No, it's not a blazingly fast computer, but both the Arduino and RPi are computers. If you want a built-in graphics chip, no, Arduino doesn't have one of those, but you can still drive simple displays. If you want to listen to sensor wires and turn on LEDs, either one will work, though the Arduino and BeagleBoneBlack have a lot more connector pins than the RPi, but you can do microcontroller jobs with either one. If you want an operating system, yeah, Arduino isn't going to run anything very sophisticated, but it's still more powerful than the 8-bit computers my friends were using in the late 70s and early 80s. (Not me - I was using PDP-11s, VAXes, and mainframes back then, or vacuum tubes; I'm only now catching up with this retro integrated circuit stuff:-)
The main problem with Raspberry Pi is that it's an earlier ARM spec; the new Beaglebone Black is ~$45 and has a newer ARM version so you get more choice of operating systems (I've read that RPi can't do Ubuntu, but BBB can, though reviewers differ on whether RPi can also.) On the other hand, the RPi has a more powerful graphics chip, so it can do full 1080p, which the BBB can't (which answers the question of which one I'm going to get to put next to my TV.) BBB has a 1 GHz CPU and a lot more I/O pins than RPi, but so far I haven't been doing anything where that matters, and I can use the Arduino to play with sensors.
Yes, it's a fiat currency, called into being by somebody, not backed by anything, only tradeable for what other people will offer you. But the important difference from government fiat currencies is that it's designed so there's a limit on how much of it can be made, unlike traditional fiat currencies which were limited by the amount of cheap metal available for coinage, or modern fiat currencies which are limited by the number of zeroes you can fit on a piece of paper, i.e. limited only by the greed of the government and the people's unwillingness to overthrow them. It's not like Zimbabwe dollars which have had at least 30 zeroes dropped of them, leaving what a friend of mine referred to as "homeopathic quantities of money". Sure, Satoshi acquired a bunch of the coins for himself up front, and potentially he could still be mining more, but the number of them is never going to get above 22 million or whatever.
Bitcoins could still lose most of their value, like those once-valuable Beanie Babies, but they can't hyperinflate.
Spent Thursday with friends. We had a US-style turkey dinner (well, veggies for me) at church at lunchtime, hung out for the afternoon, went to Korean BBQ for dinner, and on the way there we saw people waiting in line at Best Buy.
Ok, going to restaurants technically counts as "buying things", but we didn't actually do that Friday.
Stealing CPUs for mining probably isn't worthwhile. Using your own GPU isn't particularly worthwhile (unless it's winter and you have electric heat, and aren't buying new hardware.) ASIC miners are available surprisingly cheaply on eBay and IIRC DealExtreme, and if you're going to buy mining equipment, the best choice is probably them or maybe FPGA boards. But from what I hear, GPU mining with stolen electricity is probably still profitable, at least if you're infecting machines yourself; not sure if it's profitable if you're also renting botnet time.
I used to offer to help them get the FTC's $50,000 reward for stopping telemarketing abuse by turning in their boss. None of them took me up on it:-)
But that program's over, so I usually just ask them how their family feels about them scamming people for a living. Most of them just hang up, some of them get mad.
Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that. If they can allege a link between Satoshi and DPR-or-Ulbrich, that gives them a better excuse to try to pry information out of anybody involved with Bitcoin, either through legal process in the US or through possibly-illegal wiretapping overseas.
Paypal's primary niche in the early days was being a popular way to pay sellers on eBay using credit cards. The seller could accept Paypal much more easily than opening merchant accounts with multiple credit card services, and the buyer didn't have to give the seller their credit card number, and the transaction fees were competitive. It was way better and faster than buyers having to mail sellers a check, waiting for the post office, sellers having to wait for the check to clear, buyers hoping the seller wasn't scamming them; it cuts a huge step out of the non-credit-card market.
If your car gets x mpg in the US, your cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car is about $1M / x. ($5 per gallon * 200,000 miles / mpg) So a 20mpg SUV will cost you $50K in gas, or a 50mpg Prius will cost you $20K. (Pro-rate if you're just keeping the car a few years, of course.) If the price per mile for electric is equivalent to 100 mpg, then it's going to save you only $10K over a Prius, but $40K over an SUV.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of the driving I do is less than 10 miles each way, but there are a lot of 40-50 mile trips that I make frequently (one is to work, on the days I don't telecommute), also between Silicon Valley and SF or Berkeley. I'd need a car with at least 200-mile range that I can charge at home in 6 hours to feel really comfortable driving that. If I could afford to maintain three cars (I don't have parking for them, and would rather not pay for the insurance and registration), I'd be fine with the current electric cars, which would get used for most non-commute driving, but my wife and I would still have full-range cars if we needed them, though I'd rather wait a few years.
When Bitcoin was new, you could successfully mine bitcoins using your CPU. But the parameters on Bitcoin keep making the amount of computation higher, and these days the CPUs have been left in the dust, GPU-based miners are getting passé, and it takes ASICs to really keep up. Part of that's competitive speed, and part of it's the cost of electricity, which as a botnet herder you don't actually care about, but you've got to have a mining client that can run on the GPU without being noticed, so it can't run if the user is doing graphics-intensive GPU stuff. Harder to hide that without being detected.
Identifying animals by species is usually convenient, but it's really an shorthand for clades of individuals. Are two individuals close enough to reproduce and have offspring that are capable of reproduction? That's a different question from whether Species X and Species Y are close enough, and the boundaries are a lot fuzzier than they taught us in high school. Lions and tigers aren't the same species, but they're close enough that ligers or tigons can be fertile, and there's at least one liliger out there. (It doesn't happen in nature, because lions and tigers don't live in the same areas, at least in modern times, but they're still close enough relatives.) And even mules are occasionally fertile.
"anti-capitalist"? Are you one of those Rand-worshippers who thinks that any decision a corporation or corporate executive makes is automatically correct? You've obviously never worked with real businesses before; they make dumb decisions all the time. (If that weren't true, you'd have gotten to this link by clicking with your Cue-Cat, or looking it up with Excite or AskJeeves.) One of the core things that makes capitalism work is that when dumb decisions get made, businesses (or parts of businesses) fail, die, and go away, and the people (and sometimes the resources they were using) can go do different things.
I'm boggled at hearing that Groupon still even exists, much less has that much market cap, because they were seriously tanking after they went public, and I haven't seen a Groupon or Groupon-like daily deal in ages.
They don't need any changes related to corrosion because they're made with those changes already included - it's mostly picking the right kinds of rubber for the seals and hoses. That doesn't mean an old motor boat engine will have been designed for that, and as the earlier poster said, there's also the problem that boat engines often sit unused for half a year, with the fuel evaporating away.
Yup. They don't have to catch criminals and terrorists significantly more often than chance, and even catching them less often than chance is just fine, as long as most people submit to the bullies and they can beat up the ones who don't. (Occasionally they fail, like the other week when some loser decided to shoot up the TSA because he had a problem with authority.)
I'm skeptical about the "scientific study", though, because TSA is almost never actually dealing with terrorists; they're much more likely to be dealing with people who are carrying politically incorrect plants and pharmaceuticals, or reading politically incorrect books, or worrying about the TSA thugs rooting through the underwear in their carryon bags.
They're not banning gatorade because it's dangerous - they're banning it because there are liquid explosives that you can dye unnaturally fluorescent colors and carry in a Gatorade bottle.
On the other hand, even pre-9/11 you couldn't bring an open beer onto a plane at most airports, because the US has silly laws about such things. Even though there's a bar in the airport right across from your gate, that'll give you your beer in a to-go cup so you can drink it at the gate while waiting for your plane.
Google reportedly offered Groupon $6B and was turned down; the company's probably worth about $6 by now.
Facebook offered SnapChat $3B? As long as it's in cash, not Facebook stock, there's only one right thing to do, which is to take the money and run. (Or take the money and stick around, if that's the deal, but take the money. Do not play Go, Do not pass up $3B.
So are you saying that fake Twitter followers increase your Google page rank? How does Google connect a Twitter user to a web page? I can see how posting a link to your website and having lots of people click on it is potentially useful, but I don't see how having a bunch of fake robotic followers clicking on the links you tweet about does anything other than look suspicious to Google. And maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see how anybody can sell "getting real people to be interested in the stuff you Tweet and pay actual attention to it" for fractional pennies per human follower.
If you're a 3D-printing company, and you need to get your name in the press, making Yet Another Plastic Head of Cory Doctorow just isn't going to do the job, even if you 3D-print the googles and red cape all in one pass. The first 3D-printed gun was mostly done to make a political point (certainly not to be a useful gun.) This one's probably a lot better manufacturing, and that's going to generate some technical hype and possible demand for printing other metal things that previously had to be made using more traditional technologies (like low-cost CNC milling machines:-) but it's the fact that guns get lots of people to freak out that gets their name in the press. (And even if you don't remember their name, if you're looking to get something made of metal that's a similar complexity, you'll probably remember that it can be 3D-printed now and Google will find them for you.)
I've got an older HTC Android phone with lots of crapware, and a Coby Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with almost none. The HTC phone includes one really important feature that's not included in the extremely vanilla Coby, which is syncing the calendar and contacts with MS Outlook over USB. There are some non-free apps that claim to be able to sync the calendar (haven't tried them), and a couple of freewares (one couldn't connect successfully; the other is a "limited to 20 events" demo that worked very well once.)
Yes, I can sync my tablet calendar with Google Calendar and theoretically sync my work calendar with Google Calendar also. But I don't want Google messing with all my data and metadata, and I don't think work really wants me to sync calendar entries titled "Name of Secret Program" with "SecretProgram.ppt" and "SecretProgramRequirements.doc" attachments. I just want to export an iCal calendar and have Android's calendar app import it.
This Bad Idea has been floating around for a few years. Some idiots built a product and have been aggressively lobbying governments to take them up on it, and even though governments really like being able to do big brother tracking of everywhere everybody drives, they still haven't bought it. They've tried selling them to Oregon and California, they've tried selling them to San Francisco for congestion pricing for drivers in the crowded downtown business district, they've tried selling them for highway toll collection, they've tried selling them to the Feds. They've tried selling it to states as revenue enhancement ("People buy Priuses which use less gas, so you're collecting less gas tax, so buy our thing instead of just raising the tax rate!") There's always at least one legislator or bureaucrat who likes the idea and tries to convince their fellow legislators or bureaucrats, which is enough for the pushers to put out a press release.
But because these guys really want to sell their product, the good guys have to keep squashing it. It's usually not hard, because it's a terribly unworkable idea, but the Big Brotherness of it is really obnoxious, and as far as I can tell, wasn't even the purpose of this system.
Dude, it is a free market, for most people in the world; if you're a draftee into some army that only uses X.400 email, or your country only allows unencrypted SMTP to pass through their Great Firewall, then I'm sorry, and I can recommend some good anti-censorship tools for you, which you can get from a guy named Bennett Hasleton.
But otherwise, you're free to use tools other than SMTP/POP/IMAP/Webmail, and we'll be happy to see your running code and give you opinions about whether you'll get rough consensus from anybody else about using it.
Yes, it's nice to be able to receive images from people who are actually your friends, not spammers, and who don't overdo sending annoyingly cutesy images (e.g. that cousin who forwards stuff to everybody.)
But being an old guy doesn't just mean that I want you to send text email and stay off my lawn, it also means I want to set the font I use to read email with so it's easy for me to read, instead of having you pick a font that you think looks great to you on your screen, because I need a font that's big enough and dark enough to read easily, and if I'm reading mail on a phone instead of a full-sized screen, I *really* want to have my choice of font size, not yours, and while maybe you think Comic Sans is cute or <BLINK>want to send your Halloween party announcement in a blood-red font that's bleeding down the page</BLINK>, I'd much rather be able to read what you wrote.
And because I'm an old cranky security guy, I really really don't want my email client trying to run your Javascript on my machine, thank you very much, even if all you think you're doing is trying to center the text neatly in ways that might look good on a 24" monitor but utterly fail when I'm reading in an SSH session or on my phone.
<href="https://nsa.gov\/web-bug.js\">Not the Web Bug You're Looking For</a>
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not a blazingly fast computer, but both the Arduino and RPi are computers. If you want a built-in graphics chip, no, Arduino doesn't have one of those, but you can still drive simple displays. If you want to listen to sensor wires and turn on LEDs, either one will work, though the Arduino and BeagleBoneBlack have a lot more connector pins than the RPi, but you can do microcontroller jobs with either one. If you want an operating system, yeah, Arduino isn't going to run anything very sophisticated, but it's still more powerful than the 8-bit computers my friends were using in the late 70s and early 80s. (Not me - I was using PDP-11s, VAXes, and mainframes back then, or vacuum tubes; I'm only now catching up with this retro integrated circuit stuff :-)
The main problem with Raspberry Pi is that it's an earlier ARM spec; the new Beaglebone Black is ~$45 and has a newer ARM version so you get more choice of operating systems (I've read that RPi can't do Ubuntu, but BBB can, though reviewers differ on whether RPi can also.) On the other hand, the RPi has a more powerful graphics chip, so it can do full 1080p, which the BBB can't (which answers the question of which one I'm going to get to put next to my TV.) BBB has a 1 GHz CPU and a lot more I/O pins than RPi, but so far I haven't been doing anything where that matters, and I can use the Arduino to play with sensors.
Yes, it's a fiat currency, called into being by somebody, not backed by anything, only tradeable for what other people will offer you. But the important difference from government fiat currencies is that it's designed so there's a limit on how much of it can be made, unlike traditional fiat currencies which were limited by the amount of cheap metal available for coinage, or modern fiat currencies which are limited by the number of zeroes you can fit on a piece of paper, i.e. limited only by the greed of the government and the people's unwillingness to overthrow them. It's not like Zimbabwe dollars which have had at least 30 zeroes dropped of them, leaving what a friend of mine referred to as "homeopathic quantities of money". Sure, Satoshi acquired a bunch of the coins for himself up front, and potentially he could still be mining more, but the number of them is never going to get above 22 million or whatever.
Bitcoins could still lose most of their value, like those once-valuable Beanie Babies, but they can't hyperinflate.
I really do need to pay enough attention to this comet, figure out if it's worth a trip to the middle of nowhere to watch.
Spent Thursday with friends. We had a US-style turkey dinner (well, veggies for me) at church at lunchtime, hung out for the afternoon, went to Korean BBQ for dinner, and on the way there we saw people waiting in line at Best Buy.
Ok, going to restaurants technically counts as "buying things", but we didn't actually do that Friday.
Stealing CPUs for mining probably isn't worthwhile. Using your own GPU isn't particularly worthwhile (unless it's winter and you have electric heat, and aren't buying new hardware.) ASIC miners are available surprisingly cheaply on eBay and IIRC DealExtreme, and if you're going to buy mining equipment, the best choice is probably them or maybe FPGA boards. But from what I hear, GPU mining with stolen electricity is probably still profitable, at least if you're infecting machines yourself; not sure if it's profitable if you're also renting botnet time.
Wednesday's /. article on Jolla Phone and Sailfish OS. Sure would have helped if the summary had mentioned what "Meaningless-Name" and "OtherMeaninglessNameOS" were :-)
I used to offer to help them get the FTC's $50,000 reward for stopping telemarketing abuse by turning in their boss. None of them took me up on it :-)
But that program's over, so I usually just ask them how their family feels about them scamming people for a living. Most of them just hang up, some of them get mad.
Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that. If they can allege a link between Satoshi and DPR-or-Ulbrich, that gives them a better excuse to try to pry information out of anybody involved with Bitcoin, either through legal process in the US or through possibly-illegal wiretapping overseas.
Paypal's primary niche in the early days was being a popular way to pay sellers on eBay using credit cards. The seller could accept Paypal much more easily than opening merchant accounts with multiple credit card services, and the buyer didn't have to give the seller their credit card number, and the transaction fees were competitive. It was way better and faster than buyers having to mail sellers a check, waiting for the post office, sellers having to wait for the check to clear, buyers hoping the seller wasn't scamming them; it cuts a huge step out of the non-credit-card market.
If your car gets x mpg in the US, your cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car is about $1M / x. ($5 per gallon * 200,000 miles / mpg) So a 20mpg SUV will cost you $50K in gas, or a 50mpg Prius will cost you $20K. (Pro-rate if you're just keeping the car a few years, of course.) If the price per mile for electric is equivalent to 100 mpg, then it's going to save you only $10K over a Prius, but $40K over an SUV.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of the driving I do is less than 10 miles each way, but there are a lot of 40-50 mile trips that I make frequently (one is to work, on the days I don't telecommute), also between Silicon Valley and SF or Berkeley. I'd need a car with at least 200-mile range that I can charge at home in 6 hours to feel really comfortable driving that. If I could afford to maintain three cars (I don't have parking for them, and would rather not pay for the insurance and registration), I'd be fine with the current electric cars, which would get used for most non-commute driving, but my wife and I would still have full-range cars if we needed them, though I'd rather wait a few years.
When Bitcoin was new, you could successfully mine bitcoins using your CPU. But the parameters on Bitcoin keep making the amount of computation higher, and these days the CPUs have been left in the dust, GPU-based miners are getting passé, and it takes ASICs to really keep up. Part of that's competitive speed, and part of it's the cost of electricity, which as a botnet herder you don't actually care about, but you've got to have a mining client that can run on the GPU without being noticed, so it can't run if the user is doing graphics-intensive GPU stuff. Harder to hide that without being detected.
Look, you're only calling her the "mystery woman" because you can't remember her name, and it was 50,000 years too early to get her phone number.
Identifying animals by species is usually convenient, but it's really an shorthand for clades of individuals. Are two individuals close enough to reproduce and have offspring that are capable of reproduction? That's a different question from whether Species X and Species Y are close enough, and the boundaries are a lot fuzzier than they taught us in high school. Lions and tigers aren't the same species, but they're close enough that ligers or tigons can be fertile, and there's at least one liliger out there. (It doesn't happen in nature, because lions and tigers don't live in the same areas, at least in modern times, but they're still close enough relatives.) And even mules are occasionally fertile.
"anti-capitalist"? Are you one of those Rand-worshippers who thinks that any decision a corporation or corporate executive makes is automatically correct? You've obviously never worked with real businesses before; they make dumb decisions all the time. (If that weren't true, you'd have gotten to this link by clicking with your Cue-Cat, or looking it up with Excite or AskJeeves.) One of the core things that makes capitalism work is that when dumb decisions get made, businesses (or parts of businesses) fail, die, and go away, and the people (and sometimes the resources they were using) can go do different things.
I'm boggled at hearing that Groupon still even exists, much less has that much market cap, because they were seriously tanking after they went public, and I haven't seen a Groupon or Groupon-like daily deal in ages.
They don't need any changes related to corrosion because they're made with those changes already included - it's mostly picking the right kinds of rubber for the seals and hoses. That doesn't mean an old motor boat engine will have been designed for that, and as the earlier poster said, there's also the problem that boat engines often sit unused for half a year, with the fuel evaporating away.
Yup. They don't have to catch criminals and terrorists significantly more often than chance, and even catching them less often than chance is just fine, as long as most people submit to the bullies and they can beat up the ones who don't. (Occasionally they fail, like the other week when some loser decided to shoot up the TSA because he had a problem with authority.)
I'm skeptical about the "scientific study", though, because TSA is almost never actually dealing with terrorists; they're much more likely to be dealing with people who are carrying politically incorrect plants and pharmaceuticals, or reading politically incorrect books, or worrying about the TSA thugs rooting through the underwear in their carryon bags.
They're not banning gatorade because it's dangerous - they're banning it because there are liquid explosives that you can dye unnaturally fluorescent colors and carry in a Gatorade bottle.
On the other hand, even pre-9/11 you couldn't bring an open beer onto a plane at most airports, because the US has silly laws about such things. Even though there's a bar in the airport right across from your gate, that'll give you your beer in a to-go cup so you can drink it at the gate while waiting for your plane.
Google reportedly offered Groupon $6B and was turned down; the company's probably worth about $6 by now.
Facebook offered SnapChat $3B? As long as it's in cash, not Facebook stock, there's only one right thing to do, which is to take the money and run. (Or take the money and stick around, if that's the deal, but take the money. Do not play Go, Do not pass up $3B.
XKCD 1057.
So are you saying that fake Twitter followers increase your Google page rank? How does Google connect a Twitter user to a web page? I can see how posting a link to your website and having lots of people click on it is potentially useful, but I don't see how having a bunch of fake robotic followers clicking on the links you tweet about does anything other than look suspicious to Google. And maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see how anybody can sell "getting real people to be interested in the stuff you Tweet and pay actual attention to it" for fractional pennies per human follower.
If you're a 3D-printing company, and you need to get your name in the press, making Yet Another Plastic Head of Cory Doctorow just isn't going to do the job, even if you 3D-print the googles and red cape all in one pass. The first 3D-printed gun was mostly done to make a political point (certainly not to be a useful gun.) This one's probably a lot better manufacturing, and that's going to generate some technical hype and possible demand for printing other metal things that previously had to be made using more traditional technologies (like low-cost CNC milling machines :-) but it's the fact that guns get lots of people to freak out that gets their name in the press. (And even if you don't remember their name, if you're looking to get something made of metal that's a similar complexity, you'll probably remember that it can be 3D-printed now and Google will find them for you.)
I've got an older HTC Android phone with lots of crapware, and a Coby Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with almost none. The HTC phone includes one really important feature that's not included in the extremely vanilla Coby, which is syncing the calendar and contacts with MS Outlook over USB. There are some non-free apps that claim to be able to sync the calendar (haven't tried them), and a couple of freewares (one couldn't connect successfully; the other is a "limited to 20 events" demo that worked very well once.)
Yes, I can sync my tablet calendar with Google Calendar and theoretically sync my work calendar with Google Calendar also. But I don't want Google messing with all my data and metadata, and I don't think work really wants me to sync calendar entries titled "Name of Secret Program" with "SecretProgram.ppt" and "SecretProgramRequirements.doc" attachments. I just want to export an iCal calendar and have Android's calendar app import it.
This Bad Idea has been floating around for a few years. Some idiots built a product and have been aggressively lobbying governments to take them up on it, and even though governments really like being able to do big brother tracking of everywhere everybody drives, they still haven't bought it. They've tried selling them to Oregon and California, they've tried selling them to San Francisco for congestion pricing for drivers in the crowded downtown business district, they've tried selling them for highway toll collection, they've tried selling them to the Feds. They've tried selling it to states as revenue enhancement ("People buy Priuses which use less gas, so you're collecting less gas tax, so buy our thing instead of just raising the tax rate!") There's always at least one legislator or bureaucrat who likes the idea and tries to convince their fellow legislators or bureaucrats, which is enough for the pushers to put out a press release.
But because these guys really want to sell their product, the good guys have to keep squashing it. It's usually not hard, because it's a terribly unworkable idea, but the Big Brotherness of it is really obnoxious, and as far as I can tell, wasn't even the purpose of this system.
Dude, it is a free market, for most people in the world; if you're a draftee into some army that only uses X.400 email, or your country only allows unencrypted SMTP to pass through their Great Firewall, then I'm sorry, and I can recommend some good anti-censorship tools for you, which you can get from a guy named Bennett Hasleton.
But otherwise, you're free to use tools other than SMTP/POP/IMAP/Webmail, and we'll be happy to see your running code and give you opinions about whether you'll get rough consensus from anybody else about using it.
Yes, it's nice to be able to receive images from people who are actually your friends, not spammers, and who don't overdo sending annoyingly cutesy images (e.g. that cousin who forwards stuff to everybody.)
But being an old guy doesn't just mean that I want you to send text email and stay off my lawn, it also means I want to set the font I use to read email with so it's easy for me to read, instead of having you pick a font that you think looks great to you on your screen, because I need a font that's big enough and dark enough to read easily, and if I'm reading mail on a phone instead of a full-sized screen, I *really* want to have my choice of font size, not yours, and while maybe you think Comic Sans is cute or <BLINK>want to send your Halloween party announcement in a blood-red font that's bleeding down the page</BLINK>, I'd much rather be able to read what you wrote.
And because I'm an old cranky security guy, I really really don't want my email client trying to run your Javascript on my machine, thank you very much, even if all you think you're doing is trying to center the text neatly in ways that might look good on a 24" monitor but utterly fail when I'm reading in an SSH session or on my phone.