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Tech talk; computer stuff goes here
Topic Started: Mar 13 2014, 06:46 PM (414 Views)
~Alkarii~
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Seriously, how could we not have had this by now?

Anyway, I'll open with a good question: can anyone recommend a decent network card?

If compatabilty is an issue, which it probably is, I've got an MSI m/b with the AMD chipset.

Other stuff about the system:

AMD A-10 5700 3.4 gHz processor
8 gb ram (DDR3)
Windows 8.1 (32 bit; should have installed the 64 bit)
600w power supply

Not sure if any of that matters.

Oh, and, the motherboard is the same one Alissa recommended. I can't recall the entire designation right off hand.
Since my liver is larger than my heart, does that mean I'm designed to drink more and care less?
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~Alissa~
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0_0 did the integrated port fail?

unless you are after super performance (which is spendy and probably not needed).

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~Alkarii~
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No. I need to be able to plug in a phone cord so I can connect to the internt. Unless I need to get a wifi router or something. The good news is that I can go with Fidelity internet instead of AT&T. That's what I used to have, and it was 28.8 kbps on my road. That company has refused to put high speed in my area for years. Fidelity is 16 megs.
Since my liver is larger than my heart, does that mean I'm designed to drink more and care less?
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~Alissa~
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so, a phone cord would be for dialup, there is an intigrated 10/100/1000 port on that board that you can run an ethernet cord from what ever modem the ISP provides strait to that port.

if you currently have dialup you need a modem, they are all the same
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~Alkarii~
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Ah. Good thing there's ethernet cables where I work.

So, if I decided to get a wifi router, what should I go with?
Since my liver is larger than my heart, does that mean I'm designed to drink more and care less?
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~Alissa~
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I just got one of the ASUS routers and I love it, but I tend to look for pretty full feature sets on devices like that. my last router was a belkin and it was a champ till I replaced it
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~The Boss~
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So, I've got a tech question here: is anyone able to explain Bitcoin? I understand the politics and the economics behind it. What I don't understand is the technology, i.e. the mining. How does this stuff even work? Anyone know? And remember, you're talking to RE's resident Luddite here, so use small words ;).
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~Alissa~
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so a coin is generated every time a certain amount of work is done, it is then awarded to whoever did the most work on it. work in this case means math which computers do. when there were just a few people the math was easy and a desktop could do it, the more people doing the math the more complicated it becomes and the more processing power it takes to get it done.

Mining is doing the math, in the early days a normal desktop processor could do the math, the faster the math got done the more coins were out there, to control it the difficulty of the math went up. work done is measured as Hashes per second Hps

at first people built clusters of computers to do the work, which was faster but is expensive because the computers use a lot of power and make a lot of heat, and when the math got harder they became not economical. thinks KHps

then people figured out how to use video cards (GPUs) which do math in a different way from CPUs to do the math, this was a little cheaper but still spendy and eventually got phased out for the most part by anyone seriously into mineing. some people still do this, they use the internet to share the work, every time their swarm or group gets a coin it is devided based on word done over the whole group. MHps

Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) are low power chips that are purpose built to do one thing, in this case math for bitcoins, people are building clusters of these to do the math, they are super fast and because they don't do other things they are also really efficient, low power, low heat. GHps to THps

I've been kind of confused by the whole crypto currency thing to be honest. people are out there spending real money on building what are essentially small super computers to do math to get imaginary money which they can only trade to other people who place value on the imaginary money, sometimes for real money.

the only way I think it has any real chance of being more than a fad is if it stabilizes, which means it will need regulation, which means the parts of it some people seem to want will go away. however like any other currency (including the green one in your wallet) it only really has value because we all agree it does.
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