If you want to buy a house with bitcoins, your main problem would be finding someone who is willing to sell you a house for bitcoins. It's indeed hard, but it already happened in the past.
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I think the US government accepted bitcoins as a legal and legitimate form of trade, but considers them more like property than currency. In any case, as Guy said, the bitcoin market is currently unstable. I think the idea is great though, so I would like to see it stabilize and I'd like to see more venues where we can actually use bitcoins, instead of exchanging them for other types of currency.
Many former US presidents have heavily criticized the federal reserve and central bank models. This is one good chance to move things in the right direction.
Many former US presidents have heavily criticized the federal reserve and central bank models. This is one good chance to move things in the right direction.
I don't have any strong feelings either for or against bitcoin, but I buy a lot of stuff on the internet, and I do want to see more choices available for normal, everyday international financial transactions.
If I buy something in my own country, there's about 10-20 different payment options available. An individual merchant may not accept all of them, but there's always at least five that I could use. But as soon as it goes international, there's a maximum of four (Paypal, Credit Card, Google, Bitcoin) and most of the time there's only Paypal and Credit Card. And as I live in one of many countries where the only thing you can do with Paypal is link it to your credit card, that effectively reduces it down to one.
If I buy something in my own country, there's about 10-20 different payment options available. An individual merchant may not accept all of them, but there's always at least five that I could use. But as soon as it goes international, there's a maximum of four (Paypal, Credit Card, Google, Bitcoin) and most of the time there's only Paypal and Credit Card. And as I live in one of many countries where the only thing you can do with Paypal is link it to your credit card, that effectively reduces it down to one.
@Dragonbird: Yes, removing middlemen can definitely enable more options in such situations.
By the way, Humble Store accepts bitcoins. GOG doesn't yet.
By the way, Humble Store accepts bitcoins. GOG doesn't yet.
An article about new Intel processors: Intel's 14nm technology in detail.
It's worth remembering, before we enthusiasts get too excited, that Intel's priority for Broadwell is not desktops. Broadwell-Y, which will probably get all of their 14nm capacity before sometime next year, is for SoC (system on a chip) and mobile applications. And I don't know where desktop (LGA 1150, Broadwell-H) stands relative to server products, but they're going for 18 cores/socket and upward of 8 sockets/board for servers. Server runners will buy all of those they can make.
I'd be interested if Intel's mobile SoCs would become more widespread in handsets (which can potentially allow all kind of goodies like mobile Linux with Wayland on them). So far they are too heavily dominated by Qualcomm who is simply nasty. May be with 14nm Atom (Morganfield?) Intel can at least make a dent. And they are supposed to have Intel GPU proper unlike previous models with PowerVR.
I'm waiting for proper Linux tablets / handsets with native GPU drivers for quite a while already, and besides Nvidia's Tegra (which doesn't support Wayland yet) there is barely anything around. Intel with their official open GPU driver can be a game changer.
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To follow up on this in order not to divert the photos thread, there can be some pluses with choosing a PSU which is higher than your expected power consumption. First of all, in practice they are usually adaptive - they don't always consume all that power that's written on them but provide as much as needed to the current load. And higher end PSU tend to be more efficient, i.e. they lose less energy on heat and therefore save you money (especially some platinum certified, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus). Secondly, with time PSU maximum power goes down as it wears out. So it's good to have some reserve rather than using a PSU with a very tight margin to your actual needs.
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At least for consumer PSUs, this is true, but the difference may be small. Optimum efficiency is somewhere between 40% and 60% of full load, but the fall-off at full load will be only a few percent. My preference is to size your PSU such that full-power operation is at or above 60% of your PSU capacity. So a nominal 750W PSU would be ideal for a 450W load, except it's going to cost more than a 550W model, and you won't recover your cost in savings on electricity and cooling.
(Industrial PSUs are different, and they tend to have a very flat efficiency curve up to at least 90% load. They are also usually run from 230V power, which improves efficiency.)
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There is supposedly a titanium 80+ which should be 90% effective at 10% load, but there aren't such PSUs produced yet, and they would probably be even more expensive.
The best power supplies for small systems can do better than 70% but short of 80% at idle (about 22.5W for Haswell desktops) and 88% to 92% at typical load (about 100W). 90% at idle would be an expensive luxury, considering the difference between 75% and 90% is 5 watts.
Good summary at http://us.hardware.info/reviews/468...which-one-is-the-most-efficient-100-watt-test
Just updated the UEFI BIOS on my motherboard. It's much easier these days - no need to write some FreeDOS images with updater tool. The BIOS itself contains an updater utility which can read the BIOS image from the USB drive!
@.Volsung. : If you mean UEFI boot with secure boot disabled - it's relatively easy. New Debian installer (for Jessie) already supports setting up UEFI boot, though I didn't try using Jessie installer with UEFI yet, since when I was installing Debian on my computer with UEFI boot I was using Wheezy installer and that required way more manual steps.
In my case "Other OS" setting in the BIOS means that you are booting with UEFI (which for example requires to use grub-efi and to have EFI partition set up), but simply disables secure boot feature which requires signing your kernel and all the applications (never tried doing that, but it should be possible on Linux by now).
The basic idea for installation with the modern boot - use GPT partitioning (not MBR) and set the EFI partition as frist (it should be FAT32). See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI#EFI_System_Partition
Jessie installer should offer various automation for doing this I think. You can experiment with it using some empty hard drive in order not to ruin your working installation.
Just keep in mind, Debian testing can bork your EFI boot entries in the BIOS. Which happened to me recently with grub-efi-amd64 package upgrade. I had to unplug the hard drive (for some reason I had also hard time booting any live images), insert it into another computer and fiddle with the EFI partition to copy EFI/debian/grubx64.efi from there as EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
bootx64.efi is a default file picked by the EFI boot process if nothing else is known (that's the standard). Luckily in my case grub package created grubx64.efi properly, but it just wiped the boot entries in the motherboard flash memory. So copying that as a default fallback entry helped, and later I added grubx64.efi back using efibootmgr tool (in order to use it, make sure that you have efivars kernel module enabled. It can be done as:
And then using something like:
Just be careful with that tool - it modifies motherboard memory to store boot entries. And don't panic if your computer doesn't boot
Most of the time things are fixable, but it can be annoying and required me some time to figure things out.
Situation can be worse when you have no proper *.efi file to boot at all. In such case you need to resort to a more elaborate trick. Insert your hard drive in any working Linux system (either live on the same machine or on another), and mount your partitions for chroot access. And then chroot into your broken system and rerun grub-install and update-grub. Make sure to do that properly, like for example provide the disk device for grub-install. I once forgot to do it and it also borked my boot ;D
Here is an example: http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-Partitioning-EN-Repairing-a-damaged-Grub
(Though they for some reason forgot to mention that you also should run update-grub).
In my case "Other OS" setting in the BIOS means that you are booting with UEFI (which for example requires to use grub-efi and to have EFI partition set up), but simply disables secure boot feature which requires signing your kernel and all the applications (never tried doing that, but it should be possible on Linux by now).
The basic idea for installation with the modern boot - use GPT partitioning (not MBR) and set the EFI partition as frist (it should be FAT32). See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI#EFI_System_Partition
Jessie installer should offer various automation for doing this I think. You can experiment with it using some empty hard drive in order not to ruin your working installation.
Just keep in mind, Debian testing can bork your EFI boot entries in the BIOS. Which happened to me recently with grub-efi-amd64 package upgrade. I had to unplug the hard drive (for some reason I had also hard time booting any live images), insert it into another computer and fiddle with the EFI partition to copy EFI/debian/grubx64.efi from there as EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
bootx64.efi is a default file picked by the EFI boot process if nothing else is known (that's the standard). Luckily in my case grub package created grubx64.efi properly, but it just wiped the boot entries in the motherboard flash memory. So copying that as a default fallback entry helped, and later I added grubx64.efi back using efibootmgr tool (in order to use it, make sure that you have efivars kernel module enabled. It can be done as:
Code:
modprobe efivarsAnd then using something like:
Code:
efibootmgr -c -l "\\EFI\\debian\\grubx64.efi" -L "Debian Linux"Just be careful with that tool - it modifies motherboard memory to store boot entries. And don't panic if your computer doesn't boot
Most of the time things are fixable, but it can be annoying and required me some time to figure things out.Situation can be worse when you have no proper *.efi file to boot at all. In such case you need to resort to a more elaborate trick. Insert your hard drive in any working Linux system (either live on the same machine or on another), and mount your partitions for chroot access. And then chroot into your broken system and rerun grub-install and update-grub. Make sure to do that properly, like for example provide the disk device for grub-install. I once forgot to do it and it also borked my boot ;D
Here is an example: http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-Partitioning-EN-Repairing-a-damaged-Grub
(Though they for some reason forgot to mention that you also should run update-grub).
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Interesting, but with 1500 Watts it's not so surprising (10% from that is 150 Watts). Let them make a lower model with titanium specs. If it's something around 750 Watts and doesn't have an astronomical price, I might consider it
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=310
FSP makes their own. They're budget units for budget applications. Within that range, same as Corsair CX or Antec Earthwatts, they're good. But there are many power supplies better than the FSP Raider series. You should be able to get a Superflower-made Kingwin, Seasonic-made Antec, or Seasonic under its own label for the same. And it will have better regulation, better cables, and more likely than not, longer life.
Seasonic (and Antec, when they're reselling Seasonic models) is conservative about power ratings. 620W from Seasonic is everybody else's 650W or more.
Intel just released a desktop Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro integrated GPU (for the first time):
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169.html
Pretty neat, but Skylake CPUs aren't that far away, so you might want to wait until they come out, before upgrading.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169.html
Pretty neat, but Skylake CPUs aren't that far away, so you might want to wait until they come out, before upgrading.
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