Google Fi's international data service used to be great. Now it's completely dysfunctional in countries such as Croatia, China, etc, and very spotty in Austria, Iceland, Philippines, Ecuador, northern Japan etc. I can no longer rely on Fi when I travel abroad.
According to the author's definition, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have a Nakamoto coefficient of 1 and a Geni value of ~0.92, meaning that they are equally centralized and brittle.
How is the proposed metric any useful in measuring and comparing decentralization of blockchains?
They discuss this, it shows how both Bitcoin and Ethereum have different dominating factors, how one has centralization in some areas the other does not and vice versa. Use the resulting numbers are the same, but examining how they were arrived at is the interesting point. It's not like positions of two balls at time 0 is the interesting number, it's how their differing properties affect the equations that determine their eventual position.
The "in case" part is what I don't understand. This wording from Coinbase also makes it seem like things are still up in the air. August 1st is in a few days! How can there still be ambiguity with what is going to happen? That seems crazy to me.
What happens is an emergent phenomenon based on the actions of at least a few hundred actors who each will be watching closely and may revise their decisions several times along the way.
This is a pedantic point, but Bitcoin forks happen frequently as part of the blockchain design (see https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks for around 20 forks last month). The only differences for the August 1 event are that the fork will be given a name (Bitcoin Cash), and that some people will be running modified code that doesn't care if its fork is shorter than the main chain. Observing that the fork will exist isn't the important thing. It's whether anyone will care after a week or two.
People are using 'fork' to mean 'multiple branches of the blockchain are considered authoritative', not 'multiple branches of the blockchain exist in an immediately-abandoned state'.
According to the spec, AMP developers are prohibited from adding their own JS, yet they are mandated to include a <script src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js" async></script> tag as the last element in the <head>. I find it amusing that the JavaScript library itself is 137KB big (38KB gzipped).
However like any CDN content, the goal would be for it to be cached if it's in common use across AMP sites. One JS module that covers a large number of content delivery sites seems like a plus to me. I can't vouch for the whole concept yet though, still reading through their spec.
For the lack of a visual editor to visualize how the scene would look like. In Unity3D you can play a game, pause it, make necessary changes to find out how would it effect your scene, and every thing is updated real-time in the scene (the changes are not saved though, so you need to remember what was changed and redo once you come out of Play mode). In short its a what-you-see-what-you get kind of tool.
Not sure why you got downvoted - when I was a junior developer, I got tasked with investigating building a simple app with Backbone, Ember, and Angular in order to determine what to use going forward for the non-profit I was working at (I didn't make the call what framework to use, I was just the test monkey for how to implement a simple app in all three frameworks). Angular turned out to the easiest by far to get work done with exposure to some advanced concepts - Backbone's documentation was very confusing since everything was in a flat list with high level details buried in there & not enough explanation, and Ember's templating system was very rigid and highly dependent on build processes for someone who had no experience working with tools such as grunt or gulp at the time.
React is probably the best candidate to achieve that simplicity along with Angular, although I would give Angular the edge, simply because it does not rely on tooling to build a small app and still benefits just as well from it when it is present. The documentation, even two years ago, was better than Backbone's at the time (and as far as I can tell from a recent study of Backbone, still is) - Ember's might have been a little better, but it also threw more stuff at you upfront.
The expert can probably work with all of these frameworks just fine - in the end, finding what framework (or no framework) jives with you is the best for your long term development. Become an expert with one, then experiment with others to draw good ideas from them and incorporate it into your code style, that is what separates the good developers from the rest.
