I don't think you should view BitCoins as a replacement for "real" currencies just yet as the article implies. You should see it as investing in gold (but safer since we know exactly how many bitcoins there are). Being able to send money anonymously is it's core value.
Not really, the trace only tells you coins were exchanged between two BitCoin wallets, not who those wallets belong to.
And any person can have an unlimited number of wallets so even impossible to tell how much one single person has.
Deflation means that the price level of goods and services is going down. There is nothing built into BitCoin that forces you to lower the price of a service you are offering.
The argument of "my money is worth more" is flawed. Let's say that the value of a single bitcoin increases from $10 to $20 over a year. That doesn't mean the BitCoin economy deflated - it just means anyone who bought a BitCoin a year ago made a good investment. The cost of a service can still go up.
"the majority of those who trade stocks are still very emotional"
Not true. The major owners in Apple, as any major company on the stock market, are mutual funds and institutional holders with 72% of the stocks. Maybe the majority of the small time investors are emotional, I don't know, but that is a completely different thing since they can only affect the stock price so much.
Cell phone networks already support multicast so there is no need to hade individual streams to each handset. The standard is called MBMS and is part of the GSM/HSPA/LTE standard.
Dataspeed relates to bandwidth by Shannon's theorem which states that the maximum capacity (C) that can ever be sent over a digital channel is set by: C = bandwidth * log2(1+S/N), where S/N is the signal to noise ratio. That is, double the bandwidth, double the maximum theoretical speed. So, to steal an example from Wikipedia: if the signal to noise ratio is 20 dB and we have 500 Mhz of bandwidth we can transmit at 3 Gbit/s (theoretically at least).
Also important to understand is that the lower the transmitting frequency, the further the signal will go (given the same transmitter strength). Going from 1 Ghz to 500 Mhz and you double the transmission range without increasing the transmitter strength.
To make this equation even more difficult, the lower the transmitting frequency, the higher noise level. So in conclusion this means that more bandwidth gives us higher transmission speeds and higher frequnecy gets more expensive since we need more transmitting towers but has low noise levels and therefore acheives higher speeds.
No, this proves that Slashdots blurbs making conclusions that does not exist. This statstic shows that there were more laptops sold than pre-built systems. I would not call that a "worthless" statistic.
The Acid2 test is not about squashing browser bugs (although this is a nice side-effect). So far, most browsers claim almost full compability with CSS1 and CSS2. CSS3 comes with a new feature-set and although both Firefox and Opera have already implemented a few CSS3 styles they are definitely not claiming to have CSS3 support. Acid2 is meant as a way to speed the adoption towards CSS3 just as the orginal Acid-test was supposed to speed the adoption of CSS2 (which succeded, with both IE and Netscape rendering the test correctly).
What on earth does this have to do with the article? What you are quoting is from *one* Spanish MEP and can in no way represent the opinion of the EU parliament or the EU commision. And besides, if you read that quote without your tin-foil hat on, you would notice that he actually makes the argument that software patents can be both good and bad (he even acknowledges the fact that they are being lobbied strongly by software authors).
And for Microsoft lobbying for software patents, they are not even in the top ten of companies filing software patents. A much more likely candidate for lobbying pro software patents would be IBM or Orcale.
Basically, what you are saying is that you don't really care what your servers are running as long as you have a phone number you can call for support. If that phone number goes to Novell or IBM you will probably have lots of open source software. Even better, if you run open source software there will in most cases be more than one firm to choose from for providing support.
Firefox is getting alot of well deserved hype these days. Everything revolves around Firefox being new which gives it a great marketing advantage (the small non-profit organization against the goliath, microsoft). But for how long will the hype last? Although I personally belive a large milestone was reached with the release of Firefox 1.0 we must be careful not to enter the "comfort zone" and expect that this is how things will continue to be.
This was the first step, now it's time to plan for the next.
Another "Bluetooth is dead" story. Haven't we had enough of these already? The funny thing is that when I read that list of features I got reminded of everything that Bluetooth promised before the first commerical products were launched.
We'll see what things are like when we have commerical products for sale.
Did you read the article? Some of the points that you bring up are in fact answered in the article (severity of the bugs for example). But most importantly, the study hasnt been released yet so I would say that many of your points are unanswered in the short article at Wired and it is therefore impossible to discuss the metrics and methods used. Personally, I would give these guys the benefit of doubt. I put a high degree of trust in a four year research project carried out a prestigious university. Wired has obviously pulled out the parts of the repot that made for the best headline but this tells us nothing about the quality of the study.
Think of it as the latest Vivenne Westwood creation strolling down the Milan catwalk. Many of the years line in clothes will be based on elemnents of the design, but noone's ever going to wear it to a business meeting.
I think this is a really good comparsion. I suspect this is actually the intention behind project looking glass. Sun knows that a true 3D desktop is not desirable and has a long way to go at the moment. Instead, looking glass should be viewed as a research project. Eventually we will see the really good and useful features that improve productivity make it into the base GNOME and KDE packages. This does not exclude eye-candy. Eye-candy is good as long as it doesn't restain the user in what s/he is trying to do. Looking Glass will continue to evolve and force people to think what a desktop CAN look like.
Yea, in europe MSN has become insanely popular and has literally killed ICQ in just under two years. AFAIK Asia is still on hooked on ICQ but are also switching to MSN. Except for the chinese who have their own nifty program, I think it's called QQQ.
Do you really NEED venture capital or do you just WANT it because it seem like a cool and easy thing? You have so many other options as people have pointed out here (friends, family et cetera). You can even ask your customers to buy a share of your company, then you will have a life long customer and an owner with a strategic stake in your company.
Another article that should be required reading by anyone thinking about getting venture capital can be found here.
There is no reason why it should only search for commercial content. This could be a huge boost for all private/community made TV shows and clips. There are lots of small highly specialized TV channels that are internet-only. Allowing their clips to be found along with other articles could create an entire new market for home-brew TV shows.
Just imagine being able to click "Find similar pages" on a TV show that you enjoyed.
Most users would probably alternate between using the web-interface and the POP3 access. Personally I use Thunderbird all the time at home for my Yahoo! account but most of the time I find myself using the web-version instead (at work, when travelling et cetera). I would guess that downloading the e-mail is a null-cost for google, the only thing that actually counts is the storage space. Meaning that even if a few customers never use their webmail they could probably live with that.
As previous poster mentioned, your bandwidth figures are way off. Furthermore, it does NOT operate in the same spectrum as mobile phones. It operates in the unlicensed ISM band at 2.45 GHz where WLAN also resides.
There is no contradiction with VC investments and staying a "non-evil" company. Your investors speak the money of language and that language only. If you can convince them that adhering to open standards and not trying to lock in your customers is the most profitable way to go then they will invest. This is what Google have done. They have shown to their investors that their openness is a competitive advantage.
If you cannot show that staying away from "evil" methods is the best way to go then you are out of luck. They will find another company that don't care about being evil and you will find yourselves beaten out of business pretty quickly.
Personally, I think that adhering to open standards and not trying to fool your customers is one of the best competitive advantages a company can have. Don't try to push some philosophy on your investors, show them why your philosophy is a competitive advantage and they will come.
Exactly. We will always be vulnerable to these kinds of "phising" attacks. It doesn't matter if we paint the location bar yellow á la firefox or whatever other measures are done to show that it is a secure site, the responsibility will still be on the actual users to make sure they are safe. All browsers will always be vulnerable to attacks of domains with names like "c1tibank.com", "citi.bank.com" or whatever other clever idea the phisers come up with.
Personally I dont think these attacks have proven anything new, phising is and will continue to be a problem in *all* browsers for the time being. Solving problems like this requires education of users. A difficult and time consuming task.
First of all, there are tons of companies building and selling products that run on top of Windows that MS would love to compete with. Take Adobe or Macromedia for example. Microsoft's doesn't have any relations with the hardcore artistic or graphic community - they would be foolish to try competing against Adobe and Macromedia.
Another good example is Firefox. It has gained tremendous support by beating IE in almost all areas. Apart from being alot more friendly to the developers, Firefox is beating Microsoft in an area where they don't compete: standards adoption. And even IF Microsoft would try to compete in that area (as they surely will) we would *still* be winning.
How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company?
Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch. If this happens (as has happened before) , it doesn't matter how much money MS have because your company will have all the money of venture capitalists and banks behind you (and even if you *don't* get support by external funding you would *still* be winning because being bought up by MS would make you a rich man).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you should view BitCoins as a replacement for "real" currencies just yet as the article implies. You should see it as investing in gold (but safer since we know exactly how many bitcoins there are). Being able to send money anonymously is it's core value.
Not really, the trace only tells you coins were exchanged between two BitCoin wallets, not who those wallets belong to. And any person can have an unlimited number of wallets so even impossible to tell how much one single person has.
Deflation means that the price level of goods and services is going down. There is nothing built into BitCoin that forces you to lower the price of a service you are offering. The argument of "my money is worth more" is flawed. Let's say that the value of a single bitcoin increases from $10 to $20 over a year. That doesn't mean the BitCoin economy deflated - it just means anyone who bought a BitCoin a year ago made a good investment. The cost of a service can still go up.
"the majority of those who trade stocks are still very emotional"
Not true. The major owners in Apple, as any major company on the stock market, are mutual funds and institutional holders with 72% of the stocks. Maybe the majority of the small time investors are emotional, I don't know, but that is a completely different thing since they can only affect the stock price so much.
Cell phone networks already support multicast so there is no need to hade individual streams to each handset. The standard is called MBMS and is part of the GSM/HSPA/LTE standard.
Dataspeed relates to bandwidth by Shannon's theorem which states that the maximum capacity (C) that can ever be sent over a digital channel is set by: C = bandwidth * log2(1+S/N), where S/N is the signal to noise ratio. That is, double the bandwidth, double the maximum theoretical speed. So, to steal an example from Wikipedia: if the signal to noise ratio is 20 dB and we have 500 Mhz of bandwidth we can transmit at 3 Gbit/s (theoretically at least).
Also important to understand is that the lower the transmitting frequency, the further the signal will go (given the same transmitter strength). Going from 1 Ghz to 500 Mhz and you double the transmission range without increasing the transmitter strength.
To make this equation even more difficult, the lower the transmitting frequency, the higher noise level. So in conclusion this means that more bandwidth gives us higher transmission speeds and higher frequnecy gets more expensive since we need more transmitting towers but has low noise levels and therefore acheives higher speeds.
Hope this explains things!
No, this proves that Slashdots blurbs making conclusions that does not exist. This statstic shows that there were more laptops sold than pre-built systems. I would not call that a "worthless" statistic.
The Acid2 test is not about squashing browser bugs (although this is a nice side-effect). So far, most browsers claim almost full compability with CSS1 and CSS2. CSS3 comes with a new feature-set and although both Firefox and Opera have already implemented a few CSS3 styles they are definitely not claiming to have CSS3 support. Acid2 is meant as a way to speed the adoption towards CSS3 just as the orginal Acid-test was supposed to speed the adoption of CSS2 (which succeded, with both IE and Netscape rendering the test correctly).
What on earth does this have to do with the article? What you are quoting is from *one* Spanish MEP and can in no way represent the opinion of the EU parliament or the EU commision. And besides, if you read that quote without your tin-foil hat on, you would notice that he actually makes the argument that software patents can be both good and bad (he even acknowledges the fact that they are being lobbied strongly by software authors).
And for Microsoft lobbying for software patents, they are not even in the top ten of companies filing software patents. A much more likely candidate for lobbying pro software patents would be IBM or Orcale.
Also try usability guru Jakob Nielsen's site Useit. Although mostly focused on web design it s a good read for anyone designing interfaces.
Basically, what you are saying is that you don't really care what your servers are running as long as you have a phone number you can call for support. If that phone number goes to Novell or IBM you will probably have lots of open source software. Even better, if you run open source software there will in most cases be more than one firm to choose from for providing support.
Firefox is getting alot of well deserved hype these days. Everything revolves around Firefox being new which gives it a great marketing advantage (the small non-profit organization against the goliath, microsoft). But for how long will the hype last? Although I personally belive a large milestone was reached with the release of Firefox 1.0 we must be careful not to enter the "comfort zone" and expect that this is how things will continue to be.
This was the first step, now it's time to plan for the next.
Another "Bluetooth is dead" story. Haven't we had enough of these already? The funny thing is that when I read that list of features I got reminded of everything that Bluetooth promised before the first commerical products were launched. We'll see what things are like when we have commerical products for sale.
Did you read the article? Some of the points that you bring up are in fact answered in the article (severity of the bugs for example). But most importantly, the study hasnt been released yet so I would say that many of your points are unanswered in the short article at Wired and it is therefore impossible to discuss the metrics and methods used. Personally, I would give these guys the benefit of doubt. I put a high degree of trust in a four year research project carried out a prestigious university. Wired has obviously pulled out the parts of the repot that made for the best headline but this tells us nothing about the quality of the study.
Think of it as the latest Vivenne Westwood creation strolling down the Milan catwalk. Many of the years line in clothes will be based on elemnents of the design, but noone's ever going to wear it to a business meeting.
I think this is a really good comparsion. I suspect this is actually the intention behind project looking glass. Sun knows that a true 3D desktop is not desirable and has a long way to go at the moment. Instead, looking glass should be viewed as a research project. Eventually we will see the really good and useful features that improve productivity make it into the base GNOME and KDE packages. This does not exclude eye-candy. Eye-candy is good as long as it doesn't restain the user in what s/he is trying to do. Looking Glass will continue to evolve and force people to think what a desktop CAN look like.
Yea, in europe MSN has become insanely popular and has literally killed ICQ in just under two years. AFAIK Asia is still on hooked on ICQ but are also switching to MSN. Except for the chinese who have their own nifty program, I think it's called QQQ.
AOL Instant Messenger (one of the most widely used IM programs)
...in the US. And whoever said slashdot isn't US-centred?
Do you really NEED venture capital or do you just WANT it because it seem like a cool and easy thing? You have so many other options as people have pointed out here (friends, family et cetera). You can even ask your customers to buy a share of your company, then you will have a life long customer and an owner with a strategic stake in your company.
Another article that should be required reading by anyone thinking about getting venture capital can be found here.
Just imagine being able to click "Find similar pages" on a TV show that you enjoyed.
Most users would probably alternate between using the web-interface and the POP3 access. Personally I use Thunderbird all the time at home for my Yahoo! account but most of the time I find myself using the web-version instead (at work, when travelling et cetera). I would guess that downloading the e-mail is a null-cost for google, the only thing that actually counts is the storage space. Meaning that even if a few customers never use their webmail they could probably live with that.
As previous poster mentioned, your bandwidth figures are way off. Furthermore, it does NOT operate in the same spectrum as mobile phones. It operates in the unlicensed ISM band at 2.45 GHz where WLAN also resides.
Whenever you're feeling down you can always watch SCO's performance during the last year....sweeeeeeet.
There is no contradiction with VC investments and staying a "non-evil" company. Your investors speak the money of language and that language only. If you can convince them that adhering to open standards and not trying to lock in your customers is the most profitable way to go then they will invest. This is what Google have done. They have shown to their investors that their openness is a competitive advantage.
If you cannot show that staying away from "evil" methods is the best way to go then you are out of luck. They will find another company that don't care about being evil and you will find yourselves beaten out of business pretty quickly.
Personally, I think that adhering to open standards and not trying to fool your customers is one of the best competitive advantages a company can have. Don't try to push some philosophy on your investors, show them why your philosophy is a competitive advantage and they will come.
Exactly. We will always be vulnerable to these kinds of "phising" attacks. It doesn't matter if we paint the location bar yellow á la firefox or whatever other measures are done to show that it is a secure site, the responsibility will still be on the actual users to make sure they are safe. All browsers will always be vulnerable to attacks of domains with names like "c1tibank.com", "citi.bank.com" or whatever other clever idea the phisers come up with.
Personally I dont think these attacks have proven anything new, phising is and will continue to be a problem in *all* browsers for the time being. Solving problems like this requires education of users. A difficult and time consuming task.
How would you compete against Microsoft?
First of all, there are tons of companies building and selling products that run on top of Windows that MS would love to compete with. Take Adobe or Macromedia for example. Microsoft's doesn't have any relations with the hardcore artistic or graphic community - they would be foolish to try competing against Adobe and Macromedia.
Another good example is Firefox. It has gained tremendous support by beating IE in almost all areas. Apart from being alot more friendly to the developers, Firefox is beating Microsoft in an area where they don't compete: standards adoption. And even IF Microsoft would try to compete in that area (as they surely will) we would *still* be winning.
How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company?
Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch. If this happens (as has happened before) , it doesn't matter how much money MS have because your company will have all the money of venture capitalists and banks behind you (and even if you *don't* get support by external funding you would *still* be winning because being bought up by MS would make you a rich man).