How long would it take to play Crisis?
I'll get my coat. =-)p
Vintage hardware enthusiast Ken Shirriff has shown that a model 1401 mainframe, which IBM announced in 1959, can mine Bitcoin. If, that is, your definition of mining includes “chugging away at the problem until pretty close to the heat-death of the universe.” Ken Shirriff used the Model 1401 housed at California's Computer …
Whilst waiting 24 hours to get the dreaded "COMMA EXPECTED IN DO" after passing my meager stack of 12x80 cards to the nasties on the other side of the counter.
My idea was more along the lines of "how would it work if a lot of random monkeys punched these cards and submitted them thousands of time an hour?"
I'd probably be filthy if not rich by now thanks to those monkeys.
Not sure what that has to do with artificial coinage, but I'm expecting my payoff will be better than yours.
You do things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" to quote JFK. Millennials can be satisfied with Angry Birds, and that's sad.
I cut my programming teeth on a 1401. Our programming class was allowed to run programs overnight on the School Board's machine. A friend and I wrote a program to calculate pi to 1000 decimal places by filling in a 1000 character word (Autocoder, the 1401's assembly language had variable length words). It ran for 14 hours before we were kicked off with no result. A damn slow but still magnificent machine.
"not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
Oh my, get carried away by sound bites much? Doing things because they are hard is of zero interest to people who have no burning desire to prove anything to anyone. As much as I admire the actual achievement, I can't help but wonder whether said gentleman would have been equally eager to conquer space if the "commies" weren't dead set to get there first...
::eyeroll::
I am not a millennial and yet I am still a lazy arse. Kudos to this guy for taking his hobby to the extreme, but let's not pretend that laziness (or lack of interest in certain arcane achievements - I happen to think this one is cool... climbing Mt Everest these days, meh) is a feature of any one generation.
No, no, no... you can't do that with the antikythera mechanism, but it will tell you when high tide will be and how soon to plant your wheat on the day the 1401 finishes*.
* Warning: results may be inaccurate if the optional "Sun explosion and Heat Death of the Universe" module has not been installed.
AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.
The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."
Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.
ProShares, the issuer of exchange-traded funds with around $65 billion under management, has launched the first short Bitcoin exchange-traded product in the US, offering a way for investors to make money from the ongoing cryptocurrency meltdown.
Dubbed the ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy, the ETF is set to launch on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BITI. Bitcoin declined to $17,601.58 over the weekend, according to Coin Metrics. It has lost 70 percent of its value since last November's highs.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Nate Geraci, president of wealth management firm The ETF Store, said there would be "a rather robust market" for the short funds.
The cryptocurrency world is experiencing what can only be described as a meltdown, with prices plummeting today to lows not seen since the end of 2020.
The plunge is likely due to several factors including general economic uncertainty as seen in the stock market, inflation, bearish conditions and loss of confidence in crypto-coins, and scared money and bots being spooked by whales selling.
It definitely did not help that crypto-lending biz Celsius Network put a freeze on withdrawals, swaps, and transfers Sunday night. Soon after Bitcoin tumbled 10 percent, Ethereum lost 19 percent of its value, and fan-favorite Dogecoin shed nearly 15 percent of its value, or about $0.01, since then.
Comment Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has declared that "expensive digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely."
He was joking, obviously, though considering Gates's supposed connection to microchips in vaccines, one can never be too careful. What he's talking about are non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which came up at a TechCrunch event in Berkeley, California, on Tuesday. Specifically the Bored Ape Yacht Club variety.
You know those kids' books where the picture is divided into three (head, body, legs) so you can turn different sets of pages to get a different image? That's what the Bored Ape Yacht Club is for those willingly parted from large amounts of money for the right to stand next to a picture of a cartoon chimp.
A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
The malware, dubbed Trojan.Clipminer, leverages the compute power of compromised systems to mine for cryptocurrency as well as identify crypto-wallet addresses in clipboard text and replace it to redirect transactions, according to researchers with Symantec's Threat Intelligence Team.
The first samples of the Windows malware appeared in January 2021 and began to accelerate in their spread the following month, the Symantec researchers wrote in a blog post this week. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule – another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.
IBM has been ordered to pay Houston-based IT firm BMC $1.6 billion for fraud and contract violations because it moved mutual client AT&T from BMC software to IBM software.
On Monday, US District Judge Gray Miller issued his final judgment [PDF] in the case, which began five years ago and culminated in a bench trial in March.
For years, IBM had serviced AT&T's mainframe computers which at least since 2007 have relied on BMC software. IBM and BMC in 2008 entered into a contract governing the business relationship between the two companies. And in 2015, the two IT outfits agreed several amendments including an Outsourcing Attachment (OA) that disallowed IBM from moving mutual clients over to its own software.
China has become the world’s second most prolific miner of bitcoin – or maybe it always was – according to new data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).
The Centre on Tuesday announced its latest hashrate data analysing activity from September 2021 to January 2022 and found the USA is home to 37.84 percent of mining capacity, ahead of China at 21.11 percent, Kazakhstan ‘s 13.22 percent and Canada’s 6.48 percent.
China banned mining and trading cryptocurrency in May 2021 – and re-iterated that ban in fact it did so several times in 2021 alone, and on other occasions in preceding years.
US prosecutors have accused an American citizen of illegally funneling more than $10 million in Bitcoin into an economically sanctioned country.
It's said the resulting criminal charges of sanctions busting through the use of cryptocurrency are the first of their kind to be brought in the US.
Under the United States' International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEA), it is illegal for a citizen or institution within the US to transfer funds, directly or indirectly, to a sanctioned country, such as Iran, Cuba, North Korea, or Russia. If there is evidence the IEEA was willfully violated, a criminal case should follow. If an individual or financial exchange was unwittingly involved in evading sanctions, they may be subject to civil action.
Big names in Bitcoin have defended cryptocurrency mining, issuing a jointly signed letter hitting back at US lawmakers who last month urged a government watchdog to probe the practice.
Twitter founder and Bitcoin champion Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Bitcoin-collecting MicroStrategy Michael Saylor, and others on Monday signed the letter [PDF] that is a point-by-point rebuttal to a memo [PDF] sent last month to America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA) and a couple dozen other Democrats.
In that first letter, Huffman and pals asked the EPA to probe proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining facilities to ensure they're following US laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and not having an outsized effect on climate change. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. Ethereum, for one, is planning to move to fully proof-of-stake approach, which is more energy efficient.
The wiki community held a vote as to whether the Wikimedia Foundation should continue to accept cryptocurrency donations, the result of which was a resounding "no".
The proposal was made by Wikipedia administrator, checkuser and oversighter GorillaWarfare based on three points: it could be seen as an endorsement of cryptocurrency by the organization; the tech is not environmentally sustainable; and, last of all, accepting crypto could damage the reputation of the foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation currently accepts donations in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, as well as traditional payment types. According to the community, crypto is one of the foundation's smallest revenue channels, making up a mere .08 percent of 2021 revenue, equating to $130,100. Total revenue for 2021 was around $162 million.
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