Don't listen to the haters. I mine a lot of sha256 coins, have a lot of fun, and make some profit too. For example, eMark was really hot last week-- it was trading for .00001 BTC at one point. Bitcoin has been at the top of the heap this week, but nothing wrong with mining Bitcoin for a while, and that always changes. A new one shoots to the top daily or weekly; just keep an eye on Coinwarz.
In fact the only reason I stopped mining eMark is because I can't figure out how to solo mine on my Linux box. I use the exact same config files as Windows, everything is as it should be, but I always get "No servers were found that could be used to get work from." If anyone can give me a hint as to what's going wrong it'd be much appreciated; here's
the Stack Exchange post with all the details.