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.
"
Actually, no:
:)
We tried to recover
some of the team joins performed during the 27-Dec to 29-Dec and it
looks like our code accidently unjoined a few people from their teams.
All joins between 27-Dec and 29-Dec were lost, because the stats db was rebuilt.
However, when they tried to recover the lost changes
they accidentally unjoined other people from their teams.
Still possibly not slashdot worthy in everyones opinion, but it's about time distributed.net got another mention
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David Taylor
davidt-sd@xfiles.nildram.spam.co.uk
[To e-mail me: s/\.spam//]
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
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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
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"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
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?
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Wow, aren't you an annoying a$$hole.
:)
I've got a better idea, as a form of protest, you should boycott slashdot until they see you java way
Why not start up a site of your own mr 3l33t coder, then you can show cmdrtaco up at his own game.
Finkployd
Actually, when you are a lone (and powerless) voice in someone else's large forum, put up or shut up is a perfectly valid point.
If you don't like the language too bad, you are just going to piss people off here and get moderated down for every whiny "java is great, woohoo!" post you make.
If you are interested in making slashdot better, contribute intelligent discussion.
Finkployd
ps. If you really are interested in convincing Malda to see your point of view, perhaps you should use a less insulting tone. These are the kind of things you learn after junior high.
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
If anyone even dares to about it that way, let me know... all it shows is what platforms are popular among supporters of distributed.net.
If it showed anything else according to the real world, you'd see Windows machines dwarfing all others, for the simple fact that there's huge numbrs of them.... Macs would come in second, with linux having just made a huge run up to the #3 spot...
That's not what it shows, though... So I don't think that anything beyond platform popularity of distibuted's audience can be statistcally relevant.
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
Thanks for this clarification. Now I understand that this is only the beginning of a very ambitious project. Good luck guys!
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
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.
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.
If he continues to ignore us, some of us may become inspired enough to do "slashdot" the right way.
This is my usual suggestion to people who bitch about slashdot. The MAJORITY of people here enjoy this site the way it is, sure there are some cosmetic improvements that could be made, but most of us are happy for the forum that is provided for us, free of charge.
The owners of this site are right not to bow down to a vocal minority, especially when that vocal minority constantly floods the forum, posts rambling complaints without solutions, and sersonally attacks the owners and users of this site.
I'm not saying you are doing all of this, but this is the company you are being grouped in with. Unless the "slashdot reformers" learn to grow up, they will not effect change at all.
Finkployd
Am I the only one finding this "Battle of the ACs -- No Holds Barred!" thread hillarious!?
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.