Or (more likely) you're a nerd with a small horde of Bitcoin who wants as much positive publicity for the currency as possible.
I'm thinking that Slashdot should start requiring Bitcoin article posters to disclose how much Bitcoin they have before publishing the article. CNBC requires someone to disclose that their firm owns 5,000 shares of stock XYZ when they go on air and proclaim how great stock XYZ is... why not require the same level of transparency here?
We should really do a release date pool, and make our best educated guesses as to when Windows 9 will ship.
Will it be like Windows Vista and takes years longer than the original estimate, or will it be more like Windows 7 and be a release with minor changes that ships on time?
My money is on November 6, 2014, and that it will be little more than a UI refresh for Windows 8.1.
I do not think that Bitcoin (or any cryptocoin for that matter) will be a good method for payment transfer until prices stabilize. As long as the price of Bitcoin can swing as much as plus/minus 50% in a day (as it did several times in 2013), no sane person would use it a big ticket purchase.
If given a choice, I'd imagine that Red Hat would have users choosing CentOS than Ubuntu if they are looking for a free Linux distribution with longer term support. At least Red Hat can then give them the option to easily upgrade to RHEL without forcing them to reinstall their systems.
Switching between the two distributions (or even Scientific Linux) is already as easy as switching repos and updating a few branding specific packages. I'd imagine that Red Hat would make the process even easier to do so in the next release.
Yeah... If Overstock.com really wanted to start taking Bitcoin right away, they could just use the Bitpay API and be done with it. I couldn't see setting that up taking more than a few days of development and QA testing.
It's actually a pretty good way of accepting Bitcoin, as the conversion to US dollars is done almost instantly.
Heh... you're assuming that Bitcoin is going to be wildly popular and every person on the friggin planet (even the ones who don't even have electricity now let along stable Internet access) are going to be using it to make ALL of their currency transactions.
I'm sure that's a problem that the Bitcoin Foundation would love to have, but I doubt that it will be something that will happen during our lifetime. I hope that I'm wrong, and that what I just said will make as much sense as a "640k will be enough for everyone" statement 20 years from now... but I doubt it.
It might not be economically stimulating for the person who has to buy the new computer, but it would certainly be economically stimulating for Dell, HP, Microsoft, McAfee, and Symantec. That was kinda the point.
If anything, bricking a few million old PC's might actually have a stimulating impact on the economy. When the users toss out their 5 year old system that is probably still running Windows XP, they will likely go out and buy a shiny new laptop from Dell or HP that comes with a copy of Windows 8.1 and Office 2012. It will probably come with a "free" trial subscription of McAfee or Symantec virus protection as well. Lots of profit to be had by all in the IT industry.
When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder who paid the Chinese programmers to write this malware.
I'm so glad that the fate of software patents in the US is being left up to a bunch of old geezers who probably can't figure out how to publish their legal opinions online without the help of their IT department.
Let's put it this way... if you were about to start a long term contract for a big project, would you rather get paid in dollars (which will likely be worth at least 95% of what they are now at the end of the contract), or in Bitcoin (which may be worth anywhere from $10 to $10,000 each a year from now, depending on who you talk to)?
Bitcoin might work for buying a bag of weed or some cookies, but you would never use it to do real business until the currency stabilizes.
I like the part where they said "Depending on the variability of AMD's press and retail samples."
The variability in the results was mostly caused by some last minute driver changes that caused a performance boost in the Radeon 290 and 290X cards, but the submitter seems to make it look some sort of "golden sample" conspiracy from AMD.
The good news is that now that the congresscritters will have Bitcoin of their own, so they'll have a vested interest in helping it become a legal and legitimate currency. That way, they can spend it on attack ads against their opponents in 2016:)
Don't forget that there are still a lot of banksters out there who are still trying to outlaw Bitcoin transactions in the US, using sites like Silk Road as an example on why it shouldn't be adopted as a mainstream currency. The potential loss of credit card transaction fees if Bitcoin becomes popular is starting to become a big deal for big banks and their lobbyists.
At some point, the CPU's built into phones will be powerful enough to handle most desktop applications for businesses without a noticeable performance hit. We're not quite there yet, though. Maybe in three or four more years, perhaps.
Hard core gamers will always want the latest $500 video card from AMD or Nvidia, though... and there will likely continue to be a niche market to support them. Everyone else will continue to buy whatever laptop they can get from their employer or for under $600 from Newegg or Best Buy.
Yeah, I love the ego of this guy. He seems to forget that Ubuntu's market share is still puny compared to Apple and Microsoft, and nobody is "following his lead" on anything.
Honestly, I doubt that many outside of the Linux community are even paying all that much attention to his statements.
Considering how CL&P's web site crashes under the load every time there is a major power outage, perhaps it's time to get rid of the incompetent people running the show now and outsource their IT to another company.
The power grid in New England is already horrible as it is, so the new guys probably couldn't do much worse. For an example, we seem to have power outages every other week in northern Connecticut that often last for several hours.
I think that the "free market" he's talking about is the one that is filled with $5 to $10 MicroUSB chargers for Android phones on Amazon and eBay.
Sure, many of them are cheap generic Chinese clones of the OEM chargers made from Motorola, Samsung, and HTC. Odds are that some of those will likely fail in a few weeks due to poor build quality, but at least you have to option to buy one if you're willing to take the risk.
Perhaps Microsoft will buy them. Judging from their past investments, they seem more than willing to pony up big $$$ for formerly important cell phone manufacturers that are quickly losing market share.
I wouldn't think that this Wikipedia algorithm would have worked on a movie like "Jobs", where it probably had a ton of Wikipedia page views and edits but not that much box office revenue.
When you have movies that are based off of nerd heroes like Steve Jobs, I'll bet that the Wikipedia editors probably fought tooth and nail to find every plot hole and technical inaccuracy they could find.
Likewise, I could see the algorithm falsely predicting success of certain Sci Fi and comic book hero movies, for the same reason.
I would think that movie theatres would want you to spend $12 to see the new movie that just came out instead of a $2 movie that has been out for six weeks.
Why do you think that studios time movie releases the way they do? It would be foolish to release three romantic comedies in one week (for example), since most movie viewers would watch one and wait for the DVD release on the other two.
That's OK... the MBA's get their vengeance by asking the server admins for a status update every 5 minutes while they are busy trying to fix the problem.
Then they'll ask IT for a 20 page root cause analysis report of the outage the following day after service is restored, even though they have no intention of reading it past the first paragraph. Not that they would understand what they were reading anyway.
OK... I broke with Slashdot tradition and actually read TFA. That said, I STILL cannot figure out exactly which Samsung phones are being specifically banned in this ruling? Is it a top seller like the Galaxy S3 or Note II, or some older phones that only the prepaid carriers offer now?
Not that it really matters... 60 days is probably enough time to come up with a workaround to get around the infringement.
Yeah... if they want to replace my hard disk, maybe they should think of getting rid of that lame 2 GB storage limit for free accounts. All of the other services like Microsoft Skydrive and Google Drive offer more storage than that. Hell, even Apple gives you 5 GB of storage for free in iCloud, and they aren't exactly well known for giving anything away for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Or (more likely) you're a nerd with a small horde of Bitcoin who wants as much positive publicity for the currency as possible.
I'm thinking that Slashdot should start requiring Bitcoin article posters to disclose how much Bitcoin they have before publishing the article. CNBC requires someone to disclose that their firm owns 5,000 shares of stock XYZ when they go on air and proclaim how great stock XYZ is... why not require the same level of transparency here?
We should really do a release date pool, and make our best educated guesses as to when Windows 9 will ship.
Will it be like Windows Vista and takes years longer than the original estimate, or will it be more like Windows 7 and be a release with minor changes that ships on time?
My money is on November 6, 2014, and that it will be little more than a UI refresh for Windows 8.1.
I do not think that Bitcoin (or any cryptocoin for that matter) will be a good method for payment transfer until prices stabilize. As long as the price of Bitcoin can swing as much as plus/minus 50% in a day (as it did several times in 2013), no sane person would use it a big ticket purchase.
If given a choice, I'd imagine that Red Hat would have users choosing CentOS than Ubuntu if they are looking for a free Linux distribution with longer term support. At least Red Hat can then give them the option to easily upgrade to RHEL without forcing them to reinstall their systems.
Switching between the two distributions (or even Scientific Linux) is already as easy as switching repos and updating a few branding specific packages. I'd imagine that Red Hat would make the process even easier to do so in the next release.
Yeah... If Overstock.com really wanted to start taking Bitcoin right away, they could just use the Bitpay API and be done with it. I couldn't see setting that up taking more than a few days of development and QA testing.
It's actually a pretty good way of accepting Bitcoin, as the conversion to US dollars is done almost instantly.
Heh... you're assuming that Bitcoin is going to be wildly popular and every person on the friggin planet (even the ones who don't even have electricity now let along stable Internet access) are going to be using it to make ALL of their currency transactions.
I'm sure that's a problem that the Bitcoin Foundation would love to have, but I doubt that it will be something that will happen during our lifetime. I hope that I'm wrong, and that what I just said will make as much sense as a "640k will be enough for everyone" statement 20 years from now... but I doubt it.
They are currently divisible to 8 decimal places, but it shouldn't be that hard to tweak the client software to allow smaller transactions if needed.
That said, it's like a COBOL programmer from the 1970's worrying about a Y2K bug. We're still a long way from needing that kind of precision.
It might not be economically stimulating for the person who has to buy the new computer, but it would certainly be economically stimulating for Dell, HP, Microsoft, McAfee, and Symantec. That was kinda the point.
If anything, bricking a few million old PC's might actually have a stimulating impact on the economy. When the users toss out their 5 year old system that is probably still running Windows XP, they will likely go out and buy a shiny new laptop from Dell or HP that comes with a copy of Windows 8.1 and Office 2012. It will probably come with a "free" trial subscription of McAfee or Symantec virus protection as well. Lots of profit to be had by all in the IT industry.
When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder who paid the Chinese programmers to write this malware.
I'm so glad that the fate of software patents in the US is being left up to a bunch of old geezers who probably can't figure out how to publish their legal opinions online without the help of their IT department.
I agree with you completely.
Let's put it this way... if you were about to start a long term contract for a big project, would you rather get paid in dollars (which will likely be worth at least 95% of what they are now at the end of the contract), or in Bitcoin (which may be worth anywhere from $10 to $10,000 each a year from now, depending on who you talk to)?
Bitcoin might work for buying a bag of weed or some cookies, but you would never use it to do real business until the currency stabilizes.
You're right... after looking at the numbers long enough, you start to see a pattern!
Oh my God... the Russians! :)
I like the part where they said "Depending on the variability of AMD's press and retail samples."
The variability in the results was mostly caused by some last minute driver changes that caused a performance boost in the Radeon 290 and 290X cards, but the submitter seems to make it look some sort of "golden sample" conspiracy from AMD.
The good news is that now that the congresscritters will have Bitcoin of their own, so they'll have a vested interest in helping it become a legal and legitimate currency. That way, they can spend it on attack ads against their opponents in 2016 :)
Don't forget that there are still a lot of banksters out there who are still trying to outlaw Bitcoin transactions in the US, using sites like Silk Road as an example on why it shouldn't be adopted as a mainstream currency. The potential loss of credit card transaction fees if Bitcoin becomes popular is starting to become a big deal for big banks and their lobbyists.
They should throw in some "free" Surface RT tablets while they are at it. It seems that they have a few thousand of them to spare...
At some point, the CPU's built into phones will be powerful enough to handle most desktop applications for businesses without a noticeable performance hit. We're not quite there yet, though. Maybe in three or four more years, perhaps.
Hard core gamers will always want the latest $500 video card from AMD or Nvidia, though... and there will likely continue to be a niche market to support them. Everyone else will continue to buy whatever laptop they can get from their employer or for under $600 from Newegg or Best Buy.
Yeah, I love the ego of this guy. He seems to forget that Ubuntu's market share is still puny compared to Apple and Microsoft, and nobody is "following his lead" on anything.
Honestly, I doubt that many outside of the Linux community are even paying all that much attention to his statements.
Considering how CL&P's web site crashes under the load every time there is a major power outage, perhaps it's time to get rid of the incompetent people running the show now and outsource their IT to another company.
The power grid in New England is already horrible as it is, so the new guys probably couldn't do much worse. For an example, we seem to have power outages every other week in northern Connecticut that often last for several hours.
I think that the "free market" he's talking about is the one that is filled with $5 to $10 MicroUSB chargers for Android phones on Amazon and eBay.
Sure, many of them are cheap generic Chinese clones of the OEM chargers made from Motorola, Samsung, and HTC. Odds are that some of those will likely fail in a few weeks due to poor build quality, but at least you have to option to buy one if you're willing to take the risk.
Perhaps Microsoft will buy them. Judging from their past investments, they seem more than willing to pony up big $$$ for formerly important cell phone manufacturers that are quickly losing market share.
I wouldn't think that this Wikipedia algorithm would have worked on a movie like "Jobs", where it probably had a ton of Wikipedia page views and edits but not that much box office revenue.
When you have movies that are based off of nerd heroes like Steve Jobs, I'll bet that the Wikipedia editors probably fought tooth and nail to find every plot hole and technical inaccuracy they could find.
Likewise, I could see the algorithm falsely predicting success of certain Sci Fi and comic book hero movies, for the same reason.
I would think that movie theatres would want you to spend $12 to see the new movie that just came out instead of a $2 movie that has been out for six weeks.
Why do you think that studios time movie releases the way they do? It would be foolish to release three romantic comedies in one week (for example), since most movie viewers would watch one and wait for the DVD release on the other two.
That's OK... the MBA's get their vengeance by asking the server admins for a status update every 5 minutes while they are busy trying to fix the problem.
Then they'll ask IT for a 20 page root cause analysis report of the outage the following day after service is restored, even though they have no intention of reading it past the first paragraph. Not that they would understand what they were reading anyway.
OK... I broke with Slashdot tradition and actually read TFA. That said, I STILL cannot figure out exactly which Samsung phones are being specifically banned in this ruling? Is it a top seller like the Galaxy S3 or Note II, or some older phones that only the prepaid carriers offer now?
Not that it really matters... 60 days is probably enough time to come up with a workaround to get around the infringement.
Yeah... if they want to replace my hard disk, maybe they should think of getting rid of that lame 2 GB storage limit for free accounts. All of the other services like Microsoft Skydrive and Google Drive offer more storage than that. Hell, even Apple gives you 5 GB of storage for free in iCloud, and they aren't exactly well known for giving anything away for free.