CurrentC has no chance of becoming the primary anything. It uses QR codes for gods sakes... virtually nobody will use it, no matter how much the merchants try to push it. It's already DOA and it hasn't even been officially launched yet.

-Matt

My physical credit card (normal mag stripe) is compromised at least once a year and sometimes more often. I might not be liable for the fraud, but it is VERY inconvenient when it happens, the card gets locked out, plus it also causes my bank to start verifying more of the transactions which is just as inconvenient if I don't answer the text message quick enough and the card gets blocked for no reason.

It got so bad that around 2 years ago I got a second credit card so I could file it with trusted sites like Amazon and with charities that I donate to regularly and not have to give them all new card numbers every time my over-the-counter card got compromised. That's how bad it has been.

Chip-and-pin is less convenient than ApplePay. Tap-and-pay cards are nominally the same convenience as ApplePay but still have physical security issues. Mag stripe is clearly going to die soon... the data breaches are occurring so often now that not fixing it is no longer an option for merchants. They will have to go to NFC whether they like it or not.

I use ApplePay wherever I can now.

-Matt

You need NFC (which many Android devices have had for years)... but you also need an actual secure chip (not a software emulation or intermediary), and the ability to initiate payment without having to turn on the phone or type in a security code (i.e. a fingerprint reader), and you have to be able to do it with the phone locked and turned off (meaning you need low power hardware to detect the NFC and wake the phone up). And then you need the OS integration to make it all work together seemlessly. And it has to not leak information to anyone except your bank which obviously needs to have the information anyway... and there is no smart phone app on the market other than ApplePay which can make that guarantee. Certainly not Google Wallet. Or CurrentC. Or anything else. And it's better than chip-and-pin and tap-to-pay which both have physical security issues (though they are much better than mag stripe).

Android is missing too many pieces and it will be at least 1-2 years before it has them all. And even then there will be such a huge percentage of *new* android phones that won't have all the pieces that it will only create mass confusion for the general consumer.

The reason Google Wallet has been a failure to-date is that it (and all other smartphone-based payment systems except ApplePay) is simply not convenient to use compared to swiping a credit card. The reason ApplePay became the #1 smartphone payment mechanism overnight is because it's utterly trivial and convenient to use.

It took me exactly 3 seconds at the local Whole Foods to pull out my phone, tap it with my finger on the finger print reader, and put it back in my pocket. It takes me about as long to swipe my card if I don't have to sign, but half the time I do have to sign so ApplePay immediately wins because I never have to sign (at least not so far).

Eventually all smart phones will do it the Apple way. For now, though, and for the next 1-2 years at a minimum, Apple is the only smartphone game in town that actually works well. Chip-and-pin and tap-to-pay cards work almost as well... they can even be more convenient in some situations, but they don't cover all the security bases.

-Matt

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.

Martyrs? Who killed them for their beliefs?

Go away, troll. They certainly died while pursuing something intensely important that they were willing to risk their lives for. The fact that you weren't around to pull the trigger makes them no less martyrs.

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

What unbelievable nonsense, but I suppose I shouldn't expect too much from an anonymous coward. You don't even realize that you proved my point with your response.

-Matt

Over $900, and he will match the donations with his own funds so... that's definitely enough for a pretty nice machine. And with the slashdotting, probably a lot more now.

The bigger problem is likely network bandwidth to his home if he's actually trying to run the server at home. He'd need uplink and downlink bandwidth so if he doesn't have FIOS or Google Fiber, that will be a bottleneck.

-Matt

A single point of failure is a big problem. The biggest advantage of a distributed system is that the main repo doesn't have to take a variable client load that might interfere with developer pushes. You can distribute the main repo to secondary servers and have the developers commit/push to the main repo, but all readers (including web services) can simply access the secondary servers. This works spectacularly well for us.

The second biggest advantage is that backups are completely free. If something breaks badly, a repo will be out there somewhere (and for readers one can simply fail-over to another secondary server or use a local copy).

For most open source projects... probably all open source projects frankly, and probably 90% of the in-house commercial projects, a distributed system will be far superior.

I think people underestimate just how much repo searching costs when one has a single distribution point. I remember the days when FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other CVS repos would be constantly overloaded due to the lack of a distributed solution. And the mirrors generally did not work well at all because cron jobs doing updates would invariably catch a mirror in the middle of an update and completely break the local copy. So users AND developers naturally gravitated to the original and subsequently overloaded it. SVN doesn't really solve that problem if you want to run actual repo commands, verses greping one particular version of the source.

That just isn't an issue with git. There are still lots of projects not using git, and I had a HUGE mess of cron jobs that had to try very hard to keep their cvs or other trees in sync without blowing up and requiring maintainance every few weeks. Fortunately most of those projects now run git mirrors, so we can supply local copies of the git repo and broken-out sources for many projects on our developer box that developers can grep through on our own I/O dime instead of on other project's I/O dime.

-Matt

This isn't quite true. Git has no problem with large repos as long as the system ram and kernel caches can scale to the data footprint the basic git commands need to access them. However, git *DOES* have an issue with scaling to huge repos in general... it requires more I/O, certainly, and you can't easily operate on just a portion of a repo (a feature which I think Linus knows is needed). So repos which are well in excess of the RAM and OS resources required to do basic commands can present a problem. Google has precisely this problem and it is why they are unable to use git despite the number of employees who would like to.

Any system built for home or server use by a programmer/developer in the last 1-2 years is going to have at least 16G of ram. That can handle pretty big repos without missing a beat. I don't think there's much use complaining if you have a very old system with a tiny amount of ram, but you can ease your problems by using a SSD as a cache. And if you are talking about a large company... having the repo servers deal with very large git repos generally just requires ram (but client-side is still a problem).

And, certainly, I do not know a single open source project that has this problem that couldn't be solved with a measily 16G of ram.

-Matt

It's just that ESR has an old decrepit machine to do it on. A low-end Xeon w/16-32G of ECC ram and, most importantly, a nice SSD for the input data set, and a large HDD for the output (so as not to wear out the SSD), would do the job easily on repos far larger than 16GB. The IPS of those cpus is insane. Just one of our E3-1240v3 (haswell) blades can compile the entire FreeBSD ports repo from scratch in less than 24 hours.

For quiet, nothing fancy is really needed. These cpus run very cool, so you just get a big copper cooler (with a big variable but slow fan) and a case with a large (fixed, slow) 80mm input fan and a large (fixed slow) 80mm output fan and you won't hear a thing from the case.

-Matt

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.