BitPay has reported that when the value of a Bitcoin rises their transaction rate goes up not down, as macro-economists would predict
You're confusing long and short-term trends. If there is a consistent long-term trend upwards, then economics predicts that people will hold, because it's the rational thing to do. If there is a lot of volatility, then it predicts that people will sell when the value goes up and buy when it goes down. This means that you'd expect a lot of high-frequency trades when the value spikes, as people cash out. They'll then buy slowly at the bottom (so as not to push the price up too fast) and then sell again at the top.
I'm by no means a bitcoin apologist, but I it's not really different from using the same stolen cycles for any other commercial purpose, such as sending spam, hosting phishing sites, launching DDoS attacks, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cloud providers that run customers' jobs on botnets.
The interesting thing would be if the botnet is sufficiently large that it passes the magical 50% mark required to take control of the entire network.
I flew from New York City to Boston a few weeks ago. The flight I was on was cancelled, the one after it was full, the one after that was cancelled, and so I finally got on the one after that. I arrived at the airport at 1pm and at my destination at 9:30pm. A bicycle wouldn't have been faster, but a bus would. So would a train in theory, but the reason I was taking the plane at all was that the train line was out of action all day due to a derailment.
How many wars can you study since the 1800s that are not based on bullshit? I count none passed the Civil war.
You might want to check the history on that one too. The 'free the slaves' excuse sounds good, but it wasn't there at the beginning and it was only introduced because the British Empire was considering entering the war on the side of the South, but it was politically impossible for the British Parliament to sell the idea of siding with slave owners against people who wanted to free the slaves when slavery was illegal back home. See how long it took to actually bother enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation after the war ended...
And many would like to pay next to nothing and still enjoy all the benefits of a functioning democracy.
I think that's basically everyone. I don't know anyone who says 'yay, taxes, I'm going to pay them and then send the government some extra money because I love paying taxes so much!' People either view taxes as an imposition that the government is forcing on them, or as a necessary evil to ensure that they continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a civilised society.
I'd be very happy to pay nothing and still enjoy the benefits of a modern functioning society. I'd also be very happy if I could have a free laptop. Oh, and a pony. I just realise that this is not a valid option: someone has to pay, and it would be hypocritical for me to ask that it be everyone else.
The other problem you see is similar to the tragedy of the commons. If most people are doing their best to avoid paying taxes, then the tax rates go up to compensate. This then affects the people who are not trying to avoid taxes more than those who are and so increases the incentives to avoid tax.
While I applaud their use of a revision control system (git, in this case), perhaps someone should explain to them that uploading a single.zip file with all of the code in it somewhat defeats the point...
The original problem was that Apple kept all of their WebKit changes private right up until they did a new release of Safari, then they published a massive diff against KHTML. This was impossible to review. They now develop in the open, so you can cherry-pick individual changes. Developing in a public repository makes a huge difference, even if it's a fork.
Yes, that wasn't an exact comparison. They're aimed at the same approximate market segment as Atom, but AMD isn't as terrified as Intel of cannibalising their more expensive chip sales. I have one that I use for NAS and media server stuff. It's connected to my projector (and plays back iPlayer video and DVDs fine) and has 3 2TB disks in it in a RAID-Z arrangement. I'm looking forward to the AMD drivers on FreeBSD stabilising a bit more and being able to get accelerated video. I bought it because there were no Atom boards with enough SATA ports for RAID-Z and an optical drive.
Drawing bitmaps is a broad statement - that's what every graphical application does and has always done since we started using raster displays instead of oscilloscopes for UIs - and it hides a lot of details. There are two important steps: rasterisation and compositing.
The first used to be done entirely on the server and is now done in the client. This hasn't changed from the perspective of an application developer, who says 'draw a line from x,y to x1,y1', but the library he calls now does this locally rather than calling xlib. This change largely happened for two reasons. The first is that X11 never got sensible antialised drawing primitives (e.g. a PS rendering model with antialiased bezier paths). Wayland doesn't have this either. The other is that CPUs became fast. One of the main reasons for wanting to do line drawing on the server was that rasterisation took up a huge amount of the CPU time if you did it purely in software and 2D accelerators (often sold as Windows accelerators, because they sped up typical GUIs) could do line drawing much faster.
The second, compositing, is what happens when you take a bunch of source images (text glyphs, controls, and so on) and combine them into a single image for display. This can be done entirely server-side on X11 and doing so over the network means that you keep the individual button images as textures on the GPU and do the compositing there. This is what most modern X11 toolkits do. I'm not 100% sure what Wayland exposes here, but I believe it only exposes this compositing at the window layer, whereas X lets you use it within the window. If you want to do hardware-accelerated composting in Wayland, you ask for a GLES context and do all of your rendering there (which, actually, isn't a bad idea these days, but is going to be horribly slow if you don't have GPU drivers).
So you're saying it's a good thing that so many people are strung out on drugs and unable to be productive that the taxpayers have to pick up the tab to try and break their habit so they can be productive again.
I'm saying that it's a good thing that people whoa re strung out on drugs have the opportunity to get help and become productive members of society.
And this is different from taxpayers paying to put criminals behind bars, how?
I would imagine that most people listen to music on their mobile phones than watch porn on them. Some people enjoy sharing what they're listening to, and have via IRC and IM clients long before Facebook was around. It probably does it for video because they go via the same media application and no one bothered to put in an if-not-video conditional (or did and it was removed because music videos are a fairly common form of video to play on these devices).
Portugal did it, and they have the single largest body of people in rehab of any country on Earth now
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Portugal shifted from regarding drug addiction as a crime to regarding it as a medical condition, and now they have the largest number of people with this condition receiving treatment. And you think this is bad? Meanwhile, the USA has the largest number of people of any country in the world (more than the USSR at its height) in prisons. The majority of these are for drug-related offences. How's that working out as an alternative?
I deliberately didn't mention C, because modern thinking is that you should start at the top of the programming language hierarchy and work your way down, rather than the other way.
I almost agree, but I think it's a lot easier to start at the bottom and work up. There are difficulties both ways. If you start at the top, then it's hard to reason about the costs of operations because you don't have the underlying knowledge of how they work. If you start at the bottom, it's difficult to see the benefits of high-level abstractions. On the other hand, the benefits of high-level abstractions become more apparent as you start using them, and you will use them when you program in a high-level language. Learning how high-level constructs are actually implemented, in contrast, is something that you need to do once and then just have in the back of your mind.
That's only true if you're trying to sell the app. With other software, 90% is written in house and not for sale as off-the-shelf software. This is why open source is so attractive to a lot of companies: it lowers their costs, but it doesn't cannibalise the market that's actually profitable for them. The same is true for mobile apps. There is a limited demand for knock-over-the-castle or tower-defence games, but a lot of companies are going to want workflow and stock control apps tailored to their specific needs, just as they previously needed VBA apps and then web apps for the same purpose. There are lots of companies that want apps that improve customer communication too. Last time I flew, I installed the airline's app on my phone, and it automatically checked me in and downloaded the boarding passes for all of my flights. This is of real value to the airline, because it reduces the number of staff they need on the check-in desks, but they're not selling the app.
The AMD Fusion boards come with 1.6GHz (Atom-equivalent) processors and integrated Radeons. They can't handle 1080p on the CPU, but can on the GPU. They're low power, so are good choices for home cinema boxes.
Most CPU vendors do. This has been the standard way of shipping RAM for mobile devices for a long time (search package-on-package). It means that you don't need any motherboard traces for the RAM interface (which reduces cost), increases the number of possible physical connections (increasing bandwidth) and reduces the physical size. The down side is that it also means that the CPU (and GPU and DSP and whatever else is on the SoC) and the RAM have to share heat dissipation. If you put a DDR chip on top of a Core i7, then one or the other (or possibly both) would be too hot to function. There are quite a few interesting experimental architectures that mix execution units and RAM on the same die, because the power cost of moving data between RAM and CPU is starting to be important. It's also often cheaper (in terms of both time and power) to recompute intermediate results than fetch them from main memory for workloads such as image processing.
No, Apple is selling tracks after negotiating a license with the labels. Allofmp3 was selling tracks under a loophole in Russian law that was intended for radio. Apple tries to make sure that you can't use a store outside of a jurisdiction where they have licensed the music (e.g. using the US store from the UK). It is possible to buy iTunes gift vouchers online from third parties to bypass this, but Apple can at least claim that they are attempting to try avoid it. In contrast, allofmp3 had a site in English, even though that wasn't the official language anywhere where they had a license to distribute music, and took credit cards from anywhere.
allofmp3.com was pretty clearly legal in Russia, but the legality of selling internationally was dubious. The US would have found it much harder to shut down if they had made at least a token effort to block international customers. Instead, they actively solicited them.
So GM and Chrysler would die and stop making cars. The demand for cars would not change even a little bit as demand is consumer driven, not supply driven. So my question is this: Why would part suppliers go out of business if the same number of cars were needed?
Because Ford was already producing cars at their maximum production capacity. It would take them a long time (months at least, probably years) to build factories that could ramp up production to meet demand. No one would want to take over the factories producing unprofitable vehicles as going concerns, so there would be a drop in demand for various parts for at least a few months. In a recession, most suppliers didn't have sufficient liquidity (or access to loans) to survive having a 50-75% drop in sales for several months.
American auto manufacturers should all just go out of business.
I don't disagree, but having them suddenly go out of business would be a problem, as you'd have a massive number of people becoming unemployed all at once, and other sectors wouldn't be able to absorb them all. Ideally, you want big companies to die by first becoming small companies. When a small companies goes bankrupt, it has a far less significant impact on the rest of the economy.
I'd say not, ZFS is not something I'd run on a machine with less than 2GB.
It depends a lot on the size of the disk. The general rule of thumb for good performance with ZFS is 1GB of RAM for each TB of storage (more if you're doing dedup). I stuck ZFS (PC-BSD) on an old laptop I gave to my tango group to play music. It only had 1GB of RAM, but it only had 20GB of disk space, so it was completely fine, and it means that if they unplug it (the battery is dead) by accident without shutting down then they still have a consistent filesystem, and I could snapshot it in a known-good state that they could refer to if they broke everything.
I can't speak for Linux, but on FreeBSD it's no extra hassle. First, you don't need to think about partitioning, you just create a big zpool. You can restrict the size of filesystems within it, but they're not hard limits, so it's very easy to expand them. On the other hand, you do get the benefits of having different partitions (i.e. you can optimise them for different use cases, e.g. turning on compression and deduplication on a volume that you don't access much and turning them off in filesystems that require more speed).
Some things are just nice to have in the background, like the end-to-end checksums, so you can detect single-block corruption, and RAID-Z being aware of the structure of the filesystem (unlike RAID-5), so recovery time is proportional to the amount of data, not to the size of the disks. It can also easily take advantage of SSDs for acceleration. If you add SSDs as either cache or log devices then it will speed up reads or burst writes significantly, even if most of the pool is on spinning disks.
The biggest win for me is O(1) snapshots. You can snapshot a volume trivially and it has no performance impact (well, that's not quite true: some things become slower if you have tens of thousands of snapshots) and you can trivially roll back. The entire filesystem is copy-on-write. You can also clone a filesystem if you want to experiment. This is very useful for jails or VMs, where you can have a single filesystem with an up-to-date base install and then just clone it (constant time, takes under a second) to create a new clean VM.
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BitPay has reported that when the value of a Bitcoin rises their transaction rate goes up not down, as macro-economists would predict
You're confusing long and short-term trends. If there is a consistent long-term trend upwards, then economics predicts that people will hold, because it's the rational thing to do. If there is a lot of volatility, then it predicts that people will sell when the value goes up and buy when it goes down. This means that you'd expect a lot of high-frequency trades when the value spikes, as people cash out. They'll then buy slowly at the bottom (so as not to push the price up too fast) and then sell again at the top.
I'm by no means a bitcoin apologist, but I it's not really different from using the same stolen cycles for any other commercial purpose, such as sending spam, hosting phishing sites, launching DDoS attacks, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cloud providers that run customers' jobs on botnets.
The interesting thing would be if the botnet is sufficiently large that it passes the magical 50% mark required to take control of the entire network.
Unless North Carolina is now part of China
I guess that's one way of settling the national debt...
I flew from New York City to Boston a few weeks ago. The flight I was on was cancelled, the one after it was full, the one after that was cancelled, and so I finally got on the one after that. I arrived at the airport at 1pm and at my destination at 9:30pm. A bicycle wouldn't have been faster, but a bus would. So would a train in theory, but the reason I was taking the plane at all was that the train line was out of action all day due to a derailment.
How many wars can you study since the 1800s that are not based on bullshit? I count none passed the Civil war.
You might want to check the history on that one too. The 'free the slaves' excuse sounds good, but it wasn't there at the beginning and it was only introduced because the British Empire was considering entering the war on the side of the South, but it was politically impossible for the British Parliament to sell the idea of siding with slave owners against people who wanted to free the slaves when slavery was illegal back home. See how long it took to actually bother enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation after the war ended...
And many would like to pay next to nothing and still enjoy all the benefits of a functioning democracy.
I think that's basically everyone. I don't know anyone who says 'yay, taxes, I'm going to pay them and then send the government some extra money because I love paying taxes so much!' People either view taxes as an imposition that the government is forcing on them, or as a necessary evil to ensure that they continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a civilised society.
I'd be very happy to pay nothing and still enjoy the benefits of a modern functioning society. I'd also be very happy if I could have a free laptop. Oh, and a pony. I just realise that this is not a valid option: someone has to pay, and it would be hypocritical for me to ask that it be everyone else.
The other problem you see is similar to the tragedy of the commons. If most people are doing their best to avoid paying taxes, then the tax rates go up to compensate. This then affects the people who are not trying to avoid taxes more than those who are and so increases the incentives to avoid tax.
While I applaud their use of a revision control system (git, in this case), perhaps someone should explain to them that uploading a single .zip file with all of the code in it somewhat defeats the point...
The original problem was that Apple kept all of their WebKit changes private right up until they did a new release of Safari, then they published a massive diff against KHTML. This was impossible to review. They now develop in the open, so you can cherry-pick individual changes. Developing in a public repository makes a huge difference, even if it's a fork.
Yes, that wasn't an exact comparison. They're aimed at the same approximate market segment as Atom, but AMD isn't as terrified as Intel of cannibalising their more expensive chip sales. I have one that I use for NAS and media server stuff. It's connected to my projector (and plays back iPlayer video and DVDs fine) and has 3 2TB disks in it in a RAID-Z arrangement. I'm looking forward to the AMD drivers on FreeBSD stabilising a bit more and being able to get accelerated video. I bought it because there were no Atom boards with enough SATA ports for RAID-Z and an optical drive.
Drawing bitmaps is a broad statement - that's what every graphical application does and has always done since we started using raster displays instead of oscilloscopes for UIs - and it hides a lot of details. There are two important steps: rasterisation and compositing.
The first used to be done entirely on the server and is now done in the client. This hasn't changed from the perspective of an application developer, who says 'draw a line from x,y to x1,y1', but the library he calls now does this locally rather than calling xlib. This change largely happened for two reasons. The first is that X11 never got sensible antialised drawing primitives (e.g. a PS rendering model with antialiased bezier paths). Wayland doesn't have this either. The other is that CPUs became fast. One of the main reasons for wanting to do line drawing on the server was that rasterisation took up a huge amount of the CPU time if you did it purely in software and 2D accelerators (often sold as Windows accelerators, because they sped up typical GUIs) could do line drawing much faster.
The second, compositing, is what happens when you take a bunch of source images (text glyphs, controls, and so on) and combine them into a single image for display. This can be done entirely server-side on X11 and doing so over the network means that you keep the individual button images as textures on the GPU and do the compositing there. This is what most modern X11 toolkits do. I'm not 100% sure what Wayland exposes here, but I believe it only exposes this compositing at the window layer, whereas X lets you use it within the window. If you want to do hardware-accelerated composting in Wayland, you ask for a GLES context and do all of your rendering there (which, actually, isn't a bad idea these days, but is going to be horribly slow if you don't have GPU drivers).
So you're saying it's a good thing that so many people are strung out on drugs and unable to be productive that the taxpayers have to pick up the tab to try and break their habit so they can be productive again.
I'm saying that it's a good thing that people whoa re strung out on drugs have the opportunity to get help and become productive members of society.
And this is different from taxpayers paying to put criminals behind bars, how?
Seriously?
I would imagine that most people listen to music on their mobile phones than watch porn on them. Some people enjoy sharing what they're listening to, and have via IRC and IM clients long before Facebook was around. It probably does it for video because they go via the same media application and no one bothered to put in an if-not-video conditional (or did and it was removed because music videos are a fairly common form of video to play on these devices).
Portugal did it, and they have the single largest body of people in rehab of any country on Earth now
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Portugal shifted from regarding drug addiction as a crime to regarding it as a medical condition, and now they have the largest number of people with this condition receiving treatment. And you think this is bad? Meanwhile, the USA has the largest number of people of any country in the world (more than the USSR at its height) in prisons. The majority of these are for drug-related offences. How's that working out as an alternative?
I deliberately didn't mention C, because modern thinking is that you should start at the top of the programming language hierarchy and work your way down, rather than the other way.
I almost agree, but I think it's a lot easier to start at the bottom and work up. There are difficulties both ways. If you start at the top, then it's hard to reason about the costs of operations because you don't have the underlying knowledge of how they work. If you start at the bottom, it's difficult to see the benefits of high-level abstractions. On the other hand, the benefits of high-level abstractions become more apparent as you start using them, and you will use them when you program in a high-level language. Learning how high-level constructs are actually implemented, in contrast, is something that you need to do once and then just have in the back of your mind.
That's only true if you're trying to sell the app. With other software, 90% is written in house and not for sale as off-the-shelf software. This is why open source is so attractive to a lot of companies: it lowers their costs, but it doesn't cannibalise the market that's actually profitable for them. The same is true for mobile apps. There is a limited demand for knock-over-the-castle or tower-defence games, but a lot of companies are going to want workflow and stock control apps tailored to their specific needs, just as they previously needed VBA apps and then web apps for the same purpose. There are lots of companies that want apps that improve customer communication too. Last time I flew, I installed the airline's app on my phone, and it automatically checked me in and downloaded the boarding passes for all of my flights. This is of real value to the airline, because it reduces the number of staff they need on the check-in desks, but they're not selling the app.
The AMD Fusion boards come with 1.6GHz (Atom-equivalent) processors and integrated Radeons. They can't handle 1080p on the CPU, but can on the GPU. They're low power, so are good choices for home cinema boxes.
And for faster performance the CPU vendors need to start stacking them onto their die.
Okay, how do I opt out of having anyone around me wear Google Glass?
Most CPU vendors do. This has been the standard way of shipping RAM for mobile devices for a long time (search package-on-package). It means that you don't need any motherboard traces for the RAM interface (which reduces cost), increases the number of possible physical connections (increasing bandwidth) and reduces the physical size. The down side is that it also means that the CPU (and GPU and DSP and whatever else is on the SoC) and the RAM have to share heat dissipation. If you put a DDR chip on top of a Core i7, then one or the other (or possibly both) would be too hot to function. There are quite a few interesting experimental architectures that mix execution units and RAM on the same die, because the power cost of moving data between RAM and CPU is starting to be important. It's also often cheaper (in terms of both time and power) to recompute intermediate results than fetch them from main memory for workloads such as image processing.
No, Apple is selling tracks after negotiating a license with the labels. Allofmp3 was selling tracks under a loophole in Russian law that was intended for radio. Apple tries to make sure that you can't use a store outside of a jurisdiction where they have licensed the music (e.g. using the US store from the UK). It is possible to buy iTunes gift vouchers online from third parties to bypass this, but Apple can at least claim that they are attempting to try avoid it. In contrast, allofmp3 had a site in English, even though that wasn't the official language anywhere where they had a license to distribute music, and took credit cards from anywhere.
allofmp3.com was pretty clearly legal in Russia, but the legality of selling internationally was dubious. The US would have found it much harder to shut down if they had made at least a token effort to block international customers. Instead, they actively solicited them.
So GM and Chrysler would die and stop making cars. The demand for cars would not change even a little bit as demand is consumer driven, not supply driven. So my question is this: Why would part suppliers go out of business if the same number of cars were needed?
Because Ford was already producing cars at their maximum production capacity. It would take them a long time (months at least, probably years) to build factories that could ramp up production to meet demand. No one would want to take over the factories producing unprofitable vehicles as going concerns, so there would be a drop in demand for various parts for at least a few months. In a recession, most suppliers didn't have sufficient liquidity (or access to loans) to survive having a 50-75% drop in sales for several months.
American auto manufacturers should all just go out of business.
I don't disagree, but having them suddenly go out of business would be a problem, as you'd have a massive number of people becoming unemployed all at once, and other sectors wouldn't be able to absorb them all. Ideally, you want big companies to die by first becoming small companies. When a small companies goes bankrupt, it has a far less significant impact on the rest of the economy.
I can't actually think of a single major technical contribution of NeXT
The first that springs to mind is that it was the first workstation-grade computer to come with a DMA controller.
I'd say not, ZFS is not something I'd run on a machine with less than 2GB.
It depends a lot on the size of the disk. The general rule of thumb for good performance with ZFS is 1GB of RAM for each TB of storage (more if you're doing dedup). I stuck ZFS (PC-BSD) on an old laptop I gave to my tango group to play music. It only had 1GB of RAM, but it only had 20GB of disk space, so it was completely fine, and it means that if they unplug it (the battery is dead) by accident without shutting down then they still have a consistent filesystem, and I could snapshot it in a known-good state that they could refer to if they broke everything.
I can't speak for Linux, but on FreeBSD it's no extra hassle. First, you don't need to think about partitioning, you just create a big zpool. You can restrict the size of filesystems within it, but they're not hard limits, so it's very easy to expand them. On the other hand, you do get the benefits of having different partitions (i.e. you can optimise them for different use cases, e.g. turning on compression and deduplication on a volume that you don't access much and turning them off in filesystems that require more speed).
Some things are just nice to have in the background, like the end-to-end checksums, so you can detect single-block corruption, and RAID-Z being aware of the structure of the filesystem (unlike RAID-5), so recovery time is proportional to the amount of data, not to the size of the disks. It can also easily take advantage of SSDs for acceleration. If you add SSDs as either cache or log devices then it will speed up reads or burst writes significantly, even if most of the pool is on spinning disks.
The biggest win for me is O(1) snapshots. You can snapshot a volume trivially and it has no performance impact (well, that's not quite true: some things become slower if you have tens of thousands of snapshots) and you can trivially roll back. The entire filesystem is copy-on-write. You can also clone a filesystem if you want to experiment. This is very useful for jails or VMs, where you can have a single filesystem with an up-to-date base install and then just clone it (constant time, takes under a second) to create a new clean VM.