Good ol' sirky.

Mine were shipped on Wednesday July 27th, 2011 to the U.S. (West Coast) via Royal Mail.
Arrived on Wednesday August 3rd, 2011 -- So 5 business days.  Royal Mail claims 5-7 business days 'on average' to the U.S. so I was a bit on the 'earlier' side.

Rounds look great and all arrived!  Thanks, Mick!  I'll save up a bit more and order from your second batch!

Cheers,
Kermee

EDIT: Quick and dirty picture from my aging Blackberry camera...

Ok, server is now free, no fees. It will have to survive off donations alone!

That said Donations would be nice!

A higher score, yes but on the other hand it also lowers the chance to be included in the payout.

Example: dif10 --> diff40, N=difficulty*1

diff10 shares have a score of 1/10, diff40 shares of 1/40.

Once let's say 10 diff40 shares have been submitted, a block is found.
Now we sum up 10/40 from diff40 shares and 7 (0.75 "left") diff10 shares.
The 7 diff10 shares get paid 70% of the block, the 10 diff40 shares get paid 25% and 5% have to be otherwise distributed (10 and 40 are too small numbers for this, however current difficulties still are - but increases are rarely 4-fold). Here you could even use prop. between these 17 shares (maybe also scored with these scores), put it in some kind of jackpot or whatever is fitting to your pool.


This means there are 2 different approaches to PPLNS:
fixed N --> no scoring needed, payout variance changes with difficulty
dynamic N (N is dependent on difficulty) --> scoring needed, payout variance is constant

The biggest issue I see with dynamic N, is that you can not predict how big your active database might get.
Still it might be the preferred method of miners, since you can in-/decrease variance at will at the cost of delayed payouts (it takes longer until you have the full payout in your hands).
Fixed N on the other hand might scare away random miners, as variance is already an issue for them and it only increases with growing difficulty.

In any case I would really recommend to any PPLNS pool operator to give out estimates how much can be earned per share in percentages rather than in BTC (xx% chance of not being paid, yy% chance of being paid once, zz% chance of being paid twice etc.) + a sum below and maybe even an overview how this correlates with real data already submitted. Already earned/pending amounts of course can be in BTC.

Could you paste a link to Meni's suggestion then? I recall lower difficulty being devalueted with the reasoning that the current block (found in the higher diff.) was more difficult to find and this means that shares from a lower diff. are worth less. I could be wrong though... I don't want to say any more until I have read through the suggestion again, but I can't seem to find it.


Oh and on a side note: I'd love to have chapters markings in the document! I guess you're using LaTeX, Meni? Please embed a library to automatically create these, thanks!

As far as I understood the "difficulty scored N" value, it devaluates shares (a bit) that were submitted during lower difficulty rounds if difficulty changes.

This can be done with a static N as well - I don't see the need to change N at all other than to make sure the percentages of getting paid for a share are constant (if you set N to 1 million fixed and difficulty goes up to 10 millions the ration between N and difficulty goes from ~1/2 to 1/10 - meaning you are less likely to be paid for a share - but you get paid proportionally more, once one gets paid).

Any exploitability there (especially since at the end of the 2016 blocks, it's easy to estimate what the next difficulty will be) is bad in my opinion and I fear there IS some exploitation potential left, if N can change.