Currency is a placeholder for value. The value of currency is that someone else is willing to exchange it for something of actual value. The value of Euros and Dollars is that large numbers of citizens have obligations to their governments that can only be discharged in those currencies. Even if all of your income is in Zimbabwe Dollars or Bitcoins, if you are a US citizen or resident then you must pay your taxes in US Dollars. This means that there are a few hundred million people with a strong incentive to accept Euros or US Dollars in exchange for goods or services.
With gold, or some other commodity, there are people who have an actual use for the commodity who will be at the end of the chain of trades. There is a demand for as long as there are people with a real use for that commodity.
With Bitcoin, there are only speculators. People accept Bitcoin because they think that the value will go up and they can pass it on to someone else. The currency is not backed by anyone or anything. There is no central bank that guarantees to accept it in exchange for some commodity, there is no government guaranteeing to accept it in exchange for tax liabilities.
The value of gold at any given time is proportional to the number of people with spare wealth and a poor grasp of economics. It seems likely to increase over time...
There's an interesting paper by the Chrome guys from a couple of years back trying to define exactly what a web application is. A modern browser is trying to be an OS, and one of the fundamental tasks of an OS is isolating applications from each other. This is relatively difficult, as two applications may exchange files or use the same libraries, but at least they are launched as different processes. A web application is a tangle of resources from a variety of different domains running in one or more browser windows, each of which may contain things from an overlapping set of servers that are not part of the application. Any serious attempt at isolation is doomed to fail.
One of the nice things about Java and Flash applets is that they provide a cleaner mechanism for saying 'this is part of the applet, but these other things aren't', although with the DOM APIs that these expose even that is quite flexible.
His example filled 1GB every 16 seconds, so 500GB in about two hours. That was an SSD though - you're basically limited by your hard drive's write speed (for extra fun, you'll likely fill up the disk cache and start swapping...). You may get 100MB/s from linear writes to a spinning disk, if you're lucky, 20-30MB/s is more plausible. The data isn't fetched from the server, it's generated by the JavaScript.
You misunderstand how the attack works. The client-side code is allowed to store 5-10MB per domain, but it can generate this data (math.random() will do it fine). The per-domain thing mean that you need one HTTP request per 5-10MB, but on the server that will be a wildcard DNS entry always resolving to the same server. If you set the cache headers with a sufficiently long timeout, then you can probably have a single site hosting the.js (so the browser will only request it once) and then just send a tiny HTML page referencing it. The JavaScript then creates a new iframe with a new (random) subdomain as the target, and so you each HTTP request to your server (total of about 1KB of traffic) generates 5-10MB of data on the client's hard disk.
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service
That's debatable. The value of the phone network is that it can reach pretty much anyone that you want to be able to reach. A phone network that only covered major cities would be a lot less valuable to everyone. Lots of people didn't bother getting phones until coverage was almost universal, because there's no point if they can't use it to call their rural relatives. You may lose money on the individual lines, but you gain money from all of the people who join because those lines exist.
When CDs were introduced, a CD drive cost about £100, and a CD recorder cost £1000+. A blank CD-R cost £10. It was easy to believe that a £15 music CD was largely production costs (pressed CDs were a lot cheaper, but no one really knew how much). When a BluRay writer costs £50 and a blank CD is under 10p, it's hard to maintain that illusion. When manufacturing price for a pressed CD was so low that AOL was carpet bombing the entire western world with them in the hope that someone would put one in a computer, it was clear that they were very cheap to mass produce, yet the prices stayed quite similar.
Now, most CDs I buy are closer to £5-6 including delivery, which is cheaper than the price of a download, is a higher quality, and comes with a backup copy on a fairly robust medium.
The recording industry didn't abandon DRM because of customer demand, they abandoned DRM because a single company controlled the DRM platform on the majority of playback devices and the distribution channel for downloads. The big labels offered Amazon the ability to sell DRM-free tracks before they offered the same to Apple so that Amazon could provide a competing source of legal iPod-compatible music downloads. Their choices were either offer DRM-free music or allow a single company control over their supply chain. There were over 100,000,000 iPods sold by 2007, when they started selling DRM-free music (and another 50 million in the next year), and these could only play music in Apple's DRM format or without DRM. That's a huge part of the market to leave in the hands of a single supplier.
This was a known problem with the enforcement of the US constitution when I was studying politics in school in 1998, and had been known then long enough to be in the textbooks that my school was replacing because they were falling apart. In a lot of other countries with a similar setup, you can challenge a law as soon as (or, in some cases, before) it goes into effect, and if you can show a hypothetical case of harm, then the law is declared unconstitutional and must be amended. In the USA, you must show harm to a specific individual. This means that laws that are known to violate the constitution can be enacted, and can be enforced. The only recompense is after the law has been shown to harm someone with standing. This is very difficult if you have a law that only violates the rights of poor people (or, in one notable historical example, native Americans) who find legal representation at that level difficult. It means that unconstitutional laws are far more likely to cause real harm, because they can't be challenged until someone is harmed, is able to prove it, and is able to get their case heard in the Supreme Court.
Actually, it isn't. It's easy to translate a word. An hour of a translator's time will easily do an entire UI for a moderately complex application. It's much harder to localise icons. For example, in China a red envelope is a good thing to receive, whereas in the UK it's a final demand for a bill. An owl signifies intelligence in most of Europe, evil in parts of latin America, and stupidity in much of Asia, yet it used to be a very common icon for help screens.
It's likely based on the same chrome engine, but it isn't Chrome (at least a recent version of it).
While they both use WebKit, the version in Browser contains a significant number of optimisations not present in Chrome.
In contrast... Firefox for Android is actually faster
I installed every Android browser I could find trying to find one that gave me fine-grained control over cookies, yet even FireFox only had an option to always allow, always reject, and didn't allow deleting individual ones. This is something we've had on desktop browsers for a decade. I have no idea why Android browsers suck so much in this respect. I can understand Google not wanting to make it easy to remove tracking cookies, but why do none of the other browsers (including FireFox and Opera) do it correctly?
I'm not sure about NetApp or Cisco, but we have a lot of code contributed by Apple and Juniper in the base system. In addition, NetApp was an Iridium sponsor of the FreeBSD Foundation last year (donated between $100,00 and $249,999), one of our largest financial sponsors. Netflix is another example: they contributed a lot of improvements to the network stack, and also a big chunk of cash to the Foundation.
If you look at airport and station bookshops, they typically have most of their book display space dedicated to the top 50 current bestsellers. A lot of people go to these shops in a hurry and just want something to read on the plane / train, so you get a big bump in sales. A lot of other shops have a wall dedicated to the top n books, so they get a lot more promotion space. They'll get a whole shelf each, whereas other books get 2-3 copies on a shelf with a dozen or so others.
It's been known for a few decades that the bestsellers list is open to manipulation, so I don't know why this is news.
I would imagine that they pay him with tokens that the US government, promises to accept in exchange for taxes, and which oil-producing counties promise to accept in exchange for oil, guaranteeing a fairly large medium-to-long-term demand.
There are not Greek Euros. The emergency plan for Greece leaving the Euro would be for every Euro to become (for example) 0.9 Euros and one Drachma. The total number of Euros in circulation would remain constant so the currency would (ignoring the lack of confidence that such a move would create) remain constant, but the Drachma would be effectively worthless, so everyone with money in Euros would lose approximately 10% of their savings. This probably wouldn't matter long-term, because the Greek economy would likely recover over the next couple of decades and so those Drachmas would be worth something again, but in the interim it would be a big problem. That's why no one really wants to see it happen.
The US can maintain a (mostly) stable currency because they have a federal taxation system that moves money from the wealthy states to the poorer ones[1]. The EU doesn't have such a mechanism, which means that the money flows from the weaker economies to the poorer ones with not reset mechanism.
[1] For some reason, the people in the poorer states consistently vote for people who want to end this.
Everyone who uses Bitcoin is a currency speculator. You can't buy everyday essentials with it, so you have to turn it back into money that your grocer accepts to do so. If you're keeping the bitcoins and not exchanging them for useful commodities (food, shelter, shiny toys, whatever), you're gambling that they will increase in value over time. The current situation with Bitcoin is that a large number of people are making the same gamble. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right up until the point when a large number of them decide to cash out. You might want to read up on the stock market in the late 1920s for a nice historical example of this happening...
On the other hand, if you're selling it immediately, then you're telling the market that you don't trust it as a long-term store of wealth and this contributes to the volatility. And if you don't think this is problematic, then consider what would happen if the value of your monthly, or even weekly, paycheque varied by 50% every week. Or even more. If you get paid on Friday, but on Thursday don't know whether you'll be paid $1000 or $500 (or $50), how financially secure will you be? How will it affect the rest of the economy if everyone has such variable incomes that they hoard some other store of value (e.g gold, land, or even US dollars) to hedge against a possible crash?
The value of US dollars can also vary quite considerably. The problem is being paid in a different currency to the one that you spend money in. It's a bigger problem when they're not linked in some way. I live in the UK, but do a reasonable amount of work for companies in the USA. Currently one US dollar is worth about 66p. Earlier this year it was 63p. A few years ago, it was 46p and it went up to about 60p over a year. Euros have varied from 78p to 89p over this year. The UK economy is closely linked to both the EU and US economies, so these tend to be largely self-correcting: fluctuations in the value of one currency affects the others. The advantage of being paid in the one that you are paying for things in is that the cost of the things that you are buying changes quite slowly relative to your income. With Bitcoin, unless you are living in a community where everyone (including farmers and landlords) accepts Bitcoins there is no feedback between your income and your expenditure. When bitcoin crashes, there there will be no bailouts and the value of the bitcoins isn't insured. It's just like being paid in any other commodity or corporate stock: there may be a massive demand for tulips...
Microsoft is still evil, they're just not as relevant. The fastest growing market segments for the last five years have been mobile and server, where Microsoft is a relatively small player. Their lock-in on Office documents is eroding as more people realise that you don't want to use a document type that records history as an interchange format. Companies like Facebook, Apple and Google have a lot more influence these days.
Exactly my thought. Microsoft ships SFU, which implements POSIX and parts of the Single UNIX Specification. NetApp and EMC both ship products based on FreeBSD, which implements most of the Single UNIX Specification. None of these are certified UNIX(R). And they want to hand The Open Group the right to sue them?
Most PDF renderers are written in C. This has the advantage that it's (usually) fast, but parsing a PDF requires a lot of offset calculations inside a file and so malformed documents can cause issues. A number of other vulnerabilities have been related to the sandboxing policies for the JavaScript in the PDFs not being quite as tight as they should have been. The FireFox PDF viewer is written in JavaScript and so should be run with the same isolation as other JavaScript. The good news is, this means that it shouldn't be possible for a malicious PDF to do anything that a malicious web page couldn't. And it has been two weeks since the last arbitrary code execution vulnerability in FireFox was fixed (CVE-2013-0746)...
That's fine for read performance. It doesn't speed up the random writes. You can get a big speedup (at the expense of reliability) by using a RAM drive for output if you're doing a lot of writes. For example, on a modern machine you want to do a parallel build, so each of 8-32 processes is going to be writing a single small file (possibly also an even smaller dependency file). You get a noticeable speedup by putting the object directory on the RAM disk. On this kind of workload, you typically don't care about the reliability anyway - if the machine fails, you can reproduce the build.
The marriage thing isn't really an issue of freedom - nothing stops gays from having religious ceremonies and making lifetime commitments - it's more an issue of forcing others to agree that gay marriage is good
You know, I'd have no problem with churches banning gay marriage and stopping gay people from having the religious ceremonies. They are free to have pretty much any views - consistent or self-contradictory - that they want, and I'm free to point and laugh at them. The thing I find indefensible is that a gay person who has been in a monogamous relationship with another for 20 years is not permitted to be their next of kin for legal purposes, while a drunk heterosexual couple that just met and stumbles into a wedding chapel can get this - along with certain tax breaks - immediately. These legal rights should be granted to any couple (or even group) that wishes to have them, not reserved for certain combinations of genitalia.
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Wow, I bet Gibbon would really kick himself if he'd read your post. He could have saved so much time and effort.
Currency is a placeholder for value. The value of currency is that someone else is willing to exchange it for something of actual value. The value of Euros and Dollars is that large numbers of citizens have obligations to their governments that can only be discharged in those currencies. Even if all of your income is in Zimbabwe Dollars or Bitcoins, if you are a US citizen or resident then you must pay your taxes in US Dollars. This means that there are a few hundred million people with a strong incentive to accept Euros or US Dollars in exchange for goods or services.
With gold, or some other commodity, there are people who have an actual use for the commodity who will be at the end of the chain of trades. There is a demand for as long as there are people with a real use for that commodity.
With Bitcoin, there are only speculators. People accept Bitcoin because they think that the value will go up and they can pass it on to someone else. The currency is not backed by anyone or anything. There is no central bank that guarantees to accept it in exchange for some commodity, there is no government guaranteeing to accept it in exchange for tax liabilities.
The value of gold at any given time is proportional to the number of people with spare wealth and a poor grasp of economics. It seems likely to increase over time...
There's an interesting paper by the Chrome guys from a couple of years back trying to define exactly what a web application is. A modern browser is trying to be an OS, and one of the fundamental tasks of an OS is isolating applications from each other. This is relatively difficult, as two applications may exchange files or use the same libraries, but at least they are launched as different processes. A web application is a tangle of resources from a variety of different domains running in one or more browser windows, each of which may contain things from an overlapping set of servers that are not part of the application. Any serious attempt at isolation is doomed to fail.
One of the nice things about Java and Flash applets is that they provide a cleaner mechanism for saying 'this is part of the applet, but these other things aren't', although with the DOM APIs that these expose even that is quite flexible.
His example filled 1GB every 16 seconds, so 500GB in about two hours. That was an SSD though - you're basically limited by your hard drive's write speed (for extra fun, you'll likely fill up the disk cache and start swapping...). You may get 100MB/s from linear writes to a spinning disk, if you're lucky, 20-30MB/s is more plausible. The data isn't fetched from the server, it's generated by the JavaScript.
You misunderstand how the attack works. The client-side code is allowed to store 5-10MB per domain, but it can generate this data (math.random() will do it fine). The per-domain thing mean that you need one HTTP request per 5-10MB, but on the server that will be a wildcard DNS entry always resolving to the same server. If you set the cache headers with a sufficiently long timeout, then you can probably have a single site hosting the .js (so the browser will only request it once) and then just send a tiny HTML page referencing it. The JavaScript then creates a new iframe with a new (random) subdomain as the target, and so you each HTTP request to your server (total of about 1KB of traffic) generates 5-10MB of data on the client's hard disk.
Telecoms lose money in rural areas. Even with phone service
That's debatable. The value of the phone network is that it can reach pretty much anyone that you want to be able to reach. A phone network that only covered major cities would be a lot less valuable to everyone. Lots of people didn't bother getting phones until coverage was almost universal, because there's no point if they can't use it to call their rural relatives. You may lose money on the individual lines, but you gain money from all of the people who join because those lines exist.
Even a physical CD is worth practically nothing
When CDs were introduced, a CD drive cost about £100, and a CD recorder cost £1000+. A blank CD-R cost £10. It was easy to believe that a £15 music CD was largely production costs (pressed CDs were a lot cheaper, but no one really knew how much). When a BluRay writer costs £50 and a blank CD is under 10p, it's hard to maintain that illusion. When manufacturing price for a pressed CD was so low that AOL was carpet bombing the entire western world with them in the hope that someone would put one in a computer, it was clear that they were very cheap to mass produce, yet the prices stayed quite similar.
Now, most CDs I buy are closer to £5-6 including delivery, which is cheaper than the price of a download, is a higher quality, and comes with a backup copy on a fairly robust medium.
The recording industry didn't abandon DRM because of customer demand, they abandoned DRM because a single company controlled the DRM platform on the majority of playback devices and the distribution channel for downloads. The big labels offered Amazon the ability to sell DRM-free tracks before they offered the same to Apple so that Amazon could provide a competing source of legal iPod-compatible music downloads. Their choices were either offer DRM-free music or allow a single company control over their supply chain. There were over 100,000,000 iPods sold by 2007, when they started selling DRM-free music (and another 50 million in the next year), and these could only play music in Apple's DRM format or without DRM. That's a huge part of the market to leave in the hands of a single supplier.
This was a known problem with the enforcement of the US constitution when I was studying politics in school in 1998, and had been known then long enough to be in the textbooks that my school was replacing because they were falling apart. In a lot of other countries with a similar setup, you can challenge a law as soon as (or, in some cases, before) it goes into effect, and if you can show a hypothetical case of harm, then the law is declared unconstitutional and must be amended. In the USA, you must show harm to a specific individual. This means that laws that are known to violate the constitution can be enacted, and can be enforced. The only recompense is after the law has been shown to harm someone with standing. This is very difficult if you have a law that only violates the rights of poor people (or, in one notable historical example, native Americans) who find legal representation at that level difficult. It means that unconstitutional laws are far more likely to cause real harm, because they can't be challenged until someone is harmed, is able to prove it, and is able to get their case heard in the Supreme Court.
Actually, it isn't. It's easy to translate a word. An hour of a translator's time will easily do an entire UI for a moderately complex application. It's much harder to localise icons. For example, in China a red envelope is a good thing to receive, whereas in the UK it's a final demand for a bill. An owl signifies intelligence in most of Europe, evil in parts of latin America, and stupidity in much of Asia, yet it used to be a very common icon for help screens.
It's likely based on the same chrome engine, but it isn't Chrome (at least a recent version of it).
While they both use WebKit, the version in Browser contains a significant number of optimisations not present in Chrome.
In contrast... Firefox for Android is actually faster
I installed every Android browser I could find trying to find one that gave me fine-grained control over cookies, yet even FireFox only had an option to always allow, always reject, and didn't allow deleting individual ones. This is something we've had on desktop browsers for a decade. I have no idea why Android browsers suck so much in this respect. I can understand Google not wanting to make it easy to remove tracking cookies, but why do none of the other browsers (including FireFox and Opera) do it correctly?
I'm not sure about NetApp or Cisco, but we have a lot of code contributed by Apple and Juniper in the base system. In addition, NetApp was an Iridium sponsor of the FreeBSD Foundation last year (donated between $100,00 and $249,999), one of our largest financial sponsors. Netflix is another example: they contributed a lot of improvements to the network stack, and also a big chunk of cash to the Foundation.
Scholars will tell you there are only 8 to 18 (depending on the scholar) unique plots in all of human civilization.
UltraWord will increase the number of possible plots well beyond the 8-plot limit imposed by the old BookOS.
If you look at airport and station bookshops, they typically have most of their book display space dedicated to the top 50 current bestsellers. A lot of people go to these shops in a hurry and just want something to read on the plane / train, so you get a big bump in sales. A lot of other shops have a wall dedicated to the top n books, so they get a lot more promotion space. They'll get a whole shelf each, whereas other books get 2-3 copies on a shelf with a dozen or so others.
It's been known for a few decades that the bestsellers list is open to manipulation, so I don't know why this is news.
I would imagine that they pay him with tokens that the US government, promises to accept in exchange for taxes, and which oil-producing counties promise to accept in exchange for oil, guaranteeing a fairly large medium-to-long-term demand.
There are not Greek Euros. The emergency plan for Greece leaving the Euro would be for every Euro to become (for example) 0.9 Euros and one Drachma. The total number of Euros in circulation would remain constant so the currency would (ignoring the lack of confidence that such a move would create) remain constant, but the Drachma would be effectively worthless, so everyone with money in Euros would lose approximately 10% of their savings. This probably wouldn't matter long-term, because the Greek economy would likely recover over the next couple of decades and so those Drachmas would be worth something again, but in the interim it would be a big problem. That's why no one really wants to see it happen.
The US can maintain a (mostly) stable currency because they have a federal taxation system that moves money from the wealthy states to the poorer ones[1]. The EU doesn't have such a mechanism, which means that the money flows from the weaker economies to the poorer ones with not reset mechanism.
[1] For some reason, the people in the poorer states consistently vote for people who want to end this.
Everyone who uses Bitcoin is a currency speculator. You can't buy everyday essentials with it, so you have to turn it back into money that your grocer accepts to do so. If you're keeping the bitcoins and not exchanging them for useful commodities (food, shelter, shiny toys, whatever), you're gambling that they will increase in value over time. The current situation with Bitcoin is that a large number of people are making the same gamble. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right up until the point when a large number of them decide to cash out. You might want to read up on the stock market in the late 1920s for a nice historical example of this happening...
On the other hand, if you're selling it immediately, then you're telling the market that you don't trust it as a long-term store of wealth and this contributes to the volatility. And if you don't think this is problematic, then consider what would happen if the value of your monthly, or even weekly, paycheque varied by 50% every week. Or even more. If you get paid on Friday, but on Thursday don't know whether you'll be paid $1000 or $500 (or $50), how financially secure will you be? How will it affect the rest of the economy if everyone has such variable incomes that they hoard some other store of value (e.g gold, land, or even US dollars) to hedge against a possible crash?
The value of US dollars can also vary quite considerably. The problem is being paid in a different currency to the one that you spend money in. It's a bigger problem when they're not linked in some way. I live in the UK, but do a reasonable amount of work for companies in the USA. Currently one US dollar is worth about 66p. Earlier this year it was 63p. A few years ago, it was 46p and it went up to about 60p over a year. Euros have varied from 78p to 89p over this year. The UK economy is closely linked to both the EU and US economies, so these tend to be largely self-correcting: fluctuations in the value of one currency affects the others. The advantage of being paid in the one that you are paying for things in is that the cost of the things that you are buying changes quite slowly relative to your income. With Bitcoin, unless you are living in a community where everyone (including farmers and landlords) accepts Bitcoins there is no feedback between your income and your expenditure. When bitcoin crashes, there there will be no bailouts and the value of the bitcoins isn't insured. It's just like being paid in any other commodity or corporate stock: there may be a massive demand for tulips...
Microsoft is still evil, they're just not as relevant. The fastest growing market segments for the last five years have been mobile and server, where Microsoft is a relatively small player. Their lock-in on Office documents is eroding as more people realise that you don't want to use a document type that records history as an interchange format. Companies like Facebook, Apple and Google have a lot more influence these days.
Exactly my thought. Microsoft ships SFU, which implements POSIX and parts of the Single UNIX Specification. NetApp and EMC both ship products based on FreeBSD, which implements most of the Single UNIX Specification. None of these are certified UNIX(R). And they want to hand The Open Group the right to sue them?
The USA is no more communist than the USSR was.
Most PDF renderers are written in C. This has the advantage that it's (usually) fast, but parsing a PDF requires a lot of offset calculations inside a file and so malformed documents can cause issues. A number of other vulnerabilities have been related to the sandboxing policies for the JavaScript in the PDFs not being quite as tight as they should have been. The FireFox PDF viewer is written in JavaScript and so should be run with the same isolation as other JavaScript. The good news is, this means that it shouldn't be possible for a malicious PDF to do anything that a malicious web page couldn't. And it has been two weeks since the last arbitrary code execution vulnerability in FireFox was fixed (CVE-2013-0746)...
That's fine for read performance. It doesn't speed up the random writes. You can get a big speedup (at the expense of reliability) by using a RAM drive for output if you're doing a lot of writes. For example, on a modern machine you want to do a parallel build, so each of 8-32 processes is going to be writing a single small file (possibly also an even smaller dependency file). You get a noticeable speedup by putting the object directory on the RAM disk. On this kind of workload, you typically don't care about the reliability anyway - if the machine fails, you can reproduce the build.
The marriage thing isn't really an issue of freedom - nothing stops gays from having religious ceremonies and making lifetime commitments - it's more an issue of forcing others to agree that gay marriage is good
You know, I'd have no problem with churches banning gay marriage and stopping gay people from having the religious ceremonies. They are free to have pretty much any views - consistent or self-contradictory - that they want, and I'm free to point and laugh at them. The thing I find indefensible is that a gay person who has been in a monogamous relationship with another for 20 years is not permitted to be their next of kin for legal purposes, while a drunk heterosexual couple that just met and stumbles into a wedding chapel can get this - along with certain tax breaks - immediately. These legal rights should be granted to any couple (or even group) that wishes to have them, not reserved for certain combinations of genitalia.