What value does Bitcoin have other than its exchange rate?
You can't pay for your groceries with Bitcoin. Nor can you pay your mortgage, and I can't imagine there are many landlords that will accept it as rent.
The CPU/GPU power is just a means of regulating the number of bitcoins that can exist, same as the Bank of England is (among other things) a means of regulating the amount of £ Sterling that can exist.
You can't exchange bitcoins for an arbitrary amount of CPU power that you can hold in your hand and physically give to someone in lieu of bitcoins (which is pretty much the point of a currency that's backed by something like gold).
One of the benefits of a currency that's backed by something precious - such as gold - is it acts as a great stabiliser. The value of the currency is unlikely to drop far below the value of an equivalent amount of gold. Mind you, it also wouldn't rise far above the value of the gold. A currency that comes from a stable country and is widely accepted doesn't really need anything to back it, it's "big enough" if you like to stabilise itself.
None of these are true of Bitcoin, which means the value fluctuates wildly. But don't take my word for it - take a look at mtgox. There's a graph you can see shows how the value has fluctuated over a day, week or month - it's up and down like a yoyo.
It's a new fiat currency (ie. it exists because someone says it exists).
There's no reason why you, I and a bunch of our friends can't get together and say "Right, we'll use this new currency called DollarPounds, we'll use a spreadsheet to keep track of who has how many and they're exchangeable for US$ at a rate of US$1 = $£1" but the only way a fiat currency can possibly work is if you have enough people who will use it.
The idea of Bitcoin is it's a currency that doesn't require a central bank to produce more money. Instead, Bitcoins are "mined" (ie. brought into existence) through means of a mathematical algorithm that generates a verifiable block of numbers. The algorithm is designed to get harder as more bitcoins are mined. Meaning that the rate at which Bitcoins can be mined slows down eventually reaching the point where no more can be mined.
On the one hand, this resolves the "Leaves as currency" inflation problem in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe by creating artificial scarcity. On the other, they've done too good a job - as soon as it becomes impossible - or even impractical - to mine further bitcoins, the currency is likely to become subject to massive deflation. We know what happens when a currency undergoes massive deflation - Germany in the 1930's or, more recently, Zimbabwe happens.
FWIW, my view is it's probably best viewed from a distance with an air of morbid curiosity.
Who gives a shit what 56% of the general populace think? They aren't qualified to have a meaningful opinion.
They may not be qualified to have an opinion that's meaningful in terms of military strategy, but they're certainly qualified to have an opinion that's meaningful in political terms.
I suspect most first-world countries can't afford an all-out war with China - nuclear or otherwise - because of the trade sanctions it would inevitably bring.
I have my doubts that China would want such a war either, for precisely the same reasons.
TBH, that part of TFA struck me as a chap who's written some basic "Learn X in 30 minutes" books, decided to go down the self-publishing route (whether he's hoping to make a business out of it or it's just a self-funding hobby I'm not sure) and is bitter about learning a lesson that cost $250.
Considering it's very easy to make mistakes that cost ten or even a hundred times that in a small business, I reckon $250 is a bargain. It'd cost an awful lot more than $250 to hire a consultant to tell you that.
Oh, they might make good money - but to make £50 million they often have to spend £49 million. When the difference between "successful business" and "calling in the administrators" is that tight, it really doesn't take very much to screw with the numbers.
Your average airline is running on razor-thin margins. They do NOT want a plane grounded for any longer than is absolutely necessary - because a grounded plane isn't earning any money. If an airliner can signal any faults several hours before it lands, the maintenance crew have advance warning so they know exactly what to look at (and maybe even have parts available) the instant it touches down rather than have it sitting on the tarmac waiting for parts to arrive.
It most certainly was not capable of running windows under emulation except perhaps very very slowly. The Acorn PC emulator was painful.
There were, however, add on cards you could buy that had an x86 processor on board and could be harnessed to run Windows. You didn't have to dual boot; you could run PC applications in a window giving you essentially two computers in one box.
IIRC there usually is a small gap between the pixels on a sensor - someone else has also mentioned that you'd want slightly higher resolution for debayering so it sounds like I was probably right - this sensor will produce images of approximately 1920x1080. But it'll be exquisitely sensitive to low-light conditions.
I think this is an attempt to be taken more seriously in the world of professional film recording - historically, companies like Sony and Panasonic have been market leaders here.
More than a few people have made very positive noises about using things like an EOS 5D but that wouldn't be terribly useful in low light situations.
Put this into a body that's designed to be handheld for long periods of time (like you see with shoulder-mounted studio cameras), stick an EOS lens mount on the front and suddenly Canon have the building blocks for a complete portfolio of pro-grade video equipment.
It's also explicitly intended "exclusively for video recording" and mentions "full HD". Which would mean - assuming I'm reading between the lines correctly - that the resolution is 1920x1080 - ie. 2 megapixels.
Depends on so many things it's pretty much pointless to discuss in general terms.
Some sorts of cancer, detected at some stages, palliative care is exactly the way to go for the reasons you describe. (As a rule of thumb, the worst cancers tend to be those that develop deep within the body. As often as not, by the time you get diagnosed you're already long past the point of no useful treatment).
Jobs' case was a little different for two reasons:
1. He was "lucky" (if luck is the word) to have a variant of pancreatic cancer that is relatively treatable.
2. He was being regularly scanned for other reasons, and hence was caught at an early stage.
The GP - while s/he could have worded it rather more tactfully - is actually pretty well correct. Had Jobs chosen more orthodox treatment on the day he was diagnosed, there's a very good chance he'd still be with us - and in reasonably good health - today.
Yes more people use Windows, but when XP and 7 finally have their support ended, the people using those Microsoft platforms will be forced into using precisely what they are avoiding, the 'modern' interface. It's going to be interesting to watch if they move to Mac, Linux or suck up to Microsoft and push themselves into that new UI.
People were saying the exact same thing about Office 2007 6 years ago. As long as the magic word "Microsoft" is on the splash screen and in the title bar, it appears to make precisely no difference - you only get wailing and gnashing of teeth if that word is taken away.
In a hypothetical universe that wouldn't result in being sued to kingdom come, I wonder what would happen were you to build your own distribution based on Ubuntu but with some strategic rebranding - call the OS "Microsoft Windows 9", rebrand Firefox as "Microsoft Internet Explorer 11" and LibreOffice as "Microsoft Office 2014", take a test group of 100 people and tell them it's the "next big thing".
Then take another, similar group and put them in front of plain, vanilla Ubuntu.
There's a Home & Student edition (that explicitly has a "Not for use in a profit-making organisation" clause in the license) that's a lot cheaper. The Home & Business is a way to get small businesses to buy Office rather than using Open/LibreOffice.
Powershell is just a heavily object-oriented scripting language that combines ideas from a number of places - there's nothing particularly new or unusual about that. However, the reason it's particularly interesting in Windows is pretty much everything in Windows already is object-oriented in its architecture, which means a scripting language that exposes the various APIs and objects is an extremely good fit.
This isn't true in Unix, which means the only way you'd ever get a language that mixed the same level of sophistication with usability and portability across different Unix variants would be with a gigantic abstraction layer. Even then you'd be likely to run into trouble because the abstraction layer would have to deal with an awful lot of cases where something that makes sense on, say, BSD, makes no sense at all on Linux. It'd be quite difficult to write an abstraction layer that gracefully gave you a way of configuring both IPTables and pf without seriously limiting the featureset it exposes.
I don't know it's so much that, more that the cost of any computer equipment is in a constant plummet - which means by the time your laptop or PC breaks down out of warranty it's worth a quarter of what it retailed for, at best. Frequently rather less than that.
If you bought the cheapest PC money could buy four or five years ago, that means it's worth approximately £nothing at all today. But nobody's going to repair it for nothing at all, which means you're going to have to pay a lot more than it's worth.
A lot of people have said "No, never". But this isn't entirely true, for a number of reasons that are more to do with practicalities than anything else:
- If you - or someone else with the same name as you - is reasonably active online, then Google et al will prefer more recent things when someone searches for you. That ill-advised comment you made on a forum ten years ago? Unless you have a very unusual name, probably no longer a problem.
- Things come and go, and when they disappear from the spotlight your data tends to vanish into obscurity with them. Forums, news aggregators, social networking sites are all subject to this. When was the last time you logged into Friends Reunited?
- Even if your name is plastered all over the news for something - news websites get updated, moved onto new platforms - and quite often the archives don't entirely survive the transition. Archive maintenance is a low priority when the thing that gets pageviews and advert clicks is the recent news.
There needs to be some push-back. We have no reason to absorb these costs.
Those costs need to be absorbed somewhere. Most cloud products operate with a business model of "flog it cheap, keep costs down to a minimum and make the money up on volume"; they work because so many businesses don't see beyond the "cheap" bit.
You want your provider to accommodate every little browser quirk that Firefox has had in the last 3 years? Fine, but don't expect any support from a business that has taken the conscious decision to avoid dealing with this.
I dunno, I think there is some sense to the bible. Even today with modern food preparation, shellfish can give you hellish food poisoning. If you don't know bugger all about food hygiene but you think an invisible sky fairy is responsible for everything, it doesn't take many fish suppers to conclude that He obviously doesn't like people eating shellfish.
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What value does Bitcoin have other than its exchange rate?
You can't pay for your groceries with Bitcoin. Nor can you pay your mortgage, and I can't imagine there are many landlords that will accept it as rent.
No it isn't.
The CPU/GPU power is just a means of regulating the number of bitcoins that can exist, same as the Bank of England is (among other things) a means of regulating the amount of £ Sterling that can exist.
You can't exchange bitcoins for an arbitrary amount of CPU power that you can hold in your hand and physically give to someone in lieu of bitcoins (which is pretty much the point of a currency that's backed by something like gold).
One of the benefits of a currency that's backed by something precious - such as gold - is it acts as a great stabiliser. The value of the currency is unlikely to drop far below the value of an equivalent amount of gold. Mind you, it also wouldn't rise far above the value of the gold. A currency that comes from a stable country and is widely accepted doesn't really need anything to back it, it's "big enough" if you like to stabilise itself.
None of these are true of Bitcoin, which means the value fluctuates wildly. But don't take my word for it - take a look at mtgox. There's a graph you can see shows how the value has fluctuated over a day, week or month - it's up and down like a yoyo.
Not sure about Zimbabwe, but with Germany the inflation came after a period of deflation.
It's a new fiat currency (ie. it exists because someone says it exists).
There's no reason why you, I and a bunch of our friends can't get together and say "Right, we'll use this new currency called DollarPounds, we'll use a spreadsheet to keep track of who has how many and they're exchangeable for US$ at a rate of US$1 = $£1" but the only way a fiat currency can possibly work is if you have enough people who will use it.
The idea of Bitcoin is it's a currency that doesn't require a central bank to produce more money. Instead, Bitcoins are "mined" (ie. brought into existence) through means of a mathematical algorithm that generates a verifiable block of numbers. The algorithm is designed to get harder as more bitcoins are mined. Meaning that the rate at which Bitcoins can be mined slows down eventually reaching the point where no more can be mined.
On the one hand, this resolves the "Leaves as currency" inflation problem in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe by creating artificial scarcity. On the other, they've done too good a job - as soon as it becomes impossible - or even impractical - to mine further bitcoins, the currency is likely to become subject to massive deflation. We know what happens when a currency undergoes massive deflation - Germany in the 1930's or, more recently, Zimbabwe happens.
FWIW, my view is it's probably best viewed from a distance with an air of morbid curiosity.
Who gives a shit what 56% of the general populace think? They aren't qualified to have a meaningful opinion.
They may not be qualified to have an opinion that's meaningful in terms of military strategy, but they're certainly qualified to have an opinion that's meaningful in political terms.
I suspect most first-world countries can't afford an all-out war with China - nuclear or otherwise - because of the trade sanctions it would inevitably bring.
I have my doubts that China would want such a war either, for precisely the same reasons.
TBH, that part of TFA struck me as a chap who's written some basic "Learn X in 30 minutes" books, decided to go down the self-publishing route (whether he's hoping to make a business out of it or it's just a self-funding hobby I'm not sure) and is bitter about learning a lesson that cost $250.
Considering it's very easy to make mistakes that cost ten or even a hundred times that in a small business, I reckon $250 is a bargain. It'd cost an awful lot more than $250 to hire a consultant to tell you that.
Seriously, they are.
Oh, they might make good money - but to make £50 million they often have to spend £49 million. When the difference between "successful business" and "calling in the administrators" is that tight, it really doesn't take very much to screw with the numbers.
I don't know that it's all that frivolous.
Your average airline is running on razor-thin margins. They do NOT want a plane grounded for any longer than is absolutely necessary - because a grounded plane isn't earning any money. If an airliner can signal any faults several hours before it lands, the maintenance crew have advance warning so they know exactly what to look at (and maybe even have parts available) the instant it touches down rather than have it sitting on the tarmac waiting for parts to arrive.
It most certainly was not capable of running windows under emulation except perhaps very very slowly. The Acorn PC emulator was painful.
There were, however, add on cards you could buy that had an x86 processor on board and could be harnessed to run Windows. You didn't have to dual boot; you could run PC applications in a window giving you essentially two computers in one box.
IIRC there usually is a small gap between the pixels on a sensor - someone else has also mentioned that you'd want slightly higher resolution for debayering so it sounds like I was probably right - this sensor will produce images of approximately 1920x1080. But it'll be exquisitely sensitive to low-light conditions.
I think this is an attempt to be taken more seriously in the world of professional film recording - historically, companies like Sony and Panasonic have been market leaders here.
More than a few people have made very positive noises about using things like an EOS 5D but that wouldn't be terribly useful in low light situations.
Put this into a body that's designed to be handheld for long periods of time (like you see with shoulder-mounted studio cameras), stick an EOS lens mount on the front and suddenly Canon have the building blocks for a complete portfolio of pro-grade video equipment.
It's a 35mm full-frame sensor.
It's also explicitly intended "exclusively for video recording" and mentions "full HD". Which would mean - assuming I'm reading between the lines correctly - that the resolution is 1920x1080 - ie. 2 megapixels.
Depends on so many things it's pretty much pointless to discuss in general terms.
Some sorts of cancer, detected at some stages, palliative care is exactly the way to go for the reasons you describe. (As a rule of thumb, the worst cancers tend to be those that develop deep within the body. As often as not, by the time you get diagnosed you're already long past the point of no useful treatment).
Jobs' case was a little different for two reasons:
1. He was "lucky" (if luck is the word) to have a variant of pancreatic cancer that is relatively treatable.
2. He was being regularly scanned for other reasons, and hence was caught at an early stage.
The GP - while s/he could have worded it rather more tactfully - is actually pretty well correct. Had Jobs chosen more orthodox treatment on the day he was diagnosed, there's a very good chance he'd still be with us - and in reasonably good health - today.
Yes more people use Windows, but when XP and 7 finally have their support ended, the people using those Microsoft platforms will be forced into using precisely what they are avoiding, the 'modern' interface. It's going to be interesting to watch if they move to Mac, Linux or suck up to Microsoft and push themselves into that new UI.
People were saying the exact same thing about Office 2007 6 years ago. As long as the magic word "Microsoft" is on the splash screen and in the title bar, it appears to make precisely no difference - you only get wailing and gnashing of teeth if that word is taken away.
In a hypothetical universe that wouldn't result in being sued to kingdom come, I wonder what would happen were you to build your own distribution based on Ubuntu but with some strategic rebranding - call the OS "Microsoft Windows 9", rebrand Firefox as "Microsoft Internet Explorer 11" and LibreOffice as "Microsoft Office 2014", take a test group of 100 people and tell them it's the "next big thing".
Then take another, similar group and put them in front of plain, vanilla Ubuntu.
That's Home & Business.
There's a Home & Student edition (that explicitly has a "Not for use in a profit-making organisation" clause in the license) that's a lot cheaper. The Home & Business is a way to get small businesses to buy Office rather than using Open/LibreOffice.
Powershell is just a heavily object-oriented scripting language that combines ideas from a number of places - there's nothing particularly new or unusual about that. However, the reason it's particularly interesting in Windows is pretty much everything in Windows already is object-oriented in its architecture, which means a scripting language that exposes the various APIs and objects is an extremely good fit.
This isn't true in Unix, which means the only way you'd ever get a language that mixed the same level of sophistication with usability and portability across different Unix variants would be with a gigantic abstraction layer. Even then you'd be likely to run into trouble because the abstraction layer would have to deal with an awful lot of cases where something that makes sense on, say, BSD, makes no sense at all on Linux. It'd be quite difficult to write an abstraction layer that gracefully gave you a way of configuring both IPTables and pf without seriously limiting the featureset it exposes.
When exactly was the last time Microsoft came up with a new idea that wasn't aping its competitors?
I don't know it's so much that, more that the cost of any computer equipment is in a constant plummet - which means by the time your laptop or PC breaks down out of warranty it's worth a quarter of what it retailed for, at best. Frequently rather less than that.
If you bought the cheapest PC money could buy four or five years ago, that means it's worth approximately £nothing at all today. But nobody's going to repair it for nothing at all, which means you're going to have to pay a lot more than it's worth.
A lot of people have said "No, never". But this isn't entirely true, for a number of reasons that are more to do with practicalities than anything else:
- If you - or someone else with the same name as you - is reasonably active online, then Google et al will prefer more recent things when someone searches for you. That ill-advised comment you made on a forum ten years ago? Unless you have a very unusual name, probably no longer a problem.
- Things come and go, and when they disappear from the spotlight your data tends to vanish into obscurity with them. Forums, news aggregators, social networking sites are all subject to this. When was the last time you logged into Friends Reunited?
- Even if your name is plastered all over the news for something - news websites get updated, moved onto new platforms - and quite often the archives don't entirely survive the transition. Archive maintenance is a low priority when the thing that gets pageviews and advert clicks is the recent news.
There needs to be some push-back. We have no reason to absorb these costs.
Those costs need to be absorbed somewhere. Most cloud products operate with a business model of "flog it cheap, keep costs down to a minimum and make the money up on volume"; they work because so many businesses don't see beyond the "cheap" bit.
You want your provider to accommodate every little browser quirk that Firefox has had in the last 3 years? Fine, but don't expect any support from a business that has taken the conscious decision to avoid dealing with this.
Dell's own brand RAID controllers are re-badged LSI controllers; my guess is he's talking about one of these.
Yeah, that's fair. But these devices aren't out of the box, they're out of warranty.
They're out of warranty, I'd be surprised if the manufacturer is even entertaining any discussion.
Why are you flashing these devices?
The only "critical" firmware upgrade is one which will - or at least has a fighting chance of - fixing an issue you are actively experiencing.
I dunno, I think there is some sense to the bible. Even today with modern food preparation, shellfish can give you hellish food poisoning. If you don't know bugger all about food hygiene but you think an invisible sky fairy is responsible for everything, it doesn't take many fish suppers to conclude that He obviously doesn't like people eating shellfish.