Heh. I read exactly that sort of tripe in the blurb that came with a Cardas headphone cable I bought a couple of years back. (The original Sennheiser cable that I had was defective, and the third-party accessory was OK value for money.) What really made me LOL was their recommendation that I buy their special plug lubricant. I'm perfectly happy with the cable itself (after all, it's just a nicely insulated wire), but this voodoo crap only serves to discredit the product. Incidentally, I often see mention of Monster cables on Slashdot as being representative of this kind of nonsense. Maybe the range available in the US is different to that here in Australia, but I mostly see comparatively reasonably priced Monster cables here. Just about anything will do for normal digital signals over a reasonable distance, but other types can be a bit more tricky. I am currently living in an area with a comparatively weak free-to-air digital TV signal that often gave me no picture at all through a Belkin antenna cable, but when I tried a (similarly priced) Monster alternative of the same length, it worked perfectly.
you might not need the 'special lubricant' but headphone cables are analog cables, and it indeed matters if the cable is high quality, well looked after, and properly manufactured.
Lets see some data for such a claim. If they really were such a big buyer they would be stuck with buying from samsung since they produce most of the flash.
Apple makes up 2.6% of Samsung's sales, Sony makes up 3.7% and Dell makes up 2.5%. Considering the market for NAND flash is very competitive now with every man and his dog making smartphones, memory cards and solid state drives, Samsung does not stand to lose 2.6% of sales if it cuts Apple off completely as there are other customers that buy the same products from Samsung. It seems Apple needs Samsung products more then Samsung needs Apple as a customer. Suing them and hoping Samsung is not a vindictive company could be a really dumb move.
Everything on Wikipedia is right, and up-to-date.
It's already too late to get in. The difficulty level has reached the point where buying and powering the new hardware is not cost-effective. And that was before the price of Bitcoins crashed. (The current price is around $13.)
While I do have an interest in others believing this (the fewer miners, the better it is for existing miners), at the current rate, it would take ~3 months for a brand-new ATI 6990 to pay for itself. If the price continues to go down, or if difficulty levels skyrocket, it might end up actually being too late, but while this does hurt miners, it's certainly not too late to get in on that front.
And that's assuming your only interest is mining. It's certainly not too late to simply buy some bitcoins and use them to buy some stuff.
does that include the power consumption, i.e. electricity bill? or you are assuming you can run the gear in a college dorm or office space where you wont have to pay for the electricity?
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow
