6.5 BTC sounds about right at the moment. Remember, however, that difficulty changes every two weeks approximately. It almost always increases (it's gone down twice, once fairly recently). As difficulty increases the daily amount of BTC will decrease.

Munin is good for this kind of stuff - you could monitor every rig from the comfort of your browser. Cdecker wrote a Munin plugin for monitoring Slush's pool, which would be fairly easy to adapt for other pools.  I've got Munin plugins for fan speeds and GPU temperatures, I've even got a plugin for MtGox prices :-) Munin is very easy to write plugins for.

You don't say what OS or OSs you need this for, but Munin runs on pretty much everything.

MagicalTux is the current owner, I believe.

I assume it was an innocent comment, too, and one that isn't really a surprise. I was watching the market depth during the insane spike a few days ago, and the bottom line totals for bids and asks had dropped markedly by the time the frenzy drew to a close.

Take a look at historical values, particularly using a log scale (as the link does). The current rally isn't as dramatic (yet!) as the November 2010 or February 2011 rallies. This seems to be how the BTC/USD rate goes - quick, sharp rises followed by slow, shallow readjustments.

In other words: enjoy the ride while it lasts, and don't panic when it ends!

On *nix I'd pipe the miner's output to a log file (which I do anyway) and then run a scheduled task every minute or so. The task would need to do some magic (this assumes some like DiabloMiner, which normally shows hash rate until a block is generate, then displays a line containing the word "Block"):

Look at the penultimate line of the log file, and do something like...
If the line contains the string "Block" then...
... and then compare the value returned (the block number) with the previous value, if a previous value exists, and if it's different (or there is no previous value) then store the new value and play a sound file.

If I had to do this in Windows I'd end up installing Cygwin or similar, but I'm sure that someone with Windows-fu could do a better job than me.

Disclaimer: rough, untested pseudo-code. The grep bit works, nothing else carries any warranty, guarantee, assurance or promise. Your milage may vary, do not drive or operate heavy machinery, DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL!

Yeah, I'd checked /etc/ssl/certs and seen cacerts so I assumed it was "just" a Chromium issue. However... I've just tried in Firefox and that's exhibiting the same behaviour.

I stress that this isn't a problem for me - I understand what's going on, and if I was so inclined I could fix it. Rather, it's a problem for non-technical users. For that reason I'd prefer Vladimir's approach to the cacert approach - at least for now, until browsers/distros catch up.

It looks to me like the "interesting" part would be Kitco: this is the closest I can find to MtGox's ticker. It contains the current spot price for silver, but would need to be parsed to determine which market (London, New York or Asia) is currently open. It's a plain-text file, not JSON or XML, and is designed to be human-readable more than computer-friendly.

Looks like it would be do-able, but it's not something I could take on right now - sorry!

bitcoinwatch.com has the current rate for gold - don't know if that would help much? If it were me I'd simply use my favourite source for silver prices and my favourite source for bitcoin prices and do the conversion myself... I don't think there's (yet) a bitcoin/silver price source.

What happens whenever a clear range appears is that other people flood in, and will over- or under-cut the "locker", Lucy. So... I can see that trading is range-bound, and I smell the potential for profit. I undercut Lucy-locker by placing a sell order at 1.3999. This is successful, and I then overcut Lucy by placing a buy order at 1.3501. Alice sees what's going on, and places a sell order at 1.3998. This is successful, so Alice places a buy order at 1.3502... after Bob, Charlie and Dave have all piled in, the price has settled around 1.375.

Another scenario is that me, Alice, Bob, Charlie and Dave all want to buy more bitcoins. I buy 2000 at 1.4. Alice buys 2000 at 1.4. Bob buys 2000 at 1.4 - well, you get the idea. Once we've all bought what we want Lucy has none left to sell. Lucy could, of course wait for the price to fall to 1.35 and buy more, but how likely is that with a high volume supporting the 1.4 price? I'd suspect that the price would be bullish for a while after our trades. The same scenario, of course, works in reverse.

I get an SSL error with cacert: both their own site and bitcoin-contact.org. This is on Chrome[ium] and Ubuntu. I realise there are ways round this, but as I understand it Vladimir's process avoids this entirely.

I don't believe it's as simple as that.

This was like someone selling zero-variance mining contracts, offering only 1Ghash/s at £1159 and claiming it's the cheapest way to buy zero-variance mining contracts. I'd complain if someone tried that, and I make no apologies for so doing.

This was about misleading claims. If the merchant hadn't made misleading claims about price they wouldn't have been criticised on their pricing. The merchant addressed the issue, which I appreciate and respect, but - frankly - they shouldn't have made this elementary error in the first place, and I'm surprised that people appear to believe it was OK.

It does, thank you.

Presentation is key when marketing something - if you appear less than honest it adversely affects the image of the product or service you're selling. It really pays to know your market and be aware of your competitors' offerings, but equally appearing to trash your competitors is less than ideal. Let your pricing and goods/services speak for themselves.

Fine. Then say that. Don't say...
...because it clearly isn't true.

Allergic reactions to a misleading claim? That's certainly true in my case. I'm sure you provide a lovely service - it'd be even better if your marketing was accurate.

bitcoinrigs.com's "Professional Rig": $1 more expensive than your cheapest model (which seems equivalent - both use one 6990).

However... their cheapest model is only $899.

Took me twenty seconds in Google. I used "mining rig site:bitcoin.org" to search, and clicked on the first link.

Dammit. I just hunted this thread down so I could satoshi-ise the spammer's signature spam.

I can't remember how the signature looked, but it was something like:

satoshi gold!
More satoshi satoshi!
Yet more satoshi gold satoshi!

Web of trust in this context refers to the user rating system used at bitcoin-otc, a market for over-the-counter trading.

One useful aspect of the discussion on measuring wood and metal in AS is that it got me thinking about how the US regulates this compared to metric countries. As I understand it, the US doesn't regulate it: folk are free to use AS or metric as they choose (possibly subject to "not misleading people by using dubious measurements"?)

This seems to me to be the best approach. We can't anticipate what needs different groups of users with different customs will have. All we can do is expect that those needs will differ. A group selling a boat to another group in Somalia, pointing RPGs and AK47s at each other while they wait for the transaction to confirm, is going to use different units to an individual making a micropayment to buy a postage stamp online in Germany.

If we start creating our own units - satoshis, bitcents, whatever - we create something additional to understand before bitcoin can be used. If we stick with The One True Unit (BTC) we can leave creation of units to the end user, and they can use what they feel comfortable with.

Just to be pedantic: Wikipedia considers Alexa ratings credible. (It's not GitHub's Wikipedia page, it's a Wikipedia page about GitHub: Wikipedia editors control it, not the GitHub developers. For the same reason, the Wikipedia article on bitcoin would struggle to become an advertisement for bitcoin - Wikipedia editors unconnected to bitcoin would resist).