...except it's in Meta now. That's one tricksy, wandering thread

Valid point. He never said different ISPs... please accept my apologies.
I don't seem to be thinking straight, it's 01:30 AM here, goodnight.

That's PRECISELY why I'm always bashing Windows on these forums.
No, I don't think Microsoft is the devil, I am using Windows 7 on my laptop right now.
I've put in a lot of work hacking and customizing it and I'm very happy with how it works.

The issue is, Windows is a general-purpose OS, written so that your grandmother is able to use it, the temp office girls are able to use it, and a 8-year-old is able to use it.
It is just horribly out of place in a heavily task-oriented mining rig.

DAT, a couple of days ago I helped out a guy here who thought his mining rig was crashing and powering off.
As it turned out, it was going into freaking STANDBY after 30 minutes.
That poor soul was ripping his mining rig apart and rebuilding it for a whole darned day and definitely NOT because he's an idiot.
He's non-technical, to be sure, but his mistake was choosing a bad tool for the job.

Really? OP reports having tried two different PCs and browsers.

We're quite the cgminer evangelists, huh DAT?

I'll just add this:
An ancient sysadmin technique is to evade a non-trivial bug rather than tackle it head-on.
Cgminer allows you to solve quite a few problems gracefully, using just one piece of code.

Critical is what also came to my mind
There's no guarantees their software is bug-free. Sad but true.
Thanks for the post, I'll be checking one against the other from now on when looking up a transaction or address.

It might be some weird spin-lock problem in AMD's software.
Which driver and SDK version are you using, BTW?

My suggestion is, download cgminer and give it a try.
Just one instance of the miner will support those cards, each of them can be individually overclocked and temperature-controlled.

EDIT :: I posted my reply on SE as well.

I beg your pardon, kind sir, but for the life of me I cannot find a difference
If the problem persists, try purging your browser cache...

That's pretty much it. If you'd created multiple receiving addresses, you'd see at a glance whether or not they were there.
...or you could debug bitcoin-qt

You DON'T need the blockchain at all. Just grab the wallet.dat and you're good to go. BTW, did you check the number of downloaded blocks against my value?

I find a pop-up an interference.
As I'd said time and time again, since the pool has no way of knowing what I MEANT to do, it is in no position to assume the role of the nosy transaction TSA-agent.

I'm obliged, DAT

As to using TOR, if you were able to contact the outside world and download the entire blockchain (that is 162055 blocks), I can't see how it could have been harmful.

EDIT :: Damn it, just lost two miners! It must be some connectivity issue as the remote router doesn't respond either. I won't be able to bring them back online until Monday so let's hope it's the ISP who messed up :<

Wow, been through hell to purchase those bitcoins?

Firstly, unless plausible deniability is what you're striving at, there is a much simpler approach to securing the wallet. The client now has the option to encrypt the wallet using a passphrase. Select any decent passphrase and you're good to go.

Secondly, the first thing which comes to my mind is please double-check whether the bitcoin client is actually using the wallet you think it is using. If for some reason (file permissions?) the client can't read your symlinked wallet, it'll generate a new one silently. I had such an issue once with a symlinked config file when I messed up ln syntax but failed to notice the mistake.

If you're absolutely sure the client is using the symlinked wallet file (have verified it empirically), consider running the client with the --rescan parameter.

If this was the first time you attempted to use bitcoin this way, you should have used a test monkey bit-cent. Free bit-cents can be had here: http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

No.

For the miner it doesn't matter what reward system the pool is using.
The difference is, with PPS you get steady payouts while proportional, score-based, dgm, ppnls, and others introduce much more variance.
Over time, payouts from all those reward systems should converge at the same value.

The miner should select their pool to minimize pool fees and stale shares.
How many stale shares you will get is influenced by your network connection to the pool, the algorithm the pool uses to prioritize LP messages, or whether the pool has grown to its limit.

There are some very subtle interactions between different software miners and pool implementations, for example:
    I'm using cgminer on my mining rigs.
    I have excellent connectivity to Eligius and always get <1% stale shares when using Eligius as a primary pool.
    However, when Eligius is chosen as one of the backup pools and receives very little traffic, my stale shares skyrocket up to 30%!

Another advice is never to choose a pool based on its recent good luck: these lucky blocks have already been mined and they don't influence the rate of future block mining at all.
OTOH, there have been pools constantly stricken with bad luck - this may indicate issues with the pool's code.

Obviously, staying up to speed with the Pools subforum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=41.0) pays off.
No one should mine using pool receiving very little attention from their owners, as Arsbitcoin - once an excellent pool - currently is.

"Safety measures" is what you wanted to use.
http://translate.google.com/ doesn't hurt.


Answer that: how is MtGox supposed to know that you ACCIDENTALLY missed a key as opposed to using a very low rate rate ON PURPOSE?
People do crazy trades eg. when trying to manipulate the btc/usd rate. Is the purpose of a bitcoin exchange to interfere with their users' trading?
Does your bank tell you what they think about a bank transfer you are sending? No, because it's none of their business. The same goes for exchanges.

Don't trade when you're in a hurry, sick, tired, or intoxicated

If you haven't set the AlwaysUnloadDll registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer, Windows might very well leave the library in RAM.
Windows Vista and 7 do tremendous amounts of caching and unless unused system RAM is very low they won't automatically unload for efficiency's sake.
That's a nice behavior for an OS to be actually making use of those gigabytes of inexpensive RAM.
I can't find the specific kb article right now; I'll update with a link if I find it.

Wow, you're going to have to use radiator surface the size of a football field
Going with so many pumps, water blocks, all that watercooling stuff... I'm afraid even 20k$ might be a low estimate.

Nor should you. Ventilation is pretty non-existent, you're raising the temperature inside that little box slowly killing the capacitors.

Bitcoin mining is an extremely strenuous process for the hardware, it can be compared to running OCCT or Furmark.
With that machine, making a few bitcoins will take you a month of 24/7 grind, realistically speaking.

If you don't believe me, take a glance at your GPU specs: (http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9400M-G.11949.0.html)
Contrast them with normal (non-mobile) GPU cards at your leisure.

I'm not trying to get you down, I'm pointing out that you're attempting to use your Mac mini far out of spec.
It was never designed for mining and has neither the processing power, cooling, nor endurance required for the task.
To put it simple, it's perfectly inadequate.

EDITED::Uh-oh, is your GPU a GeForce 9400M? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Mini#Intel-based_Mac_Mini)

I hate to break your heart but that machine just doesn't belong in the mining universe.

Jonny is very technically sound indeed but so are the hardware secrets guys (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com)
There is one aspect to PSU reviews where they are unmatched: they do crazy overload tests.

Diablo miner is being optimized for GCN (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1721.0)
With time, the drivers will be refined as well. There should be plenty of unused potential in the new architecture.

Check these threads out:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57410.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56630.0

Mind you, it's not pure performance that matters but power efficiency (performance for any given power usage).