I believe the root of the problem is that Windows shipped without a bluetooth stack, leaving it up to the various bluetooth hardware makers to write their own drivers. Hardware companies are not very good at software - it's outside their core competency, and they view drivers as an expense rather than a way to improve their product. So some of them did things their own way, some of them licensed stacks from other companies, and we ended up with about four competing implementations each with their own bugs. (And since the only thing most hardware companies test is that their hardware works on windows with the drivers they're supplying, the spec and the apple/linux implementations didn't really help). It's a little like the UHCI/OHCI confusion in the early days of USB, only much worse.
The licensing incompatibility only goes in one direction. Linus himself has said that if he'd known 386BSD existed he wouldn't have bothered. Without Linus we'd still have a GNU system, maybe it would look more like GNU/kFreeBSD, and the cathedral/bazaar moment would have to happen with some other piece of software, but it'd happen.
We were combining multiple languages long before Windows even existed. Ever heard of a sneaky little program called a linker ?
The problem is that the C ABI is really weak. As befits C, all it really speaks is small numbers and big numbers, there's no concept of objects. So you can't do type-safe function calls. You can't pass closures around. As C++ programmers have found to their cost, you can't throw an exception and catch it if there's C code between where you do this. You sure as hell can't take a class from one language and subclass it in another, because C doesn't even have a notion of classes. That's what.net gives you, a system ABI that understands some higher-level concepts.
And if you're about to say that makefiles are not effortless, well what do you think your shiny $1500 IDE does when you click "Build" ? Chances are, it produces a Makefile from all the metadata in your project and hands it to a hidden command-line build tool.
What's the point you're trying to make here? You know when you compile a programming language it actually just produces a bunch of assembly and hands it to a hidden assembler, so C takes just as much effort as writing your own assembly.
(And my IDE at least uses something better than Makefiles).
You can write and build programs for windows mobile under Linux (or pretty much any platform that can run GCC), I've done it. Sure it's not got official MS support, but there's no code signing or anything so you end up with something just as good as you'll make on a windows PC.
Copyright started as a way for the King of England to control the printing presses. We have quite possibly the strictest copyright laws in the world (recordings have even been retroactively taken out of the public domain), much like with our libel laws.
I'm also worried about what happens if the BTC economy shrinks: how do we implement the reciprocal deflation?
With luck, people who abandon bitcoin will abandon their coins too. But if they sell them I can see this being an issue. Hmm.
Currently I'm in favor of adjusting the current BTC system, rather than a complete reboot. It's a high bar to do so since it has to be accepted by the majority of the network, and there are high costs for doing so (people will balk if the rules for their currency can be changed on a whim - then again the same objection applies to any fiat currency), but I think it's possible to do if a very strong economic case can be made.
Fair enough. Hopefully the rate or not of adoption of the current system will eventually be persuasive. But I can see some value in competition; with good management software, if there were five or so bitcoin-like systems running in parallel maybe it'd allow more experimentation to find optimal economic policies. Or not.
It's coming out of the general principle that corporations only pay tax on their profits rather than earnings. The benefits from that should be fairly obvious (a company that's selling $300000 of widgets and making $1500 profit from this is probably benefiting humanity more than one that's selling $100000 and making $1000 from it).
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
A disproportionate increase in taxes on the rich is needed, because they're currently disproportionately low.
Re:Then Why Are We Seeing the Same Negative Effect
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
The evidence is right there, in the fact that the US still has a AAA rating.
They're the government. They can print the money if they need to. (Why you would trust a dollar-denominated investment at all is another, wider question, but if you want to pay someone to give you x dollars in 3 months' time, the US government is absolutely the most reliable organization to do that with).
If all it takes to get around Scotland's 24-hour limit for detention without trial is a claim of "national interest" then it's a pretty empty protection.
In terms of physical dimensions, sure, but I doubt it for resolution. I picked up a 1440x900 monitor for $30 three years ago, even a 1280x720 TV would cost a hell of a lot more.
Instead of building yet another mars rover, NASA should have used what it had and just build ten more Mars Exploration Rovers instead of one extremely expensive, completely new rover - with a whole new set of technical issues.
There are new technical issues because it's new tech. Just think for a moment about how much better digital cameras have gotten over the past 10 years. Sure, we could build 10 more MERs, but we'll get a lot more science value out of one new rover.
The only difference is that MS are letting us see what they have. Google have collected the same data and more. (And bear in mind anyone with a fleet of vans could do the same). When it comes to violating my privacy, I don't think I have more faith in any of these companies than I do in random strangers on the internet.
than the HDMI-> VGA adapter I'll need to use it with a cheap display. I guess you have to pick a single port when you're going cheap, but DVI would have been a lot nicer.
Autogenerated "source" is basically useless - trying to edit it will make you want to stab your eyes out. It's exactly as big an issue as it sounds like.
Sure. But not the only way. The point is someone could entirely innocently distribute the binary and "source", as downloaded from the FSF's site, without accompanying written offer (because the source is just there, right?). And that would be violating the GPL.
But I would also say a band - at least anything non-classical - would likely be the worst use of testing the sound systems
Yes and no. Testing should reflect usage. If what you're going to do with your sound system is listen to bands, then the best way to test it is listen to bands, and see if they sound good to you on it. Ultimately that's all that matters.
This probably ends up with people getting low-quality sound systems to match the one in their car, because that's what they're used to listening to and people prefer familiar distortions over accurate reproduction. But ultimately subjective enjoyment is what matters - there's no inherent virtue in having an accurate sound system.
The processing growth has averaged about 1000% yearly for the last year and a half. The actual inflation would be a bit less since it'd be diluted into the pool of coins from the last couple years, but you're still looking at 800% or so. That will continue as long as the BTC's reach is growing.
I would expect the coin's value to grow with the number of users though, which will balance this out. Surely price will be more dependent on number of bitcoins/user than on absolute number of bitcoins - every user "needs" the same number of coins, however many users there are.
If you buy in now and two years from now it's trading at USD$1000, should your share be inflated down to compensate?
Yes. Or rather, the reward algorithm should be such that the value people can get from mining is the same whenever they got in. I think bitcoin has done a lot of good in pioneering the concepts and the crypto, but it'll be a variant without the exponential decrease in available mining that ultimately sees large-scale adoption.
Re:Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Here's my missing feature: no way to set a default transparency for foreground windows. Still. It was there in kde 3.5, I've filed a bug report about it, but nothing.
Do you actually own it? I've seen a site that will generate an IPv6 address for you, but it's just picking one at random - there's no guarantee someone else won't decide they want it. IPv6 is supposed to solve the address exhaustion problem, but as an end user I can easily get an IPv4 address (I just pay my ISP xx/month), whereas I can find no way to get an actually-mine IPv6 address.
If mining gave exponentially increasing money supply, the exchange rate would be spiraling down insanely fast.
2% a year inflation is exponential; the dollar is still doing OK. Remember bitcoin mining is ultimately limited by computing power, which approximately doubles every 18 months, which works out a shade below 1% per week. That's high by the standards of traditional currencies, but it's not absurd, and I don't think it'd be enough to make the currency unusable.
In the future it would be even better if the BTC was a reasonably stable value store (like the dollar) so that you could simply receive and then spend BTC directly instead of as a proxy for USD.
Yes and no. People holding a currency long-term is bad for everyone; savings are better off kept in stocks or assets. And it's not like the current mining-payout algorithm has kept the price stable.
No one got them for free. When the early miners got them, they were worth very little - the USD$ net-present-value returned per watt invested isn't terribly less now than in the beginning.
People probably sold them for what they cost them to make, so that's not surprising. But to say that someone's watt two years ago is worth thousands of times what my watt is now doesn't add up.
The very high returns are from taking the risk of holding onto the asset hoping it'd appreciate. That part is just like buying a penny stock and hoping the company pulls through the crisis. In both cases, it was very likely that they'd lose what they were continuing to hold. Would you consider an investor who bought into a penny stock to be getting that money for free?
Someone who gets a penny stock buys it from someone else, on an open market. The early adopters of bitcoin are far more analogous to the issuers of a new currency - they've created a bunch of tokens and declared they're worth something. And back when private banks issued their own currencies, customers would insist that those banks held proportionate reserves of hard assets that they could claim from if need be. That's what's missing from bitcoins.
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I believe the root of the problem is that Windows shipped without a bluetooth stack, leaving it up to the various bluetooth hardware makers to write their own drivers. Hardware companies are not very good at software - it's outside their core competency, and they view drivers as an expense rather than a way to improve their product. So some of them did things their own way, some of them licensed stacks from other companies, and we ended up with about four competing implementations each with their own bugs. (And since the only thing most hardware companies test is that their hardware works on windows with the drivers they're supplying, the spec and the apple/linux implementations didn't really help). It's a little like the UHCI/OHCI confusion in the early days of USB, only much worse.
There are plenty of new topics that could still have articles written about them - it's just Wikipedia declares them non-notable.
ftp(1)
The licensing incompatibility only goes in one direction. Linus himself has said that if he'd known 386BSD existed he wouldn't have bothered. Without Linus we'd still have a GNU system, maybe it would look more like GNU/kFreeBSD, and the cathedral/bazaar moment would have to happen with some other piece of software, but it'd happen.
We were combining multiple languages long before Windows even existed. Ever heard of a sneaky little program called a linker ?
The problem is that the C ABI is really weak. As befits C, all it really speaks is small numbers and big numbers, there's no concept of objects. So you can't do type-safe function calls. You can't pass closures around. As C++ programmers have found to their cost, you can't throw an exception and catch it if there's C code between where you do this. You sure as hell can't take a class from one language and subclass it in another, because C doesn't even have a notion of classes. That's what .net gives you, a system ABI that understands some higher-level concepts.
And if you're about to say that makefiles are not effortless, well what do you think your shiny $1500 IDE does when you click "Build" ? Chances are, it produces a Makefile from all the metadata in your project and hands it to a hidden command-line build tool.
What's the point you're trying to make here? You know when you compile a programming language it actually just produces a bunch of assembly and hands it to a hidden assembler, so C takes just as much effort as writing your own assembly.
(And my IDE at least uses something better than Makefiles).
You can write and build programs for windows mobile under Linux (or pretty much any platform that can run GCC), I've done it. Sure it's not got official MS support, but there's no code signing or anything so you end up with something just as good as you'll make on a windows PC.
Copyright started as a way for the King of England to control the printing presses. We have quite possibly the strictest copyright laws in the world (recordings have even been retroactively taken out of the public domain), much like with our libel laws.
I'm also worried about what happens if the BTC economy shrinks: how do we implement the reciprocal deflation?
With luck, people who abandon bitcoin will abandon their coins too. But if they sell them I can see this being an issue. Hmm.
Currently I'm in favor of adjusting the current BTC system, rather than a complete reboot. It's a high bar to do so since it has to be accepted by the majority of the network, and there are high costs for doing so (people will balk if the rules for their currency can be changed on a whim - then again the same objection applies to any fiat currency), but I think it's possible to do if a very strong economic case can be made.
Fair enough. Hopefully the rate or not of adoption of the current system will eventually be persuasive. But I can see some value in competition; with good management software, if there were five or so bitcoin-like systems running in parallel maybe it'd allow more experimentation to find optimal economic policies. Or not.
It's coming out of the general principle that corporations only pay tax on their profits rather than earnings. The benefits from that should be fairly obvious (a company that's selling $300000 of widgets and making $1500 profit from this is probably benefiting humanity more than one that's selling $100000 and making $1000 from it).
A disproportionate increase in taxes on the rich is needed, because they're currently disproportionately low.
The evidence is right there, in the fact that the US still has a AAA rating.
They're the government. They can print the money if they need to. (Why you would trust a dollar-denominated investment at all is another, wider question, but if you want to pay someone to give you x dollars in 3 months' time, the US government is absolutely the most reliable organization to do that with).
If all it takes to get around Scotland's 24-hour limit for detention without trial is a claim of "national interest" then it's a pretty empty protection.
In terms of physical dimensions, sure, but I doubt it for resolution. I picked up a 1440x900 monitor for $30 three years ago, even a 1280x720 TV would cost a hell of a lot more.
Instead of building yet another mars rover, NASA should have used what it had and just build ten more Mars Exploration Rovers instead of one extremely expensive, completely new rover - with a whole new set of technical issues.
There are new technical issues because it's new tech. Just think for a moment about how much better digital cameras have gotten over the past 10 years. Sure, we could build 10 more MERs, but we'll get a lot more science value out of one new rover.
The only difference is that MS are letting us see what they have. Google have collected the same data and more. (And bear in mind anyone with a fleet of vans could do the same). When it comes to violating my privacy, I don't think I have more faith in any of these companies than I do in random strangers on the internet.
than the HDMI-> VGA adapter I'll need to use it with a cheap display. I guess you have to pick a single port when you're going cheap, but DVI would have been a lot nicer.
Autogenerated "source" is basically useless - trying to edit it will make you want to stab your eyes out. It's exactly as big an issue as it sounds like.
Sure. But not the only way. The point is someone could entirely innocently distribute the binary and "source", as downloaded from the FSF's site, without accompanying written offer (because the source is just there, right?). And that would be violating the GPL.
But I would also say a band - at least anything non-classical - would likely be the worst use of testing the sound systems
Yes and no. Testing should reflect usage. If what you're going to do with your sound system is listen to bands, then the best way to test it is listen to bands, and see if they sound good to you on it. Ultimately that's all that matters.
This probably ends up with people getting low-quality sound systems to match the one in their car, because that's what they're used to listening to and people prefer familiar distortions over accurate reproduction. But ultimately subjective enjoyment is what matters - there's no inherent virtue in having an accurate sound system.
The processing growth has averaged about 1000% yearly for the last year and a half. The actual inflation would be a bit less since it'd be diluted into the pool of coins from the last couple years, but you're still looking at 800% or so. That will continue as long as the BTC's reach is growing.
I would expect the coin's value to grow with the number of users though, which will balance this out. Surely price will be more dependent on number of bitcoins/user than on absolute number of bitcoins - every user "needs" the same number of coins, however many users there are.
If you buy in now and two years from now it's trading at USD$1000, should your share be inflated down to compensate?
Yes. Or rather, the reward algorithm should be such that the value people can get from mining is the same whenever they got in. I think bitcoin has done a lot of good in pioneering the concepts and the crypto, but it'll be a variant without the exponential decrease in available mining that ultimately sees large-scale adoption.
Here's my missing feature: no way to set a default transparency for foreground windows. Still. It was there in kde 3.5, I've filed a bug report about it, but nothing.
If you read Darths and Droids it becomes much more amusing.
Do you actually own it? I've seen a site that will generate an IPv6 address for you, but it's just picking one at random - there's no guarantee someone else won't decide they want it. IPv6 is supposed to solve the address exhaustion problem, but as an end user I can easily get an IPv4 address (I just pay my ISP xx/month), whereas I can find no way to get an actually-mine IPv6 address.
If mining gave exponentially increasing money supply, the exchange rate would be spiraling down insanely fast.
2% a year inflation is exponential; the dollar is still doing OK. Remember bitcoin mining is ultimately limited by computing power, which approximately doubles every 18 months, which works out a shade below 1% per week. That's high by the standards of traditional currencies, but it's not absurd, and I don't think it'd be enough to make the currency unusable.
In the future it would be even better if the BTC was a reasonably stable value store (like the dollar) so that you could simply receive and then spend BTC directly instead of as a proxy for USD.
Yes and no. People holding a currency long-term is bad for everyone; savings are better off kept in stocks or assets. And it's not like the current mining-payout algorithm has kept the price stable.
No one got them for free. When the early miners got them, they were worth very little - the USD$ net-present-value returned per watt invested isn't terribly less now than in the beginning.
People probably sold them for what they cost them to make, so that's not surprising. But to say that someone's watt two years ago is worth thousands of times what my watt is now doesn't add up.
The very high returns are from taking the risk of holding onto the asset hoping it'd appreciate. That part is just like buying a penny stock and hoping the company pulls through the crisis. In both cases, it was very likely that they'd lose what they were continuing to hold. Would you consider an investor who bought into a penny stock to be getting that money for free?
Someone who gets a penny stock buys it from someone else, on an open market. The early adopters of bitcoin are far more analogous to the issuers of a new currency - they've created a bunch of tokens and declared they're worth something. And back when private banks issued their own currencies, customers would insist that those banks held proportionate reserves of hard assets that they could claim from if need be. That's what's missing from bitcoins.