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Most GPU miners have moved from bitcoin to litecoin or feathercoin as they use scrypt hashing instead of SHA256 so are resistant to ASIC hardware. Mining these currencies usually offer an extra 30-50% over mining bitcoin directly and can be sold for bitcoin or USD on various exchanges.

As an example for a $300 ATI 7950 card that generates ~600kH/s scrypt you will generate $1.33 per day in litecoins vs ~450MH/s with SHA256 which currently generates $1.01 per day in bitcoin.

With the onslaught of ASIC hardware coming though it's not clear what's going to happen with GPU mining. As more people move to the other currencies they will become less profitable to mine and could get to the point where they cost more in electricity than they generate in profit. Definitely bitcoin mining will be at that point by the end of the year for people without ASIC hardware.

With everyone anticipating an even bigger crash and given all the bad news in May it's surprising bitcoin has remained relatively stable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/31/w...

There are a few problems with read=any (or really read=one as any is only supported by writes). One issue is it will still send the request out to all the servers in the quorum so even if you don't have to wait on a quorum you still put the read load on them.

The second and more important issue is that if you want consistent data the only way to use read=one is if you use write=all which means you would have no resilience to a server outage. So in a normal cassandra cluster where you have write=quorum a read=one can give you back no data. In my experience this happened frequently enough with long GC pauses on one of the nodes that it wasn't useful to use in production.

This also exactly describes how HBase works. I've always preferred HBase to Cassandra for this exact reason. You put far less read load on your servers and you don't have to worry about most of the things on http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/Operations.

Another benefit that is not mentioned is that with a master based system you can easily move who is responsible for the data if a server starts to hotspot. In Cassandra you have to use random key distribution because if you have a server hotspot then the only solution is to split the token ring which is an intensive operation that is hard to do while the server is under heavy load.

The mentality of using a single return statement at the end of a function comes from languages that require memory management. In these languages if you return early you would cause a leak by not releasing your resources at the bottom of the function before returning.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/118717

The current method for handling immediate transactions is a Green Address (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address). Basically using a third party that both people trust for sending coins so if you as a seller receive coins from this address you know they weren't double spent and can accept the coins right away.

While I don't think it will ever see the support that bitcoin enjoys (or even litecoin for that matter) the model you are describing is provided by another alt coin call PPCoin (http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf).

The site claims March 5th – April 5th, 2013.

It's very difficult to predict how much money these will make as it's unknown by the time you get one how many other ASICs will ship. If you look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0 these are preorders for BFL ASIC that people have reported.

So at the current difficulty you would make $220.35 / day with a 66 Gh/s Avalon. If you look at predictions people are throwing around though on what these BFL orders will do to the difficulty (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.msg1218884#msg...) then your $/day would go down to $11.42.

The question is will BFL ship on time and how many units will they ship. They claim to be shipping their first batch on the week of Feb 10th. This second batch from Avalon is said to be shipping March 5th – April 5th, 2013. So if you believe BFL will ship before then, then the difficulty will look very different by the time you get your Avalon.

While I agree it used to be very difficult to move between USD and bitcoins, https://coinbase.com (YC S12) has made this pretty easy at this point.

Bitcoin transactions can go down to 0.00000001 BTC. They aren't however stored as floats due to rounding errors this can introduce (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=13837.0).

Yep, all 4 letter domains were registered back in 2007 (http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/11/02/four-letter-domains-all-r...).

Of course domains expire or are sold between owners so getting a 4 letter domain is still possible.

It's not ideal. It will end up storing two copies of the data files, one in the .git folder as a blob and one for the regular file in the checkout.

There are projects (http://git-annex.branchable.com/ and https://github.com/schacon/git-media) to try and get around this issue but then you are not really using git to manage the files directly anymore.

I haven't seen it written anywhere, but judging by the __type in errors like this, I would say Java:

  {"__type":"com.amazon.coral.validate#ValidationException",
  "message":"One or more parameter values were invalid:
  The provided key size does not match with that of the schema"}