The Bitcoin Death Star: KnC Plans 10 Megawatt Data Center In Sweden

1sockchuck writes "Bitcoin hardware vendor KnC Miner has begun construction on a a 10 megawatt data center in Sweden that it will fill with high-powered computers mining for cryptocurrency. KnC has emerged as a leading vendor in the volatile market for ASIC mining rigs, focusing on underpromising and overdelivering. One goal of its move into cloud mining is to cushion any fallout from delivery delays on new hardware, which have been a sore point for miners in the fast-moving Bitcoin market. "Over the next few months we are bringing online enough hashing power to make sure that any delay in the Neptune timeline will be compensated with a completely free hosted hashing packages to all fully paid customers," KnC says in its newsletter."

Comments

Now even bitcoin miners have better planning

[i kan reed]

than whoever planned slashdot beta.

Re:Now even bitcoin miners have better planning

[tburkhol]

From Dice's quarterly report:

Corporate & Other segment revenues decreased 9% year-over-year to $4.3 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2013 from the comparable 2012 period, due primarily to the financial results at Slashdot Media.

Message: slashdot is losing money, and something needs to change very fast. Whatever /.'s current user base is, it is not a profitable set of consumers, and Dice appears not to be worried if their non-profitable customers go away.

Re:Pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

They need that much power to render the Slashdot Beta javascript.

Why not just keep it?

[AmiMoJo]

Why not just keep the Bitcoins they mine?

Why not just keep Slashdot Classic? Fuck beta.

Re:Why not just keep it?

[Joce640k]

Because mining the Bitcoin miners is more profitable.

Re:Why not just keep it?

[TWiTfan]

Everyone these days wants to fuck beta. How about a few of us show some charity, drop trow, and fuck alpha too?

Re:Why not just keep it?

[niado]

Just like in a physical gold-rush - sometimes it is better to just sell shovels.

Slashdot death rattle

[east coast]

The Beta will mark an end to some of the most informative and most insightful users from their daily input on Slashdot. Many have voiced disgust but Dice has decided to be tight lipped and head strong in the face of civil disruption.

If you want a progressive and forward thinking Slashdot you must voice your opinion on the matter now. Dice is moving to what will certainly be a call for exodus.

Why would Dice buy Slashdot only to destroy it?

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[Viol8]

Seems to me its a simply case of some web devs justifying their jobs. It doesn't matter if its better or worse - its different and that means they can show some pointy haired managers just how much work they've done and get a pat on the back and potentially prevent their jobs being outsourced to a body shop in Bombangalore for another year or 2.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[sinij]

I don't understand anyone would think "Beta" is anything other than a disaster, but someone please post where we all going to move to.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[TheNastyInThePasty]

Slashdot is officially being actively destroyed because it doesn't make enough advertising revenue anymore

From the report:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[JWW]

I have been reading/commenting at /. since 1998.

I have a 5 digit userid (of course the beta won't display that anymore).

I'm gone if the beta is forced on me.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[TWiTfan]

One of the biggest annoyances I found in the beta is the way it handles comments in the User section. Right now, in classic, I can do a quick check of all my posts and see all the replies and mods to said posts in one nice table. In the beta, I can only see them one comment at a time (and have to click on each one to see if there were any replies or mods). Not to sound like a narcissist, but I do like to keep track of replies to my posts. And the shitty beta makes it almost impossible to do that.

But on the upside, I get to see all my Slashdot "Trophies" on the left!! Woo hoo!!

Seriously, trophies???? Wtf??

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[JWW]

You know, I wouldn't fuss if they removed the disable ads checkbox in my classic mode. I'd live with it.

But the beta site is garbage.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[Ralph Wiggam]

Beta is taking away my OG userid? This aggression will not stand, man.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[Yebyen]

Try using it for a while. You can't link directly to comments, you can't click a username to visit somebody's profile, it seems to delete whole posts (for me at least) whenever that person tries to thoroughly exercise Unicode, instead of just deleting the Unicode characters like Classic. It has really got nothing at all positive over Slashdot Classic in my opinion. It should be clear what the users want, since every single article is crapflooded with comments about "FUCK BETA" and they are actually getting modded up.

Re:Slashdot death rattle

[JWW]

Its not about not displaying the userid its about the craptacular posting and commenting system in the beta.

The lack of displaying the user id is a symptom of the developers paying no attention to how the current system works and operates well.

Another strike against them is that in the beta following your or other users past comments is incredibly cumbersome and unwieldily.

In the interest of cleanness they provide so little information on the users' comments pages as to make tracking and following comments and moving through comment threads extremely clunky.

Ah, but will it Fuck Beta?

[denzacar]

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to mine Bitcoin is insignificant next to the power of the Fuck Beta.

Re:Ah, but will it Fuck Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your lack of FUCK BETA disturbing!!!

Re:Ah, but will it Fuck Beta?

[DaTrueDave]

I will be joining in the Slashcott from Feb 10-Feb 17.

Nobetanobetanobetanobeta...

[aardvarkjoe]

If the "new site" had been designed by competent programmers, then it would have been a trivial matter to swap between the "new" and "old" interfaces. Apparently it is not. They must have hired the contractors that couldn't get a job working on healthcare.gov.

Continue to turn the comments threads into a trash heap to drive people away. And don't forget to turn on your ad blocker. Do what you can to get their attention until they publicly acknowledge that this is a mistake -- because they're not going to pay attention otherwise.

Boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.

On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott

Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories

Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.

Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))

I am Slashdot

[OzPeter]

I submit stories. I read stories. I add comments. I moderate comments. I am the reason that there is ad revenue.

I am Slashdot.

Re:I am Slashdot

[dmbasso]

I submit stories. I read stories. I add comments. I moderate comments. I am the reason that there is ad revenue. I am uglier than an ass-hole stabbing. I went full retard, and never recovered.

I am Slashdot beta.

FTFY. :)

Re:I am Slashdot

[OzPeter]

I submit stories. I read stories. I add comments. I moderate comments. I am the reason that there is ad revenue. I am uglier than an ass-hole stabbing. I went full retard, and never recovered.

I am Slashdot beta.

FTFY. :)

OMG I have a stalker!

Re:Pfft

[cheesybagel]

If money is the tool of the Devil then Bitcoin is even worse. Exponentially wasting electricity and semiconducts to generate a unique numeric key. Great!

My First post

[cageybee]

I've been a lurker for a long time, probably a couple of years before registering for an account, and have never posted a thing (I have moderated over the years) I'm going to break that tradition now for: Beta is awful, please please keep access to Classic. I cannot read Beta on any device other than my home PC. If I can't read your site, I will not be coming back. Please do not completely break Slashdot

Re:My First post

[Nightbrood]

Like you, I signed up for my account and then was happy to lurk for years... After this beta stuff popped up I decided I should voice my opinion. If Beta is the direction they intend to go then I do not intend to follow.

As another poster has stated, we submit the news, we comment on the news, we moderate the comments. We are the community and we are the product that DICE has been selling to advertisers. DICE should pay attention because without the community they do not have a product. At this point, they cannot say the community did not give them fair warning.

Expected response

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you like your classic slashdot. You can keep your classic slashdot."

Re:Expected response

[TWiTfan]

Actually, IIRC, when Dice bought Slashdot, that's pretty much exactly what they said. They gave the usual, BS "We promise we won't change anything guys," spill. Of course, 5 minutes after saying that, they started fucking with stuff. Some of the most embarrassing were those paid sponsor videos they started trying to pass off as regular submissions. You would think that they would have known better than to try to bullshit such an intelligent userbase with some retard-obvious shit like that.

Re:Expected response

[doesnothingwell]

Traffic is king, block slashdot on your router for the week so you won't be tempted. If beta is still here on the 18th its over.

About the proposed boycott

[knarf]

I've seen many calls for a boycott, and such a thing might be in order to get the powers that be to understand that the future of /. is rather bleak without actively participating users.

One thing is missing from these boycott calls: a means of communication before, during and after the proposed boycott. Without such a means of communication nobody will know whether the boycott is successful or not. At the most they'll head for /. - thereby negating the effect of the proposed boycott - to see whether it is as empty as intended.

If anyone has a suggestion for a good place to discuss and connect during the boycott, please speak up. Understand that many /.-ers are wary of all the social boondoggery which infests the web so don't come with suggestions like 'facebook' or 'twitter'. A newsgroup would work, as would another discussion forum. That newsgroup should have a web interface, preferably one which does not require you to login using a Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter/other-big-data-vacuum account.

Any suggestions?

Re:Pfft

[ShanghaiBill]

Exponentially wasting electricity and semiconducts to generate a unique numeric key.

It is far better than the damage done by gold mining, which can result in erosion and mercury contamination. But even the environmental damage done by gold mining is better than Slashdot Beta.

Why sell mining rigs?

[raynet]

This one puzzles me somewhat. If one can make money by mining with ASIC rigs, why would anyone sell or rent them, wouldn't they make more money by mining? If they make more money by selling or renting, then wouldn't that mean that mining is silly?

Slashdot Beta doesn't copy titles?

[GameboyRMH]

If I had to choose between more banner ads on Slashdot and the current beta I'd go with the extra ads hands-down. I've had the option to disable ads for a long time but I left them on.