Slashdot Mirror
Distributed.net Has Lost Some Team Association
singularity writes "According to Nugget's plan at Distributed.net, some users have lost their team affiliation. I checked mine, and sure enough I needed to join team Slashdot again. As always, you can join Slashdot.org's team after you have contributed your first blocks and have your password.
"
...some of the team joins performed during the 27-Dec to 29-Dec...
If I need to translate, that means only if you joined a team between December 27th, and December 29th.
Is this really big news for slashdot???
-Saxton
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Does team affiliation matter in the end, or is the greater goal the cooperative effort of so many people as members of distributed.net?
Does anything I say matter in the end? Probably not. Just wondering, is all. :^)
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Maybe it seems naive but why are teams necessary for distributed.net or do they increase key rate processing any?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I can't see how the perl code for slashdot intersects this topic in the fact that maybe they both use perl.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
D. Taylor - Whoops, thanks for the correction... much appreciated.
-Saxton
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Well I guess it is more important news than DCypher.Net bringing out clients for Linux and FreeBSD for the new Gamma Flux distributed computing project. That one was rejected twice.
*sarcasm off*
ProcessTree - Isn't it time your computers started paying for itsel
I think that most people value the reasoning of people asking why and with what means. The question that people should ask is why is this necessary and important.
I believe it was Socrates who said that "tge unexamined life is not worth living" or some such.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
If people are affected, they wont loose blocks, everything is logged, so when they rejoin their team, the unasigned blocks that where processed get assigned to the team. NO BIG DEAL!
This message complies with part 15 FCC rules, (CE) Approved
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
People the world over have usually found the need for vanity wheather it be in gold or silver or in rank. Basically this reduces the team standing and allows for Billy Bo Bob's 31337 team of W2k people to get ahead.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Why is this still needed? Haven't we verified that these encryptions can be broken through brute-force already? To continue doing it would seem to be wasteful exercise of cpu power, kinda like Sisypus pushing that stone up the hill, only to have it fall back down. Don't mean to upset any body, just wondering why?
I understand the original point was to show that 56-bit encryption wasn't enough, but RC5-64 is just not that interesting. (In fact, I could argue that this is proving that RC5-64 is more than adaquate, if they've only searched 17% of the keyspace in 2+ years of massive work).
Why doesn't someone think up a better project for all of this computer power? Even Seti-at-home is pretty dull, since I don't really believe they know what they're looking for.
Anyone have any better project ideas?
---
Because people are so religious about their platform, this offers them a superficial way of proving it. The end result is that more people will probably join in, and more blocks will be completed.
Another ZDNet editor finds slashdot...
Finkployd
One thing you haven't done is demonstrate the technical merits Java might have over Perl.
They are both interpreted languages - Perl compiles scripts into byte code just before execution just as Java does.
From what I've seen, Java just adds more bloat and bugs to anything it touches.
I think the major problem here is you see something *you* don't like. Despite the fact that many other thousands of users are quite happy with it, you feel the need to whine about it in a manner that causes annoyance - and ADDS to the the ``hundreds of thousands of bytes'' you must download.
Further, without a hint of irony, you call your detractors ``juvinile''. A quick lession: Attacking the author instead of the issue only makes your point look foolish. Ad Hominem tactics never get you anywhere.
In my own defense for attacking the author in this case - the authors credibility is now the topic at hand.
If you're so intent on ``utilizing your right to express yourself'', why do you insist on hiding behind a mask of anonymity?
-Jeff
dist.net has exhausted 89% of the keyspace in the CSC project. This means that either 1)we will find the key in less than five days or, more likely, 2) the key was missed due to an error in client code. If 2) is what actually happened, this will be a major detractor from dist.net as the project will have been a failure, and we will need to re-check the keyspace from the beginning. D'oh!
I havn't had a chance to talk to Nugget yet, so I don't know what he saw or what reports he had, but I think that what happened is that all team joins for Dec. 30 were lost. Unfortunatly, we had no way to recover those, so anyone who joined a team or changed their team affiliation on Dec. 30 would be affected. IIRC, we saw about 10 people from Dec. 26-Dec. 29 who changed their teams, so this will probably affect only a very, very small number of people. Since I havn't talked to Nugget yet, there could be something else going on that I'm not aware of though.
/. }:8)
As others have pointed out, no blocks have been lost, and if you weren't on a team before, your blocks will all get assigned when you join the team of your choice (part of the nightly statsrun assigns any blocks for a given participant with a team ID of 0 to that participant's current team, assuming that their current team isn't 0).
Sorry for the confusion. As other's have mentioned this really isn't a big deal. Of course, it never hurts to get mentioned on
dB!
decibel@distributed.net
Yes Sybase ASE for Linux on a Linux box
My posting using my username shows that I believe enough in what I say to put my name behind it. It shows that enough thought has been put into it that I'm willing to stake my reputation behind it.
Your remarks are nothing but inflammatory drivel.
I hadn't stated that your concerns aren't valid - merely that your methods of expression are childish.
You've made a blind suggestion without any technical backing or how your particular solution has merits over others. You've made allusions to ``other sites do it better'' without any references or demonstration. Further - you're unfamiliar with how the ``real'' Slashdot actually works - an experience that is quite limited to the maintainers themselves.
It also seems that you lack the life experience to realize that repeating the same tired drivel doesn't make your point heard more - it just deafens the ears you hope might listen.
You've yet to offer any constructive criticism, and that is where you fail.
-Jeff
Looking at the stats page, so far 88.8% of the CSC 56 bit challenge has been completed, and the correct key has not been found. With only five days left before the keyspace is exausted, I'm beginning to worry that somehow we may have missed it. If we get to the end and still haven't found it, what will we do? I'd hate to have to explain to those 15 thousand active participents that their processor time was wasted. What could have gone wrong? Forged blocks, an error in the algorithm, anything else?
....when doing it "brute force" no longer pays. I do believe the 64bit challenge will be broken that way, but some bright young student of maths is going to take the 72 - 128bit challenges in one go!
It may feel good to be part of a 'group effort' and some can (like floodnet, electrohippies, etc) can be so stubborn that i can do a 'strobe attack' to all the targets and accomplish single handedly what the whole group of 'surfers' (serfs?) attempt to do.
I'd admit whoever gets the whole challenge deserves the Nobel Prize, but rest assured it will happen like this and in this decade! In closing, i'd be a bit suspucious of "seti@home" or other group efforts. As a matter of fact, it is general policy to not allow participation in any of this on my servers, that includes Napster, just another great waste of resources.
Nope. I'm saying "Oh God! Not again!" But that's just me :) I think I'm going to turn off reparenting. The ACs and trolls of late are really starting to get on my nerves and I don't need some higher rated comment stimulating my interest.
Our true purpose is to promote wide-area distributed computing... encryption contests just happen to be the vehicle we've used to do that so far. OGR will be the first contest that breaks that mold.
For those who are interested, I would suggest taking a peek at our mission statement.
Ok your comments about NNTP really have little revelency with actual experience. Have you ever seen the actual nntp distribution system? It relies on servers that need to transfer several hundred gigs a day at the very least. Not only that but when you get right down to it you then could effectively block anonymity that you are so lavishly enjoying (most likely you are a person with already high karma) so that you can say whatever you want.
The http/perl interface is the best for all around compatability issues when things like this are involved. Personally if your little plan does go into production taco better provide an interface that everyone can use and not just the elities. If not a little lawsuit under the ADA will be in order to correct the matter for the betterment of the community. I really find this intreesting that you can't even just post to items and then you can see if anyone has actually read your remarks and then posted back by using the user page.
Even if you submit several thousand submissions a day only the last 50 will be counted and then you can see the responses to them. Another interesting fact I have used slow and low bandwitch connections at various locations and slashdiot works find and dandy in even the most low key setup. For starters you could change the HTML created to "lite" mode and that would most likely reduce the useless details of the posts to a minimum (in informal test that I have run preformance increased by at least 20-50%). So quite frankly quite your bitching and let us enjoy things the way we want ok?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Gee when I took a class in communications for the work place they said the first and foremost people need contact information in order to actually get your point across. Taking the "clinton sucks" message reference it does not good for two reasons the second of which besides the fact that you are not addressing the person directly is that you are not making any credible measure of your point because you are implying that you need to hide because what you say is dangerous or stupid.
Quite frankly I don't think Malda gives a pile of horse shit about what you say and neither do I. He owns creative liscence to that site and that is his affair. What anonymous cowards say in his forum is of little concern to him or almost anyone else. In fact I would think that because I have not seen evidence that slashdot can expire old and or unused accounts that one of the main reasons that anonymous coward posting (versus posting anonymously) was implimenting was because he didn't want his ewntire database filled with expired logins for microsoft stoolies.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The core problem here is that its 2 different rankings and as you state people wont do CSC because the are affraid of their RC5 rating.
the sloution to this could be to make a single rating, so a work unit from either project would count.
This message complies with part 15 FCC rules, (CE) Approved
/joke on
:(
:(
I have it!
I wrote it down on a pice of paper this morning, tho unfortunately i lost it again.
i had it on a StickyNote(TM) sitting on my monitor, i guess my cubicle neighbour must have stolen it.
i knew i should not have written "top secret key" on the note
/joke off
-Tournesol
This message complies with part 15 FCC rules, (CE) Approved
To take your comments one at a time...
.plan for more info.
because it was supposed to add stability and scalability that was not available in the NT/SQL config they had before.
Statsbox II is more stable and scalable than Statsbox I. sbI was having more and more hardware issues. It was also a single Pentium 166 that was OC'd to 200MHz. sbII is currently a dual PII-300, and the motherboard should support any Slot 1 CPU. This mobo will also support up to 1G of RAM and currently has 1/2G installed. sbI was maxed out with 256M, iirc.
Well, it's no faster. Crashes and corrupts just as often,
Based on what measure? The RC5 statsrun dropped from over 6 hours with stats turned off to under 4 hours with stats left on. Even with the ever increasing RC5 statsrun time (it will keep getting longer until the project is done) and CSC stats, we're still finishing stats in less time than on sbI, and we're leaving HTTP access enabled durring the run.
We've also had far less unexpected downtime with this setup than with sbI. In fact, I can't think of any hardware issues that have affected sbII. The current problem was caused by human error, read my
they have failed misserably at putting the functionality back into the stats pages.
This is the only argument yake that holds any weight, as far as I can see, but I'd like to know what is missing other than all of the CPU/OS info that the old site had? Also please note that there is CPU/OS info available for CSC (see here and here).
Since I do d.net more 'cause stats are cool than any other reason, it kinda pisses me off...
You're certainly not the only participant who is a stats-junkie (I'm one myself). We do try and take stats very seriously, but unfortunately, there's only so much time in our days. Nugget, Bruce, and I are working on our next version of stats, which will be far more robust (and hopefully will include cross-project stats). Sometime in the future, we will also be looking to bring some more PHP and SQL folks on-board.
I hope you can undertand how discouraging a post that is full of misinformation can be to those of us who are working to improve stats.
Just like communism how is it moving anything forward?
If you mean finite fine grained control for every possible function to be something that is advanced. You know I guess that their are two considerations here.
1. Bandwidth that you have is limited
2. NNTP solves the bandwidth problem by allowing you to access things at least as fast or at least competitively due to the lack of moving more data.
Now in all the implimentations that I have seen of any newsgroup program you have an option to download headers and then you can look at the subject and determine what it says. If this is your argument then it is dead wrong. Try this experiment for me. Find a browser preferably some version of netscape because IE messes up the formatting. Find a story that is either scrolled off the page of stories in either standad but preferably on maxium stories for today and then save it as text.
Go back and look at the actual difference between the text of the subject and the text of the article (in NNTP language the news body) you will see a striking difference between the actual content of the body and what is being discused.
That plan would only usually use just having more user intervention and most likely almost the same download time. Having a high user threshold usually helps for downloads takig less time plus the other tips I have given in posts.
As far as being a fool for replying well I guess I am but that is only because I have seen too many examples where people wanted to "improve" something and it just made things much, much worse that as Shakespeare said "it moves me to stand"
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
distributed.net announcements don't kill other projects. It's too bad that the existing OGR project decided to pack their bags... but laying blame on someone else?
I'd think slashdotters are used to holding strong to an underdog. Like someone's just going to quit working on some app for Linux just because some other company announces they are going to make it for Windows?
You get the anology.
Secondly, distributed.net supports distributed computing efforts as a whole, not just their own. See their Mission Statement where they say "...we will advocate distributed computing..." implying as a whole, not just themselves. Their mission is to do things "...in the advancement of distributed computing..." not just distributed.net.
Thirdly, distributed.net even credits the Origional Effort on their OGR Page... and in no way told the origional effort to stop what they were doing.
-Saxton
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Guess that means that Windows is better than all other OSes combined, eh? :)
It's funny. Laugh. Just don't moderate it as funy, because it's not really thatfunny.
Not that he's not a nutfuck, of course, but it really would be convenient to be able to read /. using, say, slrn (I'm thinking slrn's scoring/killfiling abilities, here)
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
His points might be valid, but after seeing the results (nested, highest scores first, -1), I have come to the conclusion that making /. more like a newsreader or one-on-one discussion forum would be a WrongThing(TM). A better way of doing the WrongThing(TM) is NOT an improvement. Slashdot is doing very well, thank you.
Anyone who's been following their
Wait--did I say this was the latest in their string of fuckups? Well guess what--as several hours had passed without a new bug report coming out of distributed.net, wouldn't you know it, now it turns out that they haven't actually completed 91% of the CSC project after all.
Yep, you read that correctly. Oh, but don't worry--it's not a bug, it's a feature. For those of you who won't take the time to click on the last link, here's how dbaker's latest
As we near the 100% mark of CSC keyspace completion, I think it's
time to explain what that CSC statistics mean, and how they are
determined.
It is perhaps a common misconception that each CSC work unit
completed is unique...
He goes on to describe the fact that they've implemented redundancy checking to weed out hacked clients with the CSC project--a very good if a bit overdue move (although perhaps they could have disclosed this earlier?)--and that they've decided to give everyone full credit for all their blocks, even redundant ones--also a good idea--and so therefore there's obviously absolutely no way that they could avoid the actual keyspace being more than 100% of the reported "keyspace". Obviously. And this was the plan all along. Which is why they even wrote up not one but two new scripts which (falsely) calculate that the "keyspace" will be exhausted in only 2 days now. Obviously.
And of course it's perfectly fine that they just hoped that the project would get solved before it his 100%, so that they wouldn't have to inform their users that they've implemented redundancy checking. And no, they're not going to tell us how many percents are actually in the keyspace (105%? 110%?), or how many days it will actually take before we check all the keys and get to find out if they've somehow managed to fuck up yet again. Why should we be entitled to know silly information like that??
Meanwhile, dcypher.net has sprung up, and, in only a couple months, and with what certainly seems to be fewer people working for them than distributed.net has debugging their database they've:
come out with a CSC client which is 250% faster than distributed (on x86, at least).
Yes, that's 2.5 times as fast.
had stats which (gasp!) don't break or have new bugs in them every couple days and (gasp!) don't have a 2 hour scheduled downtime to update every night and even (gasp!) update in real time, almost like real databases do!
started the Gamma Flux project which, while not personally my cup of tea, is certainly the first distributed computing project which is actually useful (it helps calculate ideal containment solutions for nuclear waste).
promised to pass on the entire share of the CSC winnings to the person who wins, as opposed to distributed.net's 20% (10% if you join a team).
/. Guess what, Decibel--there's a word for preannouncing programs months before you plan to release them so as to scare off any potential competitors. It's called "FUD", and it's a particularly disgusting kind; in fact, even Microsoft's backed off a bit from that sort of thing lately.
But what finally pissed me off the most was reading this post earlier in this thread from Decibel at distributed.net, in response to an admittedly pretty hostile post from Armin Lenz at dcypher.net, in which he has the gall to imply that dcypher shouldn't have done CSC at all because distributed had "announced" that they intended to work on it soon after the contest was announced, way back in May. Of course, Decibel doesn't mention the fact that they didn't launch the project until November 17, 2 weeks *after* dcypher.net, and only then with a broken client (yes, a brute force program that's 2.5 times slower than it should be is certainly broken), and that they haven't even *released* a finished client for the Mac!
And furthermore, he doesn't even understand that making the argument that "we announced first" isn't likely to garner too much respect at
And despite all that, he still says "we did CSC because it was relatively easy to add". Well I'd hate to see how badly they can screw up a project that's a little "hard".
I'm hoping I won't get the chance with OGR. Despite everything, I think OGR is a pretty cool project, and I just might be persuaded to stick with distributed.net if they (finally) come out with their OGR client, and it works, and isn't orders of magnitude slower than competing clients, and they fix their stats and get their act together. I suppose in the end I was always a sucker for the moo.
But distributed has a lot of lost trust to earn back.
I have been using distributed net clients on many platforms since they have been around. I have to say that when I first joined they had vision, and their client on every platform known to man working on one big project was a great idea. Then something happened. Adam Beberg left. I don't know the man, but I do know that is the point distributed.net died. Adam left to pursue the v3 (version 3) client scheme he had come up with. Basically you can write your own core for whatever project you are working on. The whole thing is GPLd. You can contribute to the CVS archive if you want. The url is http://cosm.mithral.com/ When this is finished people will be able to use distribued clients for things like rendering graphics, nuclear research, etc, etc. Why buy a beowulf cluster when there are millions of PIIIs chugging away at 0.00001% of CPU time used while people type? Save the money and make a NOW (network of workstations).
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.