Slashdot Mirror

... that are used by spammers as well. I thought it might be interesting to do this. I do NOT want somebody putting code on my machine, no matter how 'good'it is for whatever reason.

Next you will have a seta@home worm. A worm that starts running seti@home (or distributed.net or whatever.) The maker can claim that is is for a good cause, just like the makers do for this one.

You could also get pop-ups that tell you that you owe them money, because they protected your PC. So pay, or else ...

That last one could be calld "The Nigerian Virus Protection Plan"

... that are used by spammers as well. I thought it might be interesting to do this. I do NOT want somebody putting code on my machine, no matter how 'good'it is for whatever reason.

Next you will have a seta@home worm. A worm that starts running seti@home (or distributed.net or whatever.) The maker can claim that is is for a good cause, just like the makers do for this one.

You could also get pop-ups that tell you that you owe them money, because they protected your PC. So pay, or else ...

That last one could be calld "The Nigerian Virus Protection Plan"

I've been computing for SETI since it started,
and with my few home computers, and a
little help from the odd work machine now and then,
I've recently hit 12000 work units!
Also, I got a dual 2.0 G5 recently and it works faster
than all my other machines combined
(2xG3 333, G3 450,2xG4 450) on SETI (on the average)
While I think the probability is high that there is
other intelligent life out there, contacting them by
2020 seems a little optimistic!

However, if we make contact in my lifetime,
I'll be shittin' my pants with everybody else.

I was really fascinated by the news
that the data had other uses, as well.

This calculation doesn't include the number of people turned off from the SETI@Home project by the new BOINC software.

Thank you for your funny post. I had a good laugh. Just in case anyone thinks any of your points have a trace of connection to reality, I'll adress them:

- Big Bang: I know this is difficult to understand, but, as time is a feature of this universe, wondering what could happen "before" the Big Bang is just nonsense. There is no "before".

- Earth "fine tuned": This is known as the Anthropic principle. To say that the universe is what it is in order for us to be here is the same as to say that the surfers in Hawaii prove that the waves and the beaches of Hawaii where created for them to surf, because if not they wouldn't be so suitable for surfing.

- Life could not have appeared in Earth: maybe I'm too simple, but I don't understand how can you say that this whole universe was fine tuned in order to support life on Earth and at the same time that life on Earth could not come into existence as the result of this universe. Henry Ford created a system to get cars to come into existence, and they were produced without him needing to act in the actual process. Surely your creator could do better in a universe created all by himself just for the purpose of life.

- Information as proof of intelligent design. Actually, the more we know about genetic code, more things we find that any competent designer could not have made: a high percentage of code meaning nothing, redundant information, bad information (that translate into illness) that is difficult to delete due to the characteristics of the system...You seem to confuse information for communication. Information have no purpose, and require no actors. Is a property of any system, related to enthropy. Communication is transmission of information, requiere actors, and gives a purpose to information.

- Fossil record: no transitional forms? have you been in any Natural History museum? You could have seen transitional forms between fish and amphibian, between dinosaurs and avians, and of course between apes and men, just to name a few.

And what should be more disturbing to you, we have found that THREE species of humans coexisted 75.000 years ago: homo sapiens (we) in Africa, neanderthals in Europe, and erectus in Asia. You should think a little bit to justify why your creator allowed these other intelligent human beings to exist at the same time as homo sapiens for thousands of years just to be later substituted by us. And please remember that neanderthals were able to produce art, and they buried their dead ones.
Just another thing: try to explain convergent evolution by creationism. Please give an explanation as to why your creator would create ichthyosarus and 50 millions of years after they dissapeared would create dolphins.

Thank you for your funny post. I had a good laugh. Just in case anyone thinks any of your points have a trace of connection to reality, I'll adress them:

- Big Bang: I know this is difficult to understand, but, as time is a feature of this universe, wondering what could happen "before" the Big Bang is just nonsense. There is no "before".

- Earth "fine tuned": This is known as the Anthropic principle. To say that the universe is what it is in order for us to be here is the same as to say that the surfers in Hawaii prove that the waves and the beaches of Hawaii where created for them to surf, because if not they wouldn't be so suitable for surfing.

- Life could not have appeared in Earth: maybe I'm too simple, but I don't understand how can you say that this whole universe was fine tuned in order to support life on Earth and at the same time that life on Earth could not come into existence as the result of this universe. Henry Ford created a system to get cars to come into existence, and they were produced without him needing to act in the actual process. Surely your creator could do better in a universe created all by himself just for the purpose of life.

- Information as proof of intelligent design. Actually, the more we know about genetic code, more things we find that any competent designer could not have made: a high percentage of code meaning nothing, redundant information, bad information (that translate into illness) that is difficult to delete due to the characteristics of the system...You seem to confuse information for communication. Information have no purpose, and require no actors. Is a property of any system, related to enthropy. Communication is transmission of information, requiere actors, and gives a purpose to information.

- Fossil record: no transitional forms? have you been in any Natural History museum? You could have seen transitional forms between fish and amphibian, between dinosaurs and avians, and of course between apes and men, just to name a few.

And what should be more disturbing to you, we have found that THREE species of humans coexisted 75.000 years ago: homo sapiens (we) in Africa, neanderthals in Europe, and erectus in Asia. You should think a little bit to justify why your creator allowed these other intelligent human beings to exist at the same time as homo sapiens for thousands of years just to be later substituted by us. And please remember that neanderthals were able to produce art, and they buried their dead ones.
Just another thing: try to explain convergent evolution by creationism. Please give an explanation as to why your creator would create ichthyosarus and 50 millions of years after they dissapeared would create dolphins.

Good grief... now that's a picture that lets you know just how insignificant you really are. Still, I'm kind of fond of this one

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

(I'm not the author of this piece, but I thought it was quite appropriate in this context)

The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.

Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's

Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)

The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.

Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's

Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)

I'm in a club at UC Berkeley called Berkeley Innovation. For one of our projects, we attempted to come up with a solution that would reduce the number of switched-on phones entering a lecture hall (to reduce disturbance).

At first we tried to build our own like these kids, until we ran across the cell phone pen. It's sitting right here on my desk, and it works. We even purchased a tried and true cell phone detector that is is very similar to the one they describe (same 30m range), and it even can emit a tone (not just lights). Not trying to put down these students for their efforts (or for the judges, who might rethink their definition of originality), but a little google action would have yielded these devices. Or for that matter, the suckers would bought some of the first prototypes for $1,000! We bought ours for $20. Hmm, maybe I could fund the trip to New Zealand I've always wanted to take by bringing a few of these little gems with me to sell for a 50x profit...

Ask any you shall receive! Click here.

Currently available projects are...

SETI@home
Predictor-Protein structure prediction

Coming soon....

climateprediction.net
Folding@home

Farther in the future (i.e. pending funding)...
Einstein@home -- a search for gravitational waves.

In the conceptual stage, since sometime last week...
neuralnet.net -- studies of the nature of intelligence using neural nets and genetic algorithms

I decided to speculate on wasteful uses of IPv6 addresses, and run some calculations on how long it would take to expend them.

Method #126: Mote technology matures. Intel is working on them. Berkely is working on them.

Each mote gets an IPV6 address. Maybe you drop a few hundred into each automobile to test everything from tire pressure to CO2 content in exhaust. I don't think this comes close to exhausting the IPv6 addresses.

Method #127: RFID tags for consumer goods. Give each and every consumer product an IPV6 address to track it from manufacturing to purchase.

Reasonable uses of IP addresses? Maybe not. But with 2^128 addresses, it would still take a very long time to use all of the address even with blatent misuse of them.

2^128 is 10^14 moles. A chemist could give you precise estimates, but a 300 milliter can of distilled water contains about 15 mole molecules of water. So, lets say that you could put an RFID tag on every water molecule in every can of pop sold. Maybe water rationing is getting very serious. You'd still have to drink 10^13 cans of pop. Coca cola sells about 4.3 * 10^9 bottles of pop a year. We could go about 23,000 years without needing to recycle IPv6 address on the water molecules. On the one hand, if we can figure out how to attach wireless TCPIP enabled RFID tags to water molecules, we can probably upgrade our IP protocols. On the other hand, who wants to update the hardware attached to 10^14 moles of water?

AT&T Failure of January 15, 1990

Link 1, Link 2, Link 3

On January 15, 1990, 114 switching nodes of the AT&T long distance system went down. The published cause of the crash was a bug in the failure recovery code of the switches. When a node crashed, it sent "out of service" message to the neighboring nodes, which are supposed to re-route traffic around it. However, the bug (a misplaced "break" statement in C code) caused the neighboring nodes to crash themselves upon receiving the "out of service" message, and further propagate the fault by sending an "out of service" message to nodes further out in the network.

The crash lasted 9 hours, while programmers searched for the cause of the bug. An estimated 60 thousand people were left without telephone service, and 70 million phone calls went uncompleted. AT&T estimates at least $60 million in lost revenue and damage to its reputation; reliability was a central point in AT&T's marketing campaign against other long distance providers at the time. The incidental damage to businesses that were unable to operate due to lack of telephone service is hard to estimate, but is presumably much larger. The public safety and national security implications of such a large telephone system outage are distressing as well.

This fault happened despite fault-tolerant design principles which were present in the phone system's design. The nodes failed fast, reporting their outage to neighboring nodes, and there was enough redundancy in the system to route around the failures. The crashed nodes recovered quickly, rebooting themselves and coming back up; however, they would immediately crash because of the messages received from neighboring nodes. The failure happened on an error-recovery path, which is poorly tested. The presence of decentralized distributed control, necessary for scaling, allowed this failure to propagate. The outage demonstrates that a bug in the software can cause a widely correlated failure.

The possibility of a malicious attack on the system was seriously investigated as a cause for the crash. The investigation came up dry, but most sources acknowledge that this accidental fault could have just as easily been activated on purpose by a knowledgeable attacker. The social implications are investigated in detail in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown.

Find a few friends and try dibs. Should be one of the cheapest solutions (basically, you'll need about as much storage space as you want to backup yourself -- ideally a bit more), as long as you can find enough friends :-)

/* Steinar */

The BOINC platform (that seti@home is switching over to) has the ability to divide work between project as you suggest. Though I'm not really sure that there are very many other projects running on it.

It's getting harder every day. Eventually, not even a remote cabin in Montana will be refuge - not once "smart dust" gets cheap enough to deploy everywhere.

I'm considering going to cash for most everything. Has anyone experimented with that lately, and what difficulties did you face?

I've been cash-mostly for years, only using a CC for online and big purchases. If you buy from the right stores you can sometimes even get a "cash discount" because the merchant doesn't have to pay the fees for the privilege of accepting Visa/MC. Another major benefit of going cash-only is that it's that much harder to join the consumer debt culture paying ~18% out-their-asses to live above their means. About the only downside is that you've got to visit the ATM a little more often if you don't want to keep a stash in the safe at home.

(cash is king... at least until cash gets RFID'd, and then I'll zap the RFID... and then my cash becomes anonymous "terrorist" currency... and then I get to go to jail for buying and selling without the permission of the state.)

</tinfoil-hat>

--

Listen to independent (usually college) radio. I spent my formative years listening to KXLU and KALX.

Listen to indie internet radio stations. A lot of people like KEXP; check the directories at shoutcast.com and icecast.org or your mp3's builtin directory (eg iTunes) (shameless plug - I run punk stream if you like punk)

Read indie newspapers, if available. L.A. Weekly if you're in Los Angeles, for example.

Read web sites that cover indie (pitchforkmedia.com is a start). Download stuff at random.

Go to music buying sites like audiolunchbox and magnatune, and listen to samples at random.

Ask friends for recommendations. Borrow stuff from them.

Hit alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.indie. Download stuff at random.

Go to indie record stores and buy stuff at random. I actually used to do this, buy something based on the cover art. Discovered some great stuff this way. And this was on a high school allowance.

All you need is a seed, and it can open up a whole new microgenre to explore.

Once you find something you like, research them. You'll often find information along the lines of "if you like X, you might like Y". Maybe a band member used to be in another band.

Look up that band's label's site. Often, indie labels have a common "sound" across their lineup, so you might like some of their label mates. Indie label sites usually have downloadable sample songs- download them.

And so on.

I do all these things. I take music seriously, it's a big part of my life. Sometimes it feels like work, to tell you the truth. But I'm driven by the idea that, no matter how much I like the music I've enjoyed in the past, there's something even more incredible out there.

I have a lot of CDs and I continue to buy a lot. But I also have a lot of downloaded music. I have a fairly clear conscience though. I genuinely feel that most indie bands wouldn't hold it against me that I downloaded their music to give it a listen, to see what they are about.

Does all the above sound like "too much effort"? Then, perhaps, music doesn't mean as much to you as me. That's cool.

Me- I'm not content to be fed stuff by commercial interests whose agenda run contrary to my search for interesting music. And I have the time and desire to invest in this pursuit. I can appreciate that others may not. Or maybe you're out in the sticks, with no broadband. In which case, I think you to resign yourself to a certain lifestyle, anyway.

That's why I don't live in the sticks :).

-h3

I'm afraid I have to disagree with your reasoning, though you have definitely thought this through.

SmartDust is currently being commercialized, and while not nanotech scale it is very small, approximate 8mm x 5 mm., shown in this photo

Your points of jamming, memory, and complexity are very valid, but consider the following three technologies being researched:

1. Plastic memory wafers about the same size as SmartDust that will hold 1Gb. They've already gotten the size to 1 inch square holding 1 Gb of memory.
2. Quantum communication replacing their Wi-Fi communication
3. The relative simplicity of the rules needed to simulate predator-prey behavior in Artificial Life. For one such simulation, look here

Sorry, ignore my parent post. After checking the BOINC site I found that this is indeed very possible. My bad.

So, maybe those differences don't matter to you, but they matter to people trying to write high-performance code: Java just doesn't cut it, while C# does....
What good do profilers do me if Java doesn't support high performance computing in the first place? What good is a memory profiler if Java doesn't give me the tools to control the layout of data structures?

That might mean something to me if .Net were not currently slower than Java. But I guess no matter how slow a platform is, as long as it has "high-performance" support it must be better? I see...

And what "tools to control layout of data structures" are you talking about? Now you are just insane. I would love to hear what that even MEANS, much less how there are not ten or twelve superior implementations for Java.

Here's a free clue for the day - most of your performance losses are going to come from algorithmic issues, not platform ones. Those are what you use profilers to detect and fix. I was able to get a very responsive Swing app going on a 486/66 (remember those?) with only 32MB of memory just by profiling the app and seeing what needed overriding in Swing for performance. No matter how much "high performance" support your platform has, if you code it wrong the performance is going to suck. And no programmer is immune from using a collection wrong once ina while or having complex system interactions give rise to big performance hits.

While I'm sure your mortgage calculator or whatever other toy app your are writing in C# is performing just fine, out here in the real world we like to write responsive apps and not just let code that adds 50% to compute time sit there.

To claim that C# is so superior for High Performance computing, when it does not yet run on computers that are meant for same, just goes to show how far out of whack your vision of reality really is.

And you know, things have changed just a little since 1998. If I were you I'd stop using MSN as your search engine and us something that can provide a little more relevant results - like this.

That's what the BOINC project is all about.

A generic distributed computing client is exactly what the BOINC platform is (see my short summary of it). You can view the websites of projects which use the BOINC platform, download the BOINC client through any of those sites, join or leave any of the projects whenever you want, and configure the client to spend a certain percentage of its time on each project. This client makes it much easier for you to support multiple projects.

but then again, you're a troll. rats.

Boinc should open up more distributed computing projects as well, since the server/client infrastructure is mostly prewritten. Since my other Boinc projects have been sputtering and not giving me work lately, maybe I'll give this one a try. More info on Boinc Here

So far, this would seem to be the 3rd BOINC project after Seti@Home and Predictor@Home.

Yes and that's what BOINC is, a generic framework for these types of tasks.
SETI@Home on BOINC

Hmm, all done ->

Back to the early experiments for a moment of humor. You may have seen a picture from the late 50's, early 60's of a zero G experiment involving a cat floating in air in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, with the oxygen masked pilot looking on. The one in my science book as a kid showed the cat twisting in mid air, front paws and rear heading in different directions as it tried to cope with simulated Zero G. Looks pretty cool, and I'm sure it made it into more than one textbook dealing with spaceflight because of it and been widely viewed. The untold story as I heard it was that the cat, which had travelled up to the test altitude in a mini cat carrier to the side of the pilot, shortly thereafter drifted in free fall to the point where he came in range of the pilots face. Very soon afterwards the pilot had a yowling, angry, cat fastened to his helmet and facemask with no intention of letting go. Of course he couldn't see. So he apparently beat at the cat with his free hand till it finally let go and disappeared someplace into the bowels of the aircraft for the rest of the flight. The pilot was *not* amused and let the folks in the ground who thought up the experiment know that upon his return. The cat apparently departed the aircraft at warp speed once it was shut down and left open for a bit. Science at it's finest. :-)

loc. cit.

But the real things looks cool too.

CC.

I wouldn't necessarily say that WEP is woefully inadequate as much as it is extremely poorly implemented. It could have worked well but it had serious implementation issues.

As all slashdotters probably already know about:

The (in)security of WEP

This is just an overview of some ideas that have been pinging around slashdot and several other communities for a while.

I have started to look at this subject fairly recently after I've heard of the problems with European parliament considering adopting a legislation similar to that in the US.

I am more interested with research that claims that software patents are altogether a different thing. Reasons are: a complex software system may rely on thousands patentable technologies. Simply verifying all these possibilities is an enormous task. In comparison, a GoreTex(TM) jacket seems to depend on a handful(if not just a single) patent. While GoreTex patent seems to support innovation, another patent seems to be a menace.

Alex (the astron god) also puts out a lecture series provided by The Teaching Company. The price is high but it seems like it's top quality.

Of course you can also see the berkeley webcast archive. be careful because they only show the last two semester's worth of courses. for example the astro 10 I took in 2001 isn't online anymore. also uses real player iirc. astro 10 is taught as a general interest course and is quite interesting even if you don't care about astronomy at all.

Not sure if somebody already mentioned this, but UC Berkeley has lecture notes, exams, and other academic content for almost all of its classes online. (Just Google to find out).

As an example, here are links to the class webpages for many of Berkeley's CS classes.

I think Berkeley also has live video lectures for a few of its classes online.

here you go.

And here is a graph of the traffic on the primary link between www.xorp.org and the outside world. At least right now, the 30Mb/s peak there is pretty obvious.

1) An honest-to-goodness, floor-to-ceiling, cradle-to-grave, first-to-last, night-n-day 64-bit environment, with

2) Strongly-typed data primitives.

For instance, if the platform requires you to use either Java or SQL, then it fails.

SQL fails because it is essentially an ASCII-based language that has almost no sense of primitive data types whatsoever, and its only undefined binary type, the binary BLOB, maxes out at 2^32 = 4 Billion bytes [so much for high-quality MPEGs of, e.g., Gone With The Wind].

Java fails because, as recently as the Java 1.5.x Beta, it cannot take long ints as array indices. For instance, the following will not even "compile" [i.e. "javac," whatever that is] under the Java 1.5.x Beta:

public class SixtyFourBit
{
public static void main (String args[])
{
long theLong = 1;
theLong theLong += 1;
System.out.println("theLong = " + theLong);

double [] theDoubleArray = new double[theLong];
}
}

As for the strong data typing, I want the environment to be natively aware of

A) IEEE 96-bit Extended Doubles
B) IEEE 128-bit Extended Doubles
C) [Bonus for Extra Credit] LabVIEW 128-bit TIMESTAMPs

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/MxMulEps.pdf
PDF DOCUMENT

> Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site to be painful to use?

You think his site is bad, you should look at those he inspires. Try following this two-column layout with ugly ASCII graphics. It gives me a headache.

> Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site to be painful to use?

You think his site is bad, you should look at those he inspires. Try following this two-column layout with ugly ASCII graphics. It gives me a headache.

Nothing "evolves" through the process, merely "adapts".

Nope. This is one and the same thing. E.g. there is plenty of molecular evidence that the blood clotting proteins forked off of pancreatic digestive enzymes by means of gene duplication and mutation. In embryonic development, some muscle cells are chemically activated to turn into bone cells. Archaeopteryx is still a tell-tale example of a gradual transition between bipedal dinosaurs and birds.

Similarly, no code existed in nature for "micro-evolution" to "mutate" lungs, electrical impulse handling, circulatory systems, etc. Either there are properties to "micro-evolution" that have not yet been revealed, or some other (possibly related) mechanism must be responsible.

The first fossil traces of lungs consist of a pair of small pharyngeal sacs in Actinopterygii. They may have populated oxygen-depleted pools and supplemented their oxygen supply by "gulping" air like some extant fish species do. Any slight increase in pharyngeal skin surface area and volume would have been of value to them, even if it just consisted of two tiny sacs at first. Tissue sensitive to electricity is found even in the lowliest of critters. Vertebrate circulatory systems serve to speed up diffusion of oxygen and nutrients, and likely started out as a simple linear transport in chordates (the link between invertebrates and vertebrates).

At least it's better than the common "viola" which really puzzled me the first time I saw it.

An alternative Viola which oldtimers may remember (I know I didn't like it much although I don't remember why)

Yep, i had some things confused. First i wrote 2.N for SunOS instead of 5.N (my bad).

Then, i did not know about the "jump" they made in 98.

Versioning numbers can be seen here.

Depending on the target age; give them some appropriate programing tools like MSWLogo or UCB Logo. Let's make hackers of them all!

Some people have hobbies where they pretend to be falling for the scam, just to see what kind of wierd nonsense they can get the scammer to do. This site has some funny pictures...

http://tbp.berkeley.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=303

More scammer-baiting can be found at http://www.419eater.com. And if you want more, just click on their links page - their are lots.

If by 'sovereignty' you mean "US control of a puppet government, who will rule from the largest embassy on the planet, run an independant military, support/write and enforce laws and dictate domestic and foreign policy/law through said puppet-government".

Look, this 'sovereign' government is not fooling anyone. Youve invaded. Now youve created a 'government'. Now you will rule from behind a not-so-effective of half-truths and flowery langauge about democracy, independance and freedom. Give me a fucking break.

I wonder how much the US-Overlords will appreciate it if the new Iraqi "Government" decides to switch their oil-trade to Euros...

There's been some interesting work in cognitive linguistics on linking grammatical categories with neurophysiological structures: for example verb aspect and motor function. I'd imagine we'll discover that the semantics of music is physiological at root, which would have the nice side effect of proving Nietzsche right yet again.

If you're interested in either learning to take great aerial photographs with a kite, or else just seeing a bunch of terrific images, Charles Benton's KAP site is the place to go.

Benton is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley. Living in northern California, he's got no end of interesting places to photograph. And I think his photography is probably aided by his architectural training and a strong ability to imagine what a shot will look like even though he's not looking directly through the camera.

It's absolutley worth checking out.

Don't see what all the fuss is about: Charlie Benton has been doing it for years....only thing is, he hasn't been wrecking 'em.

Next, go back to the BOINC client, select the Projects tab, right-click on SETI@home and select "Update". To view the graphics, in the BOINC client click on the Work tab, then right-click the application currently running and select "Show Graphics".

Much more complicated than the old client but this seems to be the new reality.

This should help explain your connectivity problems...from the setiathome homepage:
June 20, 2004
We expect the faulty router to be repaired tomorrow. Normal data service will follow.

June 18, 2004
The campus network folks did some great troubleshooting and narrowed down the problem to a faulty link on the path to our ISP. Repairs have been called in.

June 17, 2004
We are working on fixing the network problems that are resulting in dropped connections to the data server.

Umm... This new version is GPL'ed

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/seti_source/