Came across http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/? on Hacker News, I wonder if people would be more motivated to become Wikipedia editors if they knew they could initially compose their articles on Devtome and get paid to do it, so that they they could refine them and get feedback on hem and such before braving the supposedly now somewhat edit-hostil Wikipedia?

-MarkM-

Also though the ssh might not ship with the same username/password combo as the web interface's admin/admin combo, as I could not log into mine using ssh even after enabling ssh...

-MarkM-

Yike I don't want to crimp my own cables. I picked up a bunch of cheap old power supplies and am looking for adapters to use with them.

The place I got them has converters that will convert one four-pin ATX to one six-pin PCI-e and it looks like I will have enough without needing to split one into two.

Any idea how much actual power the boards use? Most of the power supplies are in the 200 to 350 watts range I think, hopefully each of their four-pin ATX connectors can power one board.

This is the first I heard of needing some special kind of USB cable, don't they come with cables? I paid for the whole thing, assembly, testing, no DIY...

All the boards and hubs and so on I got in the past all came with whatever connector cables they needed for data. These don't?

-MarkM-

What exactly are those cables, then? I don't see 4-pin ATX type there. What is the one plugged into itself? Six-pin PCI-e extension cable?

I have been trying to prepare for my boards, I have a bunch of power supplies that have four or five four-pin ATX plugs that used to be for old-style IDE hard-drives, I was going to get a bunch of converters to turn those into six-pin PCI-e, is that what I need?

What is that little cable, for the fan? What does it need from the power supply? A local shop has a lot of things that splice in a tree pin female fan connector with only two actual pins in it between a male and female ATX four-pin so as to allow the four-pin still to be useable while the fan connector also gets in there. Would that work?

-MarkM-

Conventional "mining" is a bit intense for a laptop, something like http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining would probably be much better.

-MarkM-

Maybe there is a way to bridge the gap between people who like to just play a game for a short span of time on lunchbreaks or whatever and hardcore people who either live in their mom's basement playing games full-time or make full use of their game-client's scripting ability to equip their characters with scripts sophisticated enough to keep them doing productive stuff 24/7 or as close to 24/7 as possible.

So far we have mostly been looking at catering to the people who miss "CPU mining", by setting up something that CPUs should be good at but botnets and GPUs and FPGAs and ASICs not particularly good at.

That is the stuff I wrote about at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

However I think maybe players who are not willing to leave characters running 24/7 but instead will log in do something and log out again might actually be able to compete, at least if they are willing to prey upon the 24/7 folk.

The problem of player versus player combat enters in at that point though, since presumably if you want to log in, raid some productive bunch of characters who have been slaving away 24/7 piling up resources, and log out again you will likely prefer that all your potential victims are all forced to be in a mode that allows player versus player combat, so thay you can charge in and slaughter them all for experience as well as loot the stuff they have been working on.

So maybe there will still be a tension here between the preferences of the 24/7 worker/crafter types who probably would prefer players cannot attack other players, and the lunchbreak raid types who, I am guessing here, might really want to be able to attack any and all other players they choose to?

What do you think?

The default mode of CoffeeMUD is that player versus player is optional. Both players have to opt in to it, and both can opt back out at any time.

The configuration system though can be set up to make the player versus player decision irreversible, so that once a character turns it on they can never turn it off.

Also what levels of character are allowed to PvP what other levels can also be configured, the default is four levels up and down.

Most likely we need feedback from people actually interested in using such settings in order to determine which ones would be worth setting up servers for, so I am interested in what kinds of PvP settings people actually want.

Note however though that there remains another way to "prey upon" 24/7 workers, and that is simply to be upper class or ruling class, basically fork out the coins it takes to set yourself up at a large scale where all the puny little labourers' pathetic little piles of produce need to all be put together into huge wagon-trains or starship-loads of goods before your character deigns to notice them, so basically you log in, see if anyone has a million of anything ready to sell, or fifty thousand tons of something so you can put it into a Freeciv-scale "freight" or "caravan" unit to ship off somewhere, do some wheeler-dealing on that kind of scale and log out again...

-MarkM-

Using the web interface?

Or did you go in with ssh and fiddle with the cgminer timeouts and such?

(I have only been using the web interface as the ssh does not seem to like the username/password the web interface shipped with.)

-MarkM-

0.97 seems to hate p2pool less than earlier versions did, but still there is too much hate, cannot reasonably use p2pool still.

Although not improved enough to work right with p2pool yet, 0.97 has overall been an improvement for me.

-MarkM-

Will the things work right with p2pool? The KnC stuff doesn't seem to like p2pool, though their latest firmware fix seemed to make it hate p2pool less than it had before.

-MarkM-

I think maybe if they truly don't care they simply don't get those coins.

For example at Bitparking's mmpool you only tell it the addresses of the coins you want, those you don't want you simply do not get...

Plus how many pools even merge Ixcoin at all? Only bitparking ever merged I0coin and back then it was also the only one merging Ixcoin too...

So maybe doublec, the admin of bitparking, has all the coins!

Most people who merged mine do so at a pool that only mines bitcoins and namecoins, I think? Maybe Devcoins too in the case of Eligius?

-MarkM-

To me they just aren't worth enough to be worth the bother of selling them. How much an hour would one be making adding up the minutes it'd take to fire up the daemon find out how many coins you have send them to an exchange wait for them to be confirmed there and sell them? So I would expect people would wait until they have tens of thousands of them before caring about whether they are worth the bother of selling them...

I actually think I had about 20,000 of them way back when, so maybe if I took the trouble to dig them up I could get $200 or more for them. But why bother? Unless I am desperate for the bucks I might as well just forget about them for now, who knows maybe some day when bitcoins themselves aren't selling for such crazy-low prices (less than $1000 each still, hard to believe but true, amazing!) maybe the other merged coins will be worth a dollar or more each and actually be worth digging up to sell...

-MarkM-

I am still working on the "CPU mining" idea, MUDgaard was up to 124 active characters logged in last night when for whatever unknown reason it decided to log everyone out and sulk. I have restarted it and the players are gradually finding out and getting themselves logged in again, hopefully this time we can get well past that number logged in before it sulks again...

Oh and it is maybe not as bad as it sounds, as it had actually been at 124 logged on for a few days before it threw them all off so I don't think it was caused by the number of players. I think there are probably stil some rooms with insane numbers of items in them left over from before I imposed a limit of ten thousand items per room; it seems to handle 10,000 per room okay but it used to have problems all the time before I put that limit in place from people putting sometimes well over a hundred thousand items in a room. The mysql back end didn't seem to like it, we managed to crash the mysql at least twice back then.

-MarkM-

$200 per bitcoin is already cheap. It is amazing the price has managed to be kept so low for so long, maybe the ASIC goldrush had something to do with it or something.

-MarkM-

I didn't know it was on any exchanges. Which ones is it on?

-MarkM-

Take a look at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

Even a raspberry pi or a beaglebone or something on that scale can be very competitive, and it still looks like it will resist botnets quite well for quite a while yet.

You should always bear in mind that pretty much any "make money on the internet" scheme is only a certain size of pie so the more people who start taking a slice of the pie the less pie they each get. Thus ideally you want things that the masses of computer-illiterate Windows-user types are going to think is too complicated or too hard or not GUI-enough; as once even the most illiterate such users can just "plug and play" the pie gets sliced up into so many parts the amount each slicer gets is so tiny as to hardly be worth bothering with.

This system takes advantage of that by deliberately using a text-type API without the overhead of graphics, so that you can do more stuff with less processing power and bandwidth and, maybe more important, the people who insist everything has to be GUI/graphical will turn up their noses at it, thus leaving more of the pie for people who are literate.

-MarkM-

When I got my Blackarrow Lancelot FPGAs I could not find a paperclip so I used a lighter to burn the plastic off of the ends of one of the twist-ties used to tie power cables and USB cables and such, it has worked fine for many months. (A quick scrape with a single scissor-blade clears the ashes of the plastic away nicely exposing shiny wire.)

The only reason I actually kept digging today to find an actual paperclip, albeit plastic coated so it too needed application of a lighter to clear the ends (and scrape off the ash with a scissor blade) was because my Saturn kept turning off the power supply with firmware 0.91 so I thought maybe the twist-tie, which is much thinner wire so needs doubling up or more at the ends to get it to fit nicely, was not working. But actually the twist-tie was not at fault.

You probably got a twist-tie with your power supply, tying the power cable and maybe one tying the other cables too. If not check your garbage bags some brands use paper-covered wire twist-ties...

-MarkM-

I removed the ribbon cable from one ASIC board and the thing worked, so I tried putting that one back and removing the other and the thing still worked. So I figured maybe the firmware, 0.91, was using so much power the power supply shut down. So while it was working (that is, while only one ribbon as in place) I upgraded to firmware 0.96, now I can leave both ASIC boards ribbon cables connected and the thing still works, but the status page only shows it getting 68 to 70 gigahashes per second.

I cannot log in on ssh even after enabling ssh, the username admin, password admin that worked to get into the web interface isn't working for ssh it seems.

I am now trying it with just one connected and it only says 17 gigahashes so I am about to turn it off again and try just the other one to see how many it says for that one.

...The other one says 27 gigahashes.

So I changed pool to Bitparking's mmpool. That same module shows 131 gigahashes. So I am going to connect both ribbons again and see how mmpool works with both ASICs connected...

... 272 gigahashes.

KnC's bastardised version of cgminer doesn't work right with p2pool it seems...

-MarkM-

UPS tried hard to stop me getting my package, refusing to let me settle my customs debts with legal tender, insisting on a certified cheque even though they themselves had already deliberately told me not to to come by until after five pm so they knew damn well it was too late to go get such a cheque, sending me to non existent credit unions to try to get such a cheque and so on, but finally by bumping it upstairs along the 800 number I got them to accept a debit card.

Both fans were off (it is a Saturn), but I had gotten the special screwdrives so I was able to clip them back in place.

I momentarily even saw the web interface, but when I told it my stratum URL for my p2pool it somehow told the power supply to shut down.

To get the power supply (a Cooler Master Ex2treme 725) to start again I have to remvoe the paperclip, so it seems to tell the supply to ignore the paperclip and shut down until the paperclip is removed and re-inserted.

The Saturn comes on for a minute or two, but before I can even ping it a bright white light shines and it apparently tells the power supply to shut down again.

The first bunch of times I thought maybe my paperclip was losing connection upon warming up or something but no it really does seem to have to be removed before it will work again.

Nothing is obviously disconnected or broken, and watching the white light more carefully along with the fans it looks like the fans do not get shut down the instant the white light shines, some number of seconds later it shines again at lower intensity just for an instant, or something else right near it flashes for a moment, and then the fans shut down, including the power supply's fan.

Any idea what-all that behavior might be trying to convey?

-MarkM-

This time UPS did phone back, they say I can go pick the thing up after 5pm at their depot in Dartmouth.

Why they couldn't do that back on Friday they didn't say.

-MarkM-

I hope DHL works better for you guys than UPS is working for me.

Friday I kept checking their website all night, by morning it still said the thing had eventually left Quebec having been checked by customs at the airport then to some town then checked by customs again then back to the airport then finally on route.

So I went downstairs to put instructions on the front door even though it apparently had not yet arrived in Halifax/Dartmouth yet.

But on the door was a notice saying they already attempted delivery.

I walked a couple blocks to the local UPS store because the website still showed it only leaving Quebec not yet in Nova Scotia.

They claimed its nothing to do with them, had me phone an 800 number, that said they will text message the driver. Took my phone number to call me back with instructions how to go pick it up or when the driver could be back with the package.

Monday morning, still no return phone call, I checked the sign was still on the door and that the website said it was on a truck on its way to be delivered.

A while later the website suddenly says a second delivery attempt has been made. I checked the door, no sign anyone has been here at all.

So now I have phoned the 800 number again, they claim within an hour I will hear back by phone from dispatch with instructions where to come myself to pick it up over in Dartmouth today...

They said their records show the person I talked to on the phone on friday did not escalate the thing at all, no message was sent by them to the driver nor the dispatch centre.

Not impressed with UPS at all...

I don't know who everyone else had been sending me stuff by, maybe FedEx or something, other packages in the past I have always been able to pick up here in Halifax after 4:30 pm when the truck finishes its route. UPS's canned recording claims one cannot do that, apparently their normal deal is you have to wait until they have made three separate attempts to deliver it on three different busness days and maybe only then might get to go pick it up, or maybe not even then since it also said something about sending it back to sender on same day as the third attempt. Really crappy "service"...

-MarkM-