I'm new to Bitcoin but I've Seti@home'ed a lonnng time ago and done gene folding so I get the distributed CPUs thing. What I'm missing here is why. If I understand it correctly all these processors are essentially looking for rare numbers and when they find one they're give a Bitcoin. Do these numbers have an actual value to science or math or is it just manufactured scarcity? Does all this do anything worthwhile or are bitcoins essentially tokens of luck and wasted electricity? In all that I read about Bitcoins nothing suggested that anything useful is being created by all this cpu time and energy spent crunching hashes. I kinda hope I'm wrong and someone clues me in.

For those musically inclined DIY slashdotters, PAIA has been around for ever. Theremins, tube preamps, effects pedals, analog synths, they could keep you busy for years! They have all sorts of neat kits.
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Don't be too jelous, it took me the better part of a week to get yellow dog Linux to boot on it.

More like the hp/cisco blade/switch backplane. Imagine if we just had to plug processing, memory, storage, etc resources into an urea high bandwidth transport. Something like a super motherboard.

Well, mostly. I checked the case, mobo, and disks. See I plugged in a scsi3 disk into a scsi2 adapter, but the ebayer that sold me the scsi3 disk failed to mention is was a LVD scsi3 disk and that was apparently enough to blow one of my channels. After that I got what I needed off the disks and mothballed it as a printer stand. When I chucked it I did pull the CPU card, the cache memory and the ram just in case anyone ever needs it for a museum piece.

I had an Apple Network Server that I got for $75 from a company that lost the AIX disks for it. I pimped the processor and RAM and stuffed the drive bays full of scsi goodness. I ran it until about 2005 when I switched to RAQ2 which was actually more powerful, had more hd space, and used less power. I used the ANS as a print stand until about a year ago when I needed more space and replaced it with a tool chest cabinet.

It saddens my that there is this tipping point where it becomes more wasteful because of power consumption to keep using old technology. It would be completely against tech companies' bottom lines, but the earth would love it if we could create an upgradable platform with a multi-decade usable lifespan while still being efficient.

Sheet mang, I know that cat from back in the CALUG 2004-ish days! Hit me up man if you catch this.

when was the quality of discourse ever good? Back in before 2000 there were a goatse.cx links all over the comments and you needed to don an asbestos suit before replying to anything.

In 1998 I started as a receptionist at a local mom-n-pop dialup ISP. Having been a computer geek pretty much all my life I moved into tech support pretty quickly. All of us read /. all the time. Some days you guys just coulnt post fast enough. We were hungry for our geek news. My IT career spanned more than half a decade and reading /. was an enjoyable daily requirement. A degree of burn out and a growing family prompted me to take a new position as a stay at home dad. I still read /. occasionally but I noticed an uptick lately. I just can't not be a geek. Anyways /. and CmdrTaco have been integral parts of my geek experience, one of the more enjoyable parts of that experience honestly. So a very heart felt Thank You, and best of luck in the next chapter of you life.