I with my ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5145 capable of 7.7Mhash/s at top speed can say this is not quite true. Last few minutes are fine.

btw, I am stuck at BTC0.0037. Maybe someone would like to help me reach the minimum payout threshold? I'd pay you your fair share for the work and cover the commission.

mining seems to be a choice of pour money at it and get big rigs/asic or sift little and often and try to chip away at the mess of 0s to get some im only a tiny player myself and now after almost 1 month have .4 btc
unless your on a laptop you might look into getting a cheap gpu even a 57xx will give you about 100-150mhash

I am on a laptop, and that's a huge offset. Nevertheless, I've learned a lot. I've also managed to worsen my browser display output setting up ATI drivers but that's another story

Slush's pool is relatively popular. I'm a small miner, two 16 Mhash workers and one 6 Mhash worker, so i contemplate what being small means, how i am impacted. There are 5Ghash miners coming into existance now. there will be a time where they will reap huge shares until the difficulty adjusts to compensate for them. we had a 32 sec block? either great luck or a fast hasher.

once the difficulty adjusts, Mhashers will obviously become the slow guys, equivalent to the current CPU miners. But, considering the slow deliverys on the Ghash machines it will be sometime before the difficulty adjusts totally in their favor, probably 3-6 months.

The point is that with the fast machines coming into being we are going to see more and more blocks where we've been excluded from the payout or got a really small portion. But, the alternative is not mining. sure you could go to another pool where there is less competion for the share. But, small pools will have less of a chance of finding a block in the first place.

Maybe Slush needs to add more zeroes to the right of the decimal so we feel like we aren't mining for nothing. Or, we just accept that there will be some 0BTC blocks for us little guys. Personally, I like Slush's pool will hang in there. Someday there will be reasonable delivery times on Ghash machines and i'll be able to get some and claw my way back up to the level of the playing field. In the mean time anything that i get is better than not mining. I'm enjoying mining as a hobby, hobbies are rarely profitable.