I can tell that for Greece, part of the EU with the 2-year mandatory warranties, Apple DOES NOT give you a second year. Yes, it is illegal, yes people have managed to fix their products by taking them to court, yes Apple products are more expensive here anyway. And yes, I am sure Apple is betting on fan loyalty to get away with this. If you can read Greek, for example you can see the 1 year warranty clearly stated e.g. here: http://www.plaisio.gr/Laptop-Netbook-GPS/Notebook/Laptop/Apple-Macbook-Pro-MC700GR.htm. There is a 23% tax included, so the base model price is 1016 euro before taxes, or $1455 which is not a bad over-charge for an apple product ($1199 on apple.com) compared to others I've seen...
You are suggesting that we can't do something in the US due to the Constitution? What you are saying would be very funny if it was not dreadfully tragic...
I am reading that the average hedge fund made 0.76% during the month, while this particular fund made 1.85%. Woohoo... One month is a ridiculously small amount of time to judge an investment strategy.
Perhaps though the reason is what is apparent from this article. It seems the developers had a (cash obviously) incentive to make one manufacturer's card look better. While they could optimize for that manufacturer, most sensible optimizations could possibly benefit the other manufacturer too and finding optimizations that would work much better on your preferred manufacturer would be too hard to do. So, what if you know there is a particular function that is very slow on the manufacturer you want to show in a bad light? The easiest thing to do is to put millions of useless calls to this function and you got it. This is exactly what is going on here, instead of sensibly using tessellation, they just threw it in loads wherever it was easy (a whole tessellated sea under the city - brilliant!) and problem solved. The AMD driver developers will find it retarded (if they don't outright attribute it to malice) and will try to code around it. What makes me shudder thought is that a developer would compromise the user experience due to make a hardware manufacturer look good. Yes, AMD users get hit harder, but these dis-optimizations do not come free for nVidia cards either. So all Crysis 2 customers get lower performance on their hardware - for example it is possible that an nVidia gtx 560 user could get the same experience as an gtx nVidia 570 user if it was not for this crap. I am a developer myself (not games), and there are some things that are familiar: - Optimize the app, we want to make it as good as possible for our users. - Forget about optimizing the app, we just have to ship it. - Cripple the non-paying version of the app. What is definitely out of my experience is: Cripple the app that people paid good money for.
Anybody can get a low erdos number. I have a semi-distant acquaintance with a "3" so it would not be terribly difficult for me to score a "4".
That's because of your definition of "low". A 4 is low for the number of kittens in cat lady's house, or the magnitude of an earthquake, but it is not low for an Erdos number, with the median being 5 and the average 4.65. So 4 is, as you too realize, very common and thus is far from being considered "low". Low Erdos number means 1, 2 or at most 3.
I was lucky enough to visit it a couple of years before it closed. Certainly worth the admission for trekkers, it is unfortunate that it closed. I've marked my calendar though: 2014 trip to Aqaba, Jordan;)
I bought an Apple machine because it was required for my work, obviously it was not based upon value. But if you read that part as a direct comparison of a Xeon to a Phenom, you did not get my point. If you did want a price/performance comparison of the two CPUs, you would have to note that the cheaper consumer version of Xeon, the i7 @ 3.2GHz costs a bit more than 2.5X the Phenom. so you would need almost 3X the performance for it ti make a better value. The Intel architecture currently is superior. As such, they don't have to lower its price as much as AMD does, so the AMD solutions are almost always a better value at their price points. But if you can spent a little more money... As someone who has been buying CPUs since the 386/486 era, I will tell you that for me the greatest thing AMD has done for the consumer is that Intel is currently selling CPUs that are close to their flagship at under $300. Up until the Athlon, if you wanted an Intel CPU that was not previous gen or crippled in some severe way, you would have to pay dearly ($1000+).
Hmm, you make a couple of very bad points. 1) The "MUCH higher failure rate for motherboards" is something I have never heard before. Especially when you go on saying "at the same price point as Intel" - are you still referring to motherboards, it is very hard to find Intel motherboards as cheap as AMD. Anyway, I have experience with hundreds of systems both Intel and AMD based over the years and I can't agree there is any sort of significant failure rate on motherboards of any of the two (although I have seen many integrated ethernet controllers go bad). With one exception. Around 2003-2004 a lab bought a dozen Dell Precision slim desktops with a Prescott. When I saw them I told the people who had ordered them that I found it suicidal to put 3.2GHz P4s (I don't remember if they were Prescott or Northwood) in such small enclosures. Sure enough, about 1.5 year later half of them had blown their motherboards, I don't know how it went from there. 2) Your basic argument is that regardless of how much money you throw on AMD, you can't get the performance of Intel, which is, well, moot as AMD unfortunately (for consumers) is not competitive in the high-end. Then you go on comparing an i5 750 which is TWICE the price of the Phenom 955 (newegg: $214 vs $113 - free $15 gift card), has much more expensive motherboards and you pair it with 3 times the RAM. Yet, *surprisingly*, the i5 is faster. Gee, who would have guessed? AMD still is price-competitive, at the price points they cover there is nothing you can get from Intel that has the same performance (esp. if you include motherboard price).
Furthermore, I would like to add that for some of us that run custom 64bit software, AMD still seems to hold strong. Example: Last year I built a Phenom 955 based system which went for under $1000, even if it had the highest quality components (best mobo with USB3, eSATA, my favorite Antec case & PSU etc). I chose an AMD on an otherwise not budget system, since it would serve mainly as a HTPC. Half a year later I bought a $4000 Mac Pro with a 3.2GHz Bloomfield quad-core Xeon. Guess my surprise when most of my own software (most doing string processing in C and Perl) are about 10% faster on my AMD-based HTPC!!! The only way to get more performance out of the several times more expensive Xeon is to manage to get over 4 concurrent threads running so I can get some benefit from HT! Not to mention that for a that much money the Mac Pro isn't even giving me USB3 or esata, which is absurd... but I digress... the point is that AMD machine which was not chosen for its high-end computation power, still holds strong against some of Intel's finest, even if more common workloads show a big preference to Intel.
In the end, I hope AMD gets back in the game. I always buy what is the best (or best value) at any time, and, historically, AMD has been my choice more often than not, but the only reason we have things like Sandy Bridge coming out of Intel right now is because AMD is pushing them. In fact, if Intel's big pockets had not prevented AMD from dominating the market like they were dominating in performance during the 2000-2005 era, we would have a much stronger AMD now and more competitive products for us consumers.
Eh, excuse me, but those cables are a complete rip-off. They don't even have directional markings! How can you expect optimum signal transfer from them?
Sorry, but we are so far from figuring how the brain works, your question has no meaning at all. If you are thinking something along the lines that a big "neural network" can emulate the brain, I would have to tell you that the artificial neuron is a very useful math construct that is only related to a biological neuron via a crude abstraction. Replacing biological neurons with artificial neural networks is similar to replacing a fisherman with a perfect sphere in a math problem : useful in some context, no relation beyond that.
Ehm... You definitely don't know what "bank" means. There are special "banks" that create and destroy money, usually called central banks or something similar, and they are often not private (this depends on the country of course - for example for the US the Federal Reserve Bank is I think partly private). But most banks cannot create or destroy money (unless by destroy you mean remove money from people's hands). PayPal is free from regulation that banks have (which for example would not allow them to freeze your money whenever they please or arbitrarily decide whether to cover you from fraud or not etc), because they claim the are not a bank and apparently no-one who matters is interested in showing that is not show. First of all, what is a bank? Let's see what PayPal themselves say a bank is. I am referencing the response someone from Paypal gave to a consumerist post that described them as an "unregulated bank" (http://consumerist.com/2010/05/keep-paypal-from-using-the-default-atm-debit-setting-to-save-on-bank-fees.html)
we're not regulated as a bank in the U.S. (we don't hold deposits or issue credit)
Huh??? They don't hold deposits? What do they call the money deposited on people's paypal accounts which from time to time they freeze at will? They don't issue credit??? What is Bill Me Later then? (https://personal.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/BillMeLater_ProductOverview) What about the PayPal Mastercard? (https://personal.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/paypal_credit_card&nav=0.1.2). Yeah, *credit* cards are not "credit", easy to argue that...
But this is the whole point. Nowadays the only way their multiplayer is safe is when it is not over a network. So it is obvious they would try to give you better 2-player support on the same display. So next time PSN is down, they will say "Stop complaining. We gave you the best multiplayer that doesn't require a network, so, go out, buy a 3D TV and find a friend!"
You could exchange your e-gold with gold, as you could with any gold-standard currency, you can exchange fiat money for services/goods by government guarantee. You can even exchange casino chips with money, guaranteed by the casino that issues them. Then there is monopoly money, bitcoins, etc. If some people collect most monopoly money and start a big campaign to give them value, it does not make them comparable to the aforementioned forms of currency.
Ehm, I don't think you can put e-gold, a gold-bullion backed currency (that was used for money laundering) together with bitcoin. And we've had enough bitcoin articles. Ok, I know the people who started bitcoin do everything they can to give it value and become rich, but enough with the slashvertisement!
So, for willfully and illegally selling 300,000 works, the recording companies paid just $50 million, or $166 per song. And careful, that is per song, NOT per copy! So they are most likely giving a fraction of their illegally gotten gains - forget about any punitive damages, they probably even get to keep a lot of the stolen money! Next time you are sharing a song online, make sure a) you make money of it b) you are a big corp.
I think you are confused by the idiotic units used. 10912 ft/min is just 108 knots, or 200 km/h. It seems there was little acceleration involved so it sounds quite likely that they would not be aware of impending doom.
Well, it is annoying, since that is the default behavior, however there are at least a couple of ways to change it without disabling automatic updates. The simplest is to find the No auto-restart option under Windows updates on the Group Policy Editor.
Exactly. And this is not limited to servers. At home I had for years an XP box, a Linux box and a Mac. Guess which one needed to restart more often? The Mac. My windows and linux machines have uptimes measured in months (well, I would do the reboot suggested by XP update once every 2 months or so - so Linux went on much longer), while my Mac would require a reboot on average once a week. Sometimes it was some problem, and sometimes it was a reboot requiring (and not simply recommending) OS update that I HAD to do if I wanted to use the latest SDK...
No, I am sure it is more than that. Apple on the other hand has always radically new designs. Think about the first ipod. Totally radical. Nothing at all like a 1958 radio (http://www.flickr.com/photos/benarent/4248023281/).
Very funny that you should compare it to e-gold. E-gold is an even more old-fashioned currency that our modern fiat money, since it was backed by gold bullion. But even so it was heavily involved in fraud, and that's why they were closed down and pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
You are either a bitcoin shill or you don't understand some things. The usage of a sophism would steer me to the first. There is nothing "radical" about bitcoin transactions. Easy and cheap or even free electronic transactions are already done with real money. The difference is that usually the facilitator asks for a transaction fee. This is not always. For example, most banks will allow my employer to electronically send me money for free. Citibank allows me to send money (Citi Global Transfer) for free from certain countries to any person on certain others (e.g. it is free from Greece to the US, but there is a charge for the reverse), and in fact the transactions are instantaneous. Most merchants will allow me to send them money (note no quotations) for a very low cost, which they will bear (through a CC fee). On the other hand, according to the designers of bitcoin itself, the way they are going to keep people interested in bitcoin and mining is to have transaction fees distributed along the miners. As bitcoin production goes down, they hope that transactions along with their fees will go up. If you don't like me calling it a scam, I can humor you and call it a "get rich quick scheme". The invertors are hoping to cash out at some point. But most will agree that if I invent my own money out of thin air and I get some fools to give it value, it will not be legal in most jurisdictions and most would call it a scam. Now, if I told you that with my own invented money you can buy 3d models I build for an online game, it does start to get a little more kosher.
I downloaded the bitcoin client a few weeks ago. I had read somewhere that you solve math problems with your gpu and get awarded bitcoins for it. Having a fast ATI card I assumed this was something like renting computer power to solve useful math problems - a sort of folding at home where you get a bonus that might have some value. I started the gpu client and started reading the bitcoin FAQ to see what it was all about. Once I read about how bitcoin generation works and how the "problems" I was solving were made up just to be awarded a probability to get a bitcoin based on your processing power, I closed the client never to open it again. I am not an environment nut, but I would start using electricity for the chance to get some guys rich.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell that for Greece, part of the EU with the 2-year mandatory warranties, Apple DOES NOT give you a second year. Yes, it is illegal, yes people have managed to fix their products by taking them to court, yes Apple products are more expensive here anyway. And yes, I am sure Apple is betting on fan loyalty to get away with this.
If you can read Greek, for example you can see the 1 year warranty clearly stated e.g. here: http://www.plaisio.gr/Laptop-Netbook-GPS/Notebook/Laptop/Apple-Macbook-Pro-MC700GR.htm. There is a 23% tax included, so the base model price is 1016 euro before taxes, or $1455 which is not a bad over-charge for an apple product ($1199 on apple.com) compared to others I've seen...
You are suggesting that we can't do something in the US due to the Constitution?
What you are saying would be very funny if it was not dreadfully tragic...
I am reading that the average hedge fund made 0.76% during the month, while this particular fund made 1.85%. Woohoo...
One month is a ridiculously small amount of time to judge an investment strategy.
Perhaps though the reason is what is apparent from this article. It seems the developers had a (cash obviously) incentive to make one manufacturer's card look better. While they could optimize for that manufacturer, most sensible optimizations could possibly benefit the other manufacturer too and finding optimizations that would work much better on your preferred manufacturer would be too hard to do.
So, what if you know there is a particular function that is very slow on the manufacturer you want to show in a bad light? The easiest thing to do is to put millions of useless calls to this function and you got it. This is exactly what is going on here, instead of sensibly using tessellation, they just threw it in loads wherever it was easy (a whole tessellated sea under the city - brilliant!) and problem solved. The AMD driver developers will find it retarded (if they don't outright attribute it to malice) and will try to code around it.
What makes me shudder thought is that a developer would compromise the user experience due to make a hardware manufacturer look good. Yes, AMD users get hit harder, but these dis-optimizations do not come free for nVidia cards either. So all Crysis 2 customers get lower performance on their hardware - for example it is possible that an nVidia gtx 560 user could get the same experience as an gtx nVidia 570 user if it was not for this crap.
I am a developer myself (not games), and there are some things that are familiar:
- Optimize the app, we want to make it as good as possible for our users.
- Forget about optimizing the app, we just have to ship it.
- Cripple the non-paying version of the app.
What is definitely out of my experience is: Cripple the app that people paid good money for.
Anybody can get a low erdos number. I have a semi-distant acquaintance with a "3" so it would not be terribly difficult for me to score a "4".
That's because of your definition of "low". A 4 is low for the number of kittens in cat lady's house, or the magnitude of an earthquake, but it is not low for an Erdos number, with the median being 5 and the average 4.65. So 4 is, as you too realize, very common and thus is far from being considered "low".
Low Erdos number means 1, 2 or at most 3.
The editor should be banished from /. for mentioning the Bacon number and not the Erdos number.
are you telling me this is NOT the year of the Linux desktop? That's news to me!
I was lucky enough to visit it a couple of years before it closed. Certainly worth the admission for trekkers, it is unfortunate that it closed. I've marked my calendar though: 2014 trip to Aqaba, Jordan ;)
From the author's comments on his blog, he claims the GPL project was on his own time and not owned by the company, but known by his company.
I bought an Apple machine because it was required for my work, obviously it was not based upon value. But if you read that part as a direct comparison of a Xeon to a Phenom, you did not get my point.
If you did want a price/performance comparison of the two CPUs, you would have to note that the cheaper consumer version of Xeon, the i7 @ 3.2GHz costs a bit more than 2.5X the Phenom. so you would need almost 3X the performance for it ti make a better value.
The Intel architecture currently is superior. As such, they don't have to lower its price as much as AMD does, so the AMD solutions are almost always a better value at their price points. But if you can spent a little more money...
As someone who has been buying CPUs since the 386/486 era, I will tell you that for me the greatest thing AMD has done for the consumer is that Intel is currently selling CPUs that are close to their flagship at under $300. Up until the Athlon, if you wanted an Intel CPU that was not previous gen or crippled in some severe way, you would have to pay dearly ($1000+).
Hmm, you make a couple of very bad points.
1) The "MUCH higher failure rate for motherboards" is something I have never heard before. Especially when you go on saying "at the same price point as Intel" - are you still referring to motherboards, it is very hard to find Intel motherboards as cheap as AMD. Anyway, I have experience with hundreds of systems both Intel and AMD based over the years and I can't agree there is any sort of significant failure rate on motherboards of any of the two (although I have seen many integrated ethernet controllers go bad). With one exception. Around 2003-2004 a lab bought a dozen Dell Precision slim desktops with a Prescott. When I saw them I told the people who had ordered them that I found it suicidal to put 3.2GHz P4s (I don't remember if they were Prescott or Northwood) in such small enclosures. Sure enough, about 1.5 year later half of them had blown their motherboards, I don't know how it went from there.
2) Your basic argument is that regardless of how much money you throw on AMD, you can't get the performance of Intel, which is, well, moot as AMD unfortunately (for consumers) is not competitive in the high-end. Then you go on comparing an i5 750 which is TWICE the price of the Phenom 955 (newegg: $214 vs $113 - free $15 gift card), has much more expensive motherboards and you pair it with 3 times the RAM. Yet, *surprisingly*, the i5 is faster. Gee, who would have guessed? AMD still is price-competitive, at the price points they cover there is nothing you can get from Intel that has the same performance (esp. if you include motherboard price).
Furthermore, I would like to add that for some of us that run custom 64bit software, AMD still seems to hold strong. Example: Last year I built a Phenom 955 based system which went for under $1000, even if it had the highest quality components (best mobo with USB3, eSATA, my favorite Antec case & PSU etc). I chose an AMD on an otherwise not budget system, since it would serve mainly as a HTPC. Half a year later I bought a $4000 Mac Pro with a 3.2GHz Bloomfield quad-core Xeon. Guess my surprise when most of my own software (most doing string processing in C and Perl) are about 10% faster on my AMD-based HTPC!!! The only way to get more performance out of the several times more expensive Xeon is to manage to get over 4 concurrent threads running so I can get some benefit from HT! Not to mention that for a that much money the Mac Pro isn't even giving me USB3 or esata, which is absurd... but I digress... the point is that AMD machine which was not chosen for its high-end computation power, still holds strong against some of Intel's finest, even if more common workloads show a big preference to Intel.
In the end, I hope AMD gets back in the game. I always buy what is the best (or best value) at any time, and, historically, AMD has been my choice more often than not, but the only reason we have things like Sandy Bridge coming out of Intel right now is because AMD is pushing them. In fact, if Intel's big pockets had not prevented AMD from dominating the market like they were dominating in performance during the 2000-2005 era, we would have a much stronger AMD now and more competitive products for us consumers.
Eh, excuse me, but those cables are a complete rip-off. They don't even have directional markings! How can you expect optimum signal transfer from them?
Sorry, but we are so far from figuring how the brain works, your question has no meaning at all.
If you are thinking something along the lines that a big "neural network" can emulate the brain, I would have to tell you that the artificial neuron is a very useful math construct that is only related to a biological neuron via a crude abstraction. Replacing biological neurons with artificial neural networks is similar to replacing a fisherman with a perfect sphere in a math problem : useful in some context, no relation beyond that.
I will add eleventy bajillion pirate dinaarrgh dollars to that offer.
Ehm... You definitely don't know what "bank" means. There are special "banks" that create and destroy money, usually called central banks or something similar, and they are often not private (this depends on the country of course - for example for the US the Federal Reserve Bank is I think partly private).
But most banks cannot create or destroy money (unless by destroy you mean remove money from people's hands).
PayPal is free from regulation that banks have (which for example would not allow them to freeze your money whenever they please or arbitrarily decide whether to cover you from fraud or not etc), because they claim the are not a bank and apparently no-one who matters is interested in showing that is not show.
First of all, what is a bank? Let's see what PayPal themselves say a bank is. I am referencing the response someone from Paypal gave to a consumerist post that described them as an "unregulated bank" (http://consumerist.com/2010/05/keep-paypal-from-using-the-default-atm-debit-setting-to-save-on-bank-fees.html)
we're not regulated as a bank in the U.S. (we don't hold deposits or issue credit)
Huh??? They don't hold deposits? What do they call the money deposited on people's paypal accounts which from time to time they freeze at will?
They don't issue credit??? What is Bill Me Later then? (https://personal.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/BillMeLater_ProductOverview) What about the PayPal Mastercard? (https://personal.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/paypal_credit_card&nav=0.1.2). Yeah, *credit* cards are not "credit", easy to argue that...
But this is the whole point. Nowadays the only way their multiplayer is safe is when it is not over a network. So it is obvious they would try to give you better 2-player support on the same display.
So next time PSN is down, they will say "Stop complaining. We gave you the best multiplayer that doesn't require a network, so, go out, buy a 3D TV and find a friend!"
You could exchange your e-gold with gold, as you could with any gold-standard currency, you can exchange fiat money for services/goods by government guarantee. You can even exchange casino chips with money, guaranteed by the casino that issues them. Then there is monopoly money, bitcoins, etc. If some people collect most monopoly money and start a big campaign to give them value, it does not make them comparable to the aforementioned forms of currency.
Ehm, I don't think you can put e-gold, a gold-bullion backed currency (that was used for money laundering) together with bitcoin.
And we've had enough bitcoin articles. Ok, I know the people who started bitcoin do everything they can to give it value and become rich, but enough with the slashvertisement!
So, for willfully and illegally selling 300,000 works, the recording companies paid just $50 million, or $166 per song. And careful, that is per song, NOT per copy! So they are most likely giving a fraction of their illegally gotten gains - forget about any punitive damages, they probably even get to keep a lot of the stolen money!
Next time you are sharing a song online, make sure a) you make money of it b) you are a big corp.
I think you are confused by the idiotic units used. 10912 ft/min is just 108 knots, or 200 km/h. It seems there was little acceleration involved so it sounds quite likely that they would not be aware of impending doom.
Well, it is annoying, since that is the default behavior, however there are at least a couple of ways to change it without disabling automatic updates. The simplest is to find the No auto-restart option under Windows updates on the Group Policy Editor.
Exactly. And this is not limited to servers. At home I had for years an XP box, a Linux box and a Mac. Guess which one needed to restart more often? The Mac. My windows and linux machines have uptimes measured in months (well, I would do the reboot suggested by XP update once every 2 months or so - so Linux went on much longer), while my Mac would require a reboot on average once a week. Sometimes it was some problem, and sometimes it was a reboot requiring (and not simply recommending) OS update that I HAD to do if I wanted to use the latest SDK...
No, I am sure it is more than that. Apple on the other hand has always radically new designs. Think about the first ipod. Totally radical. Nothing at all like a 1958 radio (http://www.flickr.com/photos/benarent/4248023281/).
You think I am only referring to this: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ which is at least exponential and will only go down if bitcoin loses its popularity (and "value" obviously). What I was also referring to, and is more important because it is by design, is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.png.
Very funny that you should compare it to e-gold. E-gold is an even more old-fashioned currency that our modern fiat money, since it was backed by gold bullion. But even so it was heavily involved in fraud, and that's why they were closed down and pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
You are either a bitcoin shill or you don't understand some things. The usage of a sophism would steer me to the first. There is nothing "radical" about bitcoin transactions. Easy and cheap or even free electronic transactions are already done with real money. The difference is that usually the facilitator asks for a transaction fee. This is not always. For example, most banks will allow my employer to electronically send me money for free. Citibank allows me to send money (Citi Global Transfer) for free from certain countries to any person on certain others (e.g. it is free from Greece to the US, but there is a charge for the reverse), and in fact the transactions are instantaneous. Most merchants will allow me to send them money (note no quotations) for a very low cost, which they will bear (through a CC fee). On the other hand, according to the designers of bitcoin itself, the way they are going to keep people interested in bitcoin and mining is to have transaction fees distributed along the miners. As bitcoin production goes down, they hope that transactions along with their fees will go up.
If you don't like me calling it a scam, I can humor you and call it a "get rich quick scheme". The invertors are hoping to cash out at some point.
But most will agree that if I invent my own money out of thin air and I get some fools to give it value, it will not be legal in most jurisdictions and most would call it a scam. Now, if I told you that with my own invented money you can buy 3d models I build for an online game, it does start to get a little more kosher.
I downloaded the bitcoin client a few weeks ago. I had read somewhere that you solve math problems with your gpu and get awarded bitcoins for it. Having a fast ATI card I assumed this was something like renting computer power to solve useful math problems - a sort of folding at home where you get a bonus that might have some value. I started the gpu client and started reading the bitcoin FAQ to see what it was all about. Once I read about how bitcoin generation works and how the "problems" I was solving were made up just to be awarded a probability to get a bitcoin based on your processing power, I closed the client never to open it again. I am not an environment nut, but I would start using electricity for the chance to get some guys rich.