[Dorset] Ripple - a low-cost, high-speed, currency-agnostic payment framework.
Hi All Thanks Ralph - great summary there. You nicely outlined the roots of the Ripple project (created many years ago by a Canadian programmer named Ryan Fugger). More recently, Ripple is being pushed by OpenCoin - a VC-backed company based in San Francisco. For now, OpenCoin is focusing on Ripple as a payments system, rather than a social credit network. Ripple is a (virtually) cost-free payments network. It supports any currency - including currencies not yet in existence. You can convert between any currency-pair you choose (eg USD/GBP or GBP/BTC). Anyone can be an FX market-maker on the Ripple network. If you've spent any time trying to convert money between eg USD and GBP using conventional services - and gagging at the commission fees involved :((( - you will recognize the potential here. Ripple tries to address several of BitCoin's shortcomings: eg CPU-intensive mining to earn currency (all Ripple currency is pre-mined); long transaction times (10 minutes in BitCoin vs. a few seconds in Ripple) ... Because of Ripple's low-cost structure, it enables micro-transactions. Also, anyone paying a merchant who accepts BitCoin (BTC) for their products can now do so directly on the Ripple network. No need to go via Mount Gox or another exchange to convert your USD into BTC first. Ripple is causing some waves (pun intended?) in the BitCoin community - and not in an entirely good sense. There's a great deal of animosity towards the project. In particular, this is focused on OpenCoin's unabashed status as a for-profit company. OpenCoin employees and backers hope to make money if and when XRP (the Ripple currency) appreciates in value. (I say: what's wrong with that? They are working hard on something new; they should be rewarded if it succeeds. After all, like any startup, there's a very high chance that it won't succeed.) The server code is not yet open-source, which has many people concerned. I believe the reasons for holding off on open-sourcing the code are perfectly legitimate. Many people seem convinced that OpenCoin's entire venture is a scam due to the similarities of their setup to a normal centralized fiat currency. I personally don't think most of these criticisms hold up to close scrutiny. Ripple has alot of potential to take off in a big way. For some reason this seems to have BitCoiners worried. Though Ripple infact works very nicely in tandem with BitCoin. So it should be seen as an enabler for widespread BTC adoption rather than as a threat. OpenCoin hopes that the Ripple protocol will do for money what HTTP did for internet communications and SMTP did for email: https://ripple.com/blog/payments-should-be-more-like-email-or-the-power-of-federated-network-protocols/ More background here: http://unspy.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/bitcoin-ripple-and-open-money/ There's a very good chance that Ripple will fail. The barriers to making headway in the world of finance are massive - to put it mildly. I do think that there's potential here though. Any thoughts? Andrew. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-10-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
Re: [Dorset] Links from 2013-07-02's Pub Meeting.
On the subject of Google Go's encouraging composition over inheritance, and the use of interfaces: I'm not sure which article you had in mind, but I found this: http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_15. -Andrew. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-08-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
Re: [Dorset] Samba and Windows Access to Drives.
FWIW, my setup is as follows: I have a dual-boot machine, running Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10. The Grub loader lets me switch between the two. About 10 years back, installing dual-boot Windows/Linux could be very problematic. I nuked one OS or the other during installation more times than I care to admit :) With more recent Linux distros though, it has become far more stable. Ubuntu does a nice job. I install Windows first, then Ubuntu. During Ubuntu installation, I can repartition my hard disk and setup ext3/ext4 or whatever. It also installs Grub perfectly for the dual-boot setup. In terms of network access: I share my NTFS partitions in Windows, so they can be seen by all machines on the LAN. I store my shared data there. I'm sure I could expose my ext3 partitions to the network via export/Samba etc, but using my Windows partitions for shared data has been relatively easy to setup, and has worked well for years now. Just my tuppence worth. Andrew. From: Simon P Smith simon.sm...@askitsdone.co.uk To: Dorset Linux User Group dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk Sent: Thursday, 20 June 2013, 16:08 Subject: Re: [Dorset] Samba and Windows Access to Drives. On 20/06/2013 15:01, Tim Allen wrote: You need enough RAM to run both OS'es together, and enough CPU power. Given that most recent machines come with both that shouldn't be an issue. I'm using it on a 12 yr old machine Terry kindly gave me (4GB, couple of vintage Xeons). Hardware (eg USB peripherals) are passed through to the guest OS via Virtualbox drivers. I've had no problems with this with things like USB memory sticks, but with more obscure stuff (like microprocessor programming pods) have run into problems. Booting the guest OS can be quite slow - I've found this more noticeable with Linux guests than Windows guests. Just as an aside (alternative to Virtualbox), if you have the virtualisation extensions on your hardware then you could use the xen/qemu visualization. Personally my laptop books into Ubuntu and then starts up a Windows 7 virtual running in an lvm partition under the xen hypervisor. This means it gets access to the tin (graphics card, usb bus etc.) and runs significantly faster than virtualbox. Regards, Simon -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-07-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-07-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
Re: [Dorset] Menu and Updater missing
Hi Charles Sorry to hear about your crash. It probably goes without saying, by my first port of call before trying any dist upgrade would be to ensure that *all* your data, config files, home dirs, and anything else you can't risk losing is properly backed up on an external device/cloud storage. Does which update-manager yield /usr/bin/update-manager? If so, try launching it directly. If that fails, try: gksudo update-manager You can also do an update without the gui, by running sudo apt-get update and then (possibly after a reboot): sudo apt-get upgrade (I'm not sure that any of the above is going to fix your missing menus and other gui elements, but fingers crossed ...) The page below explains various ways to get onto 13.04. This ought to work for 12.04 aswell. http://askubuntu.com/questions/279620/how-do-i-upgrade-from-12-10-to-13-04 Have I understood your request correctly? Apologies if this is not pertinent to your problem. Good luck, Andrew. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-07-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
[Dorset] MagPi Magazine for the Raspberry Pi
Hello Nice seeing many of you at last week's meeting. One of the questions raised was (if I recall correctly) about DIY projects in linux. I mentioned the MagPi magazine, which is based around the RaspberryPi (running an optimized version of Debian). The mag has loads of coding tutorials, and many DIY electronics projects which you can hook up to your Pi via the GPIO interface (or other expansion boards). Issue 13 of the magazine has just been released. It is completely free, and available as a PDF download: http://www.themagpi.com -Andrew. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-07-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
