WayneS

That makes is pretty clear to me. They are not generating actual Bitcoins. Read the article again.

"we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol" 

Reading this I really didn't get the impression the chips would be generating actual bitcoins. Just currency-like tokens for doing resource management and proving that something occurred.

Ok, continuing the argument from the article and not discussing practical methods of waste disposal...

Instead of using chemical rockets for the entire dV how about using a rocket to get into orbit and then using an ion engine driven by solar energy to lose the additional 20km/s? It seems the "fuel" weight required would be significantly less.

To be convincing they need a fake room where the camera can pull backwards and you can see there is no way the sun is real.

Old now '95. That is the an early pre-production version Pentium Pro running at 100 Mhz. The 256k L2 cache was really fast relative to memory because it was in that second die in the same chip.

I like to combine the graphs together into one picture and then another processor structure appears the picture: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4893/mem_lat3.jpg

This graph show the memory latency for a linked list walk that strides across a certain size buffer in memory. I used to use this picture for interviews and ask people to explain as much as they can about the processor from the picture. It end works for people who know nothing about processor architecture as I can walk them over what it says and see how they think and react to new information.

> A sticky overflow flag would be great... "if properly scheduled"

That is the rub right there. Think about what this means. Every ALU operation needs to read whatever register contains this state and write a new value. So every ALU operation becomes serially dependent all all previous operations. You have just totally killed performance on out-of-order processors.

Processor designers work really hard to avoid these kinds of operations. In fact between the Pentium and the Pentium Pro (aka p6) the behavior of condition codes on several x86 instructions were changed from "keep old value" to "always cleared". We couldn't find any code that cared and it was never previously documented.

This code doesn't have to use branches, it could also OR the condition codes to some register after every operation. This would also hurt performance, but only for code that cares instead of all code.

Anyone else read that as "wessel" with a fake Russian accent?

And a little bit north you can see that big crane on a barge in the water. Very cool.

Yes is it all closed. Look at bittorrent-sync. Totally cool, but closed and controlled. I don't see that working here, other than being used for porn and piracy.

Agreed, the new perl looks like Ruby. And I am willing to bet Ruby is more self consistent and easier to learn. (Says the perl 5 expert)

You understand it is making $90k/day revenue?

bad things. This is much more practical for torpedoes. In fact you would almost call those missiles at that point. Yup, it appears that is already a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supercavitating_torpedo...

"But what is up with the Visual Basic community? They are neither angry nor happy. They just ... are? :)"

This is answered by the mentions relative to TIOBE graph. They use VB, but they are careful not to talk about it.

No information on the website and it doesn't answer the key question. Why is this better than doing the same thing in Evernote? Evernode's free level is plenty for storing receipts.

You seem to be assuming someone is using Ubuntu One.

Same here: Centurylink DSL in Indiana

Green? Because it runs off batteries? Is that all it takes.

OK, but didn't we just have a discussion on hacker news showing that helicopters with one large blade are more efficient than ones with many smaller blades?

Here is a part that I don't get. Do they actually change the magnetic strip on the 'coin'? Or does it have a fixed VISA number that is tied to your ID and owned by the 'coin' company. Then they just use the coin app and the timestamp of the transaction to know which card to charge in the backend.

That would mean the company gets a log of all transactions.

The easiest for the US is coinbase.com. Unless you want to buy a lot. But they are not an exchange so you can't setup buy/sell orders.

I agree the log chart is the desired way to view the data because then a straight line is showing steady growth.

But look at the chart you posted. I see a sharp uptick on a nice linear trend since July. Now go look at the rest of the chart and ask yourself what happened every time there was a sharp uptick? Hmmm

I believe bitcoin will continue to grow, but I wouldn't tell people this is a good time to buy. Wait for the "correction" then buy.

Nice answer. However in practice current Intel processors do CRC32 in hardware. This blows away the rest and has really nice results. So I use portable code that using Intel's slicing-by-8 CRC32 code for generic machines and then automatically uses SSE4.2 on x86's that most people are actually using.

Ahh that is kinda how "exponential growth" works. But clearly the exponential part is recent because if you project backwards at doubling every 4 weeks you find the hash rate started at one hash every 28 days. ;-)

Use the keyboard

I really wanted to like this but it was missing a couple key features for me. I described by problems in the github issues page and wondered back the theoldreader. When theoldreader got slow and was down for over a day I came back and found he has continued to make fixes and addressed most by my issues. Very happy now, and the website is consistently responsive which I care about much more than fancy layouts.

The thing about China and possibly several other countries on your list is that while college is cheap (or free), the number of students accepted are very low. So for example only the top 10% (or 1%) of high school students even get the option to go to college. So competition in high school is very fierce to get one of the college slots and not end up with a factory job.

(And I imagine money can be used to "open" a spot, but that won't appear in tuition summaries.)

Don't apologize too much. I was having fun demonstrating how to track this stuff down. That said I would have been really upset if I had donated a significant amount of money to the EFF and then they decided to give all of it away.

BTW it is probably possible to verify that the money donated was REALLY send to the bitcoin faucet.

Oh and yeah I got my first bitcoins from the faucet like many of these other people. It was an important service, however given how bitcoins can be split up it didn't need to be giving out large amounts at all.

I am going to have to call bull on that.

Here is the original EFF donation page: http://web.archive.org/web/20110514012705/https://www.eff.or...

It contains the bitcoin address.

Here is the history for that address: https://blockchain.info/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2...

Which as you can see received a total of 3,515.077 BTC. This is still a lot and is worth over $400k today, but way short of your 20,000.

FYI, here is the original discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20185.0

edit: That discussion was right after the first bitcoin bubble and at the time it was trading for around $17 so the total donations that they were talking about was about $60k. Still a lot of money to be going to the faucet (and down the drain?).

So they profit from idiots? That is a pretty good strategy, they will never run out.