You wouldn't be screwed if your business operates in Bitcoins, and your customers pay you in Bitcoins. If you take out a loan for 100 Bitcoins, you will still owe 100 Bitcoins, regardless of the USD exchange rate.
If you aren't dealing in USD, it doesn't matter how much value the USD loses.
Similarly, if you had debt denominated in USD, it wouldn't matter how much value the Zimbabwe Dollar or Weimar Republic Mark lost in hyperinflation. Your debt burden would be the same amount of USD. It just depends on your frame of reference.
The dollar has not reduced in value by a factor of six in the last few weeks. Nearly all of the change in the USD/BTC exchange rate is due to a reevaluation of the real value of bitcoins.
So even if you did all your business in them, it's likely prices would have fallen substantially in the last few weeks, and you would be screwed, per the grandparent.
That said, the source of BTC's volatility right now is precisely the fact that few people are doing business in them, and nearly all demand for them is speculative.
>> 1. at amazon.com, the only site I have been tracking the tablets in actual sales, the Xoom is either #1 or #2 in tablet sales over the past two months. I mean, it is ahead of even the iPad 2
Amazon itself doesn't sell the iPad. It is only sold through Amazon via 3rd party merchants for a huge markup. Obviously sales are going to be low on Amazon when the cheapest price is $130 over the price in the Apple Store or other authorized resellers like macconnection.com.
It's amazing that the iPad is on Amazon's best seller list at all, since it doesn't make any financial sense to buy an iPad on Amazon.
I think Ronald Reagan basically defines himself as a communist here. He says communism is "the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good." But shortly before that, he suggests he is against Jane Fonda's "liberty" in the name of the "liberty of millions of Americans" (the common good).
MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
But I imagine you might not always appreciate her [Jane Fonda's] views Mr Reagan.
RONALD REAGAN:
No I dont care much for Communist sympathizers to be frank.
MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
But surely she is liberated in her freedom to do so.
RONALD REAGAN:
If ones liberty threatens to undermine the liberty of millions of Americans then I must disagree Marcel.
<SNIP>
MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
Thats a good point Edward. Can you even tell us what communism is Mr Reagan.
RONALD REAGAN:
Its the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good.
Exactly what I noticed. It's the central philosophical problem with classical liberalism right there! Before I sent this to friends: is this an April fool?
Nah, neither, I was using raw GDP. Those countries don't have politico-economic systems which funnel large chunks of their populations into either incarceration or the military. Forbes list also seems appropriate for the discussion given the 'very rich' theme going on.
Care to dig up those rates/expenditures per capita?
The pictures I've seen look like mDP to me. Apple invented Mini DisplayPort, so mDP is proprietary, but it's licensed for free and VESA later adopted it as part of the DisplayPort standard.
"he also talked up the significant “value transfer” in financial terms that would come Nokia’s way as a result of reduced operating expenses and new revenue streams such as access to Microsoft’s search and advertising capabilities."
Wouldn't these two "value transfers" have occurred with Google? Nokia's operating expenses might have been reduced even further if they'd gone with Android (free) instead of WP7 (which they are paying to use). Wouldn't Nokia have gained access to Google's search and advertising capabilities if they'd gone with Android?
I don't know if Google or Microsoft is better for Nokia, but this article doesn't make it sound like Elop had any convincing reasons for his decision. It sounds like Nokia agreed to give Microsoft money (WP7 fees), but they haven't actually agreed on anything concrete that Microsoft will give Nokia yet?
> Nokia's operating expenses might have been reduced even further if they'd gone with Android (free) instead of WP7 (which they are paying to use).
MS fee is what? $10 per phone, probably less for Nokia? But, do anyone actually think that Android is free? Sure, it can be free if you're some cheap Chinese factory that just slaps the latest commit from Android repository on their handset, but key Google applications aren't open sourced, and to get them you need to make a deal with Google ("Google experience" apps, support, etc), which I doubt is free.
On top of that, if Nokia wants to differentiate itself from said Chinese manufacturer, they need to build some custom UI on top of stock Android (which probably everyone will hate, but that's the way of doing things in Android world). And to support that UI on couple of future Android releases in timely fashion for each handset, to avoid angry mob with obsolete phones mere months after the purchase (SonyEricsson, I'm looking at you). Developers time aren't free, and Nokia is notoriously bad at making software, just look at their Symbian record.
Also, if some cheap Chinese manufacturer slaps the latest Android commit on their handset, Google makes money, because that phone is going to run Google searches and show Google ads.
I doubt this is actually true. Apple has always required in-app purchases to go through Apple. That's why the Kindle app pushes you out to Safari to make purchases.
Despite what the article says, I bet Sony tried to implement their own in-app purchase process instead of bumping the user out to Safari. Apple rejected the app for breaking a well-known rule, and now Sony is whining about it for publicity. That's my guess anyway.
In fact, the article says "Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division."
This isn't a change. In-app purchases have always had to go through Apple.
"Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13"
In 2010, Mike Beltzner (director of Firefox) announced that Flash causes more crashes than any other plugin. Maybe they should ban Flash while they're at it.
We all know that's not possible. That would be like Firefox blocking requests to facebook.com because some users end up getting phished or stuck with malware from facebook apps. Nobody would use a browser that blocks flash (and doesn't support h.264 in <video>).
If I remember right, this was right before Firefox 3.6.4 introduced out-of-process plugins so Flash has its own process to crash instead of taking down the whole browser.
Of course, for some reason the Skype plugin is still capable of crashing it...
stackoverflow said:
"There’s also the 30 minute deploy cycle." ... "It is important to note that these issues are by no means specific to Azure; similar teething issues affect other Platform-As-A-Service providers such as Google App Engine and Heroku"
Deployment on Heroku takes seconds in my experience. Certainly not 30 minutes!
Also, db backups on Heroku are easy. And if you don't want to use Heroku's built-in PostgreSQL db, it's easy to use Amazon's RDS instead.
It seems strange to imply that Heroku currently has the same problems they attribute to Azure.
I think the claim is that PAAS has tradeoffs which you make versus "as simple as dedicated" host-it-yerself, which is true in my experience.
Heroku is wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it is not all "I don't know anything about sysadminning and now I don't have too, git push origin deploy OK now I can go back to making rounded corners and drop shadows" peaches and cream. I have a client product on it. Half of the gems/plugins that I used required me to either hack the source or do some deep spelunking to find out why they aren't working. For example, I used TinyMCE editor for that nice Wordpress-esque WYSIWYG feel. TinyMCE is written in Javascript, and the configurations for the plugin causes the Javascript to be written out on first access. Heroku is not quite so happy when you try to write things to the hard drive, and died hard on that.
This was for a site which is pretty darn pedestrian as far as Rails projects go.
I have always felt that Heroku's constraints are good for you, though. Yeah, it might be mildly annoying at times, but you really _should_ be putting static content on a CDN, and not have long-running processes, etc.
I also have yet to have a gem blow up in my face, though.
If you aren't dealing in USD, it doesn't matter how much value the USD loses.
Similarly, if you had debt denominated in USD, it wouldn't matter how much value the Zimbabwe Dollar or Weimar Republic Mark lost in hyperinflation. Your debt burden would be the same amount of USD. It just depends on your frame of reference.