("$russian")', (replace $russian with lowercase Russian text. I can't give a proper example, because Slashdot is a piece of junk still stuck in the 90s).
What that prints is exactly what you give it -- no uppercase. Whoops.
This works nicely to demonstrate that even for simple string manipulation one has to have some awareness of the underpinnings.
It's not the 80s anymore. Useful systems are complex, have many layers, and tend to grow new layers over time.
In the 90s, a web page was a static.html file. Some minimum understanding was enough to make one.
Later, CGIs were added. Now you need some understanding of HTTP.
Add a database. Now you need to understand SQL, and related matters, like SQL injection.
Add JavaScript. A whole new language to deal with.
Add dynamic content. Suddenly, the page isn't a static thing, there's a DOM that's being modified in real time.
Add a growing internet, with many users of your page. Now you need to know how to make a scalable system, and how to design a proper database.
Add cloud computing, where the underlying infrastructure itself can be scaled in real time, and where you can get extra database servers if you need them for a couple hours.
Add internationalization, and now the programmer has to be aware of Unicode, different date formats and so on.
With each added feature and with each added layer the complexity grows. And you can't just throw your hands up and say "fuck this, let's do it like we did in the 90s", because all those things were added for a reason. Without Unicode, you have problems with your international clients. Without dynamic content your page is clunky and slow compared to the competition. Without planning for scalability, your infrastructure falls down right when your business is on the front page of Reddit.
I get the nostalgia for the good old and simple times, but that never lasts. As soon as a new tech emerges, people build on top of it, and then on top of that, and so on, and things escalate until it's hard for a single person to deal with all of it anymore.
I'm not asking for an oracle, but for a good filter.
You don't need a team full of PhDs to figure out that Air Umbrella was an unworkable and terribly impractical idea, or that Solar Roadways was a stupid idea because it compromised both the function of a solar panel and a road to make a whole that was far worse and more expensive than simply building both of those things next to each other.
Lots of people in fact pointed that out. A site staffed by a bunch of volunteers with a decent understanding of physics and electronics would go a long way. And if you have $10K to spend, you could hire a bunch of engineers to take a quick cursory look at a bunch of stuff and give a quick opinion on whether it's obviously stupid or not.
The problem with that is that kickstarter is full of half-baked ideas and people trying to sell some random thing they dug up on Alibaba as their own creation.
Personally, what I would want to see instead of a list of very well curated kickstarter projects. A list somebody went through and determined that:
The project is actually physically possible.
The project is actually doable with the skills and tools the maker has.
The project is actually novel, and not simply reselling an existing one.
The project as described makes sense to experts in the associated discipline and seems workable
The maker actually understands what they're getting themselves into and have the knowledge and resources to produce it.
(optionally) The product actually has some sort of practical use to it.
Such a list would go a long way highlighting the people with a good idea that can actually be realize, and bring more money to those who are truly deserving.
But my sympathy has limits. In this day and age it's irresponsible to leave old, unmaintained stuff on the web.
These days the entire net is constantly being scanned for stuff like buggy SSH versions, exploitable wordpress instances and a myriad other bugs. If you're leaving your old stuff completely unmaintained it's pretty much guaranteed that somebody will break into that box sooner or later, and then use it for some nefarious purpose.
The age where you could just set up a box in the closet, use it to serve a page about your cat, and then forget about it is sadly long over. These days if you're not paying attention, installing updates and keeping up with what's going on with it you'll end up serving trojans, sending spam, or being a member of a botnet, if not something worse.
If you don't have the time to go to letsencrypt.org, get a free cert, and tell Apache to use it, you shouldn't be running that server.
Get Marvel Unlimited. It's just $10 a month and gives you access to decades worth of archives, and you can read all you want without extra cost.
Then just check out something related to movie characters that sound interesting, browse the app's own suggestions, or try something at random.
And if at some point you find yourself interested in how some situation came to be, or where a character came from, just google for it and you'll quickly find wiki pages telling you exactly which issues to read.
1. Take a bunch of transaction data 2. Append a random number 3. Hash the entire thing 4. If the hash starts with enough zeroes (you get a result that looks like 00000A3234...), and you're the first, success! This earns you money. 5. If the hash doesn't have enough zeroes, pick a different random number, goto 2.
The number of zeroes you need depends on the difficulty level, and the difficulty level depends on how many people are participating in the network.
Now, why do this? Because this allows for decentralized generation of money. There's no central authority that can issue coins, but this creates the problem of how do you inject money into the economy without letting everybody who wants to give themselves a billion dollars.
And this is the solution they came up with. The hashing means anybody can solve the problem, and everyone can verify that it was indeed solved. The difficulty scaling means that as people add computing power, difficulty grows ensuring that money is always injected roughly at the same speed, keeping things stable.
Actually, what happened to good old capitalism, I wonder? Shouldn't the idea be that you can do any arbitrary stupidity you like, so long it doesn't harm people and you pay for it? So how about just sending them a bigger bill?
I used 0.001 BTC as a round value to illustrate the problem. Currently I'm getting a suggestion of a $4 fee to send $10. Just slightly less insane than it used to be.
Bitcoin volume can't collapse in the current state because the blocks are always full. There's more people wanting to use the network than resources the network has, so a reduction in interest still results in full usage of what there is.
The whole spam argument is complete bullshit. The fees are high enough that it would cost insane amounts of money to send enough transactions to affect the network, and even if somebody did, guess what? Sending transactions is what the network exists for in the first place. If it can be defeated so trivially, it's just a bad design that should be replaced with something better.
True, but that only makes the problem worse. The people and companies that accept BTC as payment don't use it as an independent system unrelated to everything else, but as something that converts to USD.
So if the minimum fee is 0.001 BTC, at $1/BTC that amounts to nothing, and at $10K/btc it's now $10 USD.
Bitcoin has a 1MB block size limit, which means people are also competing to get their transactions accepted by the network. The more competition there is, the higher the minimum fee rises.
Bitcoin also has a supply that grows at a fixed rate, and the more people get interested in it, the more competition there is for that supply, therefore the more the price rises, and with it so does the value of the minimum fee.
The two problems together add up to a complete clusterfuck that means that the more interest there is in BTC, the worse it actually it performs at being a curency.
This stopped working in the current state of Bitcoin, because you pay a fee for the amount of data you use on the blockchain, and the more addresses you accumulate, the more horrible the fees become.
Fees have got so high that addresses with a small balance (somewhere around $15-ish last time I checked, which is crazy) are effectively lost, because the fee is higher than the amount stored in the address.
The problem compounts for paying people. If I want to send you $15, I may have to spend somewhere around $15 in fees to do so, costing me a total of $30. At the end of this you will have an address with $15 worth on it, but which can't be actually spent, so I paid you, but you have effectively nothing anyway. At this point either you bump your prices, or try to consolidate your accounts through a very low fee transaction that might or not get processed, and that may take a week or so.
TL;DR: The modern bitcoin is completely useless as a payment system, and only remains of interest to people who hoard it and hope the price will rise. I expect it to crash and burn eventually as the realization sets in that it's not good for anything anymore except as a kind of gambling system.
Those people interested in something that approximates a currency can go with Bitcoin Cash, which is a fork that's far more in line with what Bitcoin used to be, or something else like Ethereum.
Easy solution: Gather data, and look for patterns.
If Youtube works at 6 Mpbs always, regardless of ISP, it's probably youtube. If Youtube works at 6 Mbps on Verizon LTE, but at line speed elsewhere, then that is quite suspicious.
The panic appears to be quite justified. The papers are out. I'm not yet done reading it, but so far what I gathered is this:
There's a demonstrated attack capable of dumping all of kernel memory at a speed of 503 KB/s. This is 34 minutes per GB, so a full dump is going to take a while at this rate, but it seems plenty fast to cause some huge amounts of trouble if the attacker knows where the juicy stuff is.
There's also a version for reading the memory of another process. This seems trickier to pull off, and the paper describes a speed of 10 KB/s of an unoptimized implementation.
Still, this appears to mean that any memory at all in the machine can be read, which is bad news for sure.
Also, this does not strictly require malware. This in my understanding means you can read memory belonging to other VMs on the same hardware, so all you need is to sign up for any random VM provider and you can poke around in whatever other customers are running.
So the paper is out. I'm not yet done reading it, but so far what I gathered is this:
There's a demonstrated attack capable of dumping all of kernel memory at a speed of 503 KB/s. This is 34 minutes per GB, so a full dump is going to take a while at this rate, but it seems plenty fast to cause some huge amounts of trouble if the attacker knows where the juicy stuff is.
There's also a version for reading the memory of another process. This seems trickier to pull off, and the paper describes a speed of 10 KB/s of an unoptimized implementation.
Still, this appears to mean that any memory at all in the machine can be read, which is bad news for sure.
That is the best way I can put it. It does okay-ish for watching it. It's pretty, and some cool things happen. There are a few WTF worthy moments (Leia), the humor is out of place, and there's one lenghty disgression from the main action that could have been avoided.
The main problems come out on further thinking.
The main problem is: I can see what it tries to do, and it fails badly at it. For instance, a theme running through the entire movie is failure. Everybody screws up. There are two problems with this: first, it's done way, way too consistently, to the point that it feels like a saturday morning cartoon where some writer took on the job of hammering into kids' heads that drugs are bad, rather than something that fits in naturally. Second, it's not even done right. For instance, Poe's screwup kills a lot of people, and yet he suffers no serious repercusions from this. He's not seriously punished in the end, nobody seems to mind his mistake, and he feels zero guilt. Why have a theme of learning from your errors when you're going to paper over the mistakes in such a way? There are multiple such events where grave consequences are bizarrely papered over, which conflicts with this very explicitly stated theme.
The other problem is that it seems to be obsessively taking down all that came before it, without replacing it with anything better. This is a weird thing to do in a movie that's right in the middle of a trilogy and results in destroying every interesting mystery and not creating anything to look forward to in the next one. To make the problem worse, the overall situation hasn't changed much at the end.
The movie also spends time on the wrong things. Luke's incident with Ben is big, important and has great consequences, yet the movie refuses to say what actually happened, and what gave Luke the idea to act as he did, while dedicating half an hour on the casino plot instead.
And then there are the minor details of the execution, like Leia's WTF moment, Luke's bizarre routine on the island, and the ill-fitting humor. Most of it is of no major consequence and could be edited out easily, but it's there and it's at times annoying and bothersome.
You can often see it in anime dubs: the dubbed version often adds noise and talk where there was none.
It seems that for Americans there must always be action or talk, or they think the viewer will get bored, and in Japan they have a more contemplative mood and it's perfectly normal to have a character be silent and thoughtful for a few moments and just look at the clouds, powerlines, or some other random element nearby. So powerlines show up because that's the kind of thing people just stare at randomly when there's nothing much going on.
If you pay attention to it, you can notice quite a lot of this kind of thing. Ranma 1/2 for instance (from memory) has people lying on the roof and looking at the sky, powerlines, blinking fluorescent lamps, people relaxing in a bath, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
No big deal, there's room to grow. Back in the 90s, when the first 3D games were appearing, people also dreamed up a bunch of stuff quite prematurely. But I'm quite sure that by now we've surpassed those expectations by far, it just took a bit longer than some expected.
So I've got a CV1. Here are the issues so far:
The resolution is too low. It works for gaming, but barely so. You won't really want to even browse the web on this if you can avoid it. So that currently puts a limit on using it for any kind of non-gaming use. This is a technologically solvable problem, but it will take time.
Dual 4K displays at 90fps would be cool, if there was hardware to support such a thing. USB C + Thunderbolt 3 does two 4K displays, at 60 FPS. Almost there, but not quite yet.
Cables are limiting. While the resolution is not huge, it's big enough to be challenging even over wires. Doing it over some kind of wireless is even more of a challenge.
Control is limited. The controllers are nice, but they're nowhere near as good as my hands.
Current tech just happens to exist at the edge of reasonably available technical capacity -- while they could do dual 4K displays right now if they wanted, only really, really hardcore adherents would pay what it takes to provide that. So it'll have to wait until today's bleeding edge becomes the next normal.
Fortunately, it's nothing tech and money can't fix. The basics are already there, now all that's left is to refine existing tech and make it better. Doing last year's hardware 20% better is what's the industry has been doing all along.
The Oculus Quest seems like a promising development -- no wires, which should make it a lot easier to use in some kinds of setups, though it will have to sacrifice 3D processing power to do so. I think at the very least it'll be a good test of how big of a deal a wire is.
Not really. There's a pretty clear dividing line.
"This code is bad for technical reasons X, Y, and Z. I'm not accepting this until this is fixed", is plain and simple.
"Also, you're a fucking moron and should have been retroactively aborted" -- now this is absolutely non-technical and unnecessary.
We can have the first and not the second with no problem whatsoever.
It's cheaper in that lithium batteries last longer if you don't fully charge, or fully discharge them.
By using a big battery and then ensuring it doesn't go below 10% or above 90%, it lasts longer, which saves money on warranty replacements. Depending on ambient conditions and driving patterns one might be able to degrade the 75 kWh battery enough, fast enough that Tesla would have to replace it at their expense. Limiting it to 60 kWh makes that a lot less likely to happen, thus it's cheaper to Tesla.
> Third, I don't see the added value. The refrigeration doesn't have to be internal (so you don't need the extra weight on board and can avoid ice buildup).
SpaceX uses densified propellant. Meaning, it's loaded at a temperature significantly below boiling point, which means simply replentishing what boils off doesn't work, as at that point it's already too warm to be useful.
That's why SpaceX needs to abort if the rocket spends too long sitting on the pad. The only solution if the propellant warms up too much is to drain all the fuel, and refuel the rocket again.
That's unless you're suggesting they should make some sort of giant cooler that wraps around the entire rocket.
> Fourth, we know from the launch of the car that the guidance systems and engine control are flaky.
If I recall correctly, given that this was a test, they simply pushed the rocket as far as it would go, and weren't aiming for an exact orbit.
Uh, what are you on? Comics were always heavy on social commentary. X-Men are social commentary with its mutants vs non-mutants dynamics. Frank Miller does a crapload of social commentary in his comics (often awful). Iron Man is social commentary, it was created by Stan Lee to see if he could make a selfish, drunk, industrialist weapons manufacturer, "shove him down people's throats" (Stan Lee quote), and make them like him. This was in the 60s, at the height of the anti-war sentiment. Captain America is social commentary. It goes on, and on, and on.
Black Panther being social commentary is nothing new, and hails straight from the source material.
The TCP checksum is literally a sum. It's not a MD5, CRC or anything fancy like that. As a result it's not that hard for something to slip past it.
It's been a long time since then, but recall the network performance was awful, which would be consistent with packets that are detected as bad being dropped by the kernel and causing a retransmission.
The error rate was absolutely awful too, I'm not talking about something that happened once a month. I think the error happened pretty much always and in a consistent spot.
VIA is cheap. Back in the C3 days they had a bit of popularity among the people who wanted a compact server, firewall or media box. Decently fast but cool running CPUs, and good silent fans were all a pretty new development back then, so there wasn't that much choice.
So I tried.
The Nehemiah CPU was a dog. The network card corrupted some of the outgoing packets, and it was visible by naked eye by just refreshing a page served by the box and seeing how a character was wrong somewhere. Sticking a system in a small box looked pretty, but the tiny fan was noisy as hell, and it killed the hard disk from the overheating after a while. There was some kind of trouble with the power supply. Accounting for the time I spent screwing around with that junk, it would have been far cheaper to just buy a normal board with a normal CPU.
With the luck I've had with this specific product line, I'm amazed some of it is still alive today.
That is dangerous in this day and age. Where does this data you need to munge come from? Where does it go to? How does your tool manipulate that data exactly? This munging is going to be one of the layers inside some kind of system, so you still need to consider how it fits into it.
And then we have to consider other issues, like: does Perl even fit well into this system? Are you causing scalability issues by executing an external command? Are you creating a security problem or a bug by passing commandline arguments wrong?
So let's take your Perl example, try "perl -e 'print uc("$russian")', (replace $russian with lowercase Russian text. I can't give a proper example, because Slashdot is a piece of junk still stuck in the 90s).
What that prints is exactly what you give it -- no uppercase. Whoops.
This works nicely to demonstrate that even for simple string manipulation one has to have some awareness of the underpinnings.
It's not the 80s anymore. Useful systems are complex, have many layers, and tend to grow new layers over time.
In the 90s, a web page was a static .html file. Some minimum understanding was enough to make one.
Later, CGIs were added. Now you need some understanding of HTTP.
Add a database. Now you need to understand SQL, and related matters, like SQL injection.
Add JavaScript. A whole new language to deal with.
Add dynamic content. Suddenly, the page isn't a static thing, there's a DOM that's being modified in real time.
Add a growing internet, with many users of your page. Now you need to know how to make a scalable system, and how to design a proper database.
Add cloud computing, where the underlying infrastructure itself can be scaled in real time, and where you can get extra database servers if you need them for a couple hours.
Add internationalization, and now the programmer has to be aware of Unicode, different date formats and so on.
With each added feature and with each added layer the complexity grows. And you can't just throw your hands up and say "fuck this, let's do it like we did in the 90s", because all those things were added for a reason. Without Unicode, you have problems with your international clients. Without dynamic content your page is clunky and slow compared to the competition. Without planning for scalability, your infrastructure falls down right when your business is on the front page of Reddit.
I get the nostalgia for the good old and simple times, but that never lasts. As soon as a new tech emerges, people build on top of it, and then on top of that, and so on, and things escalate until it's hard for a single person to deal with all of it anymore.
I'm not asking for an oracle, but for a good filter.
You don't need a team full of PhDs to figure out that Air Umbrella was an unworkable and terribly impractical idea, or that Solar Roadways was a stupid idea because it compromised both the function of a solar panel and a road to make a whole that was far worse and more expensive than simply building both of those things next to each other.
Lots of people in fact pointed that out. A site staffed by a bunch of volunteers with a decent understanding of physics and electronics would go a long way. And if you have $10K to spend, you could hire a bunch of engineers to take a quick cursory look at a bunch of stuff and give a quick opinion on whether it's obviously stupid or not.
The problem with that is that kickstarter is full of half-baked ideas and people trying to sell some random thing they dug up on Alibaba as their own creation.
Personally, what I would want to see instead of a list of very well curated kickstarter projects. A list somebody went through and determined that:
Such a list would go a long way highlighting the people with a good idea that can actually be realize, and bring more money to those who are truly deserving.
But my sympathy has limits. In this day and age it's irresponsible to leave old, unmaintained stuff on the web.
These days the entire net is constantly being scanned for stuff like buggy SSH versions, exploitable wordpress instances and a myriad other bugs. If you're leaving your old stuff completely unmaintained it's pretty much guaranteed that somebody will break into that box sooner or later, and then use it for some nefarious purpose.
The age where you could just set up a box in the closet, use it to serve a page about your cat, and then forget about it is sadly long over. These days if you're not paying attention, installing updates and keeping up with what's going on with it you'll end up serving trojans, sending spam, or being a member of a botnet, if not something worse.
If you don't have the time to go to letsencrypt.org, get a free cert, and tell Apache to use it, you shouldn't be running that server.
No examples, no specifics, just some vacuous rambling.
Damn, I miss the good old days when Slashdot posted stuff of interest.
Get Marvel Unlimited. It's just $10 a month and gives you access to decades worth of archives, and you can read all you want without extra cost.
Then just check out something related to movie characters that sound interesting, browse the app's own suggestions, or try something at random.
And if at some point you find yourself interested in how some situation came to be, or where a character came from, just google for it and you'll quickly find wiki pages telling you exactly which issues to read.
Bitcoin mining is approximately this:
1. Take a bunch of transaction data
2. Append a random number
3. Hash the entire thing
4. If the hash starts with enough zeroes (you get a result that looks like 00000A3234...), and you're the first, success! This earns you money.
5. If the hash doesn't have enough zeroes, pick a different random number, goto 2.
The number of zeroes you need depends on the difficulty level, and the difficulty level depends on how many people are participating in the network.
Now, why do this? Because this allows for decentralized generation of money. There's no central authority that can issue coins, but this creates the problem of how do you inject money into the economy without letting everybody who wants to give themselves a billion dollars.
And this is the solution they came up with. The hashing means anybody can solve the problem, and everyone can verify that it was indeed solved. The difficulty scaling means that as people add computing power, difficulty grows ensuring that money is always injected roughly at the same speed, keeping things stable.
Well said, comrade!
Actually, what happened to good old capitalism, I wonder? Shouldn't the idea be that you can do any arbitrary stupidity you like, so long it doesn't harm people and you pay for it? So how about just sending them a bigger bill?
Well, it helped that a good amount of the electorate decided they did not want political experience.
I used 0.001 BTC as a round value to illustrate the problem. Currently I'm getting a suggestion of a $4 fee to send $10. Just slightly less insane than it used to be.
The mempool is sure as heck not empty, and hasn't been in a long time: https://blockchain.info/en/cha...
Bitcoin volume can't collapse in the current state because the blocks are always full. There's more people wanting to use the network than resources the network has, so a reduction in interest still results in full usage of what there is.
The whole spam argument is complete bullshit. The fees are high enough that it would cost insane amounts of money to send enough transactions to affect the network, and even if somebody did, guess what? Sending transactions is what the network exists for in the first place. If it can be defeated so trivially, it's just a bad design that should be replaced with something better.
True, but that only makes the problem worse. The people and companies that accept BTC as payment don't use it as an independent system unrelated to everything else, but as something that converts to USD.
So if the minimum fee is 0.001 BTC, at $1/BTC that amounts to nothing, and at $10K/btc it's now $10 USD.
Bitcoin has a 1MB block size limit, which means people are also competing to get their transactions accepted by the network. The more competition there is, the higher the minimum fee rises.
Bitcoin also has a supply that grows at a fixed rate, and the more people get interested in it, the more competition there is for that supply, therefore the more the price rises, and with it so does the value of the minimum fee.
The two problems together add up to a complete clusterfuck that means that the more interest there is in BTC, the worse it actually it performs at being a curency.
This stopped working in the current state of Bitcoin, because you pay a fee for the amount of data you use on the blockchain, and the more addresses you accumulate, the more horrible the fees become.
Fees have got so high that addresses with a small balance (somewhere around $15-ish last time I checked, which is crazy) are effectively lost, because the fee is higher than the amount stored in the address.
The problem compounts for paying people. If I want to send you $15, I may have to spend somewhere around $15 in fees to do so, costing me a total of $30. At the end of this you will have an address with $15 worth on it, but which can't be actually spent, so I paid you, but you have effectively nothing anyway. At this point either you bump your prices, or try to consolidate your accounts through a very low fee transaction that might or not get processed, and that may take a week or so.
TL;DR: The modern bitcoin is completely useless as a payment system, and only remains of interest to people who hoard it and hope the price will rise. I expect it to crash and burn eventually as the realization sets in that it's not good for anything anymore except as a kind of gambling system.
Those people interested in something that approximates a currency can go with Bitcoin Cash, which is a fork that's far more in line with what Bitcoin used to be, or something else like Ethereum.
Easy solution: Gather data, and look for patterns.
If Youtube works at 6 Mpbs always, regardless of ISP, it's probably youtube. If Youtube works at 6 Mbps on Verizon LTE, but at line speed elsewhere, then that is quite suspicious.
The panic appears to be quite justified. The papers are out. I'm not yet done reading it, but so far what I gathered is this:
There's a demonstrated attack capable of dumping all of kernel memory at a speed of 503 KB/s. This is 34 minutes per GB, so a full dump is going to take a while at this rate, but it seems plenty fast to cause some huge amounts of trouble if the attacker knows where the juicy stuff is.
There's also a version for reading the memory of another process. This seems trickier to pull off, and the paper describes a speed of 10 KB/s of an unoptimized implementation.
Still, this appears to mean that any memory at all in the machine can be read, which is bad news for sure.
Also, this does not strictly require malware. This in my understanding means you can read memory belonging to other VMs on the same hardware, so all you need is to sign up for any random VM provider and you can poke around in whatever other customers are running.
So the paper is out. I'm not yet done reading it, but so far what I gathered is this:
There's a demonstrated attack capable of dumping all of kernel memory at a speed of 503 KB/s. This is 34 minutes per GB, so a full dump is going to take a while at this rate, but it seems plenty fast to cause some huge amounts of trouble if the attacker knows where the juicy stuff is.
There's also a version for reading the memory of another process. This seems trickier to pull off, and the paper describes a speed of 10 KB/s of an unoptimized implementation.
Still, this appears to mean that any memory at all in the machine can be read, which is bad news for sure.
(mostly spoiler free)
That is the best way I can put it. It does okay-ish for watching it. It's pretty, and some cool things happen. There are a few WTF worthy moments (Leia), the humor is out of place, and there's one lenghty disgression from the main action that could have been avoided.
The main problems come out on further thinking.
The main problem is: I can see what it tries to do, and it fails badly at it. For instance, a theme running through the entire movie is failure. Everybody screws up. There are two problems with this: first, it's done way, way too consistently, to the point that it feels like a saturday morning cartoon where some writer took on the job of hammering into kids' heads that drugs are bad, rather than something that fits in naturally. Second, it's not even done right. For instance, Poe's screwup kills a lot of people, and yet he suffers no serious repercusions from this. He's not seriously punished in the end, nobody seems to mind his mistake, and he feels zero guilt. Why have a theme of learning from your errors when you're going to paper over the mistakes in such a way? There are multiple such events where grave consequences are bizarrely papered over, which conflicts with this very explicitly stated theme.
The other problem is that it seems to be obsessively taking down all that came before it, without replacing it with anything better. This is a weird thing to do in a movie that's right in the middle of a trilogy and results in destroying every interesting mystery and not creating anything to look forward to in the next one. To make the problem worse, the overall situation hasn't changed much at the end.
The movie also spends time on the wrong things. Luke's incident with Ben is big, important and has great consequences, yet the movie refuses to say what actually happened, and what gave Luke the idea to act as he did, while dedicating half an hour on the casino plot instead.
And then there are the minor details of the execution, like Leia's WTF moment, Luke's bizarre routine on the island, and the ill-fitting humor. Most of it is of no major consequence and could be edited out easily, but it's there and it's at times annoying and bothersome.
You can often see it in anime dubs: the dubbed version often adds noise and talk where there was none.
It seems that for Americans there must always be action or talk, or they think the viewer will get bored, and in Japan they have a more contemplative mood and it's perfectly normal to have a character be silent and thoughtful for a few moments and just look at the clouds, powerlines, or some other random element nearby. So powerlines show up because that's the kind of thing people just stare at randomly when there's nothing much going on.
If you pay attention to it, you can notice quite a lot of this kind of thing. Ranma 1/2 for instance (from memory) has people lying on the roof and looking at the sky, powerlines, blinking fluorescent lamps, people relaxing in a bath, etc.