I conceded that it is justified to worry about how freely QE is being used, but it must also be recognized that the most vocal knee-jerk counter-proposals (give up on fiat currency for some fixed resource X) have actively displayed very damaging behaviors even as people advocate for them.
QE in this case is probably most problematic since it has, in practice, been like 'trickle down', causing the high end indicators (like stocks) to return to the highs before the recession, whilst leaving unemployment too high. I suppose the theory is that while 'trickle down' has been proven not to work because the 'haves' don't have incentive to give, but when they don't feel wealthy they will robb the 'have-nots' like bandits...
The German period is of course the period following World War I. They were in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the winners basically put things into motion that were going to destroy what was left of the German economy no matter how you sliced it, and they ended up inflicting hyper-inflation upon themselves by trying to 'print' their way out of it. This is generally how hyper inflation works, the authoritative body starts printing them like toilet paper usually out of response to some very dire circumstance.
This is of course what people rightly worry about in the context of Quantitative easing (how much is too little or too much is something that is just a guess until it's too late). Of course we have examples of what the opposite (hyper deflation) can do to an economy and it is equally devastating so we can't say 'printing money' done carefully is unequivocably bad. Anyone looking at bitcoin value over time can see that it has been hyper deflationary and if it were central to a 'real' economy, that economy would be in trouble.
at least bitcoin produces some type of mechanism for faith in it to even exist at all
What mechanism would that be? Do you refer to the notion that because it is not a fiat currency that it must be better? There's also a fixed quantity of helium in the world, why not use that as currency? That means gold must have tracked the average cost of things pretty closely... no wait, it hasn't. Well at least gold has always gone up lately so it's predictable in the deflationary effect, well except the rather sharp decline since the beginning of 2012. Or do you think that because it has the potential for anonymity roughly equivalent to cash that it has value? The two problems there are that, in practice, people would rather have a very clear claim to ownership than anonymity, and the transactions are actually more traceable than most cash transactions.
all other currency's faith is derived through "well everyone else is doing it."
I hate to break it to you, but that's true of *EVERY* currency that has ever existed, bitcoin included. Ever since growing beyond the feasibility of straight barter systems, our economies have relied on consensus agreement upon an arbitrary assignment of value to some 'thing', whether it be gold, silver, bitcoin or some made up but explicitly managed thing backed by a stable organization like most modern currencies in the developed world.. If walmart started accepting bitcoins exclusively, then bitcoins 'value' would increase, that's precisely because 'everyone else is doing' is the *singular* important thing in any 'currency'. If 90% of the people willing to accept bitcoin as 'payment' lost their faith, it would crash (and in fact enter a death spiral landing in zero).
it will be due to the collective stupidity of large numbers of people.
That is of course a very very likely thing. I think the first world nations are where they are because they strike the right balance. Not *too* few people in a position to completely change things, but not so many that it devolves to chaos.
Even with the relatively still small subset of the population that is participating in it, they have made BitCoin untenable as a currency. It's simply too volatile. Over the last few hours, the 'value' has increased by 20%. Now that *sounds* to BitCoin advocates like awesome news, but it means I can't negotiate an annual salary or a reasonably establish terms for a loan or really much of any sort of long term planning.
While people may rail against a central bank manipulating a currency, the aggregate behavior of any fixed currency without some regulatory hand has been too volatile for day to day use. People complain that the QE is going to, bound to lead to hyperinflation, but thus far that has not happened but we have seen hyper-deflation in terms of BitCoin overall and a lot of extreme booms and busts along the way. People are right to worry about QE going to far, but jumping on the gold or bitcoin bandwagon is betting on systems that have objectively demonstrated in practice worse behaviors than what has been observed in the central banks.
Windows Phone OS had been released in the hopes of getting to rough parity in the market with Android and Apple. MS had to start from scratch due to both form factor driving UI redesign and also because no x86 vendor was remotely ready to enable such a thing. After having a late start and nothing really to distinguish themselves from apple and google apart from having a smaller application library, things look dire.
The whole point of Metro was essentially to 'throw the desktop users under the bus' so to speak. MS had learned already (Vista) that MS laptop/desktop customers are very much *stuck* with them and the risk of dramatic change to their share is negligible. So they needed to try to move developers to a model that would get them closer to the windows phone platform, hence metro.
Of course the RT situation was always questionable. An x86 based solution could do a strict superset of the RT based devices, and AMD at least was desperate enough to give the right pricing (and Intel felt the pressure enough to deliver viable solutions in time as well). WIndows value proposition is the ability to run existing x86 Windows applications. Without that, there is nothing really to recommend it over other platforms.
RT couldn't find a value proposition that created a market just like windows phone is struggling. Windows without legacy compatibility is just not attractive (live by the sword, die by the sword: windows on x86 has gobs of compatible software, windows on arm has next to nothing compared to google and apple devices).
The initial hard *need* for RT would be that Intel couldn't/wouldn't release an architecture that would even get in the same ballpark as ARM manufacturers in terms of cost and power. Now that need is greatly reduced with Intel's Bay Trail platform. Windows 8 x86 tablets are in the same ballpark as the Nexus 7. There are certainly cheaper android devices more and more, but Intel and MS could elect to participate at those price points if they want to at this point and still turn a profit.
I guess, if all you have are fiat systems, then everything depends on confidence
You have that for any *currency*, fiat or not. Let's take a hypothetical and say you went through the last decade or so living as if gold *was* the standard and valued everything in ounces. You would have suffered the effects of pretty strong deflation going to the end of 2011. In the time since the end of 2011, you would have had pretty bad inflation. Confidence in gold is highly volatile and it's impossible to make good long term guesses. You could argue there are other precious metals and the aggregate of them would appear stable, but the point is the poster child of a non-fiat currency is gold, and that's why gold's value has fluctuated so much more than things on average. Putting aside the value of 'confidence' in gold as something more than 'just a chunk of metal', and gold would be much much much cheaper since it's practical applications are notable, but no where near justifying the market price.
The problem is that for the last few centuries, the 'game' aspect changes real production and actual delivery of service. After the great depression, people weren't homeless and hungry because they *couldn't* have been provided shelter and food, it's because confidence evaporated and cash flow dried up. The 'game' of the last few years kept people fed and in houses (mostly) and kept production and service going more than it would have otherwise.
Economy is about motivating people to do for each other what must be done to be 'successful'. That involves a whole lot of arbitrary definitions of things and accommodating both rational and irrational responses.
In the last century or so, whole economy crashes have thus far not been due to some fundamental resource shortages. It has instead been due to crises of faith. People saw balances and 'felt' less rich than they were and cash flow dries up because everyone becomes timid. The point on doesn't matter if the number is $1 or $100 assumes that compensation is different (e.g. if minimum wages were at $1000/hr, then bread being $100/hr would be in line with the current state since the numbers at a given point in time are arbitrary). This is not talking about a scenario where suddenly bread costs 100x more, because that *would* be catastrophic inflation. The absolute value is arbitrary, but the change over time is the part that would be scary.
I wonder if BitCoin may end up being the world's "lingua franca" currency, sooner or later
I continue to be amazed at the faith in BitCoin displayed.
No, you won't be constructing a massive large scale stable economic system out of bitcoin. History has shown at modern economic scale, *some* degree of money manipulation has to occur to counteract the realities of human psychology. People romanticize the gold standard and assume it was left because some nefarious plot by the powerful. It was left because a relatively hard fixed resource that a critical mass of people consider to be 'currency' results is incredible instability. You essentially have a mob rule economy, with all the trappings that one logically extrapolates from the phrase 'mob rule'.
'Value' is a surprisingly complex matter and no index is *perfect*, but a moderately decent one is CPI. The closer a commodity follows 'CPI', the more that commodity might be inferred as a stable indicator of the actual buying power of the one holding it. Gold and bitcoin have seen massive fluctuation, but the CPI has not. Neither an employee or employer can quote an annual salary in terms of ounces of gold or bitcoin because it's just too unstable. I keep including 'gold' because really bitcoin advocates view it as the second coming of a gold standard that is 'internet ready' and bitcoin fluctuation could be attributed to 'newness' but gold has no such excuse.
As much as people decry centralized control of currency supply without it being beholden to anything in particular as an irrational manipulation of things, the reality is the human participants in an economy are not rational actors, and some manipulation is required to manage the irrational behavior.
The danger here is that there is some speculation involved, but if not for the Quantitative easing, we may well have been on the trajectory to a repeat of the great depression. A lot of theory suggests that such moves globally might have averted the great depression. You are right that bubbles and crashes to some extent is not bad, but no one can deny that the great depression was bad.
This is not to say governments should feel they have free reign to print money (see Germany post world war i, the confederate states of the U.S civil war, and recently Zimbabwe). We love it when a problem and solution are straightforward, that one 'pure' philosophy is the correct thing (e.g. inflexible 'money' supply is a popular cause for people to rally behind), but the truth is that there is a lot more subtlety and a middle road must almost always be sought.
At the scale of the US economy, it's important how people 'feel'. If people feel like things are crashing or will crash, then things will crash. If that means 'printing money' to make people *feel* like things are good, then so be it. Obviously you can't do that indefinitely, but if you have no flexibility then things have historically proven to bubble and crash.
It does mean that comparing most economic indicators is not necessarily apples to apples, but if people *feel* like it is, and it makes people willing to move money, then it does have some value. The key is finding the right balance between inflexible metric, mob rule economy, central manipulation of the markets, etc.
Again, the answer is 'no'. Some people think the age of the companies is different, and the problem last time was too much faith in fuddy-duddy old companies. No, they were just in the position to be riding high on the influx of VC to all sorts of new, not established startups that had to buy their hardware and software from *somewhere*. The bubble popped around the new companies first, not the old. The big, 'old' companies suffered the downstream effects of that bubble going away.
Again, we see the signs all over the place of the late 90s. Massive investment in endeavors without any sign of profitability yet and not really a good sign of how profitability will occur (hello Snapchat). Lot's of 'new blood' with money being spent under the assumption that 'oh, these whipper-snappers are refreshing, new, and might completely change the world *this* time for a long term and better be a part of that'.
The bulk of Amazon's success is still yet predicated on operating on razor-thin margins (and you already see investors grumbling). Their EC2 unit is currently the beneficiary of the same dot-com rush that the 'old' companies benefitted from in the late 90s. Facebook I'm not quite sure about, but it does seem to be a potentially troubling sign they feel they have to shell out billions frequently in order to stay 'cool'. Google and Apple are about the only one of the mentioned three that I think has an undeniably working business model without a huge sign of long-term problems (well, except for 'growth' might plateau since there is only so far they can go). I do think in another economic downturn, Apple would go down pretty hard since market tolerance for premium brands gets hit hardest.
We get people who want security jobs who can't answer, "What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"
While that is a pretty basic question, I'm failing to see the direct connection to security, unless you have way too much faith that web developers 100% honor the semantic promise of http requests and are also 100% infallible at not having side effects even as they try to honor the requests when they do try.
Of course, having a 'security job' is always something that I get very wary about. It's better than having no security focus at all, but generally when I hear that there is one group of people trying to think about security and nothing else and everyone else not thinking about security at all with the expectation that the security team can fix everything as an island. I have seen that lead to horribly unusable scenarios because the security team has the job to make it secure, not helpful and freqeuntly lead to no better security.
First, for the apples to apples portion of the discussion, that display technology is 45 degree FoV. Given the article is about a project largely of interest because they were ambitious to 210 degrees which is much higher than the still respectable 90 degrees of Rift, bringing in a 45 degree FoV product into the discussion isn't immediately helpful. Now you *could* be suggesting that the technology could do better if they wanted, but until that's demonstrated it would be risky to assume that. The most optimistic reference material I could find about that sort of design said '100 degree FoV could be possible' based on designs that acheived 60 degree FoV' (but that's not exactly an apt comparison, since that material predates DLP which means it isn't quite talking about the avegant solution). In short, Avegant is aiming squarely at private consumption of video content rather than immersion.
Second, a significant driver for these new projects is a realization that HMD isn't a market that can drive a lot of custom, one-off design work right now. In order to get to a technology that people can actually *get* at an approachable price, they are working to leverage mass-market display technologies that are largely paid for by their use in tablet and similar form factor applications. DLP into the eye is a bit more custom and will probably not be as cheap.
Also, this discussion is solely about the display technology, but a very large part of the work that Oculus is focused on is motion tracking, which is a pretty critical component.
Finally, at least that prototype doesn't exactly look like the poster child of 'glasses you could wear', it's still pretty bulky.
I'm not saying that Avegant should pack up and go home, it could be very promising, but that's not a good reason to tell Oculus and InfiniEye that they are on a dead end path either. Avegant doesn't waste available resolution like the alternatives, but currently there is no solution that leverages the full resolution of the utilized technology while also providing an immersive FoV, but the former point might be moot if the tablet manufacturers continue their one-upmanship to the tune of 3840x2160 7" displays.
You can at least be more likely to know what you are getting when a public official rants stupidly in public. The people who never ever rant publicly likely harbor as bad if not worse sentiments privately, and the populace is none the wiser.
There were several comments which seemed not to really be supporting claims of bias (Arial font, hating the word lascivious), together with some things that are as likely to be just being inconvenienced (e.g. a police report in spanish I suspect is included to imply racism, but is just as likely to be complaining much in the same way I might complain if someone gave me something in German).
But the vast majority of comments were more cut and dry 'I hate the people who I'm called upon to conduct hearings for', which would be the more relevant serious half of this.
I won't disagree about the awkwardness of MPSS, but the 'very hot card, no fans' is because it's meant only to be installed into systems that cooperate with them and have cooling designs where the hosting system takes care of it. For a lot of systems that Phi go into, a fan is actually a liability because those systems already have cooling solutions and a fan actually fights with the designed airflow.
Of course, that's why nVidia offers up two Tesla variants of every model, one with and one without fan, to cater to both worlds.
you get to use whatever frameworks help you deal with REST communications
The obvious problem being is those frameworks are making the best of the situation, you don't go out to make things more complicated so you can 'get' to use frameworks to bring it back to manageable. REST over http has some valid applications for specific network access patterns, language interoperability, and access from javascript in browser, but if you are doing IPC in most cases it's much faster and easier to use the particular languages serialization features over a socket for IPC.
I will add another criticism of the state of REST is that advocates sometimes overly believe in the power of caching proxies to cure any concerns about a design's scalability. True, it's better than SOAP with regards to taking some advantage of the semantics of the protocol, but still it's always wise to keep in mind that there is a time and place for many things, and rarely is that 'everywhere' and 'all the time'. REST is the flavor of the day so it currently is afflicted with zealots cramming it where it doesn't belong, which doesn't really do any technology any favors despite that technology's merits (Java is probably a great example of a technology with some extremely good stuff in it earning a horrid reputation largely borne out of being too popular and accumulating crap).
Adding my rant, particularly about how this is far from an isolated incident...
Some notable examples....
Palm's WebOS bragged on how developers *got* to use javascript and css to develop local applications.... Despite some decent UI design elements, the thing was a beast to develop for in that model.
Gnome 3 in it's infinite wisdom has gone to javascript and css for their shell...
iPhone in its original vision figured web browser would suffice before realizing pretty quickly that a decent framework would be called for...
Of course we also have the peculiar entity of Node.js, because web developers had to deal with languages that were just too reasonable in the webapp server space (yes, I know the I/O semantics natively act in a reasonable manner, but things like eventlet bring that sort of model to python).
It's related to the phenomenon where so many vocal developers believe if you do *anything* over a network it better be http. I've even seen scenarios where developers have advocated for http over TCP as IPC for multiple processes that are related by common fork() ancestory, meaning they couldn't possibly run on distinct servers (ignoring the massive security exposure it represented on top of the weirdness).
Now there are decent and reasonable things in the space (e.g. network apis that reasonably *can* map to REST semantics can be explored decently) among the abominations (e.g. SOAP which of course has been plaguing the world for a long time, but still it's the best example of a widespread moronic standard over http for no good reason on top of being a mess in and of itself). Of course everyone jumping on the 'REST' bandwagon means a great deal of interfaces claim to be that way without really usefully being in that camp, and even in apis where it's done mostly correctly, developers think they suddenly have no obligation to write client libraries or utilities or even so much as document it. It's the latter that seems to be most prolific sadly...
Re:Where was this caution with Wii U?
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Well, the general state of affairs with Wii long term was that aside from the fun controller gimmick exploited to good effect in actually precious few first party games, Wii didn't have a lot of good gaming experience from third-party titles.
The problem with Wii-U was the perception that the same factors contributing to lackluster third party support compared to Sony and MS offerings was going to continue. Wii U didn't change that much from Wii and the new 'gimmick' (second screen) doesn't as obviously translate to a fun family experience as the motion controllers did. With all that in mind, expectations were around gamecube level of interest, perhaps worth it if only for the inevitable first party Nintendo titles, but the broader gaming market is left wanting.
With these two, the horsepower is there and the third party ecosystem is there and so it is highly reasonable that games will show up. Of course, it's still silly to endeavor to purchase it when games aren't there yet, but reviewer enthusiasm isn't totally unwarranted.
IBM has announced willingness to license the Power8 design in much the same way that ARM licenses their stuff to a plethora of companies. IBM has seen what ARM has accomplished at the lower end in terms of having relevance in a market that might otherwise have gone to Intel given sufficient time, and sees motivation to do that in the datacenter where Intel has significantly diminished POWER footprint over the years. Intel operates at obscene margins due to the strength of their ecosystem and technology, and IBM is recognizing that it needs to build a more diverse ecosystem itself if it wants to compete with Intel. That and the runway may be very short for such an opportunity. ARM as-is is not a very useful server platform, but that gap may close quickly before IBM can move, particularly as 64-bit ARM designs start getting more prevalent.
For nVidia, things are a bit more than 'sure we'll take more money'. nVidia spends a lot of resources on driver development and without their cooperation, using their GPU accelerator solution will get nowhere. nVidia has agreed to invest the resources to actually support Power. Here, nVidia is also feeling the pressure from Intel. Phi has promised easier development for accelerated workloads as a competitor to nVidia solutions. As yet, Phi hasn't been everything people had hoped for, but the promise of easier development today and promise for improvements later has nVidia rightly concerned about future opportunities in that space. Partnering with a company without such ambitions gives them a way to try to apply pressure against a platform that clearly has it's sights on closing the opportunity for GPU acceleration in HPC workloads. Besides, IBM has the resources to help give a boost in terms of software development tooling that nVidia may lack.
You are still relying upon a third party to attest to your identity. In the DNS case, your DNS provider takes over the role of signing your stuff, and they can 'extort' you too.
The problem is that all http clients see 'https' as meaning the client has a level of expectation about 'security'. Browsers have long started to do things to very obvious to denote 'good ssl' from 'bad ssl', but the expectation remains that 's' means 'meaningfully secure'.
So how best to convey 'encrypted, but don't really care about third party cert validation', which would be a must-have in a world where *every* public facing site has a TLS protected socket. Maybe a different uri scheme like 'httpe://', complete with the scare strikethroughs and such, but not with the 'are you sure, are you really really sure' that https does today...
Basically, they are shining three LEDs at you and moving where the light from those LEDs land. Ostensibly, laser is supposed to be usable safely in this sort of application as well, but this company steered away from even that.
So this isn't pointing something that is even particularly high powered or coherent at your retina, mostly just sidestepping the screendoor effect because the light path is being manipulated in a manner that isn't as discrete as an array of OLEDs accomplishing the same thing (the latter being easier since the LED state doesn't need to change nearly as fast with OLED or LCD as it would in a system scanning the retina with similar light source.
Still, not my cup of tea yet as the FOV isn't ambitious, and I think FOV is more key than eliminating the inter-pixel gaps (and in fact if mobile device industry continues their one-upmanship, a 7-inch 4k display might be viable and not matter much anyway).
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I conceded that it is justified to worry about how freely QE is being used, but it must also be recognized that the most vocal knee-jerk counter-proposals (give up on fiat currency for some fixed resource X) have actively displayed very damaging behaviors even as people advocate for them.
QE in this case is probably most problematic since it has, in practice, been like 'trickle down', causing the high end indicators (like stocks) to return to the highs before the recession, whilst leaving unemployment too high. I suppose the theory is that while 'trickle down' has been proven not to work because the 'haves' don't have incentive to give, but when they don't feel wealthy they will robb the 'have-nots' like bandits...
The German period is of course the period following World War I. They were in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario where the winners basically put things into motion that were going to destroy what was left of the German economy no matter how you sliced it, and they ended up inflicting hyper-inflation upon themselves by trying to 'print' their way out of it. This is generally how hyper inflation works, the authoritative body starts printing them like toilet paper usually out of response to some very dire circumstance.
This is of course what people rightly worry about in the context of Quantitative easing (how much is too little or too much is something that is just a guess until it's too late). Of course we have examples of what the opposite (hyper deflation) can do to an economy and it is equally devastating so we can't say 'printing money' done carefully is unequivocably bad. Anyone looking at bitcoin value over time can see that it has been hyper deflationary and if it were central to a 'real' economy, that economy would be in trouble.
at least bitcoin produces some type of mechanism for faith in it to even exist at all
What mechanism would that be? Do you refer to the notion that because it is not a fiat currency that it must be better? There's also a fixed quantity of helium in the world, why not use that as currency? That means gold must have tracked the average cost of things pretty closely... no wait, it hasn't. Well at least gold has always gone up lately so it's predictable in the deflationary effect, well except the rather sharp decline since the beginning of 2012. Or do you think that because it has the potential for anonymity roughly equivalent to cash that it has value? The two problems there are that, in practice, people would rather have a very clear claim to ownership than anonymity, and the transactions are actually more traceable than most cash transactions.
all other currency's faith is derived through "well everyone else is doing it."
I hate to break it to you, but that's true of *EVERY* currency that has ever existed, bitcoin included. Ever since growing beyond the feasibility of straight barter systems, our economies have relied on consensus agreement upon an arbitrary assignment of value to some 'thing', whether it be gold, silver, bitcoin or some made up but explicitly managed thing backed by a stable organization like most modern currencies in the developed world.. If walmart started accepting bitcoins exclusively, then bitcoins 'value' would increase, that's precisely because 'everyone else is doing' is the *singular* important thing in any 'currency'. If 90% of the people willing to accept bitcoin as 'payment' lost their faith, it would crash (and in fact enter a death spiral landing in zero).
it will be due to the collective stupidity of large numbers of people.
That is of course a very very likely thing. I think the first world nations are where they are because they strike the right balance. Not *too* few people in a position to completely change things, but not so many that it devolves to chaos.
Even with the relatively still small subset of the population that is participating in it, they have made BitCoin untenable as a currency. It's simply too volatile. Over the last few hours, the 'value' has increased by 20%. Now that *sounds* to BitCoin advocates like awesome news, but it means I can't negotiate an annual salary or a reasonably establish terms for a loan or really much of any sort of long term planning.
While people may rail against a central bank manipulating a currency, the aggregate behavior of any fixed currency without some regulatory hand has been too volatile for day to day use. People complain that the QE is going to, bound to lead to hyperinflation, but thus far that has not happened but we have seen hyper-deflation in terms of BitCoin overall and a lot of extreme booms and busts along the way. People are right to worry about QE going to far, but jumping on the gold or bitcoin bandwagon is betting on systems that have objectively demonstrated in practice worse behaviors than what has been observed in the central banks.
Windows Phone OS had been released in the hopes of getting to rough parity in the market with Android and Apple. MS had to start from scratch due to both form factor driving UI redesign and also because no x86 vendor was remotely ready to enable such a thing. After having a late start and nothing really to distinguish themselves from apple and google apart from having a smaller application library, things look dire.
The whole point of Metro was essentially to 'throw the desktop users under the bus' so to speak. MS had learned already (Vista) that MS laptop/desktop customers are very much *stuck* with them and the risk of dramatic change to their share is negligible. So they needed to try to move developers to a model that would get them closer to the windows phone platform, hence metro.
Of course the RT situation was always questionable. An x86 based solution could do a strict superset of the RT based devices, and AMD at least was desperate enough to give the right pricing (and Intel felt the pressure enough to deliver viable solutions in time as well). WIndows value proposition is the ability to run existing x86 Windows applications. Without that, there is nothing really to recommend it over other platforms.
RT couldn't find a value proposition that created a market just like windows phone is struggling. Windows without legacy compatibility is just not attractive (live by the sword, die by the sword: windows on x86 has gobs of compatible software, windows on arm has next to nothing compared to google and apple devices).
The initial hard *need* for RT would be that Intel couldn't/wouldn't release an architecture that would even get in the same ballpark as ARM manufacturers in terms of cost and power. Now that need is greatly reduced with Intel's Bay Trail platform. Windows 8 x86 tablets are in the same ballpark as the Nexus 7. There are certainly cheaper android devices more and more, but Intel and MS could elect to participate at those price points if they want to at this point and still turn a profit.
I guess, if all you have are fiat systems, then everything depends on confidence
You have that for any *currency*, fiat or not. Let's take a hypothetical and say you went through the last decade or so living as if gold *was* the standard and valued everything in ounces. You would have suffered the effects of pretty strong deflation going to the end of 2011. In the time since the end of 2011, you would have had pretty bad inflation. Confidence in gold is highly volatile and it's impossible to make good long term guesses. You could argue there are other precious metals and the aggregate of them would appear stable, but the point is the poster child of a non-fiat currency is gold, and that's why gold's value has fluctuated so much more than things on average. Putting aside the value of 'confidence' in gold as something more than 'just a chunk of metal', and gold would be much much much cheaper since it's practical applications are notable, but no where near justifying the market price.
The problem is that for the last few centuries, the 'game' aspect changes real production and actual delivery of service. After the great depression, people weren't homeless and hungry because they *couldn't* have been provided shelter and food, it's because confidence evaporated and cash flow dried up. The 'game' of the last few years kept people fed and in houses (mostly) and kept production and service going more than it would have otherwise.
Economy is about motivating people to do for each other what must be done to be 'successful'. That involves a whole lot of arbitrary definitions of things and accommodating both rational and irrational responses.
In the last century or so, whole economy crashes have thus far not been due to some fundamental resource shortages. It has instead been due to crises of faith. People saw balances and 'felt' less rich than they were and cash flow dries up because everyone becomes timid. The point on doesn't matter if the number is $1 or $100 assumes that compensation is different (e.g. if minimum wages were at $1000/hr, then bread being $100/hr would be in line with the current state since the numbers at a given point in time are arbitrary). This is not talking about a scenario where suddenly bread costs 100x more, because that *would* be catastrophic inflation. The absolute value is arbitrary, but the change over time is the part that would be scary.
I wonder if BitCoin may end up being the world's "lingua franca" currency, sooner or later
I continue to be amazed at the faith in BitCoin displayed.
No, you won't be constructing a massive large scale stable economic system out of bitcoin. History has shown at modern economic scale, *some* degree of money manipulation has to occur to counteract the realities of human psychology. People romanticize the gold standard and assume it was left because some nefarious plot by the powerful. It was left because a relatively hard fixed resource that a critical mass of people consider to be 'currency' results is incredible instability. You essentially have a mob rule economy, with all the trappings that one logically extrapolates from the phrase 'mob rule'.
'Value' is a surprisingly complex matter and no index is *perfect*, but a moderately decent one is CPI. The closer a commodity follows 'CPI', the more that commodity might be inferred as a stable indicator of the actual buying power of the one holding it. Gold and bitcoin have seen massive fluctuation, but the CPI has not. Neither an employee or employer can quote an annual salary in terms of ounces of gold or bitcoin because it's just too unstable. I keep including 'gold' because really bitcoin advocates view it as the second coming of a gold standard that is 'internet ready' and bitcoin fluctuation could be attributed to 'newness' but gold has no such excuse.
As much as people decry centralized control of currency supply without it being beholden to anything in particular as an irrational manipulation of things, the reality is the human participants in an economy are not rational actors, and some manipulation is required to manage the irrational behavior.
The danger here is that there is some speculation involved, but if not for the Quantitative easing, we may well have been on the trajectory to a repeat of the great depression. A lot of theory suggests that such moves globally might have averted the great depression. You are right that bubbles and crashes to some extent is not bad, but no one can deny that the great depression was bad.
This is not to say governments should feel they have free reign to print money (see Germany post world war i, the confederate states of the U.S civil war, and recently Zimbabwe). We love it when a problem and solution are straightforward, that one 'pure' philosophy is the correct thing (e.g. inflexible 'money' supply is a popular cause for people to rally behind), but the truth is that there is a lot more subtlety and a middle road must almost always be sought.
At the scale of the US economy, it's important how people 'feel'. If people feel like things are crashing or will crash, then things will crash. If that means 'printing money' to make people *feel* like things are good, then so be it. Obviously you can't do that indefinitely, but if you have no flexibility then things have historically proven to bubble and crash.
It does mean that comparing most economic indicators is not necessarily apples to apples, but if people *feel* like it is, and it makes people willing to move money, then it does have some value. The key is finding the right balance between inflexible metric, mob rule economy, central manipulation of the markets, etc.
Again, the answer is 'no'. Some people think the age of the companies is different, and the problem last time was too much faith in fuddy-duddy old companies. No, they were just in the position to be riding high on the influx of VC to all sorts of new, not established startups that had to buy their hardware and software from *somewhere*. The bubble popped around the new companies first, not the old. The big, 'old' companies suffered the downstream effects of that bubble going away.
Again, we see the signs all over the place of the late 90s. Massive investment in endeavors without any sign of profitability yet and not really a good sign of how profitability will occur (hello Snapchat). Lot's of 'new blood' with money being spent under the assumption that 'oh, these whipper-snappers are refreshing, new, and might completely change the world *this* time for a long term and better be a part of that'.
The bulk of Amazon's success is still yet predicated on operating on razor-thin margins (and you already see investors grumbling). Their EC2 unit is currently the beneficiary of the same dot-com rush that the 'old' companies benefitted from in the late 90s. Facebook I'm not quite sure about, but it does seem to be a potentially troubling sign they feel they have to shell out billions frequently in order to stay 'cool'. Google and Apple are about the only one of the mentioned three that I think has an undeniably working business model without a huge sign of long-term problems (well, except for 'growth' might plateau since there is only so far they can go). I do think in another economic downturn, Apple would go down pretty hard since market tolerance for premium brands gets hit hardest.
We get people who want security jobs who can't answer, "What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"
While that is a pretty basic question, I'm failing to see the direct connection to security, unless you have way too much faith that web developers 100% honor the semantic promise of http requests and are also 100% infallible at not having side effects even as they try to honor the requests when they do try.
Of course, having a 'security job' is always something that I get very wary about. It's better than having no security focus at all, but generally when I hear that there is one group of people trying to think about security and nothing else and everyone else not thinking about security at all with the expectation that the security team can fix everything as an island. I have seen that lead to horribly unusable scenarios because the security team has the job to make it secure, not helpful and freqeuntly lead to no better security.
First, for the apples to apples portion of the discussion, that display technology is 45 degree FoV. Given the article is about a project largely of interest because they were ambitious to 210 degrees which is much higher than the still respectable 90 degrees of Rift, bringing in a 45 degree FoV product into the discussion isn't immediately helpful. Now you *could* be suggesting that the technology could do better if they wanted, but until that's demonstrated it would be risky to assume that. The most optimistic reference material I could find about that sort of design said '100 degree FoV could be possible' based on designs that acheived 60 degree FoV' (but that's not exactly an apt comparison, since that material predates DLP which means it isn't quite talking about the avegant solution). In short, Avegant is aiming squarely at private consumption of video content rather than immersion.
Second, a significant driver for these new projects is a realization that HMD isn't a market that can drive a lot of custom, one-off design work right now. In order to get to a technology that people can actually *get* at an approachable price, they are working to leverage mass-market display technologies that are largely paid for by their use in tablet and similar form factor applications. DLP into the eye is a bit more custom and will probably not be as cheap.
Also, this discussion is solely about the display technology, but a very large part of the work that Oculus is focused on is motion tracking, which is a pretty critical component.
Finally, at least that prototype doesn't exactly look like the poster child of 'glasses you could wear', it's still pretty bulky.
I'm not saying that Avegant should pack up and go home, it could be very promising, but that's not a good reason to tell Oculus and InfiniEye that they are on a dead end path either. Avegant doesn't waste available resolution like the alternatives, but currently there is no solution that leverages the full resolution of the utilized technology while also providing an immersive FoV, but the former point might be moot if the tablet manufacturers continue their one-upmanship to the tune of 3840x2160 7" displays.
You can at least be more likely to know what you are getting when a public official rants stupidly in public. The people who never ever rant publicly likely harbor as bad if not worse sentiments privately, and the populace is none the wiser.
There were several comments which seemed not to really be supporting claims of bias (Arial font, hating the word lascivious), together with some things that are as likely to be just being inconvenienced (e.g. a police report in spanish I suspect is included to imply racism, but is just as likely to be complaining much in the same way I might complain if someone gave me something in German).
But the vast majority of comments were more cut and dry 'I hate the people who I'm called upon to conduct hearings for', which would be the more relevant serious half of this.
I won't disagree about the awkwardness of MPSS, but the 'very hot card, no fans' is because it's meant only to be installed into systems that cooperate with them and have cooling designs where the hosting system takes care of it. For a lot of systems that Phi go into, a fan is actually a liability because those systems already have cooling solutions and a fan actually fights with the designed airflow.
Of course, that's why nVidia offers up two Tesla variants of every model, one with and one without fan, to cater to both worlds.
you get to use whatever frameworks help you deal with REST communications
The obvious problem being is those frameworks are making the best of the situation, you don't go out to make things more complicated so you can 'get' to use frameworks to bring it back to manageable. REST over http has some valid applications for specific network access patterns, language interoperability, and access from javascript in browser, but if you are doing IPC in most cases it's much faster and easier to use the particular languages serialization features over a socket for IPC.
I will add another criticism of the state of REST is that advocates sometimes overly believe in the power of caching proxies to cure any concerns about a design's scalability. True, it's better than SOAP with regards to taking some advantage of the semantics of the protocol, but still it's always wise to keep in mind that there is a time and place for many things, and rarely is that 'everywhere' and 'all the time'. REST is the flavor of the day so it currently is afflicted with zealots cramming it where it doesn't belong, which doesn't really do any technology any favors despite that technology's merits (Java is probably a great example of a technology with some extremely good stuff in it earning a horrid reputation largely borne out of being too popular and accumulating crap).
Adding my rant, particularly about how this is far from an isolated incident...
Some notable examples....
Palm's WebOS bragged on how developers *got* to use javascript and css to develop local applications.... Despite some decent UI design elements, the thing was a beast to develop for in that model.
Gnome 3 in it's infinite wisdom has gone to javascript and css for their shell...
iPhone in its original vision figured web browser would suffice before realizing pretty quickly that a decent framework would be called for...
Of course we also have the peculiar entity of Node.js, because web developers had to deal with languages that were just too reasonable in the webapp server space (yes, I know the I/O semantics natively act in a reasonable manner, but things like eventlet bring that sort of model to python).
It's related to the phenomenon where so many vocal developers believe if you do *anything* over a network it better be http. I've even seen scenarios where developers have advocated for http over TCP as IPC for multiple processes that are related by common fork() ancestory, meaning they couldn't possibly run on distinct servers (ignoring the massive security exposure it represented on top of the weirdness).
Now there are decent and reasonable things in the space (e.g. network apis that reasonably *can* map to REST semantics can be explored decently) among the abominations (e.g. SOAP which of course has been plaguing the world for a long time, but still it's the best example of a widespread moronic standard over http for no good reason on top of being a mess in and of itself). Of course everyone jumping on the 'REST' bandwagon means a great deal of interfaces claim to be that way without really usefully being in that camp, and even in apis where it's done mostly correctly, developers think they suddenly have no obligation to write client libraries or utilities or even so much as document it. It's the latter that seems to be most prolific sadly...
Well, the general state of affairs with Wii long term was that aside from the fun controller gimmick exploited to good effect in actually precious few first party games, Wii didn't have a lot of good gaming experience from third-party titles.
The problem with Wii-U was the perception that the same factors contributing to lackluster third party support compared to Sony and MS offerings was going to continue. Wii U didn't change that much from Wii and the new 'gimmick' (second screen) doesn't as obviously translate to a fun family experience as the motion controllers did. With all that in mind, expectations were around gamecube level of interest, perhaps worth it if only for the inevitable first party Nintendo titles, but the broader gaming market is left wanting.
With these two, the horsepower is there and the third party ecosystem is there and so it is highly reasonable that games will show up. Of course, it's still silly to endeavor to purchase it when games aren't there yet, but reviewer enthusiasm isn't totally unwarranted.
IBM has announced willingness to license the Power8 design in much the same way that ARM licenses their stuff to a plethora of companies. IBM has seen what ARM has accomplished at the lower end in terms of having relevance in a market that might otherwise have gone to Intel given sufficient time, and sees motivation to do that in the datacenter where Intel has significantly diminished POWER footprint over the years. Intel operates at obscene margins due to the strength of their ecosystem and technology, and IBM is recognizing that it needs to build a more diverse ecosystem itself if it wants to compete with Intel. That and the runway may be very short for such an opportunity. ARM as-is is not a very useful server platform, but that gap may close quickly before IBM can move, particularly as 64-bit ARM designs start getting more prevalent.
For nVidia, things are a bit more than 'sure we'll take more money'. nVidia spends a lot of resources on driver development and without their cooperation, using their GPU accelerator solution will get nowhere. nVidia has agreed to invest the resources to actually support Power. Here, nVidia is also feeling the pressure from Intel. Phi has promised easier development for accelerated workloads as a competitor to nVidia solutions. As yet, Phi hasn't been everything people had hoped for, but the promise of easier development today and promise for improvements later has nVidia rightly concerned about future opportunities in that space. Partnering with a company without such ambitions gives them a way to try to apply pressure against a platform that clearly has it's sights on closing the opportunity for GPU acceleration in HPC workloads. Besides, IBM has the resources to help give a boost in terms of software development tooling that nVidia may lack.
You are still relying upon a third party to attest to your identity. In the DNS case, your DNS provider takes over the role of signing your stuff, and they can 'extort' you too.
The problem is that all http clients see 'https' as meaning the client has a level of expectation about 'security'. Browsers have long started to do things to very obvious to denote 'good ssl' from 'bad ssl', but the expectation remains that 's' means 'meaningfully secure'.
So how best to convey 'encrypted, but don't really care about third party cert validation', which would be a must-have in a world where *every* public facing site has a TLS protected socket. Maybe a different uri scheme like 'httpe://', complete with the scare strikethroughs and such, but not with the 'are you sure, are you really really sure' that https does today...
Basically, they are shining three LEDs at you and moving where the light from those LEDs land. Ostensibly, laser is supposed to be usable safely in this sort of application as well, but this company steered away from even that.
So this isn't pointing something that is even particularly high powered or coherent at your retina, mostly just sidestepping the screendoor effect because the light path is being manipulated in a manner that isn't as discrete as an array of OLEDs accomplishing the same thing (the latter being easier since the LED state doesn't need to change nearly as fast with OLED or LCD as it would in a system scanning the retina with similar light source.
Still, not my cup of tea yet as the FOV isn't ambitious, and I think FOV is more key than eliminating the inter-pixel gaps (and in fact if mobile device industry continues their one-upmanship, a 7-inch 4k display might be viable and not matter much anyway).