I don't really think that they got that close. The OLPC was supposed to be $100, and it never got down to less than $200 after several years after the initial promise.

That said, it help to launch the $300 netbook trend, soon followed by $100 7" Android tablets and cheap Windows based laptops. All of those caught on far better than OLPC did, and probably helped to get technology into low income households far better than the original project.

Even the creator of the test admits that any average user will probably not come anywhere close to 500 TB of writes during the lifetime of their 256 GB SSD.

Someone like Backblaze might if they used the SSD as a cache drive for a RAID array, but using a TLC based drive for that purpose is pretty foolish.

I guess that IBM's customers can now stop worrying about the NSA planting bugs in their servers and worry about the Chinese government doing it instead :)

Or (more likely) you're a nerd with a small horde of Bitcoin who wants as much positive publicity for the currency as possible.

I'm thinking that Slashdot should start requiring Bitcoin article posters to disclose how much Bitcoin they have before publishing the article. CNBC requires someone to disclose that their firm owns 5,000 shares of stock XYZ when they go on air and proclaim how great stock XYZ is... why not require the same level of transparency here?

We should really do a release date pool, and make our best educated guesses as to when Windows 9 will ship.

Will it be like Windows Vista and takes years longer than the original estimate, or will it be more like Windows 7 and be a release with minor changes that ships on time?

My money is on November 6, 2014, and that it will be little more than a UI refresh for Windows 8.1.

I do not think that Bitcoin (or any cryptocoin for that matter) will be a good method for payment transfer until prices stabilize. As long as the price of Bitcoin can swing as much as plus/minus 50% in a day (as it did several times in 2013), no sane person would use it a big ticket purchase.

If given a choice, I'd imagine that Red Hat would have users choosing CentOS than Ubuntu if they are looking for a free Linux distribution with longer term support. At least Red Hat can then give them the option to easily upgrade to RHEL without forcing them to reinstall their systems.

Switching between the two distributions (or even Scientific Linux) is already as easy as switching repos and updating a few branding specific packages. I'd imagine that Red Hat would make the process even easier to do so in the next release.

Yeah... If Overstock.com really wanted to start taking Bitcoin right away, they could just use the Bitpay API and be done with it. I couldn't see setting that up taking more than a few days of development and QA testing.

It's actually a pretty good way of accepting Bitcoin, as the conversion to US dollars is done almost instantly.

Heh... you're assuming that Bitcoin is going to be wildly popular and every person on the friggin planet (even the ones who don't even have electricity now let along stable Internet access) are going to be using it to make ALL of their currency transactions.

I'm sure that's a problem that the Bitcoin Foundation would love to have, but I doubt that it will be something that will happen during our lifetime. I hope that I'm wrong, and that what I just said will make as much sense as a "640k will be enough for everyone" statement 20 years from now... but I doubt it.

They are currently divisible to 8 decimal places, but it shouldn't be that hard to tweak the client software to allow smaller transactions if needed.

That said, it's like a COBOL programmer from the 1970's worrying about a Y2K bug. We're still a long way from needing that kind of precision.

It might not be economically stimulating for the person who has to buy the new computer, but it would certainly be economically stimulating for Dell, HP, Microsoft, McAfee, and Symantec. That was kinda the point.

If anything, bricking a few million old PC's might actually have a stimulating impact on the economy. When the users toss out their 5 year old system that is probably still running Windows XP, they will likely go out and buy a shiny new laptop from Dell or HP that comes with a copy of Windows 8.1 and Office 2012. It will probably come with a "free" trial subscription of McAfee or Symantec virus protection as well. Lots of profit to be had by all in the IT industry.

When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder who paid the Chinese programmers to write this malware.

I'm so glad that the fate of software patents in the US is being left up to a bunch of old geezers who probably can't figure out how to publish their legal opinions online without the help of their IT department.

I agree with you completely.

Let's put it this way... if you were about to start a long term contract for a big project, would you rather get paid in dollars (which will likely be worth at least 95% of what they are now at the end of the contract), or in Bitcoin (which may be worth anywhere from $10 to $10,000 each a year from now, depending on who you talk to)?

Bitcoin might work for buying a bag of weed or some cookies, but you would never use it to do real business until the currency stabilizes.