That's not really true. Miners can collectively switch to a new client that supports whatever feature they want, but everyone else needs to run the same client in order for that to work.

Otherwise the rest of the bitcoin network will refuse to confirm their transactions.

No. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is the Satoshi, which is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin.

It will happen eventually but the developing world can't afford to give each of their college students iPads or Kindles or whatever. Paper textbooks are cheap outside of the USA because that is what the market will bear over there.

They will be on paper for at least a little while longer.

You sound like you've never had to mediate a 3-way vendor argument between the hardware vendor, the linux support vendor and the HBA vendor, all claiming that it's someone else's fault that the hardware/OS/HBA combo doesn't work, even though they assured you that it did before you bought it. Oh, and you're a top customer, so they want to keep you really really happy. But not "it actually works" kind of happy.

I was talking about Solaris on Intel. Not sure where you got this from. In fact, you kind of reinforce my point: running Solaris on other people's hardware is just asking for trouble like this, which WAS MY POINT!

Anyway, if you really want to play this game, I'd be more than happy to pull up some of the various support cases I've opened with Sun and Oracle about Solaris and get you to try to explain each one to me, since you're such a bigot for Solaris.

Spoken like someone who has never run them side by side in a large estate

I have and do at my current gig, so shut your pipe. I have also done software development for both. So I know the ins and outs of both OSes pretty damned well. I even admitted to you that Solaris is the better OS, yet you're still not happy with my response. Spoken like a true fanboy you have.

There is one advantage to Solaris and it is the vendor lockin, namely the fact that you have limited hardware combinations, whereas with Intel you have literally hundreds of combinations of chipsets and configurations to support and test against. Again, this is one reason why I do *NOT* recommend Solaris on Intel unless you're buying one of Oracle's own Intel servers where they have actually tested the OS and the hardware together.

Or who want to run large databases with more than a few GB of RAM. Small databases seem fine on Linux, but Oracle or DB2 or Sybase don't seem as stable on Linux as on Solaris when you get up to 32+GB RAM.

I'm running rather large databases, much larger than that, with OEL on Dell branded hardware. It just works for us.

Yes, and it's a crying shame. Oracle are terrible. I know of whole enterprises who jumped ship when Oracle took over. But Linux still isn't there, even though most places I'm working at these days have more Linux than Solaris, HP-UX or AIX, and usually more than all other Unix combined. But there's still too much of the amateur around Linux.

Your only indictment against Linux is that you have some specific hardware issue, that's not really convincing and pretending that Solaris doesn't have those issues is just plain laughable and absurd.

OK, first off, it is not stolen. You cannot steal open source software. Oracle is following the GPL.

Second, Oracle was doing OEL before they acquired Sun.

Solaris is a technically good and high quality OS but its hardware support was limited. If you bought the Sun-branded boxes and Sun-branded cards, you were OK. However if you are white-boxing a server, you had to be careful to select chipsets that were on their compatibility list. Then support got murky at that point even then.

I really, really love Solaris, but let's face the facts. Outside of the SPARC platform, there is no reason for Solaris. Linux does everything as well or nearly as well. Linux is weaker in some areas, but not weak enough to justify the cost and lock-in of Solaris.

Solaris exists for Oracle to milk legacy customers on support contracts who aren't ready or willing to migrate to Linux and commodity x86 hardware . There isn't much if any new development going on, and Oracle is only pushing Solaris to new customers as part of their big data warehouse solutions (where customers have $$$$$ and want to spend it with one vendor) where they want to get people locked in to one vendor.

This is a urban legend. Attaching "Business Reply Mail" envelopes and cards to parcels is an invalid use of those mailings and will be discarded. You are either lying (this incident never happened) or your postman has never worked in sorting and has no clue about this.

See here and here.

If you want to piss them off, send them something nasty that will gum up the letter-opening machines at the CC company. Of course you may well end up being sued or charged with a crime, depending on the circumstance.

It's been a while since I've used a full-service pump but they ALWAYS ask you what kind of gas you want in your vehicle..

What, do you think that people who drive diesels are constantly getting regular gasoline in their tanks because the pump boy doesn't know how to ask you what fuel you want?

The environmentalists are actually against it

No. There is an industry standard for phone charging that Apple voluntarily agreed to - basically saying all phones will come with a standard charging port (micro-USB). But that standard is essentially pointless because you can be compliant by making an adapter available as an option.

Apple has a micro-USB-to-Lightning adapter that you can purchase, as an option, for like $30.

Yeah this stuff happens everywhere but China is like the world's capital of industrial espionage. It happens by several orders of magnitude more in China than any other place.

That's a design problem. An LCD picture is 100% predictable in terms of the size and position of the picture. LCD monitors don't have options to (un)widen/lengthen/rotate the picture because the picture is an exact representation of the pixels that are sent to the screen. So if the text / arrows on the screen do not line up with the buttons, then it means whoever designed that UI screwed up and did not actually bother to position the elements correctly.

(It could also mean something like there are several different models of ATM in the field and the options/text won't fit properly on some ATMs, again, a UI issue).

This has nothing to do with calibration as there is nothing that is out-of-spec hardware wise.

VMWare's P2V tool will not P2V a UNIXware machine. It can't even P2V a machine running a 2.4.x Linux kernel without some additional hacking.

Who made you the gatekeeper for defining what P2V is defined as?

If I have a physical machine and I virtualize the OS on it, as far as I'm concerned it has been P2V'd.

Curious: have you actually tried virtualizing NTP or do you just think its a bad idea without any experience?

I virtualize ntp for UNIX (build cluster and lab farm) and domain controllers for Windows (which acts as a time server for our 5000 or so desktops at work). Both Microsoft and VMWare explicitly support doing timekeeping functions in their associated hypervisors so long as you follow their guides. No problems whatsoever.

I hope you realize that the internet is going to have much higher latency spikes than your hypervisor will (unless its badly configured or extremely overcommitted).

If you're trying to "correlate logs down to the microsecond" then you should either be using a local time source or should be getting your time from a nearby source on the network.

I'm not sure you understand how hypervisors or NTP really work.