Why All Alt Coins Are A Waste Of Time And Doomed To Fail

Bitcoin, surprisingly to most people, have endured a few years already and increased in value from a fraction of a penny to a peak or about 1,000 dollars. As of now it seems like bitcoin is here to stay with a bright future ahead. As the very first crypto currency bitcoin enjoys widespread adoption by merchants, consuners, miners, and investors.

However most alt coins have little to no adoption aside from miners and traders. Because of this, most alt coins are doomed to continually decrease in value until they are pretty much worthless. With hundreds of different alt coins there is immense competition and the values have become diluted. Add this to the fact that there are more alt coins mined every day and it is obvious that their value will continue to plummet.

While some coins have some useful new feature and may have enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight, the majority are just carbon copies of existing crypto coins. Therefore they are pretty much worthless and will eventually die as the miners and traders give up on them. It is inevitable so it would be a huge waste of time to do anything with them. If you do want to continue to use altcoins, stick to the few that are most popular such as dogecoin and Litecoin. These are the few alt coins that will hold their value much longer than the rest. Although I think that Litecoin is the best choice of all the alt coins if you want to trade or mine something. Other than that I believe that all altcoins will be a wast of time in the end as they will be worthless and inevitably die out as they are abandoned.

Justin.tv Shutting Down - Live Video Streaming Pioneer Halting Operations

As one of the original pioneers into the live video streaming arena, Justin.tv has definitaly had an impact on live video streaming and the internet as a whole. The site has come a long way from being a sole stream of one of the founders' daily life captured with a webcam attached to his baseball cap and broadcast to the internet via a makeshift rig in his backpack. In fact hundreds of thousands of viewers regularly visit and stream content from the Justin.tv website. That is, until today of course. If you try to visit the website now you aren't greeted by the familiar homepage listing many of the top streams at the moment. No, there is just a single page that announces the end of the Justin.tv website and apps.

In recent years, the site has sort of become a wild west of streaming video channels, full of pirated copyright material broadcast to anybody on the internet free of charge. The channels were not operated by Justin.tv, all channels are created and run by the users. This means that there were tons of streams that the various copyright holders would not approve of, including channels with streams of popular TV shows and movies. This was a good chunk of the appeal of the site, but not all of it. If I want to watch something on my computer I can find it online and download it in a matter of seconds. In this sense, Justin.tv was nothing new or revolutionary. But the site was much more than just a breeding ground for pirated material. There were tons of streams that were legitimate and attracted hundreds and even thousands of viewers at any given time. Among them were people broadcasting their daily lives just like the founder did 7 years ago, radio stations broadcasting their own live video stream of the studio, and much more. The site was also an online community in its own right, offering chat rooms for each channel and other social networking features, allowing users to communicate and share ideas and voice their opinions with other like minded individuals. This, I think, is the feature that is going to be missed the most.

There is a silver lining of some sort, though. Twitch.tv, Justin.tv's video gaming counterpart is still going to remain active. Apparently this is the most popular (read: profitable) part of their business and has no become their main focus. In order to keep growing the Twitch.tv brand, they must halt operations at Justin.tv (or so they say) so that they can focus all their efforts and resources (read: bandwidth) on the one site.

What do you think about this announcement? Did you see it coming? Or are you as devastated as I am? Are there any good alternatives to Justin.tv? What site will you visit now to stream videos? Leave your comments below, I would love to know what everyone else has to say.

"Spider Goats" Produce Super Strong Fibers Stronger Than Steel And Kevlar

Listening to Coast to Coast AM radio show they brought up a very intersting subject that I have never heard of but sounds extremely fascinating.  We all are familiar with spider webs, created by silk spun by the spider in a web pattern to catch and trap bugs and insects.  It may not seem like it but the silk that spiders create is very very strong, in fact it is stronger than steel pound for pound.  This material would be very beneficial if only we could harvest the silk.  After all how hard would it be to "milk" a bunch of spiders in order to extract enough silk to do anything with.

So how can we get enough of these super strong fibers that make up the spiders silk to actually do something with?  Well one way is to take the spiders out if the equation.  How?  Well that is where this topic gets really strange.  Apparently scientists have been able to isolate the DNA of the spider that creates the super strong silk and inject it into goats.  The goats then produce milk like any other goat, except now the milk contains similar fibers compared to those in spider silk.  In fact the goats can actually create fibers that are even stronger than the spiders silk!  These fibers can be extracted from the milk and be spun together into fabric.  As you would expect, like the spiders silk, this fabric is super strong.  In fact it is so string that it is stronger than Kevlar and can stop a bullet just like a Kevlar lined bullet proof vest, but the material that comes from the "spider goats" is so strong that much less material is needed.  This means that the super strong spider goat material can be made into a garment about as thick as a regular t-shirt  that could stop a bullet as well as a thick Kevlar vest like what police and armed forces personnel use.  And all the while these genetically altered goats go on to live a mostly normal life and don't seem to be hurt or in pain or anything like that.  The one problem that they did mention however is that these goats are all sterile after this procedure and can't have offspring, so every new generation of spider goats needs to be implanted with the spider DNA.

I think that this is absolutely amazing that people have actually figured out how to do something so incredible like this that it actually sounds like science fiction.  What else can be created in this manner?  What other applications could this super strong fiber be used for?  Only time will tell but I think that there will only be more incredible breakthroughs in the future, things that we can't even fathom being possible. 

Completely Redesigned New Mac Pro Cylindrical Computer

Once again apple has redesigned the Mac Pro.  Usually Apple computers are pretty revolutionary, but this is even more drastic of a change than normal.  There is nothing on the new Mac Pro that is like any other computer in the world.  The case alone is unlike any other computer, being a black cylinder about 10 inches high and 6 inches in diameter with a hole in the middle for cooling.

There's no doubt this new model is stunning.  Even if you don't like the look of it you still have to admit that it is very creative.  The CPU and GPUs are all connected thermally to the middle piece of aluminum that acts as one big heat sink for the entire unit. The specs are pretty amazing too, Apple claim that it can edit 4k video and render effects in the background with no performance degradation thanks to its available 12 cores.  

But with the new design they had to drop a lot of typical computer parts.  There is no optical drive and the storage is flash based.  There is no room for expansion via PCI cards or new hard drive so you'd better be sure to buy the system you want that will be able to fit your needs for the long run because you can't just pop in a new hard drive more ram and a new video card.

Since Steve Jobs died the company has taken a drastic turn.  I'm not sure that they will be able to continue what he started, but time will tell.  I'm hoping so.

Amazon's New Product Category: Add-On Items

Amazon has recently started classifying certain smaller and cheaper products as "Add-On Items." These are items that are inexpensive and not cost efficient to ship individually so Amazon will now only ship add-on items with other items if the total cost is over $25. If your order is less than $25 they won't ship any items that are marked as add-ons. On one hand I could see how this could save the company money and if they save money they can offer lower prices and better products and services. However this is also frustrating for customers who don't understand and don't like this new policy.

Personally I think this is a good idea in theory but I don't like it how it is right now. I think that they should offer a discount if you ship with other items or even charge a premium for shipping add-on items individually. I was searching for a cable that was about $5 and was marked as an add-on item. I tried to checkout but when I was in my shopping cart I couldn't understand why there was no way for me to check out yet. It seriously took me about 20 minutes of going back and fourth, trying different items, different browsers, I even tried using another computer! Then I finally actually read what it said for add-on items. Since this cable was so cheap I couldn't even order it by itself. I either had to order $20 worth of more crap or buy a more expensive cable! This is pretty frustrating when you spend a while finding the best item at the best price and then finding out you can't even buy it. I wish they would just let me buy it and even charge me a little more for shipping and handling. It's almost like a teaser price saying "this product is cheap - so cheap you can't even buy it!" If they just offered the option to buy it on its own and pay a little more I would have bought it already. But since they don't allow me to I will look for a better deal elsewhere. I might end up buying from Amazon but I doubt it after this. I might think twice about buying from Amazon next time because of this. And I am an Amazon affiliate so I don't like talking negatively about them, but when I see something I will comment how I feel about it no matter what. It just goes to show that any thing that looks too good to be true, usually is. Any time you are shopping, either online or in a store, always look out for deals that are too good and prices that are too low. Most times there is either fine print that you need to know about or the product is inferior. Amazon is a great retailler and most of their products and deals are the best anywhere, but this is one thing that I do not like about Amazon.

Blog Comments For Backlinks No Longer Provide Link Juice, Most Blogs Using NoFollow For Comment Links

A few years ago when SEO just started to become very competitive most people were scrambling to get as many links to their sites as possible. They didn't care about the quality of the links, if there was relevant content on the page, anchor text, page rank of the linking domain, etc. But now things have changed, no longer do people want as many links as possible. Many SEOers believe that too many bad quality links actually do harm to your site's SERP results. And since Google has started the "NoFollow" tag which means that the spider doesn't follow the link or give you any credit for it. One of the easiest and quickest ways to get some fast back links was to comment on people's blogs and use links in the body of your comment and for your name. But now most blogs automatically use the NoFollow tag on any links in the comments section making this practice pretty much futile. There are still a few blogs out there that pass on their link juice to links left in the comments section but for the most part the only good a comment link will do is if somebody reading that blog clicks on your link. Some search engines count these links, and of course nobody knows exactly what is in the search engine's algorithms but most people in the SEO field seem to agree that NoFollow links don't count for anything in the top three search engines - Yahoo, Bing, and of course good old Google. So next time you see an offer for 10,000 backlinks from blog comments for $10 you know that it isn't even worth that. The better way to get quality links and real organic traffic is to take your time to get high quality links. Submit press releases to attract links and articles from real people, not automated scripts. Create useful articles that are relavent to your site and the site you post it on. Post good answers to people's questions in forums and other sites. Submit to high quality web directories like DMOZ. Create a real blog with lots of good content for your site with news and info about your products or services. Don't spam the entire web just to get a few crappy links. It won't help and many people claim it could actually harm your SERP rankings. So just like they taught you in school - don't follow the crowd, just say NO!

Mt. Gox Is Not Down: How To Access Mt. Gox Without 503 Error

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about how I could not access the Mt. Gox online bitcoin exchange site. Every time I tried to go to the Mt. Gox online homepage it would redirect me to a 503 error page that read 'Service Temporarily Available' so of course I thought that the site was down. At first I thought it was only a temporary service disruption due to upgrades or high traffic loads. I tried a dozen or so times within a few minutes at first but I still got the same error each time so I decided to try again later. The next day I tried again a few times and still got the 503 error every single time, I thought that something else was going on besides a simple hardware upgrade or software update. I speculated there was a problem because Mt. Gox was being attacked by malicious hackers with a DDoS attack.

I don't know for sure but I don't think that that was the cause of the error. This was a few days ago that I first encountered the error. I have checked it a few times since then and still got the error page every time. That is when I tried a few things to see if the Mt. Gox site was definitely down or not. I finally figured out that if you type in exactly http://mtgox.com (not www.mtgox.com, http://www.mtgox.com, or mtgox.com) that the home page loaded immediately. I have no idea why this is but if you enter the www prefix or if your browser adds the www when you type in only mtgox.com. The only thing I can think of is that there is a problem with the www subdomain or the server that the www subdomain points to. So there you have it, if you are trying to access Mt. Gox and it gives you the same 503 error try entering http://mtgox.com and it should work fine.