Should you Bitcoin? Short answer in the past yes, now not so much. I've mentioned Bitcoins in previous articles and modern mining, which is how you get them, has driven up the price of graphics processors in recent times. Can you make any money using your spare GPU cycles on your PC? Answering that question is not as simple you might think, despite what a mining application may tell you. It depends on how powerful your GPU is, what the price of Bitcoin is that week and things like how much you pay for your power because you will be using more. The process works by maximising the power of your GPU, using more electricity than for regular use and keeping your PC hotter than usual 24/7. Mining works by solving complex maths equations for the blockchain which over time takes longer and longer and more processing power.
If you want to see how this works and if you can make any money try for example nicehash.com. You register, download the miner software, install and set yourself up as a resource for mining. People then pay you in Bitcoin to lease some of your, along with a whole bunch of others', processing power. So how much will you make? Using the Nicehash Profitability calculator you will be given a per month estimate based on what people earned the previous month. Figure it will cost you about 200-300 extra Watts to mine at full power. You can work out how much that costs by multiplying by your kWH electricity cost by about 5-7. Subtract that number from what the calculator tells you and you have your possible profit. The number will vary.
Windows Server 2019 is coming, and it will cost you more. The reason is fairly transparent, they want you to move onto the Azure platform. Those that haven't been attracted by the cloud will pay the extra, a few will make the move and others will simply not bother to upgrade and it will be Windows XP all over again. Special attention has been paid to virtualisation and the cloud. The Server Core has been reduced in size from around 5GB to 2GB. The new Server will come with support for Shielded VMs and will include WSL allowing Linux to be run side by side with Windows. It will also better integrate with Azure, no surprises there. In classic Microsoft style the 2019 Server will be out later this year.
In our final look at IP addresses and connectivity you may have heard about IPv4 and IPv6. We have looked at the v4 style addresses comprising 32 bits in 4 octets which give you around 4.3 billion potential addresses. Many of these were assigned to companies and while some are still not used they were unavailable to the public. The later v6 standard allows for 128-bit addresses and a very large number of possible values. This was released to solve the running-out-of-addresses issue. A typical v6 address might look like: 2600:8f2:200:ff70:de7b:e44e:c0fe:3aa7 or eight groups of up to 4 hexadecimal digits. In simpler terms a long address that is really hard to remember. In reality there turned out be less need for v6 than anticipated and the vast majority still use v4.
So how does your network device get its IP address? You can manually assign them or let your network's Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) dynamically assign one, typically from your router. Connect a device, it asks for an address and your DHCP assigns it one from the available pool. If you have say a computer that is being used as the source of your media, then you may want it to assign a static address, as dynamic ones can change when you restart the device. If you give two devices the same address this will cause conflicts and problems on your network. In the beginning it is better to have someone help you with this part of the process.
The Level 4 driverless pod has debuted in London servicing a section of Olympic Way, sharing with a bicycle path along the river. The system doesn't need a dedicated infrastructure as all the necessary sensors, including LIDAR, cameras, radar and ultrasound, are carried aboard the pods. Monitoring is done over the local 4G mobile network. At a top speed of a bit over 14kph it brakes for pedestrians but ignores cyclists whizzing past beside it. In related news, a driverless Uber vehicle, not in the UK, has killed a cyclist. Guess that could put the automated car back a year or three.
For those with the need for drive space and didn't like what Western Digital and Toshiba had on offer, Seagate has their 14TB drive out, Helium filled. Like WD it supports the 12TB SAS data transfer technology. If you have to ask how much, you probably can't afford it.
Finally for this week, Stephen Hawking's last paper doesn't support the multiverse model as the headlines have claimed. What it does do is introduce some ideas on how to link Einstein's gravity-based universe with that of the quantum world. Very cool.
