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User: compro01

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  1. Re:ISP:s at fault on IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low · · Score: 1

    I doubt they'll be bothering with that. Getting 100Mbps out of VDSL2 would require 500 metre loop lengths (And they really like their "available everywhere" bit. Makes things much simpler to just go off city, rather than needing exact address.), and I don't see them pouring any more money into DSL, given that they're going to start rolling out fibre to the premises later this year and have full coverage of all 9 major cities by 2017.

  2. Re:ISP:s at fault on IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low · · Score: 1

    Ack, didn't mean to post that yet.

    Anyway, I can get 25 Mbps over DSL today, anywhere in the city (as opposed to either of the cable ISPs which only offer it in select areas), due to the phone company pouring a fair bit of money into cutting the loop length down to 900m maximum and investing in fibre-to-the-node, with fibre-to-the-premises coming soon. I'm pretty sure they could crank that up to 50Mbps whenever they wanted, but are probably holding that in reserve for business reasons so they can one-up the cable companies when they announce they're majorly rolling out 25/50Mbps.

    Though my ISP doesn't appear to have any publicly announced plans for IPv6. =/

  3. Re:ISP:s at fault on IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low · · Score: 1

    You can get great speeds over DSL (especially VDLS2), you just need to keep the loop length short (< 1km)

  4. Re:I'd use ipv6 on IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low · · Score: 1

    Comcast is actually doing something right with IPv6. They've already started to roll out dual stack.

  5. Re:I don't like it on Large Scale 24/7 Solar Power Plant To Be Built in Nevada · · Score: 1

    peak solar=low demand? what?

    you may have heard of these new fangaled things called air conditioners. popular in the south, heavily used around peak solar, guzzle power like a frat boy guzzles beer.

  6. Re:is it good for bitcoin? on AMD Releases FirePro V5900 and V7900 Workstation GPUs · · Score: 1

    The V7900 would probably net somewhere around 200-250 Mhash/s. In terms of clock speed and processor count, it's slightly inferior to a 6870.

    The V5900 would probably get 100 Mhash/s or so.

  7. Re:So someone please explain the difference on AMD Releases FirePro V5900 and V7900 Workstation GPUs · · Score: 1

    Different processors. The $500 workstation card is more similar to a $250 gaming card, only modified for real work (3D modeling, GPGPU number crunching, etc.) at high precision, with drivers to match and certification from the major names (autoCAD, etc.). That's what you're paying the premium for.

    This V7900 is between a 6870 and a 6950 in terms of hardware and the v5900 is between a 6670 and 6750.

  8. Re:Not a fan on Mandatory Automotive Black Boxes May Be On the Way · · Score: 1

    Funny, the ECU must use a different measure than the speedometer.

    Either that or you've only seen snow on a cone and not under your wheels.

  9. Re:First number on Linus Torvalds Considering End To Linux 2.6 Series · · Score: 4, Funny

    Visual basic actually.

    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/3/2/247

  10. Re:Being positive here... apk on Sony Music Greece Falls To Hackers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SONY now knows 1 good thing from this: How to stop it from happening again on this and other sites/domains they own & host websites from.

    How to stop this particular attack.

    Available evidence suggests they have no shortage of dailyWTF-worthy screwups that people can continue to exploit.

  11. Re:Why would you watch a movie on your phone? on Rooted Devices Blocked From Android Movie Market · · Score: 1

    Some of the world rides a bus, train, or flies on an airplane and wants to have a TV show or movie to watch while doing so.

  12. Re:Climate Change Deniers on Signs of Ozone Layer Recovery Detected · · Score: 1

    That's what I was referring to in my 2nd sentence.

  13. Re:Climate Change Deniers on Signs of Ozone Layer Recovery Detected · · Score: 1

    CFCs themselves are potent greenhouse gasses, in addition to ozone depletion. The replacements (HCFCs) are actually a little better in that regard.

    Though these are already being phased out. We started on that 15 years ago in 1996, with complete elimination targeted for 2030. All this is laid out in the Montreal Protocol treaty.

  14. Re:Still wondering... on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    I know about the fork resolution, but that wouldn't apply to this case, as each side of the fork would not recognize the other side as valid (they would be operating on different rules about what a valid block is. As the GPP post mentioned, if the new sort of bitcoin kept handing out the subsidy at a higher rate than the original algorithm is set to do, the zeroth transaction in the block would be invalid due to having the wrong transaction amount, resulting in the entire block being invalid) and thus would act as if the fork didn't happen.

  15. Re:Shells on the beach on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    1. Depends on who you ask. Some people have a real issue with inflation or the money supply being increased. Other people don't like the system for transferring money around (moving money internationally is frequently a PITA without using intermediaries like paypal, which lots of people don't like).

    2. You wouldn't get very far with that. The system will automatically compensate for the additional processing power and make the mining calculations more difficult to maintain the rate at about 6 blocks per hour. You would be able to flood in at most 100k BTC before the difficulty compensated and while that would put a significant dent in the exchange rate if you were to unload it all at once, it wouldn't likely do much long term.

  16. Re:This again here. on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Mining output depends on what hardware you have to throw at it. My gaming videocard churns out about $0.28/hour.

  17. Re:This again here. on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    1. Which is why the currency is highly divisible (to 8 decimal places), so there's actually 21 quadrillion currency units and that can be expanded later if necessary.

    2. The generation rate compensates for additional processing power to keep it relatively constant at around 300 bitcoins minted per hour and subsidy gets cut in half every 210,000 blocks. It will be decades before all the coins are mined.

  18. Re:Bitcoin is stupid on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Hypothetically, if this gets widely accepted, you would have to deal with scientific notation in order to trade them, as one bitcoin could end up being worth thousands or even millions of dollars at present value, so a pack of potato chips might have to be traded as .99 x 10^-6.

    Or you could use standard metric prefixes. The smallest tradable unit currently is 0.01 microbitcoins, which is a sufficiently small number of zeros.

  19. Re:Er. Uh. on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Either the java is more inefficient than I figured, you were unlucky during your preliminary testing, or your math is off by about an order of magnitude. A Q6600 should mine about 0.0019 BTC/hour.

    As for what the cycles are being used for, basically, it's recording transactions (the block chain is basically a massive accounting ledger, and each block is a section of it) in a manner that makes it near impossible to tamper with. The mining takes a list of transactions, the hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and a nonce (and a couple other things), and hashes those repeatedly, incrementing the nonce each time (which completely changes the hash due to how it works), until it gets a resulting hash value that is less than a certain number (the target) at which point it becomes the next block in the chain, and everyone starts the whole process over again.

  20. Re:what can you get with bit coins? on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Food, Clothing, Software, Server hosting, etc. No housing yet, though I suspect that may just be a matter of time before someone starts offering to rent apartments for bitcoin.

  21. Re:"mining" for bitcoin on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    According to the Bank of Canada, the average lifespan of a note is 1-9 years, depending on denomination (5s last 1-2 years, as they get circulated heavily, whereas 100s last practically forever as they're hardly used).

  22. Re:Still wondering... on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Depends on your definition of "substantial". A couple hundred dollars of profit is obtainable with a couple hundred dollars of investment.

    Over the past two weeks, for an investment of $223 (a single AMD 6870 videocard), I have mined the equivalent of $134. In another two weeks, I will likely have recouped my entire original investment, which is pretty good as mining is a secondary use (primary use for the card is playing games) and will begin making profit.

  23. Re:Still wondering... on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    Suppose bitcoin gets a huge influx of new users who don't like the idea that all money has been mined (and possibly hoarded) by the early adopters. They agree to increase the mining rate and the reward. If there's enough of them to outnumber the old bitcoiners (let's say that China switches to bitcoins and distributes its own bitcoin software), wouldn't that have an impact?

    Given a sufficiently large influx of hashing power, it would effectively result in a fork of the blockchain, creating two semi-independent currencies, as you'd have two sorts of miners, each of which mutually reject the other sort's blocks.

    Coins created since before the fork or linked to addresses untouched since before the fork would be usable in either side of the fork, but anything affected past the fork would be mostly limited to one side. Over time, the fraction of the former would decrease and the two forks would become fully independent of each other.

    From the user perspective, if you had, say, 100 BTC pre-fork, you would end up effectively having 100 BTC on each side, and you would be able to spend each of those amounts independently of the other.

    What exactly would happen in the long term of this situation is an open question. Both sides of the fork could continue indefinitely as independent currencies or one of them could die out as its userbase dropped in favour of the other. It depends on what people do.

  24. Re:Snow days are healthy on Internet Could Mean End of "Snow Days" · · Score: 1

    You must have a different definition of "snow day".

    Around here, a "snow day" entails weather conditions such that you DO NOT want to be outside unless absolutely necessary. Windchill below -40 isn't real fun to play in.

  25. Re:The bitcoin federal reserve on Mint It Yourself With a Browser-Based Bitcoin Miner · · Score: 1

    1. The former is outside the context. Bitcoin in and of itself doesn't deal with fractional reserve banking.

    2. That kind of transaction shuffling doesn't add much in the way of work really. The transaction list in a block is only hashed once, then that hash is included in the repeating hash calculation, which cycles millions/billions/trillions of times before a valid block is found.

    3. Amount of value added is not fixed. It decreases over time, specifically every 210,000 blocks (about every 4 years. It'll happen for the first time sometime between mid 2012 and early 2013), the block subsidy (the 50 BTC) is cut in half (25, 12.5, 6.75, 3.3525, and so on) and eventually caps off at roughly 21 million. At an intermediate time, transaction fees will become the dominant means of paying the miners.