Was just able to do a withdrawal.  Whatever was broken seems to have been fixed.

Same problem for me.  Final verification says insufficient funds.

Lots of blocks being found by 118.244.207.xxx recently.  They could have been a big part of the hashing increase.  In fact, the "popular" pools seem to only have had a modest increase in hashing power but a lot more blocks seem to be found by other miners.

Finally, 3 blocks in the last 3 hours including a 6 minute block.  Hopefully we'll get a break from the 8+ hr blocks for a little while.  Knock wood (and don't jinx it).

So was block 278333 ours or not?  It shows up on blockchain.info but isn't on the Bitminter list.

Oddly, after another very long wait for a block Bitminter seems to have found one about 25 minutes ago, but it seems to have taken down the whole pool.  This is only the second block in in the last 1.5 days and it's not even clear what's happening now.  Certainly "luck" is involved but wow, this is very unlucky!  Hopefully everything is back soon and normal luck returns.

I've had a couple of failovers to backup pools in the last few days.  But they are infrequent and do not last long.

I'm trying to set worker's minimum difficult but it doesn't seem to work.  For example, I can set it to 384 in the worker settings but when I run cgminer I see it set as 512.  Is there something to do other than set the worker setting?

There were definitely problems a little while ago, connection related.  But it all seems to be fixed and operating normally now.

Anyone having trouble connecting to Slush?  I have one miner that has been running fine for awhile and continues to work with Slush.  I have another miner that was temporarily taken offline.  It can't connect to the worker it was using before.  It also can't connect to "new" workers.  It *can* connect to other workers that weren't in use but had been used by other devices before... only Slush never credits those workers for any work!  Pointed the miner over to BTCGuild and it is working fine.

That was a suspicious auction.  Not only did he steal your pictures but he had none of his own.  The auction was also taken down several times by eBay because it wasn't allowing Paypal and other reasons.  I hope the buyer wasn't scammed and actually gets the product (or used Paypal for protection if it was a scam).

Not clear why a lot of alt-coins exist other than as trading vehicles (think arbitrage opportunities).  There is a huge mining race for BTC.  It seems like the alt-coins do not have the same level of race.  All the new HW is for BTC only and so perhaps there are still opportunities for GPU mining of alt-coins.  You could then exchange into BTC of course.  But unless commerce directly accepts anything other than BTC the alt's will have limited use.  I've heard some people talk about LTC as silver to BTC's gold, but not sure if that analogy works since we no longer even have a gold standard for currency.  Besides, the metals have other uses, e.g. jewelry, electronics, etc.

$10K @ 3?  You're rich.  Cash out a little bit and let the rest ride.