Slashdot Mirror

I know I don't bother with many links these days - whats the point when I can use google to search for it, the open directory to find by category (or even on the odd occaision Yahoo). Even if I am looking for something similar I don't even have to web crawl for it - you can just Show Similar to find it.

I stating the assumption that others are also doing this - and if this is so, then won't the ability of page rank and similar link "usefulness" evaluation algorithims to produce good results degrade?

Any thoughts....?


Keep Lamb Chop On Top - SETI - The Team Lamb Chop Gauntlet

Well, you will be glad to hear that no tax money goes to support SETI. Zero public resources are spent on it.

Everyone that contributes to SETI, from Paul Allen to Team Lambchop, is spending their own resources of their own free will. They obviously think it's not a waste.

So, what exactly are you complaining about?

Yea...right. I have had one email address since May and I already get 50+ spams per day. I have never given out the address in a web form, replied to spam, entered a contest, or anything else with it. However, the one thing that I did do was place it on a community page (go team lamb chop!) since I was acting as a web master for a short time. Guess what, two weeks later I was getting nailed with spam.

Does you pr0n theory hold? No.

Yes, be sure to run the command line client - it is much faster. Other tips, stats and stuff can be found on the #1 Seti team: Team Ars Technica Lamp Chop (TLC).

All you Americans should join TLC *now* unless you want Seti Germany to overtake the top spot in Seti!

It's good to see such a strong response from the community and we thank everyone that has given us constructive feedback. However, we feel that many of you have completely missed the purpose of the article.

The purpose of the article is NOT to compare OSs, get fast SETI@home times, or even to optimize the systems at all. We thought this was clearly stated in the abstract and methodology sections. Either we screwed up and did not make this apparent or people did not read the article. The study of optimizing systems and making SETI@home faster is already handled very well by Team Lamb Chop (if the site ever decides to come up...).

What we DID want to accomplish is to study work unit completion time VARIATION . This question was prompted by our reading of the SETI literature which had not dealt with this matter. Our research question was: on a "typical" system, how much does the completion time vary from instance to instance? If I run the same work unit over and over, how much will my completion time vary? I don't know about the rest of you, but when I run SETI@home on my systems, I do not disable all other processes (including cron or anything else). If we did disable anything out of the ordinary, then we did not accomplish our goals. As was clearly stated in the methodology section, we used the default settings for each OS.

A separate question was the method used for us to arrive at this conclusion: testing several OSs in several configurations on the same platform. At this time, this method seems a useful one for comparing configurations.

Now that we have a baseline, we are going to continue and try to figure out the questions posed in the article. Such as: why does Linux have such a high variance in comparision to the other OSs? We have collected many great suggestions and I will test all of them and post the results.

In any case, this article cannot be used to compare OS to OS performance. Not only is that not the purpose of the article, but there are too many confounding variables--many of which have been raised here.

From the S@H Webpage:
"Restrictions: ...Distribution of this software is prohibited."
Because the client has the linux client flashed into ROM it appears that this card violates this restriction. The restriction could have been easily gotten around by requiring the user to download the client and then flash it into ROM themselves. I don't know if they have an "agreement" with the SETI guys or not....nor do I know if the SETI guys would sort of prosecute them. (Could they? dunno.)

Most likely by the time the card would be shipped (I heard 6-8 weeks) Version 3.0 of the client would be out and the client preinstalled on the card would be obsolete.

For those of you who would like to see a Version 3.0 Preview, we have one up right now :). You can check it out here: Version 3.0 Preview

-zAmboni

From the S@H Webpage:
"Restrictions: ...Distribution of this software is prohibited."
Because the client has the linux client flashed into ROM it appears that this card violates this restriction. The restriction could have been easily gotten around by requiring the user to download the client and then flash it into ROM themselves. I don't know if they have an "agreement" with the SETI guys or not....nor do I know if the SETI guys would sort of prosecute them. (Could they? dunno.)

Most likely by the time the card would be shipped (I heard 6-8 weeks) Version 3.0 of the client would be out and the client preinstalled on the card would be obsolete.

For those of you who would like to see a Version 3.0 Preview, we have one up right now :). You can check it out here: Version 3.0 Preview

-zAmboni

I'm with Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop, which is ahead of MacAddict, Slashdot, and Microsoft, not to mention a certain well known CPU company that goes by the symbol INTC. Wanna join my team? Work units of all races, creeds, and colors are welcome...
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