The benefits? Realistically: many sleepless nights, headaches, heartaches, trolling, frustration, loss of money and the very slim chance of making a profit...

I wouldn't have said this 6 months ago, but right now I think there is room for more pools with the hashrate jump and the new technical challenges of keeping up with the hardware revolution. That said, the effort required to get up to speed as a meaningful alternative pool is massive and requires a lot of know how of both regular server and networking scalability issues, as well as unique bitcoin mining and its protocol scalability issues.

The 2 usual reasons for this are: Mixed versions of different driver files installed, and virus software interfering.

New version: 2.11.2, 9th March 2013

Keep on quashing bugs in 2.11 series and developing further, hopefully a stable release soonish (this one if we're lucky!).


Human readable changelog:

Numerous fixes to the parallel pool test startup code which should work robustly now, including fixes for crashes and failure to fall back to pools when they come back to life.
Ability to start work on a backup pool much sooner once a stratum pool gets an interrupted connection.
Hopefully fixes for API related crashes.
Fixed a memory leak with GPU share submission.
More named threads on operating systems that support them.
Make AMD APP SDK 2.8 GPUs use diablo kernel for non-Tahiti chipsets.
Fixed an ancient bug where if you have multiple OpenCL platforms installed (eg Intel and AMD) with no devices on the highest numbered one, cgminer would refuse to work on any devices.


Full changelog:

- Whitelist AMD APP SDK 2.8 for diablo kernel.
- Cope with the highest opencl platform not having usable devices.
- Fix memory leak with share submission on GPU work structures as discovered by
twobitcoins.
- usb_cleanup() without locking.
- Use curl_easy_cleanup to close any open stratum sockets. (Spotted by luke-Jr)
- Show pool number in switch message
- Don't start testing any pools with the watchpool thread if any of the test
threads are still active.
- Set sockd to false should curl setup fail on stratum.
- Close any open sockets when reusing a curl handle and reopen the socket
whenever we're retrying stratum.
- Set pool died on failed testing to allow idle flag and time to be set.
- Remove unused pthread_t typedefs from struct pool.
- Perform pool_resus on all pools that are found alive with the test pool
threads.
- Use pool_unworkable in select_balanced as well.
- Differentiate pool_unusable from pool_unworkable.
- Keep a connection open on higher priority stratum pools to fail back to them.
- Rename threads according to what pool they're associated with as well.
- Set the wrong bool in pool_active
- Start the stratum thread only if we successfully init and authorise it,
otherwise unset the init flag.
- Make the initialisation of the stratum thread more robust allowing the
watchpool thread safe access to it after the stratum thread is started.
- API no longer ignore send() status
- API make the main socket non-static

Looks like a real bug, thanks. Will fix it upstream.

Working hard to fix remaining showstopper bugs in 2.11... new version out today sometime.

It was simply low level humour postulating on what the pool would do with the money which obviously you did not find funny.

I understand people are very touchy with respect to transactions on this forum given the number of scams constantly going on, but lumping me with them given my history with bitcoin and free software when I'm not running any business venture and have only ever delivered code in response to donations is a bit harsh.

On the other hand, the mere presence of this forum thread may well change the pool's response to this transaction error.

Glad to see us Australians are not left out of this sort of "action".  

Working on it. There're some fixes in git already which should prevent the crash.

Eleuthria has been an upstanding and respectable member of the bitcoin community for as long as I can remember, and I am touched he gave back the transaction fees he received by mistake in that block that was mined.

No

No idea, I only ever got 575kH out of my 7970s but I had 4 of them and ran them at stock memclocks with 4GB ram.

I'd say it's unlikely, but I don't really play with scrypt much any more. Perhaps you just need more system ram.

Heh whoops, I just got a crash so it's not quite there yet  

LOL.

My kids have just reached an age where they're quoting this too so it's very topical.  Thanks 

That's the main network difficulty it uses to calculate, btc, so it's the real thing. Your best share should show you something real big.

New release: v2.11.1, March 7th 2013

Keep building on the changes required for BFL SC when it comes out, adding new features and fixing bugs with the new 2.11 branch... This is still the unstable development version but is proving quite stable for my testing so far.


Human readable changelog:

Faster startup now when pools are slow, connecting to the first pool available!
Fixed some stratum bugs which would lead to weird disconnects when pools were slow.
Improved the mining resume support for stratum.
Added the show message feature of stratum (which I don't believe any pool uses yet?).
Lots of other minor stratum fixes and improvements.
Added the --hotplug (time) feature if you have hardware that has random stalls every time the usb devices are probed (default is 5 seconds).
Extra API features.
Random bugfixes.


Full changelog:

- Shorten the time before keepalive probes are sent out and how frequently
they're sent with stratum curls.
- Only set stratum auth once to prevent multiple threads being started.
- Display select return value on select fail in stratum thread.
- Clear the socket of anything in the receive buffer if we're going to retry
connecting.
- Allow pools to be resuscitated on first startup by the watchpool thread.
- Check all pools simultaneously at startup switching to the first alive one to
speed up startup.
- Clear just the socket buffer when we don't care what is left in a stratum
socket.
- Clear the stratum socket whenever we are closing it since the buffer is going
to be reused.
- Do not continue work from a stratum pool where the connection has been
interrupted.
- Reset stratum_notify flag on suspend_stratum as well.
- Close any sockets opened if we fail to initiate stratum but have opened the
socket.
- Close any existing stratum socket if we are attempting to restart stratum so
the pool knows the connection has gone.
- Show mechanism of stratum interruption if select times out.
- Make stratum connection interrupted message higher priority to be visible at
normal logging levels.
- Implement client.show_message support for stratum.
- API add 'Network Difficulty' to 'coin'
- Setup BFLSC support
- API use control_lock when switching pools
- Make sure to retry only once with noresume support for stratum.
- Instead of keeping track of when the last work item was generated to keep
stratum connections open, keep them open if any shares have been submitted
awaiting a response.
- usbutils.c copy full size to 'Last Command'
- configure - set USE_USBUTILS when usbutils is required and use it in the code
- Clear last pool work on switching pools if the current pool supports local
work generation or we are in failover only mode.
- make rw locks: mining_thr_lock and devices_lock
- Release MMQ device only once (not 4 times)
- api.c fix MSG overlap
- Hotplug - allow setting interval via --hotplug or API
- curses - fix - put a dev_width inside #ifdef
- usb_cleanup() use correct locking mechanism
- Implement and use usb_cleanup() on shutdown or restart
- miner.php report 'Last Valid Work' as time before request
- API - return Last Valid Work
- api -> drv
- ZTX bug set missing drv_id

Yes. What pool and protocol? Some pools have been really struggling of late so it's the likely culprit.

Ahahaha you so funny 

I wouldn't say "guessing". It's great marketing getting people to pay for something in advance where getting it first counts so much, even if it's not likely to be available for another 6 months after you claim.