Somebody once made a calculation based on the fact that you'd need at least 1 erg of energy to represent a 1 bit transition. Based on this they estimated that it would be impossible to cycle a 256 bit counter through all its possible combinations using the available enery in the solar system. I.e., even at 0 degrees Kelvin there isn't enough energy in the solar system to cycyle through a 256-bit counter, let alone compute 2^256 hashes.

I wish I still had a link to the reference.

In Windows you can turn on EFS and/or Bitlocker if your version supports these features. For most people it is probably an overkill to encrypt both at the file system and disk levels. Personally I think that Bitlocker is not practical to use if your hardware does not have TPM.

TOR is too slow for doing regular daily stuff. I don't really feel the need to wait for my packets to bounce around the world in exchange for a little privacy (at this time).

I wish I had continued CPU mining ...

Late last year I started CPU mining on a spare server as a joke and solved 2 blocks before Windows update promptly rebooted the system.  I never bothered to restart the miner and I forgot all about BitCoin until last month. That was the easiest $1,700 I've ever made. Oh well ....

Kind of like a reversion from the new back to the old Turkish Lira.

I was in financial software back then and glad they did it, because some of the banking transactions in the old turkish Lira had so many zeros behind them that were at risk of overflowing the variables we used in our softwre to store them. (We only could use fixed decimal datatypes to avoid round off errors).

Ok, thanks. I wasn't sure that this was a symtom of that. I probably should auto-restart my poclbm miners every few hours to correct this type of potential problem.

My BTC Guild miners did not pick up the following 2 new blocks that were picked up by miners connected to other pools:

03/06/2011 19:10:35, long poll: new block 000002a2a5aaadae
03/06/2011 19:14:59, long poll: new block 00001239399053ae

Time zone is ET. While this was happening the pool was happily accepting a bunch of (possibly stale) work.

Was this just me or did everyone else on BTC Guild miss these 2 blocks?

Depends on your configuration. If you set up pushpool to listen on a publicly accessible IP/port then it can still be directly attacked by people who know the IP address and port. They might, for example, send a flood of tcp connects that just linger until you run out of available connections for valid miners. This doesn't attack require ICMP.

If you want it to be an invite-only pool, consider allowing only access via SSH tunnels. Each indidual user account also authenticates the SSH tunnel.

It would reduce the possibility of DDOS attacks significantly. Further, because you know which user account authenticated each tunnel if garbage traffic starts coming in from any one tunnel you would know who is responsible and deauthorize that user.

The SSH server is still susceptible to DDOS but you can easily put it on a separate box/datacenter from your pool server, e.g. on an small Amazon EC2 cloud instance which could be scaled up to multiple instances during a DDOS attack. That way your pool server is protected and nobody has to know where it is physically located.

I am mining on Server 2008 R2 x64 boxes and have no problems installing generic ATI drivers.

I've also tried CPU mining on an R710 (dual hex core) using minerd.exe without any drivers and got something like 24 mhash/s with 11 threads, if I recall correctly. OP might want to take this route.

#1 for sure.

Choice is good.

I am frequently out and about accessing websites on a netbook and doing my best to conserve power so that the battery lasts me until I get home. It gets very annoying when a web page goes into some javascript loop and the CPU fan starts spinning and I know my battery is being drained at a high rate. In this day and age many websites present dynamic content with ajax, xmlhttp and what not, so noscript is not a viable option (kind of like driving a car without heat or a/c). The right thing for website operators to do is to present the user a choice.

Something weird is going on with the Bitcoin network. It took 30 minutes for a payment to even show up on block explorer after the BTC disappeared from my deepbit account. Usually it is instantaneous.

Conceptually that may seem to make sense, but what would you quote the prices of your goods in .... US dollars? That would make "price inflation" a third-order effect because the prices that you are measuring are now dependent on the money supply of the base currency (USD) as well as a whole bunch of other things such as the price of oil, market manipulation, government regulation, etc.).

In the same way that there is a limit to the number of atoms on the earth.

Still down?

Were they using Comcast business class for their internet connection? That service is not meant for hosting sites with with a lot of traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Comcast pulled the plug on them because all the getwork() requests were saturating the node.

Anyway hope the new server comes up soon as I like this pool.

Currently about $0.198/kWh in NYC for Residential rates (supply, delivery and other BS charges).