Another point, Bitcoin isn’t money laundering.  There’s a trail/trace of every transaction.  Where the money came from, where it went to, who owned it along the way.  Even more easily accessible than a bank record.  So it *IS* traceable, but only to a PRIVATE KEY.  Receiving doesn’t necessarily indicate knowledge though (similar to receiving stolen goods, you can do it knowingly or not).  So how do they map a bitcoin address to a  person, they need your wallet.dat file, thats where the private keys are.  Thats what allows you to spend the coins you receive.  So how do they get those files?  Good old fashioned door busting of course!  Or ISP subpeonas and the like to get data.

Bitcoin just changes the method of tracing cash from dyes and marking and noting serial numbers, to bitcoin addresses/public keys and matching those public keys with held private keys.

Sen. Schumer MAY BE trying to make an argument under the constitution, but in the same way that bartering can be done, and Visa, and others, so can bitcoin.  If he suceeds he can likely only criminalize these other also valid forms of commerce.  I have NOT seen a single sourced article about this though, so it’s all gossip.  Show me on the senates site or similar where he’s doing it and I’ll believe it.

Fast forward to 2010. It’s been long enough, I figure the AMD/ATI integration should’ve helped them out by now, right?  Buy a new machine with two ATI Radeon HD 5870′s. Capable of 850MHz GPU clock and a 1200MHz memory clock, before overclocking or tweaking. Right out of the box I get underscan on my HDMI connection. No worries I think, fire up ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC) and turn it off, problem fixed. Really retarded that they do that at all, but whatever.

Cue reboot to do the obligatory windows update…WTF? Underscan again? OK maybe drivers got punked, reset it, yay. All is good. A day or so later, another reboot. ?!??! UNDERSCAN AGAIN!?!?! Go get latest Catalyst drivers. They don’ properly install so I have to uninstall them, run driver sweeper, and then try the install again. Back to underscan…reset…but now the underscan is clearly on on EVERY reboot. Resort to Googling. Apparently this bug has been around for a damn long time. And may even be that it keeps coming back. How about this ATI. Since almost NO HDMI compatible display device is going to desire underscan, JUST DISABLE IT BY DEFAULT!? No nVidia card I’ve had has had this issue.

So on top of this really painfully obvious underscan issue, the driver installer/uninstaller doesn’t work right.  Its so bad in fact that ATI’s own people often point customers to driver sweeper instead of FIXING the damn thing.  Installing new drivers is not remotely seamless like it should be.  Upgrades should always be pain free, download installer and run.  With ATI’s packages running the installer like that may or may not get you fully updated depending on the phase of the moon, color of your hair, and whether the geese have flown south for the winter or not.

Another irritating one. And one I’ve attached a GPU-Z screenshot for. With Adobe Flash 10.1, playing any flash accelerated video, IE from YouTube, will lock your Radeon HD 5870 to 400/900, no matter what. I fired up Kombustor and FurMark to prove it. Close the YouTube window and your clocks unlock to 850/1200. This is another bug that goes WAY WAY back after a bit of Googling.

Seriously ATI?

The attached image shows me first firing up a YouTube clip in FireFox.  The Video clock jumps to 400/900 and sticks…a little odd, especially if the video is paused but whatever…. Then I fire up MSI Kombustor (same as FurMark).  The GPU load jumps to 100% but the clocks stay locked at 400/900.  I close the YouTube clip, and the clocks then unlock and shoot up to 850/1200.  The Kombustor/FurMark frame rates reflect the hobbled video card clocks.  Nothing I do unlocks the clock from 400/900 as long as Flash is playing video.  This is with the latest Catalyst 10.9a (Hotfix) drivers.  I had to install these to get rid of the previously mentioned underscan idiocy.

Same behavior with Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.  This is all running on Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

So in short, don’t get ATI. They can’t get their drivers right. You never know when a bug will come back, or when/IF they’ll fix performance critical bugs. I shouldn’t have to make certain to close each and every browser window to play a game, get max performance for a transcode, etc. Not on a machine with 4x 3.2GHz cores.  The experience here with this card follows similar bad experiences with the older card and software (I had underscan issues on that one too, and performance issues that may or may not have been similar, but I never looked into it too deeply).

You drop thousands of dollars for a high end gaming machine/workstation.  1/4 or more of that will be in the video cards, and this is what ATI delivers.  I’ve found articles on AMD/ATI’s own forum from users indicatign BOTH these issues go back to *at least* mid 2009, and probably earlier.  Why am I not blaming Flash?  Even if Flash is asking for video acceleration, or asking for a 400/900 clock, the ATI drivers should STILL adapt the clock to the GPU load.  If the GPU pegs out it should let the clock go.

Hey ABC, It's Mike looks like, and we're took a huge duty this morning here DEF called me because things are going
down from his point of view on that. And once I got some acid and then both of and liars routers. We were
essentially down wanted flap. I don't know 510 times. Or so I don't have any contact information for either server
crazy. Or and later anywhere that I can find, but I assume I lost it or I don't know, maybe never gave it to me
either way. I don't have any lost DVDs or anything like that anyway. So when do much good to call him without any
of that me know when you get this. Just give me a call. I think it's we're screwing the recovered now but clear
they had some for a major an orange on them and i kinda wanna know what was planned to where they had to sue us
for whatever the heck happened. Anyway, give me a call back. Bye.

Yup.  Clear as mud.  Moon, that spells mud.

[root@vps0 security]# md5sum access.conf*
1ab9971e4ec0682b89aaff29fea6de9e  access.conf
1ab9971e4ec0682b89aaff29fea6de9e  access.conf.rpmnew
[root@vps0 security]#

[root@vps1 private]# vztop

vztop - 18:02:45 up 4 days, 17:30,  2 users,  load average: 1.29, 1.36, 1.28
Tasks: 372 total,   2 running, 370 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 13.3% us,  1.1% sy,  0.0% ni, 85.2% id,  0.1% wa,  0.1% hi,  0.2% si
Mem:  65881472k total, 22104056k used, 43777416k free,  1624648k buffers
Swap:  4192924k total,        0k used,  4192924k free, 17053276k cached

 CTID   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    0 27254 root      25   0  308m 299m 4504 R  100  0.5  46:03.17 yum
    0 31593 root      15   0 89524 4672 2568 S    8  0.0   0:35.59 sshd

Seriously guys? 299MB?  SERIOUSLY?

Not that it really matters on this machine.  For those of you having trouble with the math, thats 64GB w/ around 42GB *free*, yes, same machine from the Serverpr0n article earlier.  It’s still annoying.  And, 100% CPU.  Doing WHAT?!  Hell if I know.  YES THATS 45 MINUTES!  At 2GHZ!