Yes some of us are. Quoted for posterity.

It is a major release because it includes the completed development goals, including databases and 32bit / ARM support. It also includes the blocktime fork from 1 min to 2 min and the tail emission at 0.3 XMR (1 min blocks) 0.6 XMR (two min blocks). It will also be the first official release in over 11 months.

How long did it take and what was the hardware? Namely: CPU, HDD / SSD drive RAM etc.

I do not expect much to happen with Monero price wise until 0.9 comes out. After that there will likely be some action.

I voted "My participation depends on evaluation of the facts of the venture and the offering" I have to figure what it is, how it works and what if any is the regulatory risk of an attack by some government.

I responded to MoneroMooo on the wallet refresh issue in the other thread.

25. Rd2

This technology is very new and needs a fair amount of peer review and testing before it can be incorporated in Monero, Boolberry or Bitcoin. I followed the thread and there are serious weaknesses that have been found and work is currently progressing to address them. It is a very exciting technology nevertheless.

I would say DASH formally Darkcoin.

I would get a GNU/Linux laptop and run Windows 10 in a Virtualbox VM. It is actually way easier to manage Windows in a VM than on the hardware itself. This puts Windows 10 in a sandbox where it belongs. If a professor insists on you accepting Microsoft's EULA as a condition of a higher education you then have the option of caving in.

Microsoft software is provided at very cheap prices or free to post secondary students in order to get them addicted at young age. When I went to university in the late 1970's the tobacco companies were promoting student events in order to get the students addicted. Some things actually do not change with time.

It took me about 7 min to refresh a wallet that was 100,000 blocks behind on a 2 TB HDD. So I can see why this could be an issue for someone to has an old HDD hard drive say about 200 GB since HDD seek time for a given spin rotation basically falls with size. I would expect about 70 min for a 200 GB HDD to refresh 100,000 blocks. Still I would not hold up 0.9 over this since there are simple fixes for a user.

1) Get an SSD or a large HDD.
2) Refresh the wallet on a regular basis rather than wait a few months as I just did.

Edit: OS Trisquel GNU/Linux 7, Processor Core  2 Quad 6600 @ 2.4 GHz (about 7 years old) RAM 8 GB DDR 2 Motherboard Asus P5N-D. Monero Version: 0.8.8.7-107eeaf

Here is another horror story from a "Trusted" Microsoft partner directed at consumers. https://boingboing.net/2015/09/22/yet-another-pre-installed-spyw.html As if Superfish was not bad enough. We must keep in mind that Microsoft allows the use of its trademarked logo on these spyware riddled computers, as it the spyware and keyloggers in Windows 10 were not bad enough. So Microsoft is the the problem here.

Edit: The Superfish computers came with the Windows logo. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/two-weeks-on-superfish-debacle-still-causing-pain-for-some-lenovo-customers/

Dell Inspiron is for Home and Home Office. I would not touch it with a 10 ft pole. With Dell I would look at a Latitude, Vostro etc. Stick to the Business products.

Edit 1: Which specific model of HP Laptop did you own?

Edit 2: I have had no problems at all with HP but I only buy their business products. I do agree some of their consumer stuff is complete junk.

One option for those who are running Windows 7 is to upgrade to GNU/Linux and then run windows 7 in a virtual machine using VirtualBox, using the existing Windows 7 license. https://www.virtualbox.org/. One can move the bulk of one's computing to GNU/Linux while keeping the virtualized Windows 7 for those situations where organizations require that people pay a license fee to Microsoft in order to across a product or service.

The first thing to understand about buying a laptop from a vendor such as HP is that there are basically two kinds of laptops. Those sold to consumers and students which are basically junk that is engineered to fail in about 6 months, and those sold to businesses that are quality products designed to last for a long time. It is important to realize that the same manufacturers are selling both the junk and the quality products. The simple way to tell them apart is that the consumer versions come with a glossy high glare screen and the "standard" "home" or "personal" versions of Windows while the business versions come with a matt anti glare screen and the "pro" or "business versions of Windows. So "HP Laptop" is meaningless depending on whether it is consumer or business it is either a piece of junk or a quality product.

The option for a GNU/Linux laptop are several depending on budget.

1) Purchase a Laptop that is designed from the ground up to run GNU/Linux

Here are some examples:

https://puri.sm/ This in an over subscribed crowd funding campaign for a Laptop designed for 100% Libre GNU/linux distributions. This by the way ensures it will work with virtually any modern GNU/linux distribution.

https://system76.com/

zareason.com/

etc.

2) Purchase an older (Windows 7 era) business laptop, and upgrade the hard drive to large SSD and possibly also the RAM. Before buying check online if that particular model has any driver issues with GNU/Linux. One thing to keep in mind is that if it is two or there years old and there little or no hits on the fora then it is likely to have few if any problems. Also when it comes to drivers GNU/Linux is very good at supporting hardware typically after about 2 years so something that failed say in 2013 could very easily work fine today. I recently bought two HP 2760p EliteBooks from a government auction for well under 200 CAD each. After adding a 1 TB SSD each and upgrading the RAM on one to 16 GB and the other to 8 GB I have two quality laptops that will last me a long time.  One of them replaced an HP Evo 1000c with a Windows 2000 logo and 3.5in floppy drive that provided me with close to a decade of service. When I replaced it this summer it was running a full Bitcoin node using Trisquel GNU/linux. By the way UEFI should not be a problem if it is unlocked (Windows 8.x and earlier). Just go into the bios and unlock it. If it is a Windows 10 machine it may be locked. I suspect that most of the locked Windows 10 laptops will be sold to consumers as part of Microsoft and its partners ongoing junk for consumers program.

3) Buy a Chromebook and upgrade the hard drive. Chromebooks are good GNU/Linux computers except that they have ridiculously small hard drives. They have to be sold unlocked because Chrome OS contains GPLv3 code.

If you trust Microsoft and the US Government with your private keys then by all means use Windows 10. I use GNU/Linux and I must say that I trust the US Government way more than many on this forum.

As for staying with Windows 7, why keep fighting change? The direction that Microsoft is heading in has been very clear for a very long time. I moved to GNU/Linux back in 2006 since at the time I did not like the "vista" on the horizon.

Yes, This is close to optimal; however one does not get those extremly low probabilites of an attack based on rouge masternodes voting yes that are repeatedly presented. The mathematics of this is the Binominal Distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution.

This is now funded.

24. Qd2

Donated 12099.13 XMR to the "A continuation for all purpose programming of what needs to get done in monero" by moneromooo

45ttEikQEZWN1m7VxaVN9rjQkpSdmpGZ82GwUps66neQ1PqbQMno4wMY8F5jiDt2GoHzCtMwa7PDPJU JYb1GYrMP4CwAwNp 12099.13 d896af65d5b6b01300e22d3778efe9dc777fcde29ff9a6f2dd04242a7b0367ac

My total should now be 20024.6 XMR for 10th Dan.