"So what? BTC is a medium of payment. The businesses accepting BTC as payment are largely converting it into their preferred currency, so the volatility isn't very important."

Really. Why don't you name a few? From where I stand no real business is keeping balances in BTC. All their prices are in USD and their payment processor (such as coinbase) is paying them in USD.

You realize how dumb your statement is? You think any business is going to forgo double-digit profits or accept double-digit losses by quoting a stable price in BTC? Good luck with that concept!

-Matt

You are conveniently forgetting the conversion to and from USD also involves transaction fees. Not only that, but you also have to trust the trading institution that is holding your dollar balance to not abscond with your dollars, otherwise you have to ALSO transfer your dollars into and out of the institution immediately.

So we are now talking about three transaction fees at a minimum, and five transactions if you don't trust the institution doing the dollar conversion. Plus someone has to eat whatever change in trading value occurs during the period where the transaction is being stored in BTC.

This immediately causes numerous problems, not the least of which being that the trade value of BTC is no longer deflationary if nobody doing real commerce is holding a balance in BTC. In addition to the fact that it won't be deflationary anyway because there can be any number of crypto-currencies in existence.

We are considering the question of volatility and whether it matters. The answer is: Yes, it does matter, and for some obvious reasons.

Consider the two holders of BTC. The speculators, and those trying to use it for commerce. You need stability for commerce-users to hold a BTC balance of any significance. Without stability the only people holding BTC are the speculators. When speculators are the only game in town, instability is guaranteed.

Now consider the so-called deflationary property of BTC (which is a phantom property in my view... wishful thinking at best). What happens to the two holders of BTC if you actually get deflation? What you get is hoarding by the commerce users (i.e. it stops being used for commerce) and more speculation by the speculators. Result == even worse volatility. Hoarding can easily destroy any currency as has been proven over and over again throughout history.

-Matt

And you haven't bought or used bitcoin for anything else since, right?

Fortunately I'm old enough to know just how stupid remarks like yours are. In this unverifiable world of social network postings, anyone can claim anything. It might make for good entertainment, but only a fool actually believes people like you.

-Matt

"At the other end, the seller receives the amount of the purchased goods or services in the amount of USD advertised to the sellersâ(TM) customer at the time of transaction, and can fulfill their customerâ(TM)s order. In other words, the seller takes no risk on Bitcoin value fluctuation"

In otherwords, all prices are still in US Dollars and neither Square Market nor the seller assume any of the risk. Plus the Bitcoin holder gets to have fun reporting every single last sale's exchange value to the IRS, and has no protection against any fraud that might occur. Which, honestly, doesn't really further the cause.

Bitcoin holders are now learning the hard way that bitcoins are not the magical deflationary stores of value they thought they were.

-Matt

The biggest problem here isn't the question of software patents. It's patents on things that are obvious, or are an obvious progression from something that's already common (eg. taking the manual process of balancing a checkbook and having a computer perform the exact same steps). It's just that software is the field where it's taken root the most, I think because people treat computers as some sort of magic that transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary.

Actually, you know, in the 19th century, the patent lawsuits were flying even more vigorously than they are now. In fact, in the field, it got so bad that it was impossible to create the device.

No, it wasn't a matter of licensing, but a matter that you couldn't build it because the patents were so broad and even worse, they overlapped! And no one was licensing to competitors, so everyone was suing everyone else. And yes, we had NPEs (non-practicing entities, aka trolls) as well.

The device? The sewing machine. Everyone was suing everyone else, and patents were granted that were overlapping. So if you managed to license one, someone else with the exact same thing would sue you. Heck, the only real difference was back then, the inventors held onto their patents and did a lot of the suing.

The end of the 19th century nearly brought a halt to the sewing machine. Until the companies got together and simply bought up every patent around from everyone. Literally buying the peace.

Ah, you don't understand the scale. Yes, people still do trade like this (manually, that is, though with some computer support for convenience). For very large orders it's still highly effective.

Small orders you can just throw onto an exchange because it's hard to front-run a small order. Large orders... you can't do that without seriously compromising your trade.

-Matt

No, you didn't read the article carefully enough (or at all). The order did in fact vanish. The HFT has bids or asks up on all the exchanges. When they see a large order fill on one exchange they front-run the order on all the others (which involves canceling the order on the other exchanges and then taking some other action) before the originators order reaches the other exchanges.

The other point here is that many of these exchanges offer special order types designed to allow HFTs to take advantage of normal investors. For example, orders which either match instantly or auto-cancel if instant execution cannot occur. And many other types beyond the standard market, limit, and split-the-difference orders.

So, yes, the potentially matching orders went poof.

-Matt

Best article on HFT that I've ever read. Explains in fine detail how institutional players get fleeced by high frequency traders. Took a while to read the whole thing, but well worth the time.

One thing to note to all of us retail investors, though... our tiny orders aren't really getting fleeced, and with spreads on most stocks of only $0.01 our trading overheads are miniscule compared to 20 years ago. Standard brokerage fees trump (by several orders of magnitude) HFT losses for people like us.

-Matt

Remote wiping is already possible. What they want is centralized control over the functionality for governing purposes. We're not idiots. Well... not all of us.

Possible, but doesn't' prevent resale. And the same ability to remote wipe can be used to remote kill like how Apple does it.

Someone steals your cellphone, you remote wipe. However ,that someone has a wiped cellphone they can fence to someone for a hundred bucks, still, while you're out the cost of a replacement.

On iOS, you remote wipe, that device is useless. You can fence it for parts, and I'm sure iFixit and others will gladly accept it, but they don't pay too much for non-functional hardware.

Effectively, it's completely useless to steal a cellphone because it can't be used - you can't even use it as an iPod Touch or anything that just merely lacks cellular functionality (say with IMEI blocks). Pretty much the value of an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch (with iOS7) is $0. Because once wiped, they're nothing more than a pretty piece of aluminum-wrapped glass.

Any idiot who buys a stolen iOS device will find out shortly that they got scammed.

And even Apple refuses to help you until you can convince a court to force them to unlock it.

Right now, steal someone's Galaxy S4 or Nexus 5, and you have a nifty Android phone that still works. Sure the user's data is gone, but you picked it up for $100 off contract. Which makes them still lucrative to thieves who can make an easy $100 off it.

It must work stand-alone: if I'm lugging my phone around with me why would I want a miniscule third-rate smart-watch?

If you're "lugging" your phone around you probably need to update your phone.

Sorry, wrong. Modern phones are pretty damn big, which is probably why smartwatches exist to begin with.

People want big screens, but then they try to use them and realize that they're completely impractical for anything other than a mobile entertainment device. As a mobile communications device, unless you're sitting down, they're impossible to use.

I tried. My friend got a Nexus 5. First thing I did was the usual way I use my phone - single handledly. It was a disaster - even with relatively huge hands, I can't reach all 4 corners. And Android (and iOS, for that matter) doesn't have guidelines that say you should put all the UI controls on one corner of the screen for single handed use. So the inability to use it single handed means I can't use it while I'm out and about without finding a spot to put down my things so I can use both hands to use the phone.

The smartwatch came out from this inability to quickly answer phone calls or do text messages while on the go because you need both hands to use the @()#&%@ phone.

Of course, Samsung likes to mock the fact that the iPhone screens are small, without mentioning that their phones are completely useless for single handled on-the-go mobile use.

Then again, I suppose it's a good way to do snatch and grabs - with a user's hands concentrating on the phone, that shoulder purse or murse is a much more attractive target, since it'll take a good 4-5 seconds for the ex-owner to deal with their phone.

The best part of using SSD's? You learn to make your backups religiously, because they will die and they will die fast. I have some very long-lived SSD's in production (SLC) but each one that I've had fail (I have a stack of about 20 on my workbench which may or may not go back for 'lifetime warranty' claims - do I really want replacements of crappy SSD's?) has gone from perfect to unreadable in minutes.

The main reason why SSDs fail is due to sudden power loss causing a massive corruption of the FTL tables. It's why some come with capacitors - so they can sync the on-media tables with what's in the RAM cache on sudden power loss. There are mitigation techniques that are possible as well that allow for sudden power down without losing data. In fact, the modern SSD is faster than the interface it's on, so compromising performance for data safety is doable.

After all, once you're around 500MB/sec, you can't go faster. If the flat out rate is 750MB/sec, no one will see it, so give up 33% of that speed for data safety so you'll still see 500MB/sec at the interface.

As for your pile of dead drives - chances are a good chunk o them, if they've still got life in them, can be used. Their tables are corrupt, so you should try a ATA Secure Erase (in anything but a Lenovo system - go figure, but Lenovos do strange things). We've used it to recover an SSD in a dropped laptop that shattered to a million bits (which was on and doing stuff).

Most good SSDs respond to typical power down commands as a request to sync data - i.e., when a hard disk is issued the spindown command prior to system turn off, it syncs the cache to the platters, parks the heads, and shuts down. Doing so is far safer on the hard drive than a straight power down (less mechanical wear - a sudden powerdown switches all the platter spinning energy into the voice coils, which flings the heads to the parking area violently. It's why a soft spindown rating on a hard disk may be 50,000+ load/unload cycles, while a emergency spindown is only 10,000 or less).

Likewise, smart SSDs do the same thing - they see a spindown command and use it as an opportunity to sync the tables to media, and then report to the host that they're ready to be turned off.

We used the hdparm method of sending the ATA Secure Erase command to the drive, it works, takes about 5 minutes and recovers and SSD to the condition it was in before failure. The only thing is that previous wear doesn't reset (of course), but the drive is still as reliable as it was brand new - just because the tables were corrupted once doesn't impact a thing after a secure erase - it's basically used to recreate brand new tables.

Judging by this, the speed is about the same as other comparable SATA III SSD's, with a little bit of a boost but nothing dramatic.

You know what the problem is? SATA3 is too damn slow. Yes, a modern SSD has hit the SATA3 bandwidth limit of 6Gbps.

The interface is now the bottleneck - something that hasn't happened in disk storage systems for a long time - it took SSDs to actually saturate a SATA3 link with a single drive, and SATA3 was created with SSDs in mind. And we've hit the limit again, far before SATA4 is even a draft.

It's why we're having PCIe SSDs that easily get 750MB/sec reads and writes.

IOPS is where we can improve.

No, not really. It's a waste of power and an unnecessary extra cost to throw a ton of dram into a SSD when the main system is likely going to have far more ram for caching purposes available. Remember that OCZ already tried the large-cache approach and it was a complete failure. It is far, FAR more important for the SSD to have a large enough capacitor to be able to at least flush flash meta-data on power loss, and you can't do that if you have a lot of power-hungry ram or have a lot of dirty data in that power-hungry ram that needs to be flushed.

More to the point, these large caches can't be used to buffer writes without serious data loss. They are really only useful for buffering reads. And, beyond that, nearly all operating systems use asynchronous writes and nearly all operating systems do some manner of write combining themselves, and tend to be IOPS-limited for reads anyway. So there's no point having the SSD cache a large number of writes, and no real benefit from having the SSD cache a large amount of read data either.

Write pipelining is accomplished by limited the number of tags one uses for write commands. The size of the cache available for writes is irrelevant because most OS flushes are going to fill it up nearly instantly anyway when they flush. So if you don't limit the number of tags you use for write commands, you will starve read commands no matter how small or large the SSD's cache is. Generally speaking, 4 tags (out of the 32 supported by SATA) is plenty for writes.

Larger write caches do not improve SSD write throughput at all, and generally won't improve read throughput either.

-Matt

before crows figure out how to use youtube

They already have - there are plenty of crow videos on YouTube. Instead of learning how to use a camera and YouTube, they've trained ape-descendents to do all the hard work for them.

I'm sure you can find a video of these crows doing their tests on YouTube.

I didn't know there was any lack of competition in the video serving market. Other video websites seem to find it hard to compete with YouTube. What makes Yahoo different? After all Yahoo hasn't been a force in anything much since the days when web-links were magenta and underlined, and most web page backgrounds were Windows grey.

What other sites are there?

Vimeo is probably the biggest alternative, and they have a good following for the "high quality indie film" market - given the videos I see posted there tend to be well produced and edited short films and other videos. It lacks the "rawness" of YouTube. But it seems to work well.

Twitch? That site is geared towards videogames. It offers livestreaming of events (with 30 second commercials every 30 seconds it seems) meaning it's not only pointless for non-videogame content, but the commercials are intrusive, loud, and really get in the way. It's only seeing a resurgence because both the PS4 and Xbone support it natively. But it lost a fair bit when PS4 voyeurs got caught up streaming amateur porn forcing Twitch to hide PS4 streamers away and close down a bunch of accounts.

The other two I can think of are Dailymotion and Liveleak, the former doesn't seem to do anything YouTube can't, except maybe mobile, and Liveleak, well, they seem to be for posting stuff some people don't want the public to know.

The other reason is well, the two biggest smartphone platforms natively support direct YouTube uploads. And Vimeo got ground because they were the first to embrace mobile by offering HTML5 video content shortly after iPhone first came out. (YouTube took a bit longer because well, everyone had the YouTube app)