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Comment: Welcome to the club.. (Score 1) 151

by lucifron (#39061845) Attached to: Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users

Norway (the promised land of freedom and liberty, my ass) enacted a similar law last april, and we're implementing it this very monent.

We've already seen mass-dna-screening using phone based location data (before the law was even in legislation; seems the police already had access to this kind of data..), and lobbying for making retained data accessible to rights holder organizations without a court process (our law lumps cell phone tracking and internet access tracking together).

Comment: How to 'mine' bitcoins (Score 1) 280

by lucifron (#35588068) Attached to: Google Engineer Releases Open Source Bitcoin Client

Thought I'd write up a quick 'getting started' guide for anyone that wants to give bitcoin mining a go:

#1 - Download the bitcoin application from bitcoin.org, install and fire it up. It will connect and sync with the p2p network, downloading approximately 114700 blocks.

#2 - Download and install the OpenCL driver for your graphics card / OS.
You might also need the full SDK, my drivers were supposed to include OpenCL support, but the GPU miner still didn't work. For AMD/ATI cards, this link should work:

#3 - Download and unpack "PyOpenCL bitcoin miner" somewhere. You'll find windows binaries here (7zip-compressed):

#4 - Using the bitcoin client, create a new 'receiving address' which you call 'mining income' to track payments.

#5 - Sign up for a mining pool. You'd rather have a few cents an hour than wait months for a random shot at 50 BTC. I'd go with:
as they're free, while the others charge a fee of 2-3%. Wallet ID is the thing you created in step 4.

You'll find the other pools here:

#6 - Stuff the following into a .bat file and run it. Might want to try from the console first, to make sure all is ok.

start /DD:\bin\bitcoin\poclbm poclbm.exe -f 60 --host=bitcoinpool.com --port=8334 --user=username --pass=password -d0 -v -w 128

This of course assumes you're on windows, and installed to a directory named d:\bin\bitcoin\poclbm..

Setting the f options to a higher value will cause less stress on your system. 30 is the default, shoot for 120 if your screen is lagging too much.

The d option is the device id of your graphics card. Mine's device 0, it could also be 1, 2 or whatever.

If the above worked, you should see a console window containing output like this:

23/03/2011 17:18:55, long poll: new block
23/03/2011 17:19:27, b15bbc4d, accepted
23/03/2011 17:19:47, 97f98213, accepted
23/03/2011 17:20:04, 2a8d658f, accepted
23/03/2011 17:20:15, 96fd6e6e, accepted
160772 khash/s

Comment: Re:"Theft increases sales" (Score 1) 305

by lucifron (#33991890) Attached to: Comic Sales Soar After Artist Engages 4chan Pirates

You never hear stories about piracy hurting anything.

Sure you do.. I've seen several threads in the last couple of weeks about open source being marginalized by unlicensed MS software. ;)

PC gaming is far from dead, the revenue was $13 billion in 2009, up from $11 bn in 2008. Has it ever been healthier, despite an ever-increasing range of activities (and consoles) competing for our time?

Go read the wikipedia pages on software-as-a-service, and I doubt you'll see piracy even mentioned. It's all about cutting costs through reduced overheads and specialization.
While businesses can afford to pay for their software, 13-year old kids might not, but they still wouldn't be able to if the pirate bay wasn't an option. I simply don't buy the argument that copyright infringement equates to lost sales.

The way IP holders and their lobbyists are pushing us towards a totalitarian society, in an effort to keep their antiquated business model, is such a threat to our free society that I'm in favor of major revision/relaxation of our IP laws. Their stated purpose is to provide an incentive for creating art and driving research, but people would, and do, these things regardless of profit.

Comment: Re:That does it (Score 1) 589

by lucifron (#33922948) Attached to: Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave

Because PostgreSQL's performance is not enough for large websites and transaction numbers (it will need many times more hardware). We have a website with 2 million members and 200 million page views a month (10,000 concurrent users sometimes). We tried to convert to PostgreSQL but it just did not provide even near to the MySQL's performance on the same hardware.

From my experience Postgres beats MySQL on single-query performance and is significantly better for high concurrency workloads. You must have been doing something wrong, or been depending on some mysql-ism like it's lower-overhead connections or the query result cache. Don't expect stellar results when your architecture clashes with the RDBMS..

And even if PG is faster, that's not why I use it. I choose PG because it's a mature, well-behaving, solid piece of engineering, that I can trust with my data.

Comment: Re:Timber Hill beaten at their own game (Score 1) 299

AFAIK Timber Hill isn't involved in this, beyond losing some $$ by acting as a very naive market maker.

The two men were brought up on criminal charges for market manipulation, after the stock exchange flagged their trades as anomalous and reported them to the authorities.

The Almighty Buck


Posted by kdawson
from the world's-smartest-executives dept.

Comment: Re:There's got to be a better way... (Score 2, Insightful) 151

by lucifron (#32542952) Attached to: Finland To Legalize Use of Unsecured Wi-Fi

Then when the owners turn it off, they can't claim they didn't know what it meant.

Why should it matter whether they "know" or not?

ISP's aren't accountable for their what their users do, should it be any different for individuals who let their neighbours check mail or whatever?

Comment: Re:Funny thing about these trades (Score 1) 525

by lucifron (#32359156) Attached to: Sudden Demand For Logicians On Wall Street

Your observations on how the market moves are pretty much spot-on, but aren't specific to automated trading systems.

The market worked exactly the same back in the 20s [1], only a fair bit slower; You'd never see accenture drop to 1 cent in less than a minute back then.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Operator
