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Dear Wikipedians:
Does anyone know of a bitcoin betting site other than bitbet.us?
I really want to try my luck betting on Donald Trump becoming the U.S. President.
Thanks,
69.158.76.23 ( talk) 00:49, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
For specific examples, both sites I noticed listed on [3] as offering US Presidential election bets namely Bovada and BetOnline (there may be more, I didn't look very well) seem to accept Bitcoin although I'm pretty sure this is only for conversion. Also the link for US presidential election betting on Bovada doesn't work for me. But I also see it from an internet search suggesting it did at least exist at one time. Whether they stopped accepting bets or perhaps more likely it doesn't work because of my location (when I first visited it said they can't accept bets from my location) I'm not sure. I have zero experience with either site so you'd want to check out reviews etc.
The first review/info site I linked to also mentions ways you can attempt to detect if a site isn't cheating. However it seems to me this is mostly irrelevant to you. You can compare the odds to more reliable sites like BetFair [4], Paddy Power [5] (actually these 2 seem to be the same company now), Ladbrokes sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/betting/politics/american/presidential-election/2016-presidential-election-winner/216136503/ or whatever [6] to see if they're giving you really bad odds which will be the main way they can cheat.
Next, there is a slight risk that there will be a very weird situation e.g. as happened in 2000 or an even more controversial one such as the electoral college voting for someone other than who they were supposed to or even someone gaining the most electoral college voters in early November followed by a military coup and no actual electoral college vote let alone the person being inaugurated. How the lesser regulated sites will handle such a situation I'm not sure although I presume any remotely decent one will say precisely what you're betting on and when they will pay out, whether they will observe it or not when the time comes. Ultimately this risk IMO seems small and you could call it part of your odds anyway.
The bigger risk will be whether they'll pay out in general or pay out with different than promised odds. Many of these sites have existed for a resonable length of time. For such simple bets (and these tend to be treated similar to sports bets), it seems likely people would have realised by now what's going on and you should be able to find lots of complaints. It gets more complicated if they pay out properly on some bets but not others, still it seems likely the complaints would have come in that you can find. So presuming you properly check, it becomes a case of their future performance being different from current and the unknown but likely small risk of that happening. (I'm not sure how likely it is that they will accept so many long odd bets on Trump to cause them problems, since many of them seem fairly large and I somehow doubt it's going to compare to generall sport betting, but I could easily be wrong.)
You could come up with other risks like "match" fixing but there's so much money in the US election that it seems very unlikely the sites could do that.
In other words, while I personally think betting on the presidential election is a dumb idea; and using sites which accept Bitcoin, many of which seem to be incorporated and regulated in environments without much oversight is riskier; the comment above seems to IMO overestimate the risk. The exception may be if you do want a site which prices their bets in Bitcoin (as opposed to simply accepting Bitcoin), as I'm not sure how many of these there are and how long they've existed. (Although if they were playing a longcon, again I'm not sure the US presidential election or anything in between is what they'll target.)
I have an Acer Chromebook 11 (model number CB3-111 and hardware class GNAWTY C2A-E7J-Q8Q). I am trying to create a recovery SD, something that I have done numerous times before, but now the app reports that it cannot find the model. Any ideas on why this might be happening? — Melab±1 ☎ 01:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Where is there a list that spells out how many MIPS various tasks need as opposed to the myriad of lists that shows how many MIPS a specific CPU can muster. So how many MIPS does Mpeg1 layer3 44.1 kHz stereo decoding take, compressing a 640x480 15 bpp image to jpeg, compressing source code text using bzip2, compiling 1000 lines of C source, drawing a circle, calculating which holidays that occur next year, FFT etc? Bytesock ( talk) 14:53, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Benchmarks are used to compare hardware but it's important to understand exactly what's being tested and how. (And some benchmarks are poorly done e.g. lacking repetition.) Note that some of the specific examples used are still a bit weird. You'll likely find it difficult to find info on ARM computers "real-time decode mpeg1-l3 at 44.1 kHz stereo and how much memory will it need" because any ARM computer you're likely to encounter can do it.
Instead, you may find benchmarks testing what sort of ARM CPUs can realtime decode h264 of a certain resolution, frame rate, bitdepth and profile. However such results should be treated with care, since it will depend on the precise software and ARM variant and the stream. (Besides the already mentioned resolution, frame rate, bit depth and profile; the complexity of the stream and bitrate also matter but these aren't necessarily mentioned by whoever did the benchmark.). Also this would generally only be useful for non hardware assisted decoding. ARM CPUs intended for media devices, phones and tablets normally have specialised hardware decoding functions for h264 so provided your stream is supported by the hardware decoder, you can usually decode it.
Definitely of current interest is the hardware required for decoding h265 realtime at various resolutions and framerates so you'll find various benchmarks. And this is for both ARM and x86. (Although hardware decoding of h265 is starting to be added. And it's perhaps the time to mention that sometimes vendors add hardware assist where there are functions which are supposed to speed up decoding but where other parts of the decoding still rely on the more generalised hardware functions. Sometimes these speedups are actually slower than a good software implementation using only generalised functions.)
Likewise "compression of 320x240 video into mpeg-2" is something even 15 years ago wasn't looked at much much. The resolution is too low to be of interest. If you go back 15 years or perhaps slightly more, you'll probably find benchmarks of MPEG-2 encoding higher resolutions. (I think I remember some.) Bear in mind also that the software and hardware has moved on since then. So your performance now is going to be higher than if your were using the same software with modern hardware. (Well presuming the hardware still properly supports the software.)
Compression benchmarks, compilation benchmarks etc are also common. Although LZMA2 (7-zip) or RAR are what's often used not bzip2 and the source code is normally far more than 1000 lines. BTW to give another specific example of why you need to consider carefully what you're looking at, refer to the AES benchmarks [7]. There's unsurprisingly a very big increase (four times or more) between older x86 CPUs without AES-NI and newer ones with. Of course, such a big speed boost will only be seen on software that takes advantage of AES-NI.Nil Einne ( talk) 20:18, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
I own a Core i7 PC, albeit with only 4 GB of RAM and an old-school HDD. I find that Word 2013 takes time to load, and isn't always that responsive when working with tables and images.
More than 15 years ago, I worked with a P100 with 24 MB of RAM, and MS Works functioned pretty well, and the table environment seemed similarly fast to Word on my present machine.
I appreciate that Word 2013 is much richer in features than MS Works, but even so. Why is the jump in resource demands so extreme?-- Leon ( talk) 19:18, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
If you do want to talk about those things, well programming practices can't magically allow a computer to easily work with an image which takes nearly all the RAM. And that would be the case for the examples me and the OP mentioned, i.e. a 8MP 24 bit image on a Pentium 100 mhz with 24 bit RAM. Of course you can make different decisions on how to handle things. For example, if a word processor during the time of the OP's Penium 100 mhz could even handle such a large image, it would surely have reduced the resolution and only ever worked with the reduced resolution variant. This may not necessarily be the case nowadays, that relates to programming but there are various reasons for difference in how you handle high resolution images, sometimes mistakes or pointless work may be done, sometimes there are actually decent reasons for the decision. So to just call it poor programming practice is partially missing the point.
Note that per my WP:indenting, I was replying to Stephan Schulz's first replies (and the previous replies before Stephan Schulz) not to you. This was beause my comment was related to the stuff Stephan Schulz and people before had said, and not to stuff you or the people between you and post I was replying to had said. (Sometimes there may be some comments which I took into minor consideration but this time there was nothing really as it was irrelevant to my point.
Bump it up to at least 8GB of RAM. My daughter's computer was creeping along with only 4GB - even making it 6GB helped noticably and 8GB is better. A GB is costs about US$5 these days. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 07:01, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
How much computing power that is needed depend mostly on the task at hand. Live encoding of video do have some absolute minimum demands. While wordprocessing inherently has less. People have really lost perspective of resources and their value. Some examples:
Now if software design teams makes unwise choices. A lot of processing power will be lost. Bad tools that generate a lot of junk code also interferes with efficient coding. Even if an A-bomb went of in the same house as yourself. A modern 4 GHz CPU would still have time to process circa 200 instructions. So all this about slow computers is mainly a question of bad selection of software. Bytesock ( talk) 17:46, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
Computing desk | ||
---|---|---|
< May 4 | << Apr | May | Jun >> | May 6 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives |
---|
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
Dear Wikipedians:
Does anyone know of a bitcoin betting site other than bitbet.us?
I really want to try my luck betting on Donald Trump becoming the U.S. President.
Thanks,
69.158.76.23 ( talk) 00:49, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
For specific examples, both sites I noticed listed on [3] as offering US Presidential election bets namely Bovada and BetOnline (there may be more, I didn't look very well) seem to accept Bitcoin although I'm pretty sure this is only for conversion. Also the link for US presidential election betting on Bovada doesn't work for me. But I also see it from an internet search suggesting it did at least exist at one time. Whether they stopped accepting bets or perhaps more likely it doesn't work because of my location (when I first visited it said they can't accept bets from my location) I'm not sure. I have zero experience with either site so you'd want to check out reviews etc.
The first review/info site I linked to also mentions ways you can attempt to detect if a site isn't cheating. However it seems to me this is mostly irrelevant to you. You can compare the odds to more reliable sites like BetFair [4], Paddy Power [5] (actually these 2 seem to be the same company now), Ladbrokes sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/betting/politics/american/presidential-election/2016-presidential-election-winner/216136503/ or whatever [6] to see if they're giving you really bad odds which will be the main way they can cheat.
Next, there is a slight risk that there will be a very weird situation e.g. as happened in 2000 or an even more controversial one such as the electoral college voting for someone other than who they were supposed to or even someone gaining the most electoral college voters in early November followed by a military coup and no actual electoral college vote let alone the person being inaugurated. How the lesser regulated sites will handle such a situation I'm not sure although I presume any remotely decent one will say precisely what you're betting on and when they will pay out, whether they will observe it or not when the time comes. Ultimately this risk IMO seems small and you could call it part of your odds anyway.
The bigger risk will be whether they'll pay out in general or pay out with different than promised odds. Many of these sites have existed for a resonable length of time. For such simple bets (and these tend to be treated similar to sports bets), it seems likely people would have realised by now what's going on and you should be able to find lots of complaints. It gets more complicated if they pay out properly on some bets but not others, still it seems likely the complaints would have come in that you can find. So presuming you properly check, it becomes a case of their future performance being different from current and the unknown but likely small risk of that happening. (I'm not sure how likely it is that they will accept so many long odd bets on Trump to cause them problems, since many of them seem fairly large and I somehow doubt it's going to compare to generall sport betting, but I could easily be wrong.)
You could come up with other risks like "match" fixing but there's so much money in the US election that it seems very unlikely the sites could do that.
In other words, while I personally think betting on the presidential election is a dumb idea; and using sites which accept Bitcoin, many of which seem to be incorporated and regulated in environments without much oversight is riskier; the comment above seems to IMO overestimate the risk. The exception may be if you do want a site which prices their bets in Bitcoin (as opposed to simply accepting Bitcoin), as I'm not sure how many of these there are and how long they've existed. (Although if they were playing a longcon, again I'm not sure the US presidential election or anything in between is what they'll target.)
I have an Acer Chromebook 11 (model number CB3-111 and hardware class GNAWTY C2A-E7J-Q8Q). I am trying to create a recovery SD, something that I have done numerous times before, but now the app reports that it cannot find the model. Any ideas on why this might be happening? — Melab±1 ☎ 01:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Where is there a list that spells out how many MIPS various tasks need as opposed to the myriad of lists that shows how many MIPS a specific CPU can muster. So how many MIPS does Mpeg1 layer3 44.1 kHz stereo decoding take, compressing a 640x480 15 bpp image to jpeg, compressing source code text using bzip2, compiling 1000 lines of C source, drawing a circle, calculating which holidays that occur next year, FFT etc? Bytesock ( talk) 14:53, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Benchmarks are used to compare hardware but it's important to understand exactly what's being tested and how. (And some benchmarks are poorly done e.g. lacking repetition.) Note that some of the specific examples used are still a bit weird. You'll likely find it difficult to find info on ARM computers "real-time decode mpeg1-l3 at 44.1 kHz stereo and how much memory will it need" because any ARM computer you're likely to encounter can do it.
Instead, you may find benchmarks testing what sort of ARM CPUs can realtime decode h264 of a certain resolution, frame rate, bitdepth and profile. However such results should be treated with care, since it will depend on the precise software and ARM variant and the stream. (Besides the already mentioned resolution, frame rate, bit depth and profile; the complexity of the stream and bitrate also matter but these aren't necessarily mentioned by whoever did the benchmark.). Also this would generally only be useful for non hardware assisted decoding. ARM CPUs intended for media devices, phones and tablets normally have specialised hardware decoding functions for h264 so provided your stream is supported by the hardware decoder, you can usually decode it.
Definitely of current interest is the hardware required for decoding h265 realtime at various resolutions and framerates so you'll find various benchmarks. And this is for both ARM and x86. (Although hardware decoding of h265 is starting to be added. And it's perhaps the time to mention that sometimes vendors add hardware assist where there are functions which are supposed to speed up decoding but where other parts of the decoding still rely on the more generalised hardware functions. Sometimes these speedups are actually slower than a good software implementation using only generalised functions.)
Likewise "compression of 320x240 video into mpeg-2" is something even 15 years ago wasn't looked at much much. The resolution is too low to be of interest. If you go back 15 years or perhaps slightly more, you'll probably find benchmarks of MPEG-2 encoding higher resolutions. (I think I remember some.) Bear in mind also that the software and hardware has moved on since then. So your performance now is going to be higher than if your were using the same software with modern hardware. (Well presuming the hardware still properly supports the software.)
Compression benchmarks, compilation benchmarks etc are also common. Although LZMA2 (7-zip) or RAR are what's often used not bzip2 and the source code is normally far more than 1000 lines. BTW to give another specific example of why you need to consider carefully what you're looking at, refer to the AES benchmarks [7]. There's unsurprisingly a very big increase (four times or more) between older x86 CPUs without AES-NI and newer ones with. Of course, such a big speed boost will only be seen on software that takes advantage of AES-NI.Nil Einne ( talk) 20:18, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
I own a Core i7 PC, albeit with only 4 GB of RAM and an old-school HDD. I find that Word 2013 takes time to load, and isn't always that responsive when working with tables and images.
More than 15 years ago, I worked with a P100 with 24 MB of RAM, and MS Works functioned pretty well, and the table environment seemed similarly fast to Word on my present machine.
I appreciate that Word 2013 is much richer in features than MS Works, but even so. Why is the jump in resource demands so extreme?-- Leon ( talk) 19:18, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
If you do want to talk about those things, well programming practices can't magically allow a computer to easily work with an image which takes nearly all the RAM. And that would be the case for the examples me and the OP mentioned, i.e. a 8MP 24 bit image on a Pentium 100 mhz with 24 bit RAM. Of course you can make different decisions on how to handle things. For example, if a word processor during the time of the OP's Penium 100 mhz could even handle such a large image, it would surely have reduced the resolution and only ever worked with the reduced resolution variant. This may not necessarily be the case nowadays, that relates to programming but there are various reasons for difference in how you handle high resolution images, sometimes mistakes or pointless work may be done, sometimes there are actually decent reasons for the decision. So to just call it poor programming practice is partially missing the point.
Note that per my WP:indenting, I was replying to Stephan Schulz's first replies (and the previous replies before Stephan Schulz) not to you. This was beause my comment was related to the stuff Stephan Schulz and people before had said, and not to stuff you or the people between you and post I was replying to had said. (Sometimes there may be some comments which I took into minor consideration but this time there was nothing really as it was irrelevant to my point.
Bump it up to at least 8GB of RAM. My daughter's computer was creeping along with only 4GB - even making it 6GB helped noticably and 8GB is better. A GB is costs about US$5 these days. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 07:01, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
How much computing power that is needed depend mostly on the task at hand. Live encoding of video do have some absolute minimum demands. While wordprocessing inherently has less. People have really lost perspective of resources and their value. Some examples:
Now if software design teams makes unwise choices. A lot of processing power will be lost. Bad tools that generate a lot of junk code also interferes with efficient coding. Even if an A-bomb went of in the same house as yourself. A modern 4 GHz CPU would still have time to process circa 200 instructions. So all this about slow computers is mainly a question of bad selection of software. Bytesock ( talk) 17:46, 8 May 2016 (UTC)