devx

I wonder if someone could build a new digital currency that starts let's say at 1 trillion units, and is expanded by 2 percent per year (that 2 percent being split so a slight increase happens every day, so it doesn't happen all at once, but after a year, the increase rounds up to 2 percent).

The problem would be seeding it and distributing it early on. But it could still be mined much like Bitcoin, with the difference being that the total amount will never be limited. Also, it should be easier to mine them, since the (non-finite) total (1 trillion) would be a lot larger than the 21 limit for Bitcoins. Someone should also do the math for this new currency's adoption rate, so all of the 1 trillion units (adjusted with the 2 percent inflation rate) get distributed in 3-5 decades.

Basically we don't want a few thousand people to get that whole trillion within 10 years. I'd also prefer if anonymity would be built it (look to Zerocoin for that). Perhaps it shouldn't be anonymous by default, but you should be able to "switch it on"). It should also be as easy to use and as secure as possible (the clients), so normal people can use it safely on all of their devices.

China announcing they want a new world currency that doesn't depend on US, and Baidu adopting Bitcoin, I assume.

How's the crime rate in Miami?

> One researcher did find D-Wave performed 3600 times faster than a classical device.

Well, that was done with the 128-qubit version, right? And now they have one that is 2^384 faster than that one, so we'll see what happens next.

If it was the 512-qubit one, then we'll need to wait for the 2048-qubit D-Wave Three that should come out in 2015 (they seem to double the qubits every year, but only release a new model every 2 years or so). That one should be 2^1536 faster than the current model.

Will these work with other GPU's? How hard is it to replicate by the competitors? And will all displays have to support 10 different GPU makers for this feature, if there's no standard set?

Optimus wouldn't have a reason to exist if say Nvidia made their "mid-range" dedicated notebook GPU's to clock at 200 Mhz for "normal use", and then go to 600+ Mhz in games, or other high-end apps.

Of course, perhaps the company that led to the making of Optimus in the first place is Intel, because they started bundling their GPU's and then charging OEM's more for the standalone CPU than from the bundle - and eventually OEM's were like "why not just get both Intel's GPU, and a higher-end Nvidia one?"

If you ask me, I think Intel's move should've been declared anti-competitive from the beginning. There's no way the bundle cost Intel less than the CPU, but they priced it that way because they had a monopoly, and could force OEM's to just accept the deal "or buy the more expensive CPU if they don't like it", which was obviously a non-option option.

I'm not sure if you're aware but Carmack is CTO at Oculus now.

> As others have mentioned they have gone all in as an exploiter of their demographic data

Oh, and exploit it they will. As expected, a future where "privacy" will become a lot more important, would be the "enemy" of what Google is trying to do, as long as ads are their main source of revenue.

> Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...

I'm hoping sooner rather than later, Google will find another cash cow, perhaps in self-driving cars, or Google Glass, or Calico or whatever, that will allow them to make a lot of money from that, and not be as desperate about tracking every single thing everyone wants does online, almost as much as the NSA.

Until that happens, we won't be seeing any true secure or private services from Google, because the desire to track will always come first, before anything.

If that's true, then that's a pretty "evil" thing of them to do, so I really hope that's not the main reason.

Samsung has just released version 1.0 of their open-source implementation of ex-FAT [1]. Why aren't they using that? I think it should at the very least work with 64+ GB microSD cards, if not with smaller ones, which I'd be fine with.

If they still think it's risky to be sued by MS, I think that lawsuit would be well worth it. At worst, they risk losing a few tens of millions of dollars (I doubt the "damages" that can be claimed would be more than that for a single Nexus model).

But the potential upside is huge. If they win, then not only Google, but every other OEM can finally stop paying Microsoft for FAT/ex-FAT patents, and just use that. Heck, they can probably even convince Samsung and a few other OEM's to pony up a pool of money for the trial, if they don't want to take it all on themselves.

The value/cost would be orders of magnitude bigger than what Google paid for Motorola's patents. And if they win, the potential savings for all OEM's who still use microSD cards, would be in the billions of dollars.

As for my personal expectations of this happening, I think Google is too chicken to do it, as they usually are when it comes to such confrontations, but I see Samsung doing it soon. What is Microsoft going to do to Samsung? Beg them not to buy Windows from them anymore? (which is what they'd risk doing if they sued Samsung)

I have a strong suspicion that the only reason Samsung even agreed to pay them for the patents in the first place was because it was part of a deal with Microsoft, in which they got lower prices for Windows licenses, which means Microsoft may even lose or break even at most with Samsung in that deal. Microsoft would've definitely agreed to something like that, because having Samsung on their "extortion list" meant every other company would then start to give them money, too - which is exactly what happened as soon as Samsung agreed to pay, and Microsoft made it public.

[1] - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzODQ

Nexus 4 was available for like a few hours at launch, and then it was out of stock for literally 3 months after that, putting a significant damp on its total demand, I think.

Google botched the launch big time last year. Hopefully they won't repeat the same mistake this year. Even if all of their stock sells within a day, they should at least be ready to satisfy 2-3x that within another 2 weeks. Waiting another 3 months is just ridiculous.

What has led to this situation in Brazil? High wages? Is the situation similar to Australia?

I said this here a while ago. Intel had only 2 options, and they are both bad for them:

1) keep going up market, and be disrupted in the most classical way possible

2) compete with ARM on price, which is unsustainable for a company like Intel

Not only is Intel used to high margins on its chips, but it's also a very small player in the mobile world, and the PC world is shrinking continuously, so "making it up" in the PC market won't cut it.

Also, if they're promoting "$300 Haswell notebooks", virtually nobody will buy $700-$1000 notebooks in the future, and Intel will never be able to raise prices, and their profits, again.

Whether Intel will die like Blackberry and Nokia (yes, I consider the acquisition as dying, since it was a move out of bankruptcy desperation) or will survive as a tiny shadow of what they used to be, I'm unsure.

I suppose it's possible for them to survive as a company that is 1/10 of what they used to be, if they really compete on price, and make radical changes within the company (end all unprofitable/low volume divisions and fire execs or engineers that are too expensive). But that really depends on how willing they are to make those hard decisions.

Hopefully they'll kick Clapper out soon, too (unless they actually intend to act on that lying to Congress felony he committed, repeatedly, over the past few months).

I think they should consider having it outside of US, or if they think the US Constitution has a good chance of protecting them, then at least have 2 offices (one in US, and one in Brazil), with redundant data between the two. In case one gets shut down, the other can still report the news about what happened.

> Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis

Maybe it's time Zerocoin (by Matthew Green's students) got implemented into Bitcoin:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-mak...

Wasn't lobster used to be called the "cockroach of the sea"?

If they change their names and brand them as something else, they could probably sell very well as expensive food, too.

But that's mainly a niche market - a market of people who wouldn't care even if the iPhone is $2,000.

Apple may very well continue to sell iPhones only to that market, but they will definitely lose market share. And I think Apple, at the very least, wants some compromise between high-end/quality and market share, and aren't purely focused on high-end, no matter what they say in public.

They know that if their market is 5 percent of smartphones (which is starting to look that way in a few years, if they change nothing about their strategy) they will start losing the developers. iOS won't be the platform to get apps first, or the most (already isn't here). And I think Apple will try to avoid that as much as possible (as futile as I think that will be).

Different view:

http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/23/steve-ballmer-the-worst-ceo...

That's why companies like Google and Microsoft should provide as much end to end encryption for their users as possible. So the government doesn't even bother asking them about the data.

I hope they've taken a snapshot of the software before announcing the crowdfunding campaign. If there has been any update since then, and it had any backdoor, it may have already been removed.

> There is mounting evidence that the NSA had a copy of several ROOT-CA keys to perform SSL/TLS interception on a massive scale.

Has anyone tried putting 2 and 2 together yet from all the leaks about what NSA has collected so far, and how easily, to see if that is likely, or if they did it through other means?

DNS SEC alternative: http://dnscurve.org/ (Dan Bernstein)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok

Why take the chance? From the leaks, the companies have "cooperated enough", especially when we're talking about "foreigners". We don't need proof for absolutely everything and for every single case, to stop trusting American companies, until there's a dramatic change in laws, and surveillance policy in US.

Source where you can donate to help the project along:

https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop

Samsung's Chromebook had about the same battery life, if not a bit bigger, and achieved that with I think half the battery size. So whatever is going on now, is probably HP or Google's fault.

Also, I think you're confusing things. Are you referring to this?

http://anandtech.com/show/7085/the-2013-macbook-air-review-1...

That shows 11 hours in "light workload". Unfortunately, starting with this year, Apple stopped giving "real" numbers for its Macbook battery life, and started giving battery life for "minimum workloads" like the whole laptop industry has done for more than a decade. The "real" battery life is closer to that "medium workload" (Haswell gave about a 50 percent boost compared to last year's Macbooks).

With medium workload, it's 9 hours, with a 50Whr battery (according to you, I didn't check), so at 30Whr, that would normalize it at around 6.7 hours. Still good, but nowhere as impressive as you made it sound at first.

I'll grant you this. The decision to use a last-gen chip in this Chromebook wasn't a very smart one, and that's probably HP's fault. Mediocre companies like HP with mediocre employees and mediocre middle management tend to be very slow about adopting new technologies in their products, which is why you never see them come out with some cutting edge tech first.

But would they have done this without Mozilla pushing the performance with asm.js, or that fast? Competition is great, and it also makes me wonder, if they keep this up - maybe NaCl won't be needed either?

1) I think with future authentication technologies, this will get easier (logging in to the wallet based on a fingerprint token?). Perhaps the new FIDO standard will help here: http://www.fidoalliance.org/faqs.html

2) Taxes would work just like how you make money today from other sources, you have to declare them. Plus, wouldn't it be better if people wanted to pay taxes based on the marvelous "services" they get from the government, rather than having part of the money being taken away from them by force, and then the government spending it however it wishes, with little benefit for the tax payer? Seems to me that if the government had to convince people to pay up, instead of forcing them, they'd be a lot more efficient with that money spending, and a lot of waste would be reduced.

3) I think the more used Bitcoin gets, the volatility decreases. Right now if someone buys $1 million worth of Bitcoin, that could still have a pretty significant impact on the Bitcoin market. In the future, if the transactions are worth trillions of dollars, someone trading $1 million of them won't mean much.

> The folder-like design in iOS 5 and iOS 6 has been replaced with an opaque app icon. The end result is so horrible that it’s hard to avoid thinking it was done maliciously: if someone was tasked with hiding away a set of unwanted apps, they would be likely to come back with a design that was something very much like the iOS 7 Newsstand.

I doubt it was done maliciously, but I stand by my previous belief: Jon Ive is just really, really bad at overseeing software design. He's much worse at software design than Scott Forestall.

Maybe Scott's UI wasn't "up to date", but he seemed to be great at UX design. Jon Ive doesn't seem to understand UX at all (did you see the font he chose for iOS7 at WWDC, which fortunately got changed because of backlash? You could barely see it), and he just copied some UI designs from 3rd party apps or other mobile operating systems (webOS, Android, WP8, etc), and made the colors lighter - all of it implemented in a not very cohesive way. And let's not even bring up the animations, translucency or parallax effect anymore, which again are things only a UI/UX newbie would add.

Could it be related to yesterday's announcement, and a confirmation that they were talking about Bitcoin?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550068

That seems similar to that strategy that says you need to commoditize your competitor's products and cash cows (especially if such a move doesn't affect you in a big way).

The dollar is a sort of "proprietary currency" owned by one "monopolistic" country now. The goal of a "competitor" would be to create an alternative that is very open and decentralized (anyone can use), to disrupt that country's power and control over the world through its currency.

Sounds good to me.