> The environmental impact of Bitcoin blockchain has always been in discussion but the topic got fire mid-May when electric automaker Tesla stopped receiving Bitcoin (BTC) as payment for its vehicle purchase citing the environmental impact of Bitcoin. But these studies findings suggest that Tesla should stop accepting bank issued currencies to protect climate.
Processing non-cryptocurrency transactions costs more in terms of CO2 than processing cryptocurrency transactions. If someone really wanted to go green, cryptocurrency is better than traditional cash/credit/etc.
@JourneymanGeek So the solution is to use a hash that works poorly on GPUs, like Argon2d.
It's quite easy, even trivial, to ensure that a GPU is less cost efficient than a consumer CPU.
It wouldn't drive up CPU costs as much because you'd need more CPUs, making buying them in bulk less and less economical (compared to buying GPUs for other cryptocurrencies).
If it can't fit into the L2 cache, having multiple cores isn't necessarily beneficial if your memory bus is already saturated. Then the limiting factor is that bus, not your CPUs.
Yeah. When you have a board with multiple chipsets ("physical" CPUs, not CPU cores), they have to have a protocol to communicate if they want to be able to run at the same time.
But there comes a point when it's cheaper to buy 10 COTS computers than it is to design a custom one with 10 chips and not enough RAM.
@JourneymanGeek Think about the cost calculations if you need 1 GiB to mine at a reasonable speed. Good luck accelerating that on GPUs or (affordable) ASICs.
Now compare that to Bitcoin or Ethereum where you can use GPUs and ASICs, meaning you're buying up lots of silicon but not putting much money back into the industry for other components.
Whereas if you have to buy multiples of entire computers rather than multiples of specific silicon-heavy components like GPUs, you're giving more back to the industry for the same amount of silicon you're using, so the effect on the shortage is reduced.
@forestdistrustsStackExchange basically the enthusiasm for cryptocurrency is so high any component used will be bought in bulk, and kept out of the retail chain
@JourneymanGeek But if each CPU you buy also requires you to buy a motherboard, RAM, etc., then it'll be a lot harder to buy it all in bulk. I doubt miners have enough resources to buy out the entire computer industry. GPUs alone? Sure. But if you use a memory-hard hash with well-chosen parameters, they'll be forced to buy the entire computer to make it worthwhile, which means instead of having 100,000,000 GPUs and 1,000 CPUs, they'll have 100,000 full computers.
GPU makers have to meet contractually obligated quotas to make for OEMs (laptops and prebuilt desktops). The remaining is sold as retail stock. Lower GPU production capacity means nothing for contractual obligations for OEMs, so retail stocks are the first to go.
So it's really only impacting the "srs gamerzzz" who need a bunch of the newest GPUs, and not people who are buying computers that come with their own discrete GPUs?
Costs vary, but an out of date estimate is: Mining just one bitcoin in South Korea costs $26170, but only $531 in Argentina; so simply moving earns over $25K per coin. It's a case of electricity, cooling, and labor costs (if you need a lot of people). --- For some it's extremely worthwhile, for others you make next to nothing.
@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Not sure about GPUs, but for those others, they also sell the ones which failed various QA and stability tests under different names and at a lower price.
So they have a RAM stick and if it remains stable even when overclocked, they sell it as gaming RAM and modify the SPD to report that speed. If it needs to be underclocked to be stable, they sell it as budget RAM and modify the SPD to report the lower speed.
@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog The obligations are for devices with certain specs. If RAM has to be underclocked significantly to remain stable, they aren't going to give it to an OEM that demanded a higher speed ("I thought I said I wanted to have 1600 MT/s!")
I've looked at Amazon reviews for WD hard drives, and seen repeated complaints in them that they're OEM drives and WD refuses to honor the warranty. Which is why I always buy parts straight from the manufacturer (e.g. Western Digital Store), so I know I'm getting a retail part.
@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog The "portable" WD drivers are indeed drives that failed QA. They are measurably less reliable. Try running it in any sort of high-use/high-stress environment and see.
Anyway, the reason why you can find GPUs and AMD CPUs in OEM PCs isn't because they're hoarding or anything - they just have negotiated contracts that were made before the shortage
@forestdistrustsStackExchange right now, I can go out and get a motherboard with a cheap celeron and an older chipset + 8 PCIe x16 (mechanical) x1 (electrical)
I try to buy enterprise drives when I can, for reliability (WD RE). They're expensive, but they're worth it. Three WD RE drives in RAID5 is a lot safer than if they were WD Red.
Actually I seem to remember someone linking some ex-mining FPGA PCIe modules... so you could in theory build a FPGA cracker on the cheap if you knew how to code em
Those GPGPUs usually have a lot of GDDR5 memory, which is expensive when you don't need all that much memory at all, just a lot of cores. And memory-hard hashes aren't good on GPUs even if they do have enough memory due to how GPU memory bus contention works (which is why bcrypt, which only requires 4 KiB of memory, is inefficient on GPUs).
@forestdistrustsStackExchange they do - but if you shop around, they're the cheapest way to get a ton of processing power, more so than 'gaming' cards right now
Especially since the ROI on switching to FPGAs would be quite low. Learning VHDL (or SystemVerilog, which I think is prettier) is one of those "just for fun but not practical" tasks.
"So why are you in prison?" "Oh, I just made a machine to shoot cops but my kid walked through wearing blue. I really wish I spent more time reading OpenCV docs"
That's why they have red tips. But yeah even then they're generally not bright enough to tell the difference. They're looking more at the color of your skin than the color of your gun's tip.
Anything capable of recognizing and aiming at a cop could shoot anything, even nerf guns. Or maybe a TASER. Or phaser, to get that "pew pew" sound. :^)
Something a little safer than just blindly firing real ammunition at someone who points a gun at you (which is likely to result in your own spongification with bullets).
@forestdistrustsStackExchange My guess would be UNIX.se, but if you are talking about the code significantly in the question, it would also be suitable on SO (I think). But UNIX.SE seems more appropriate in any case.
According to fs/proc/array.c:130, the following array defines various process states:
/*
* The task state array is a strange "bitmap" of
* reasons to sleep. Thus "running" is zero, and
* you can test for combinations of others with
* simple bit tests.
*/
static const char * const task_state_...
Hope it's not too imposing. I just don't want to dig through the source and historical source and try to figure out the edge cases. Would be nice if someone on Unix already knew the answer.
I'm just having trouble comprehending in what case it would get stuck in that state and actually result in /proc/<pid>/status displaying it as "X (dead)".
I expect you could see it if ps runs, and the scheduler stops handling that exit code and gives ps a few slices of time to fetch the process status for the process that is dead.
"X (dead)" is a specific process state. I think ps looks in /proc/<pid>/status where they're listed by letter and summary text (so "Z (zombie)" isn't it).
I'll check that part of the code. That'd rule out being able to see a process in state X due to a race condition with an unlucky preemption and a high-priority ps.
Looking at the tag-excerpt, it is probably not a good fit: "For questions about how political events influence the Stack Exchange network. For other questions about politics, consider posting your question on Politics Stack Exchange."
But looking at some other questions in this tag, not all of them are "about how political events influence the Stack Exchange network".
@Martin I would be hesitant as well. I don't think it needs the politics tags. It is about policy. We're not asked to take a position on what they put on their profile is agreeable by the community.
Everyone’s idea of a dream home could also be different, but what’s common to each Indian is that they wish to have a house of their own. For many, it's quite just an asset; it's a source of pride, affection, security, and stability. this sense is further strengthened when it's your first house....
@rene you get a different lottery number each time you refresh. I put a script on it, want to claim as much numbers as possible to increase my chances of winning :P
June 08, 2021 10:01 UTC WARN ongoing CDN Performance Impact Investigating - We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN servic...
Yeah, it took half the internet with them. Big news sites, Reddit, Twitch ... the fun thing is that the news sites that do still work (like the Dutch NOS) are so slow in reporting it XD