SETI@Home Gets An Upgrade

Are they ever going to release by slickwillie · 2000-01-21 05:07 · Score: 1

an X GUI version?

Re:Are they ever going to release by GodOfHellfire · 2000-01-21 05:34 · Score: 1

i don't think that most *nix users would want that. well, the linux folks would.

i have it running on 20 of my headless boxes (don't tell my boss!!), so x gui would be pointless.
Re:Are they ever going to release by beme · 2000-01-21 05:45 · Score: 1

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/uni x.html mentions "The xsetiathome X11 client released with the 2.0 versions of the client has known problems. Please note the README.xsetiathome file in the .tar delivery. Not all platforms necessarily have an xsetiathome client. Please do not email us about bugs in the xsetiathome client."

-beme

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-beme
1971
Re:Are they ever going to release by Otto · 2000-01-21 05:48 · Score: 2

Ask and ye shall recieve. It's bundled with the 2.0 download.

Check out http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/README.xsetiathome. txt
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Re:Are they ever going to release by ucblockhead · 2000-01-21 05:50 · Score: 2

Under Windows, running as a screen saver doubles the time it takes to process a block. On a PII 350 running Windows NT, turning all the graphics off took me from 25 hours a block to 14 hours a block.

I'd imagine that X would be worse, if anything, given the way Windows trades stability for graphics speed.

If your interest is throughput (either as a score whore, or because you want to donate as much as you can) I'd stay away from any X client.

--
The cake is a pie
Re:Are they ever going to release by Petethelate · 2000-01-21 05:59 · Score: 1

an X GUI version?

Speaking from experience, it gets really old after a while. Never got the current version to make it past the proxies at work, but if 2.0 really does work, I might set up a couple of work boxen to crunch. Preferably, without the gui.

OTOH, if Nitrozac@home ran under X, I'd be there in a heartbeat. :-)
Re:Are they ever going to release by sgage · 2000-01-21 06:13 · Score: 1

TKSeti works really nicely.
Re:Are they ever going to release by jerk · 2000-01-21 06:46 · Score: 1

as far as i can tell tkseti doesn't post the data with the 2.0 linux client. nor will wmseti work. also, there is no xseticlient for linux that i could find. it is bundled with some of the other *nix clients, however
Re:Are they ever going to release by Lebofsky · 2000-01-21 07:15 · Score: 1

Yeah, there's an xsetiathome client that will be bundled with the various unix versions. It's not a screensaver, though - just an X window that opens up with similar graphics as the Mac/Windows client. Maybe someday it'll act as a screensaver as well. - Matt - SETI@home
Re:Are they ever going to release by thedward · 2000-01-21 08:33 · Score: 1

with the -fullscreen option, I'm sure it would work fine as a module for xscreensaver

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Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
Re:Are they ever going to release by Axemaster · 2000-01-21 10:30 · Score: 1

Well, considering a lot of Wintel users have it running in Screensaver mode (at least just about all of the people I've seen running it on Windows), and considering that SETI *almost* has too many people crunching data compared to whats available, the GUI option really isn't a big deal for most.

Personally, and this is not trolling for flames, I think the SETI project is a waste of time in its current state.

The data you process may be processed multiple times by others, thus rendering your time spent, worthless. I have heard reports that they in fact lost a portion of the anylized data, and resubmitted it to clients, as well.

Finally, by their own technical paper, they claim:

The sky survey covers a 2.5 MHz bandwidth centered at 1420 MHz ... The survey covers 28% of the sky (declinations ranging from +1 to +35 degrees) with a sensitivity of 3E-25 W/m2.

2.5mhz frequency spread, covering 28% of the sky.

It just seems like a waste of time to me.. others may (and obviously do) see it differently, but to me, if they are only searching 1/4 of the sky, and even then, only scanning a 2.5 mhz frequency range, that leaves a LOT out. I ran a client myself, but when I started reading more data about the project, and what it entailed, I decided that I could put my proc time to better uses.

Then again, SETI obviously has the use of expensive hardware, dedicated scientists, and hundreds of thousands of interested people willing to run clients to analyze the data, so obviously it has support. I dont think the entire SETI program is a waste of money, I just dont see the benefits of scanning such a small portion of the sky/freq range.

Again, not trolling here, this is an objective opinion.

--
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
Re:Are they ever going to release by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 17:56 · Score: 0

why cant it have an option to turn off graphics after 15 mins of showing it? Who watches it for hours?
Re:Are they ever going to release by Ferzerp · 2000-01-26 08:51 · Score: 2

The 2.5 Mhz is the only frequency area that we really know the background noise well enough to do this.

Artificial Intelligence by Da+Penguin · 2000-01-21 05:09 · Score: 3

The Great AIP (Artificial Intelligence Project) has started.

It is open source, GPL, and for Linux

Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:17 · Score: 0

...as well as off-topic and vaporware, apparently.

Interesting? Go, Planet of the Apes boy.
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Jburkholder · 2000-01-21 05:19 · Score: 2

yes, but he mentions opensource, GPL and Linux...
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:20 · Score: 0

>Interesting? Go, Planet of the Apes boy You maniacs!!
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:30 · Score: 0

as off topic as this post is, it is interesting
and way off topic

hey moderators, wake up!!!!!!!!!!
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Xzzy · 2000-01-21 05:42 · Score: 1

It suggests that AI research has been "slowing down." Hello? What about that big chess machine IBM built? What about all those bots people wrote for Quake2? What about Half-Life? Now, admittedly, most of this is entertainment related, but it's still AI research, and it's getting pretty darn advanced. Q3, if you listen to Carmack, has even better bots. I mean, this guy has a cool idea, but so far, it looks like there's no client to download, his mission statement is incredibly vague, and there's really no details about how they're going to use distributed computing to enhance the project. Past that, his claim that "AI has been slowing down" seems totally wrong. Call me skeptical.
Re:Artificial Intelligence by gatz · 2000-01-21 06:09 · Score: 2

These things arent real AI, (well, not sure about the chess machine,) but for the quake bots, there is nothing intelligent about it. They are programmed to respond to the input that is given to them. Just because it may be complex doesnt mean its AI. Im not too sure about this project either though. There doesnt seem to be any real opensource AI stuff going on besides this though, none that I have heard of at least. Could be cool if it get support..
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:53 · Score: 0

"Open Source AI" is kind of vague. What exactly is it going to do? Aren't most AI apps targeted to one sort of task? Or will this one be able to answer all my questions, like "what's for lunch?"?

But I guess this grand "Open Source" AI will outdo them all, right? :P
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:04 · Score: 0

> It suggests that AI research has been "slowing
> down." Hello? What about that big chess machine > IBM built? What about all those bots people
> wrote for Quake2? What about Half-Life?

AI has not lived up to its wild expectations from the late sixties, and seems to remain stuck in the same problem: exceptional achievements in finite, well defined, relatively simple domains, pathetic advances in open, fuzzy ones.

IBM's Deep Blue, good as it is, it's just more of the same: chess is a very narrow, finite domain.

AI is not really slowing down. It's just proceeding at the same snail pace it was forced to adopt thirty years ago.
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:18 · Score: 0

I agree that AI is not really slowing down, but from what I've heard, commercially people were really excited about AI being the next big thing back in the 70s (and maybe early 80s). But that kind of excitement about AI has certainly died down.
Re:Artificial Intelligence by jawad · 2000-01-21 10:28 · Score: 1

Is the Great AIP going public anytime soon? Sounds like a sure bet!
Re:Artificial Intelligence by smallstar · 2000-01-21 11:34 · Score: 1

The examples you give of AI research are pretty narrow. I don't know much about game bots, but personally I'm not sure if they qualify as "artificial intelligence" in anything but the loosest sense. Expert systems like chess-playing computers represent only very small subset of all the true research being done in AI.

The kind of project that the Great AIP site seems to be proposing is an entirely different idea. From what I can tell, they are proposing to create an online environment that allows AI's to interact and evolve and eventually "reach intelligence". We're talking about an artificial intelligence that should be able to interact, experience, develop, learn and create... not a big computer that can calculate and evaluate insanely huge numbers of chess moves.

The project itself concerns me a little, because I'm not sure that its creators have fully investigated and appreciated the magnitude of the task they are undertaking. The history of AI research shows a recurring pattern: periods of extreme optimism and lofty aspirations, followed by periods of cynicism as people's ideas fail to pan out as expected. Over and over we are confronted with the fact that this thing we call "intelligence" (which I notice the Great AIP still hasn't even *defined*) is far more complex and elusive than we previously suspected.

Not that I'm trying to say that AI research is pointless or that an open source AI project has no merit; I simply hope that people involved will do some serious research into previous attempts at finding "intelligence". Otherwise, I worry that they will simply repeat past mistakes.

For more information on the huge range of ideas and research falling under the category of AI, check out the collection of links at http://ai.about.com/compute/ai/. For a good beginner's overview (and a chance shamelessly plug a friend's site ) I recommend this AI Tutorial Review.
Re:Artificial Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 12:58 · Score: 0

They are programmed to respond to the input that is given to them.

So are you.

Mars Probe Signal Decoding option by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:10 · Score: 2

Word goes the new version has an option to search for signals of Nasa's lost Mars Probe. :)

They made this to work on a 386...cool... by Fiore2 · 2000-01-21 05:11 · Score: 1

Do you people think this is worth the download?

This is interesting "For example, our Windows version uses only standard Intel 386 instructions, not MMX, or other proprietary variations. " 386! :)

Re:They made this to work on a 386...cool... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:34 · Score: 0

Ummm...they made it work with the standard 386 instruction set, that doesn't mean it is designed for a 386 chip. The only Intel-condoned additions to the 386 instruction set are MMX and Katmai's SIMD extensions.
Re:They made this to work on a 386...cool... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:23 · Score: 0

I thought the 486 and Pentium added a few new instructions...

How does this work? by browser_war_pow · 2000-01-21 05:11 · Score: 1

Even if there are 100,000,000 people using the client, what good does that do if there aren't enough telescopes (all types)? (BTW I am not trying to be a troll here)

Re:How does this work? by lamz · 2000-01-21 05:14 · Score: 1

The problem is not the telescopes. There is so much data flowing in to the radio telescopes that the problem is getting enough cpu's together to process it all.

Mike van Lammeren

--
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Re:How does this work? by Caffeinated · 2000-01-21 05:16 · Score: 1

There are enough telescopes, they are satellite dishes from observatories all over the world. Plus, each dish is continually downloading data, so processor cycles are continually needed to interpret data.

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automatictaxistopelectriccigarettelovebaby
Re:How does this work? by Petethelate · 2000-01-21 05:51 · Score: 2

Even if there are 100,000,000 people using the client, what good does that do if there aren't enough telescopes

The setiathome FAQ covers most of it, but the short story is they are getting data in 2.5MHz wide chunks. To keep a work unit small enough so that a reasonably powered machine will do the job, they filter the data so that a workunit comprises 107 seconds of data, in a band a bit over 9kHz wide.

So, for every hour they are running ar Arecibo, they can get over 8600 work units. That helps a bit, too.

One other thing I've seen (I've been on since they went with the release) is that a lot of people sign up, process a few units and lose interest.

For what it's worth, I've processed a bit over 335 units. This is on a single box, because I couldn't get through the proxies at work. Even so, I'm running in the 97th percentile.

Hint: With a Windoze box, the screen saver chews up a lot of resources. On Win98, I let it run in the background without (usually) writing to the screen. This speeds up processing about 3X. (It takes about 11 to 12 hours on a 350MHz PII in background, 39 hours on the screen. I never finished a workunit on my 486 box....)
Re:How does this work? by ucblockhead · 2000-01-21 06:02 · Score: 1

How odd... I have the exact same box, but running NT. It takes me 14 hours to run a block, but the odd thing is, with graphics turned on, it took only 25...

We also must have started around the same time, because I've down 342 units as of today.

The numbers are interesting. At three hundred or so blocks, we're at more than almost 98% of the people. As far as I can tell (and it is only an estimate, look at the charts), 5% of the people are responsible for something like 99% of the blocks processed. (My poor little Pentium, which runs under a different account, has only managed 56 blocks, and yet it is in the 86% percentile.)

--
The cake is a pie

Alright! by pb · 2000-01-21 05:12 · Score: 1

All I can say is, it's about time. People have been whining about the duplication of effort on the SETI@Home project for a while.

This abundance of processor time is actually a pretty good argument for a good, open, generic distributed project framework. (unfortunately, most of them don't look as *cool* as SETI. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Giant waste of time and effort by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:14 · Score: 1

I'm not talking about geeks running this on their private computers. But you've got sysadmins everywhere who spend a significant portion of their time looking for ways to run that stupid thing on even more of the computers in their networks. "But it only uses idle time, no harm is done" - ha ha. Yes, it was kind of funny when it started, but anyone running that stuff on anything else than their own computers isn't worth his job.

Re:Giant waste of time and effort by GodOfHellfire · 2000-01-21 05:40 · Score: 1

i have 20 boxes on a test network that are used mostly as terminals to log in to the production system. seti@home is FAR better use of the machines than just sitting there as idle workstations.

so there.
Re:Giant waste of time and effort by lonnonf · 2000-01-21 05:54 · Score: 2

SETI@home is actually a fantastic program for "burning in" new machines that aren't ready for prime time yet. In a large server farm composed of several dozen machines, the laws of probability dictate that some piece of hardware is faulty. SETI@home is a great way to let new servers run with a full processor load for a while to see if anything goes wrong before loading the boxes with whatever production code will eventually run on them.

I do agree, though, that setting this up on corporate machines is an amazing waste of time. Then again, so is posting comments on Slashdot from work, but that doesn't seem to stop very many people.

Finally! by Super_Frosty · 2000-01-21 05:18 · Score: 2

It's about time they got a new version. Of course, no discussion of SETI@Home is complete without mentioning: "WHY WON"T THEY OPEN SOURCE IT?!?" There, now I have initiated the debate. One thing that they could do is "opensource" the data, that is let people attack the data with clients that they have designed, in their own open-sourcey style. That would be unfair competition, I suppose. Still, security concerns are a lame excuse, and they should really open it up.

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No comment at this time

Re:Finally! by MarkKomus · 2000-01-21 05:32 · Score: 1

Okay if they open source it I'm wondering what improvments can be made? I know there is the obvious of improving how it looks and the graphics. But the math being ran by this program is fairly advanced and I'm sure they don't want anyone being able to compile a client which screws this part of it up.

Also what would people to do ensure data files being sent back are valid? And is there anyway to do this if the entire client is opened.
Re:Finally! by Signail11 · 2000-01-21 06:07 · Score: 2

They can use the d.net approach: open-source the compute portion and then link it with the closed-source binary only networking code. Put in some redundancy to make sure clients are doing all the checks; for example, ask for various intermediate values calcuated during the FFTs. The math done by the program is NOT advanced: any undergraduate compsci student should have enough math background to understand it. The implementation of the FFT in SETI@home looks to be rather poorly done, but of course one can't tell for sure because I don't have a copy of the source. Nonetheless, other public available FFT implementations (in generic C/Fortran code, not to mention machine optimized vendor or scientific computing libraries) tend to perform significantly better on equivalent sized transform block, such as FFTW, and Dan Bernstein's FFT library. The people running SETI@home are top-notch, so I don't think their poor coding is accidental...they simply see no need for clients to process data faster.
Re:Finally! by jonwiley · 2000-01-21 08:33 · Score: 2

The reason not to opensource SETI@home is a scientific one. In order to ensure that the experiment goes smoothly and in order to ensure accurate and consistent reporting of results, the scientists must maintain control over the methods of the experiment.
The program code is an essential part of the method of the experiment. Different methods (which would erupt if it was opensourced) would ruin the validity of the results, since consistency was not maintained. Thus, the scientists are protecting the credibility and validity of their results while also minimizing uncertainty.
This is a single experiment that uses the help of a lot of people. It isn't a lot of experiments. A single experiment must maintain consistency throughout. Tracking and documenting multiple versions would be a larger endeavor than the scientists have time for and it would introduce an unacceptable level of uncertainty in the results.
Re:Finally! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 11:30 · Score: 0

A fine point, indeed. To wit, open sourceing SETI could have prevented THIS from occurring.
Re:Finally! by Mattsson · 2000-01-21 17:47 · Score: 1

If they *do* opensource it, how will they sort out "false" clients from "real" clients? How can they be sure that all different versions that will appear treat the data with the exact same algorithm?
Remember that they beta tested the current incarnation of the client for over a year (and during that time, you *could* download the source) before releasing it.
If someone starts sending incorrect data back to them, they will have to start over again or simply stop the whole project.
So the security concerns they are talking about are not "we're afraid to be hacked".
It's "We're afraid that someone will make a really fast client that everyone will use but which returns unreliable (not proven) data."

(Actually, there are hacked clients which are faster but returns unreliable data allready...)

--
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Re:Finally! by PsiPsiStar · 2000-01-22 01:15 · Score: 1

Would there be any way to send a false signal to SETI? Not that I'm going to try, but i'm wondering if that could be part of SETI's concern re; open sourcing their program.

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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.

The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:18 · Score: 2

SETI@Home is a true example of half hearted socialism at work. These people want some of the benefits of socialism without the true benefits of sharing. They want community help, but not true community help. We need to email them all our socialist pamphlets to help them learn the truth. Please help us.

Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:36 · Score: 0

oh yeah, we're going to 'help you.' who are you? "please help all the anonynous cowards of the world tell somebody that they aren't being 'socialist enough'" great idea. besides i don't think they WERE trying to be SOCIALIST -- they just want more cpu's helping out.
Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:58 · Score: 0

relax, this guys trolling. he's been trolling the socialism crap on several stories for the last couple of days. he just tailors his socialist stuff for each story. sigh. yet another troll.
Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:34 · Score: 0

bleh. the LWM or one of the many troll wannabes.

boring.
Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:14 · Score: 0

Please don't feed the trolls.
Thank you
Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 10:10 · Score: 0

(Score:2, Interesting)? Uh, are you sure this guy wasn't just trolling? It wasn't even a very good troll. If he had claimed that the SETI@Home client ran better on Linux than *BSD, or vice versa, now *that* would be a good troll...
Re:The Truth by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-22 02:50 · Score: 0

It's a good troll because I got moderated up 2 :-)

New Code = longer time? by OctaneZ · 2000-01-21 05:18 · Score: 3

They talk about adding new code to look for pulsating signals, this is a very interesting idea, but unfortunately I am afraid that a lot of people will not switch from v1.6 to v2.0, due to the fact that this additional check will increase the amount of time that it takes to process a block. A lot of the people I know here at Cornell are doing this as much for the recognition of processing X number of blocks a day, as they are for the actual science of the project.

Re:New Code = longer time? by jwilloug · 2000-01-21 05:28 · Score: 1

A lot of the people I know here at Cornell are doing this as much for the recognition of processing X number of blocks a day, as they are for the actual science of the project.

This won't be the first time an upgrade has caused an increase in time. If they stay true to form (and they may not), at some point they will just start discarding results from older clients.
Re:New Code = longer time? by cetan · 2000-01-21 05:33 · Score: 2

It is really a shame when people get so wrapped up in being "stats whores" that they would think this way.

I understand the want to be noticed and visable, high on the stats, but at some point it just goes overboard. People begin installing clients on computers that they do not own or operate, people begin hacking clients to return false-positives to gain higher rankings....it's really pathetic.

Everyone has their own reasons for participating in a distributed computing project. To me, being concerned at all about their stats only proves that they are narrow minded and short sighted.

Enough ranting for one day.

--
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Re:New Code = longer time? by Otto · 2000-01-21 05:46 · Score: 2

From http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/unix.html (note the last line) :

Version 2.0 Upgrade procedure:
-1. Stop your currently running v1.x client
-2. Put the new v2.0 binary in place of your v1.x binary
-3. Start the new client
-The v2.0 client will restart processing of your current work-unit from the beginning.
-Please discard your v1.x binary. It will soon be unable to obtain new work units.

So, bye bye to those who won't upgrade...

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--
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Re:New Code = longer time? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:02 · Score: 0

Yup. I couldn't care less about the actual project. Besides, I don't think we are going to find aliens this way.
Re:New Code = longer time? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 18:55 · Score: 0

People will just change their names from "Mr Buddy" to "Call 1800-SUCKMYTITS, we please to please" or

"Call AOL NOW, join up"

I can see it now, aol putting seti in all AOL 6.0 clients to get it in all the stats and promote AOL even mnore.

alternate motives by SaintAlex · 2000-01-21 05:22 · Score: 3

Nearly every person that I know ran the SETI client alot when it first came out. It was fun competition to see who could spread their user to the most machines, change other people's userid's remotely, or just a trophy of computing muscle. It didn't take too long before people started trying to crack it.

It was pretty fun during the attempt, but when it succeded, the whole thing became pretty meaningless. The user Ragnar - who I happen to know personally - is a prime example (likely the best). If you check his stats, he should be in #10th place, or maybe even higher. I havn't checked in a while. The method that he uses is quite ingenious, yet still horribly unbalances the whole thing. (I've abandoned my saintalex user, who ended up getting picked up by ragnar, so I'm not being a hypocrite here :)

Guess it's back to RC5.

SaintAlex

Observe, reason, and experiment.

--

Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)

Re:More SETI information available by Gutzalpus · 2000-01-21 05:22 · Score: 1

More SETI information, eh? I'll admit, I've seen some REALLY strange/bizarre stuff come out of Hoe, but I never realized the damn thing was written by extraterrestrials.

It all makes so much more sense now...

the truth is out there by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:23 · Score: 0

wow...with all of this good stuff for cp nerds and scifi fanatics, what will be left for the future?

A new project proposal by PD · 2000-01-21 05:24 · Score: 0

SETI is an important project, but almost as important is the safety and reliability of our nuclear arsenal. I am proposing a distributed project to assist the US Army in safeguarding the integrity of our nuclear stockpile, and in designing new nuclear weapons for our 21st century needs. This is a worthy project, because right after we contact the aliens, they will come after us and we'll need the nukes to fend them off.

--
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.

OPEN SOURCE SETI by opensourceman · 2000-01-21 05:25 · Score: 4

yep... once again the seti project misses the target. am i the only one who sees the problem here, my brothers? can this project ever "succeed" being run by people this clueless?

let's say you lived out in the woods in the deep south. you wake up one morning, nice and toasty warm in your red long-underwear. you decide you'd better go hunting today, if you're going to have dinner tonight. hmmmmm. rabbit sounds dang good!

what do you do? go grab your rifle and just tromple through the woods hoping to scare up some scraggly rabbit? of course not... you grab your rifle and your bloodhound and go tromple through the woods knowing your bloodhound will sniff out a nice fat meal!

"good god, open source man has finally lost his mind!" i can hear you gasp. well, when have i ever let you down?!

what the seti project needs is a bloodhound. it's ludicrous to just shove a bunch of software on some brain-dead intel driven computer and expect to sort out any kind of an intelligent signal. the seti project is trompling through the woods, without a keen nose to sniff out those crispy alien critters!

this is why i recommend that the seti project release a version of seti at home that runs on... get this... the aibo! yes, my brothers, our whacky friend, the aibo has come of age and is ready to mature into the sophisticated extraterrestial tracking device it has always been destined to become.

the aibo - he's not just for petrification any more!

thank you.

Re:OPEN SOURCE SETI by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:37 · Score: 0

I just saw Clockwork Orange for the first time last night. Two days ago, I wouldn't have understood what you're talking about.

Octane7: What's that? (OT) by slickwillie · 2000-01-21 05:28 · Score: 1

A tall double latte with nonfat milk?

Re:new project by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:30 · Score: 0

And dont forget http://www.angelfire.com/b oybands/98febreze/Portman2.jpg

But can it still do petrification?? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:33 · Score: 0

Right?

Your new addition is nice and all, but I'm afraid I won't be buying one of your new AIBOs if the advanced petrification features have been removed in favour of a bunch of alien-tracking stuff that I don't really need.

I trust the new model is fully SFIPS (Society For International Petrification Standards) compliant? Which version of the SFIPS specifications?

Re:But can it still do petrification?? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:36 · Score: 0

of course. Fully SFIPS 2000 compliant!
Re:But can it still do petrification?? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:41 · Score: 0

of course! what aibo would be complete without the scientfically proven magic petrification ray?! i'm also thinking about an enhancement that allows the aibo to sniff out assholes who give out peoples email addresses and then allows you to boil them in a vat of their own semen.

Re:alternate motives (update) by SaintAlex · 2000-01-21 05:39 · Score: 2

I was just talked to ragnar... apparently the seti folks caught on and deleted his accounts. Unless this new version is able to block his efforts, he could easily start back up again. You can rest well, however, as he said that he was probably not going to.

Hopefully this new client'll return the seti project to what it was in the early days....

SaintAlex

Observe, reason, and experiment.

--

Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)

The idea behind seti is great. by zerocool^ · 2000-01-21 05:40 · Score: 3

The Idea of Seti@ is great. I think its great.

However... The other day, i was in a computer lab at the college where i attend, and in the (ctl-alt-del) task manager in NT, i noticed one of the process was RC-5 and another was seti@home. I can't kill the process, not in five minutes anyway, without admin access and on a guest account... meaning someone with admin access put it on, its using 90% of my processor cycles, and i don't want it on my computer lab station.
I move to a different station.
Its there too. Well. This is sure legal.
Some bright kid with SysAdmin access put the programs on there. There are like 400 Computers in this room.

Seti is a great Idea. unfortunately, things like it and RC-5 always make a following that they don't need and that no one wants. If you want to make your processor run hot, go ahead. Don't put it near me.

What do you mean, I can't initialize things in an assert?"
~zero

--
sig?

Re:The idea behind seti is great. by Knara · 2000-01-21 05:51 · Score: 2

"its using 90% of my processor cycles, and i don't want it on my computer lab station."
I dunno, I run seti@home (not RC5)constantly on my k6/2-400, 96mb, etc running *gasp* win98 and I honestly don't see enough of a performance hit in anything to justify complaining.
Then again, I suppose that depends on whether or not one agrees that win98 delivers "performance" in the first place }:D
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by zerocool^ · 2000-01-21 06:05 · Score: 1

I agree - i have run it on mine, and it dosen't suck enough power to really bunch my shorts up, but the computer lab is running 166 workstations with 16 meg of ram. And they have 29 (you read that right, 29) processes running in NT, counting RC5 and seti. I remember on the NT server i set up, i had it down to 8 processes; this is a workstation.
just throwing more of my 2 cents worth in.
~zero

--
sig?
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by Pike · 2000-01-21 06:05 · Score: 2

These programs use *spare* cycles. When you start using the computer it moves out of the way and gives the majority of the CPU % back to your apps.

More accurately, on most OSs, the background client program for d.net or set signals to the OS that it is a low-priority process, so there is no performance hit.

So what's the big deal? If you had performance problems on those computers, it probably wasn't the d.net clients.
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by ucblockhead · 2000-01-21 06:06 · Score: 1

I run it constantly under NT. It seems to have no effect on anything else I run, which includes CPU intensive stuff like DevStudio.

The only thing it changes is the task manager performance display, which always shows a processor use of 100%. But given the amount of time I spend compiling, believe me, if it took even 1% of the CPU time I used, it'd be gone.

--
The cake is a pie
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by Skip666Kent · 2000-01-21 06:36 · Score: 2

Sounds like they should make all contributions Anonymous by default. No logins, passwords or teams. They'd lose a few folks, but gain a steadier and more dependable crowd who weren't just in it to get a happy hard-on seeing their name on a list of 'top contributors'.

Never happen, but that's okay. Just keep them grits a-comin', and stay (or get) ripped in 2000.

--
**>>BELCH
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 11:26 · Score: 0

I tried using the SETI client on my wimpy PC with 32M RAM, and it just used too much memory. I'm sure I had plenty of cycles to spare but it was making my box swap too much. So there's more to it than just CPU.
Re:The idea behind seti is great. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 23:18 · Score: 0

So change the priority, knucklehead.

Linux and Slashdot on Seti@Home by retep · 2000-01-21 05:41 · Score: 4

There is both a Linux and Slashdot group on Seti@Home. If you want to help out just go to the Seti@Home website and download the client. After installing the client you can just join the Slashdot or Linux group by going to the groups link on the main page. Search for the group you want. Then just join the group.

The Slashdot group currently has 424 members and has computed 47953 packets.

The Linux group currently has 344 members and has computed 146283 packets. (there are a few *really* good systems in the Linux group that process the bulk of those packets)

Re:Linux and Slashdot on Seti@Home by LocalYokel · 2000-01-21 06:41 · Score: 1

Join Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop instead.
Ars Technica is cooler than /. anyway. They're interested in technology, not politics.

--

--
--
E2 IN2 IE?

Breaking News! by cxreg · 2000-01-21 05:42 · Score: 5

An intelligent signal was detected by a Windows user in Memphis last month but was kept quiet by SETI. They knew it was a message from an alien race but they could not decode what it meant. An encryption specialist who knew someone at distributed.net handed the message over to them and unbeknownst to users, the message was inserted into the key-cracking server. Early this morning the message was cracked and experts were amazed at the significance and wisdom the contacting race had bestowed upon us. The NWO wanted to keep this to themselves and control the rest of the world however with the release of Kevin Mitnick this morning this was impossible. Kevin broke into Top Security systems at NASA and stole this incredible piece of knowledge and has now given it to the world. Without further hesitation, the message:

FIRST POST!!!!

--

God Fucking Damnit

Re:Breaking News! by Octal · 2000-01-21 05:59 · Score: 4

Unfortunately, due to the astronomical distances involved, and the limited speed of light, the alien message actually turned out to be the 432nd post.
Re:Breaking News! by voidref · 2000-01-21 07:23 · Score: 1

But was moderatated up to the impossible value of 6 because of it's philisophical implications.

SETI@Home useless.... by Arcanix · 2000-01-21 05:45 · Score: 2

People should give their spare CPU cycles to useful distributed computing efforts like www.dcypher.net or www.distributed.net. If you want to actually contribute to something useful you should go to the links above instead of wasting your time with SETI@Home which sends out duplicate work because it already has too many people helping :P

Re:SETI@Home useless.... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:43 · Score: 0

Even better than those is PrimeNet.. http://entropia.com/primenet/

So where is it? by m3000 · 2000-01-21 05:47 · Score: 1

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is 2.0? All I see is 1.06.

Re:So where is it? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:03 · Score: 0

It seems like it is only a few UNIX versions of the 2.0 available. Atleast if you look in : ftp://alien.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/
Re:So where is it? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-22 00:03 · Score: 0

I'm sure that all the important platforms will be available soon. I don't know about Windows though.

That sounds like a great idea, in theory. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:48 · Score: 0

I'm all for that, and I'm glad that the AIBO will continue to deliver the kind of quality of petrification we've come to expect from Sony and the AIBO product line, voted the Medusa Realm's "best robotic dog for turning girls to stone."

However, one question about the new feature... what if the person is a female, and does not, by definition, possess semen? What if the person is a male too young to possess semen?

Re:That sounds like a great idea, in theory. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:59 · Score: 0

come on... this is slashdot! women and kids who are too young aren't reading (let alone posting people's email addresses) because they're out getting laid.
Re:That sounds like a great idea, in theory. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 08:51 · Score: 0

what if the person is a female, and does not, by definition, possess semen?
Then /. would be the perfect place for her to find a remedy for that problem.
What if the person is a male too young to possess semen?
Nevermind. /. is probably the wrong place for her.
:)

Moderators read this by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 05:51 · Score: 0

Moderators:

There's no seti info there.. it's just some e-zine thing. I looked thru the archives, no info at all. Just a troll.

Why ETI.. by RuntimeError · 2000-01-21 05:52 · Score: 0

The most potent reason for SETI is the lack of terrestial variety :o) sorry, had to say that

OPEN SOURCE[ing] SETI (is a very, very, bad idea) by SaintAlex · 2000-01-21 05:58 · Score: 1

If SETI were to be opened, multiple problems would be encountered. First off, there's immediate compatability issues. With hundreds of variations of the client floating around, it's more than likely that many would be incompatible with the SETI servers. Secondly, cheating (getting counted for undeserved blocks) would expierence a boon. Previously, I was only aware of a few people who were actually able to cheat, but, if the source was opened people could forge blocks to their little heart's content (for more on cheating, see my previous post).

It is unlikely that these 2 points would encompass the totality of the issues, should your idea be implimented.
Open Sourcing is *not* for everything.

SaintAlex

Observe, reason, and experiment.

--

Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)

Hrrrmmm. by Signal+11 · 2000-01-21 06:03 · Score: 0

Making something crack-proof. I think the big "D" tried that. *cough* Anyway, while we're listening for intelligent life on other planets, try to ignore that recurring "hack,hack,hack" sound that's coming from your machine. =)

Is SETI@Home worthwhile? by jd · 2000-01-21 06:04 · Score: 5

This is not a trivial question. Firstly, SETI@Home uses the Aricebo Radio Telescope. This is a very nice dish for radio astronomy, but useless for SETI work. It's far too small. The smallest useful dish or array will be the hectare array, being built by the SETI Institute. Aricebo will only be able to detect signals from nearby stars that are: (a) at LEAST as strong as our most powerful RADAR, (b) SUSATAINED for a substantial period of time, (c) containing information on a carrier wave, (d) orbiting a planet or star, with no compensation for motion

In short, leakage (the most likely sort of signal to be found) will be invisible, actual RADAR type devices will be screened out (too short a duration and no information content), and any civilisation advanced enough to WANT to locate other civilisations by sending deliberate signals are likely to be filtered, by being screened out as local interference through a lack of doplar shift.

Methinks that SETI@Home is ingenious, but is using the wrong telescope. And it'll be finished before the RIGHT telescope has been built & put on-line.

As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house. Don't blame them - look to yourself first.

Having said that, SETI@Home's attitude has been somewhat attrocious. They've been going on about security, when that was never the cause of them going non-Open Source. Progress was. And part of that is their fault. They refused to set up a CVS repository, did VERY slow (and low-quality) releases, and basically impeded themselves at every turn. They should have done a damn sight better than that. Yes, there were only a few people there, which is EXACTLY WHY they needed to use CVS, rather than relying on manually testing every e-mailed patch, and rolling a fresh tarball by hand every few weeks or months.

Honestly, if SETI@Home has shown anything, it's shown that we should be less worried about intelligence "out there" and rather more worried by the lack of it down here.

--
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)

Re:Is SETI@Home worthwhile? by LocalYokel · 2000-01-21 06:50 · Score: 2

I participate in SETI@home because I get off on having more computing power than my friends and relatives, and running a command at "nice -19". :)
There's no need to look in the skies for ET, because there are plenty of aliens here on earth -- I'm certain my ex-boss was one, and my friend Pete's former roommate, who had superhuman abilities (collegiate track champion) would neither confirm nor deny his terrestriality. NO, I don't think it's worthwhile -- it's a big waste of time.

--

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E2 IN2 IE?
Re:Is SETI@Home worthwhile? by Anonynous+Coward · 2000-01-21 06:57 · Score: 1

You forgot to mention one of the other major reasons SETI@Home is useless.....As with most of the other distributed computing projects out there, people seem interested soley in being the #1 data processor, rather than the actual science being done. Time and again, this has caused people to cheat and contaminate the results.

slower, but more thorough is a wise decision by TheDullBlade · 2000-01-21 06:06 · Score: 2

Remember all the hoopla over the rumor that they deliberately slowed down the software to let more people feel the warm fuzzies of running a client?

As they say, they have more processing time than they need, so find ways to use it!

A few people may bitch and moan about lower stats, but I say to hell with the people that make stats their first priority. They are the kind who are likely to cheat or run the client on an error-prone over-overclocked (as opposed to overclocking a severely underrated chip) machine, making the extra security measures that slow everything down necessary.

--
/.

I know I'm biased... by Oscarfish · 2000-01-21 06:06 · Score: 3

...but for me it's distributed.net all the way. I was with Seti this past Summer, but three things contributed to my "desertion":

The lack of timely upgrades for the client a la distributed.net

The lack of updates of fresh content on the website a la distributed.net

Network outages

"Recycling" of data - just a horrible waste of time

I'm happy to say I was with CSC since day one and I'm still happily cracking away on RC5.

There's a much stronger feeling of a "team effort" with distributed.net, and how can you help loving those cool little cow icons?

Seriously, two weeks ago I reinstalled the NT command line version of Seti (an ANCIENT client, but there hasn't been an update) on one of my machines and let it run all night...wouldn't you know it, it hung on sending and receivingg the data, and the stats I had (I identified myself with the same Email address I had previously used) never showed up. So I deleted it and went back to CSC.

Let's keep cracking on RC5! I can't wait for the OGR contest to start.

--

--------

Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t

Re:I know I'm biased... by ucblockhead · 2000-01-21 06:13 · Score: 1

I had trouble with the NT command line version as well, but found that if you run the graphics version, but turn off the screensaver mode and minimize it, it runs pretty much at the same speed.

--
The cake is a pie
Re:I know I'm biased... by cetan · 2000-01-21 06:41 · Score: 2

I too have been with distributed.net for quite a while (Since RC5-56 in spring of 1997). But I also participate in a number of other current distributed computing projects.

PiHex

Mersenne Primes

Seti@home

Why do this? Well, first my ultimate goal is not stats-oriented. I don't really care where I am in the stats, where my team is in the stats, etc. What I enjoy most is that I contribute to a number of projects, albiet a little in each.

For example. The Seti@home client runs on a Pentium 166 (overclocked to 200) that is sitting in the living room of my apt. It makes my roomates happy to see eye-candy on the monitor out there and it keeps the otherwise idle machine (it's a proxy/firewall for our cable modem connection) doing something. No, it doesn't zip through data blocks (about 1 every 5 days or so), but it is doing _something_.

So, what's my point? (I'm asking myself that same question). Basicly, it's that people participate in distributed computing projects for various reasons. If Seti@home has brought 1.6 million people into the distributed computing fold, then more power to them! (I do contest their figure of 1.6 million people participating, but that's for another discussion). Even if the client is not 100% efficient (and what software package is 100% efficient?) they are still contributing to the overall education of people in matters of distributed computing, in particular internet based projects.

Finally, it should be noted that distributed.net re-did a large number of CSC data blocks (~25%) as a security measure to reduce/eliminate false-positives from making their way into the stats.

--
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!

The point of the post was.... by zerocool^ · 2000-01-21 06:13 · Score: 1

The point was *not* that it decreased the performance, insomuch is it was that someone put it on public university use computers. To use a computer that is not yours (and I seriously doubt that the University asked for it to be run on 400 of their computers) in order to accomplish a task that is meant to be run in *your* spare cycles, to me, seems wrong. There was not much performance decrease. The issue is that someone put it there without asking a higher up admin, and it is against the "Acceptable Computer Use Policy". And it bugs me. Call me wierd or paranoid.
Plus, running their processors ar 99% 24/7 is going to burn the already taxed processors. I think most of the computers are old, but at least a few are new. Over heating the processor dosen't seem like the best of ideas.
And to be even more anal, your tax dollars plus my tuition pay for these computers.
~zero

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sig?

Re:The point of the post was.... by Chuck+Chunder · 2000-01-21 07:25 · Score: 2

You're wierd :)

Running a processor at 100% capacity 24/7 is not going to 'burn' the processor, that is what they are designed to do. Those processors will be consigned to the rubbish bin well before they stop working.

You could perhaps argue on power consumption, but as long as the clients don't stop disks spinning down and monitors going to sleep there's not much of a case there.

The university isn't getting any less of a return on investment on the processor because it is being used more and in fact they may even get something out of it, even if it's just publicity.

In fact I'd suggest that a large group of computers that otherwise spend a fair amount of time idling but need to be on for easy access are perfect for adding to a distributed computing effort such as d.net or seti@home.

--
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Re:The point of the post was.... by Decibel · 2000-01-23 00:27 · Score: 1

There is one possibility that you forget: the clients could legitimately be there. There are many people in acedamia that love distributed.net and fully support it's use, and oftentimes, the client is installed by an admin.

Unfortunately, there are those who install the client without permission, and against the distributed.net AUP.

High Percentile for low block numbers by xscarecrowx · 2000-01-21 06:14 · Score: 1

Its kinda scary in the articles it said they had TOO much computer power but ive only done 37 blocks on this account and its in the 82% percentile where did everyone else go did they stop using it? imagine how much data they would be crunching if everyone that signed up used it vigilantly!!!!

A Personal SETI Story by Gothea · 2000-01-21 06:17 · Score: 3

When I first heard about SETI@Home last summer I was thrilled; ever since I was a child I had been fascinated by outer space and the possibilities of life beyond our planet. I installed the software and even watched it process as I was going to sleep at night. I kept diligent records of my own peaks and high Gaussians and even had a map where I pinpointed where in the sky my data had come from. (And of course I studied the stats on the SETI homepage trying desperately to surpass everyone else on my domain in units completed. I don't have a fast processor; I never did.)

Well, I don't do that anymore. I took it off my screensaver after a while and then when I went to DSL and had it automatically connect, most of the time I forgot it was there. But still, I'm glad to have it and glad to have the opportunity to participate; in a small way it's like fulfilling a dream from my childhood. I thank all those involved for that.

As for the new version coming out, I'm crossing my fingers that it'll fix the connection problems I've been experiencing ever since we networked our computers and I no longer have a direct connection to the Internet. Even though I don't look at it much anymore, I think it's a worthwhile project--both for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and for distibuted computing.

Gothea

Re:A Personal SETI Story by HardLogic · 2000-01-21 11:40 · Score: 1

Yeah, I let it all slide for a while. Then I got access to a raft of Solaris machines at work. Now I have a total of 2.8 GHz and 2.2 GB chugging away on seti. It sure is a lot more fun when you can see you totals jump each day. :-)

I was a bit worried about taking away from other processes, but the client runs at priority 00, so no worries.

I think we're missing the point... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:21 · Score: 0

I think everybody's missing the point. When are the SETI people going to admit to the unsuspecting public that 99+% of the patterns will not be findable by modern digital computers due to Godelian incompleteness? The arrogance of NASA for doing this! I mean, it's a fun thing to do if you've got a fast processor and are clueless about modern mathematics, but that's about it. Trust me on this one... I'm in graduate school right now, with a master's degree in mathematics.

Re:I think we're missing the point... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:13 · Score: 0

So, what does Godel's Theorem have to do with this? Please enlighten us, provide a published article or website.

Trust me on this, I'm an expert. You don't know what you're talking about. Easy to say. Now prove it.
Re:I think we're missing the point... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 13:04 · Score: 0

Plus it's not a NASA project anyway. I suppose I just got trolled, oh well...

427 Members by Skip666Kent · 2000-01-21 06:25 · Score: 2

Feel free to post running tallys if you join, eh?

: )

--
**>>BELCH

Drift scans at Arecibo by pq · 2000-01-21 06:26 · Score: 5

Well I'm seeing a lot of "what happens when they run out of data" posts deep down, so let me contribute my $0.02 worth of radio astronomy:

Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.

Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.

During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.

With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...

Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!

--
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."

Re:OPEN SOURCE[ing] SETI (is a very, very, bad ide by ethereal · 2000-01-21 06:30 · Score: 4

I've disagreed with this before, so here goes:

With hundreds of variations of the client floating around, it's more than likely that many would be incompatible with the SETI servers.

So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client.

Secondly, cheating (getting counted for undeserved blocks) would expierence a boon.

There are two ways that people could cheat: returning false negative results without actually checking the results, and returning false positive results when there really isn't a positive.

False negatives can be easily caught by issuing the same blocks to other clients. Compare the results, and if they disagree run them again at SETI HQ, and ban the cheating clients from participating. The article already discusses how they are sending the same blocks to two clients at once, they just need to up that level of redundancy a little bit to solve this problem. You couldn't normally trust even a non-hacked client to provide the correct results 100% of the time anyway, because that machine might have bad RAM, an overclocked processor, no cooling, the case off, and a RF transmitter in the next room. Some level of redundancy will always be necessary for this sort of project, and can also be used to catch cheaters.
False positive results are even easier to catch. Don't you think that SETI HQ will check any positive results themselves before going public? They aren't going to call the NY Times on the strength of hacked.linux.box returning a positive on it's first data block, let me tell you. Just ban clients that return false positives, and get on with the thing.

When discussing open-sourcing distributed.net's key cracking, where there's a prize attached, it has been pointed out that a hacked client could be used to return a false negative but inform the user so that they can claim the prize before d.net can. But for SETI@Home, there isn't any danger of that. Who is going to believe J. Random Hacker's claims of detecting SETI on his bedroom PC? Even if someone did this, there's only one place that the raw data could have been coming from, because J. Random Hacker certainly doesn't have a high-powered radio telescope in the back yard generating all that data.

In short, I have yet to hear a good explanation of why the benefits of open-sourcing the client wouldn't exceed the problems (minimal, see above) of doing so.

--

Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

Re:I LIKE TURNING YOUNG CHEERLEADERS TO STONE by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:32 · Score: 0

What do you have against him anyway?

Browse at 1 or something to ignore stuff like this. The fact is, 'trolls' will always be a part of /.

See for yourself!

Where are the moderators??? by zerocool^ · 2000-01-21 06:33 · Score: 0

Seriously, someone hire some new moderators.
I browse at +1 threshold, and I recently had the pleasure of seeing a post about a "donkey punch" which I had no interest in or desire to see. I also noticed that said comment was marked as "Interesting". Not to me, buddy. Also the natalie.portman@home comment is "interesting". Someone needs to seriously look at the moderators, and that would help alot of the problems on /. Until then, I'll just browse at 4.

Go ahead and moderate me down, and off topic... it would be fitting.
~Zero

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sig?

Re:Where are the moderators??? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:43 · Score: 0

Until then, I'll just browse at 4.
Why don't you just stop reading /. at all? Would be a lot easier.

It was: Be sure ... by LazyBoy · 2000-01-21 06:40 · Score: 1

to drink your Ovaltine.

A crummy commercial!

--

If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.

SETI's memory consumption by linuxci · 2000-01-21 06:55 · Score: 2

One of the problems I find with Seta@home is its memory usage compared to the distributed.net client (dnetc) as this output from top shows:

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 767 n343145 20 1 12992 12M 236 R N 0 50.6 20.5 6530m setiathome 5474 n8201079 16 0 640 640 516 R 0 48.3 1.0 1:11 dnetc

While dnetc used 1.0% of memory, seti used 20.5% of memory. Also as seti don't provide optimisations of modern processors (and the fact that they're unlikely to find anything anyway) then I just think seti is a waste of spare cycles. OK RC5's only slightly better but at least it'll come to an end eventually.

E.T. tastes like rabbit. by kielbasa · 2000-01-21 06:57 · Score: 1

Would the aibo just sit and point at alpha centra or the the crab nebula? How would he measure such an angle?

Re:Breaking News! You are GAY! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 06:58 · Score: 0

so? fags and queers are people too and deserve respect!

a small xlock solution ... by martial · 2000-01-21 07:00 · Score: 2

I am using this small "xlock" solution for seti since I started using it (version 1.3), so that it only start when I actually lock my x screen on my system (going home, lunch, meeting ...)

----- setilock
#! /bin/tcsh

cd /local/software/setiathome-1.3
./setiathome -nice 19 >& /dev/null &
xlock -mode blank
killall setiathome
rm -f lock.txt
------

So that on my nice "old" afterstep 1.0, when I press "window+L" (the "window" key bind to "3" on my X), will actually run the script: start seti, then my xlock and the kill seti (and its lock) it once I unlock my screen.

The nice part is just so that unlocking is not a real issue (I do have cronjobs, but they are not that consuming).

I do recognize, that this method is a little overkill (I should just "stop" it and "continue" later) but it works for me this way so I thought I was going to share it.

Hope that helps.

--
-- Martial MICHEL

Re:a small xlock solution ... by martial · 2000-01-21 07:22 · Score: 1

I just upgraded to v2.0 for my small linux box, so here is the updated version of the script :

------ setilock
#! /bin/tcsh

cd /local/software/setiathome-2.0
./setiathome -nice 19 -nolock >& /dev/null &
xlock -mode blank
kill `cat pid.sah`
------

The "-nolock" consider that I will only run seti when I "x"lock my system, with no other running version (for the current one is killed when I un"x"lock it).

Note that /local/software is just my method for installing new softwares that I compile/install without messing with the system install (I then have a script to create links to /local/bin, /local/include, etc ... so that when I want to upgrade the software, I just have to run the perl script to delete the created links and create new ones ;) )

Hope that helps ;)

--
-- Martial MICHEL

Isn't there *something* worthwhile? by Tim+Behrendsen · 2000-01-21 07:02 · Score: 2

Indeed. And I might add, I am not convinced that they even know what they're looking for when analyzing the data.

I think this project is a complete waste of time and resources. Even more of a waste than RC5/64, and that's saying something.

Isn't there some project out there that actually has some scientific usefulness?

---

Re:Isn't there *something* worthwhile? by jawad · 2000-01-21 10:36 · Score: 1

How about OGR, the upcoming distributed.net project?
Re:Isn't there *something* worthwhile? by jwang · 2000-01-23 19:31 · Score: 1

How about Dcypher.net's Gamma Flux Radiation project?

How useful is distributed.net compared to THIS?? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:11 · Score: 0

Talk about duplicated effort.. d.net's client is badass, runs on everything & doesn't crash..but...it's useless. Great, we found the secret French passphrase. Woo-friggin-hoo. How about looking for something that may actually exist? It's too bad Seti's client blows & they don't have the talent from distributed.net.

Guess where my blocks are going?

Empty computer labs? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:16 · Score: 0

I'd never put it or any other 'fun' thing like distributed's client on an actual user's machine or a server, but there's so many high-powered (well..) machines out there just sitting, waiting for some nimrod to use it in a training session, or loaner, or whatever for an hour a day. Meanwhile, the other 23hrs a day, there's 20 300mhz machines idling, doing nothing. Screw that...I'm lookin for E.T..or the sooper secret numbah/phrase/dingdong

Re:SETI@Home *IS NOT* useless.... by __aakfae6292 · 2000-01-21 07:18 · Score: 1

that's absolutly not true
distributed.net and other cracking projects are a waste of cpu cycles cuase any idiot knows that you can eventualy crack anything.

but what can be a greater reward then finding ET?

Duh, why do you think we're -looking- for them? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:21 · Score: 0

..pre-emptive strike, baby..

But only for *nix. by Potatoswatter · 2000-01-21 07:24 · Score: 1

v1.0.6 for Mac SUCKS. A low-level debugger shows they implement their own drawing (rectangle, line, ...) code for the screensaver part, and that uses a significant amount of processor time. Not to mention being ugly.
What's more, the processor optimizations (when it is doing math) are dismal.

I dunno if they're planning to come out w/ a v2.0 GUI for Win/Mac, but until they clean their code or OSS it, I'm sticking w/ dnetc. All text, Altivec optimized, 3.8MKeys/sec. They know where the computing power is :v) .

--

Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra

That's my gripe with SETI's client.. hog hog by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:26 · Score: 0

Ive been running distributed.net's client for a long time & it never gets in the way. If SETI's client is still up to its old tricks of slowing your stuff down, that's bad news.

btw, did you try actually running anything else? it -should- throttle down SETI's CPU % when something else starts running. Oh no, burning CPU time? It'll be obsolete & in a closet by the time the CPU burns up. When was the last time you had a non-DOA non-overclocked or otherwise mucked with processor just up & die? Paranoid freak, you are.

Open-Sourced SETI by wass · 2000-01-21 07:35 · Score: 3

Of course, no discussion of SETI@Home is complete without mentioning: "WHY WON"T THEY OPEN SOURCE IT?!?"

This may have been discussed previously, but I'll bite anyway. The problem with open-sourcing the SETI signal-processing code is the fact that this is a running experiment. With open-source operating systems, web-hosts, games, etc, you will be running these on your own computers and/or on your own networks. The SETI example is completely different. With SETI, you are contributing to their scientific experiment. Therefore, they want to know precisely how every resulting piece of data was processed. I cannot stress that enough. As a scientist, I can assure you that if you cannot verify the integrity of certain data, then you may as well throw that data out (or re-run the experiment at the least. As learned with the cold fusion people, DON'T PUBLISH if you're not certain of the validity of the data).

The problem with open-sourcing the code is that somebody on the client side could very well have changed the processing code, and introduced any number of possible errors. It could be something seemingly harmless, like using single-precision floats or linear interpolation, in some places instead of whatever methods were originally employed there, for a processing-speed gain. However, there is no way that the SETI folks can tell if the data they are receiving has been processed correctly or not. And one thing SETI cannot do is accept compromised data.

I do believe it is in the public interest to let others know the code processing and evaluating techniques, though. What could be done is run an open-source type development of a separate client system, and then release some sort of binary-only module for the actual runtime client (perhaps they'll not reveal the data-authentication routines, for instance). You may disagree completely with this, but please understand that from the point of view of a science experiment, they MUST in no way whatsoever receive data processed in a different method than they originally intended .

--

make world, not war

Re:DSS - FREE THE CODE BAYBE ! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:39 · Score: 0

You know.. now they'll just bring charges against geocities, which is owned by Yahoo, who is a supporter of FreeBSD... oh wait.. there also filthy rich so it doesn't matter.

"zerocool^"? by auntfloyd · 2000-01-21 07:52 · Score: 0

"zerocool^"?

d00d, ur l33t0! for using such a kewl anme from such a kewl m0vi3!!!: Hackers (or as I like to say 'h4x0rs')

Which, as we all know, is a completely accurate portrayal of the 'hacker' lifestyle.

For that offense alone, you should be moderated down. No go beg for forgiveness from the online confession booth.

~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd

A **REAL** mirror site: by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 07:58 · Score: 0

The sites the previous AC listed to didn't exist (how typical). So here's two *real* mirrors:

ftp://ftp.quuxbar.org/pub/DeCS S/DeCSS.zip

ftp://ftp.quuxbar.org/pub/D eCSS/css-auth.tar.gz

No go kick some MPAA a$$!!!

original client GPL? by rillian · 2000-01-21 07:58 · Score: 1

As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house.

Can you provide a reference for this? Or better yet, a link to the GPL'd code?

I offered to help them during the call for developers in April/June 1998. However, I changed my mind when they refused to consider putting the code under any sort of Open Source license. I'd be very disappointed if they had done a GPL'd release, since I was quite interested in participating otherwise. The licence was my only objection: in fact, I remember arguing that the non-free license would hurt their ability to attract developers!

The last version of the code I have is version 1.4a from 1998 June 22, and it contains no license of any sort.

Re:My complaint about /. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 08:02 · Score: 0

I saw this posted in rec.music.smash-pumpkins once, only instead of "/." it used "Billy Corgan".

And I fell for it, took the bait, and posted a scathing reply.

Boy did I feel like an idiot.

Distributed computing with less memory by micahjd · 2000-01-21 08:07 · Score: 1

I had been running Seti@home on my 366/celery linux box for quite a while. However, with 64MB of ram, running seti, netscape, staroffice, xmms, emacs, gcc, gnome, or whatever else I happen to be running I end up having to swap a whole lot.
I don't know how seti@home's algorithm works, but I would still be running it now if it wasn't such a memory hog.
Anybody know of worthwhile distributed computing projects that use less memory?

--
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2

Yeah? by pivo · 2000-01-21 08:19 · Score: 1

Maybe if you explain your position, rather than just stating it, you might not sound like such a clueless blowhard. Then again, maybe you'll sound like more of one :)

SETI@Home by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 08:35 · Score: 0

join the search for extraterrestrial grits. they are like earth grits, but they are blue. you can still pour them down your pants, too. thank you.

What a waste of time! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 08:43 · Score: 0

This whole deal is such a load of BS but you pinhead geeks are so infatuated with it. Are you trying to look like fools??? People are laughing at you...

Don't think so. by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 09:22 · Score: 0

I think it's just the mmx instructions an the KNI (katmai new instructions, how original) that are present in the PIII. Oh and everybody, a program written without those instructions is still"made to work with a 386", which is the vast majority of the programs out there. Intel always kept backward compatibility with the x86 instructions in fear of losing money during transitions.

SETI "cheating" by athmanb · 2000-01-21 09:28 · Score: 1

> There are two ways that people could cheat: returning false negative results without actually checking the results, and returning false positive results when there really isn't a positive.

When talking about cheating (and generally about abusing the S@H software), people generally talk about delivering work units without actually processind them.
This has been done in the past (with the closed source client), and was only detected because the lowlifes doing this forgot to forge reasonable processing times and instead sent them in with a 10 minute counter.
If a more intelligent idiot would decide to boost his fame and sabotage the client by sending in bogus data, this would really sabotage S@H, and since the S@H authors are members of the holy church of 'security through obscurity' they're not gonna change their opensourcing policy anytime soon :-(

Want to talk about it? by Kris_J · 2000-01-21 09:58 · Score: 2

Just a quick plug for my SETI Club - for somewhere to keep talking about SETI & SETI@home after this story has fallen off the /. front page. Currently just over 250 members. Enjoy.

Great! Now how do i get it? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 10:27 · Score: 0

I'm stuck with windows for now, and when i go to the download section, it shows version 1.6. How do i get the new version?

Re:How useful is distributed.net compared to THIS? by jawad · 2000-01-21 10:30 · Score: 1

Please. Don't. This argument is on EVERY article that mentions either Distributed.net or Seti@Home. Give it up people, some will run d.net, others will run seti; lay off the evangelism.

Bah! That only solves HALF the problem! by hypergeek · 2000-01-21 10:55 · Score: 2

Keeping SETI@home closed source only solves half the problem...

You're completely forgetting about all the cheaters who could just travel to some planet N light-years away, then travel back in time (N + Blargh + Glorp) years, where Blargh = the time it took said cheater to reach said planet, and Glorp is the time it would take the cheater to build an ultra-high powered radio transmitter and aim it to the exact point that the Arecibo telescope will be in N years, plus up to 24 hours of "padding time" to ensure that the telescope will be facing the right direction at the moment the signal arrives.

Then, said cheater simply pushes the Big Red Button labelled "Transmit Bogus Alien Mating Calls To Fools On Earth", sits back and waits.

Of course, he'll still have to rush back to Earth in time to compromise the SETI@Home network's security to ensure that the data packets containing the bogus interstellar message get routed to his computer alone!

Then, he sits and waits.... soon, the data packets are processed, and sent back to SETI... yes, my pretties... soon I^H...he... will receive a pat on the back and perhaps a small thank-you check for my^H^H...his..."contribution" to science...

Umm... the preceeding situation was, ahem, completely hypothetical and I^Hthe hypothetical "cheater" would never stoop so low just to trick SETI@Home into thinking that I, Hypergeek^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhe had just found extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Or maybe this hypothetical person-whom-I-don't-know would stoop so low... I mean, I have no idea-- it's all speculation, right?

[Mumble... that SETI check had better be enough to cover the costs of the interstellar space ship, the time machine, and the ultra-high-powered radio transmitter... otherwise Dad'll kill me when he gets his MasterCard bill!]

Umm... SETI@Home does offer a monetary reward for finding extraterrestrial life, right?

Uh oh. I'm dead. Unless, that is, anybody could figure out a way I could either:

Flee to another solar system really fast
Go back in time and stop myself from... nah... go forward in time to the end of the month and hide my dad's credit statement
Send a distress call to extra-terrestrials so they'd come and rescue me. Oh, scratch that one... the signal would never reach them in time, and, besides, I only built a "Transmit TO Earth" high-powered radio transmitter.
Or, if nobody can figure out a way to do those things... perhaps you could help me find a good recycling plant that pays a decent rate for scrap metal? I figure I can make back 1/10000000000th of what I owe... damn... it's too bad nobody would possibly be interested in buying a used interstellar spaceship, time machine, and ultra-high-powered radio transmitter... at least, not anybody on Slashdot... [Sigh...]

Well, I'm dead Real Soon Now. There's only one way to prevent this tragedy from claiming the lives of other, innocent victims: OPEN SOURCE SETI@HOME!!

-Hypr Geeque

--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

Re:Bah! That only solves HALF the problem! by job0 · 2000-01-22 09:58 · Score: 1

excellent :)
Re:Bah! That only solves HALF the problem! by ethereal · 2000-01-23 23:36 · Score: 1

Dammit, I'm stumped. My many and various arguments for how to detect and avoid hacked clients are powerless in the face of your hypothetical attack on the foundation of physics :) I bow to your mastery of the forces of this universe, and even though you are currently toast with your folks, you certainly own my Einstein-limited slower-than-light dimensionally-restricted box.
Sigh...rooted again. When is Mandrake going to have a patch for this?

--
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

Other platforms for: Seti@home @ play @whatever! by uninerd · 2000-01-21 11:54 · Score: 1

hey, wouldn't it be cool to distribute it even further? As pointless and stupid as it is... how about loading this to run on the Casio mp3 watch? In my opinion, it would be way cooler to have a little gadget processing seti data on my wrist- rather than using it to play crappy music. Or how about the video game systems? Dreamcast, hellzyeah! Only play that thing a couple hours a day, gobs of free time to sit there and process.

Whatever... My ideas, like my sigs, probably aren't even original.

Re:Breaking News! You are GAY! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 12:08 · Score: 0

But only up the ass.

Jealous, jealous again by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 12:55 · Score: 0

You just wish you were as cool as MEEPT.

Re:NAKED AND PETRIFIED MEN by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 13:09 · Score: 0

How about Al Gore? He's already petrified.

Ah... fuck seti! by Sonicboom · 2000-01-21 15:38 · Score: 1

If the LGM are REALLY flying around in high-tech UFO's.. doncha think they'd CONTACT US if they really wanted to speak to us??????????? Come off it! Get a grip! Seti is such a waste of time... they'll contact us when they're ready! In the meantime - work on RC5-64!

--
[Connection closed by foreign host]

why did they build 686-version first? by Explo · 2000-01-21 18:02 · Score: 1

Why, oh why did they release first Linux version compiled for 686, not 386? This limits severely the amount of users that can initilally jump into the 2.0, IMO...

--
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.

Re:New Code./.... i agree by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 19:05 · Score: 0

Exactly, aliens dont use radio waves get real, they probly are lauphing at us all.

They probly use something like triggering a 100mhz pulse of nutrinos or something from the centre of a star and use that as the global transmitter, so all you gota do from miles from home is fine the star and hit TUNE IN button in your NEtscape Ver87.3 and it connects one way TCP at 100mbits/sec by recieving all nutrino or whatever other non radio wave signal there is.

Now imagine them standardizing this and put this into hundreds of stars by placing remote servers on planets to control the stars. This way the server can 'server' send scientific data, realtime cameras etc.. of all planets etc and detailed data plus 360deg photos at full 100meg/sec from the star, by probly using the stars energy too, by doing something to it... THis way if they do this to lots of remote stars, they can recieve PERMENENT full stream data on all stars localy.

It could also have a piggy back protocol for local people/aliens to send their own email whatever to other locations/recievers which could re-transfer to other stars.

Basicly turn each star into a COMMS BEACON, like a TV broadcast transmitter but with 1000 channals.

Its so obvious no one has tried, why try to recieve data from empty space? at our lame radio waves. Maybe its already being sent but hidden in star light data/pulses or nutrinos.

Ohh and it wouldnt hurt to encrypt this real badly to avoid bad aliens stealing your (C) data.

I bet you theres some interstella RIAA out there using 1024 bit ENC on comms.

just my rants... seti is probly a front for CIA to decode/find russian militirary satts. Aliens arent dumb to use radio waves un encrypted. They would hide it in normal data.

Dang, i should patent the above idea, or use it in some movie.

Cant decide by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 19:14 · Score: 0

I couldn't decide which was the more useful client (distributed or seti) to be running on my machine which is on all the time anyway. So I decided to run both - dnetc when I'm using the machine and seti when I'm not - since seti uses up so much memory and IS noticeable when it's running in the background. Since a work unit is completed on seti before I reconnect to my ISP it will then drop back to dnetc only. Why do either? Why not? It's wasted CPU cycles otherwise...

You may find this interesting by BrianH · 2000-01-21 20:24 · Score: 3

I know I'm posting this fairly late in the thread life, but I REALLY hope some of you will find this interesting.

Last night I attended a lecture/discussion by Dr. Kent Cullers, the Signal Detection Group Leader, one of the project managers in the SETI Phoenix Project, and one of the board members of the SETI@Home program (ever see Contact? The blind radio astronomer was modeled after him). After the lecture, I asked Dr. Cullers about this very topic. I told him flat out that I could not understand why a project with as lofty goals as SETI would willingly give a cold shoulder to thousands of potential programmers willing to donate their time towards developing more efficient clients and (potentially) search algorithms. I also told him flat out (in front of 100+ people) that while I've always supported the goals of SETI, their cold shoulder to the OSS community made no sense when you consider their claims of supporting scientific cooperation. His reply was refreshing, honest, and to the point.

The first thing he told me was that, despite public claims to the contrary, security is not SETI@Home's biggest concern. The REAL problem right now is that there is apparently no efficient system in place for transporting large blocks of information from the receiver setup to the SETI@Home hub at Berkeley. I'm not sure how many of you realize this, but SETI@Home is an affiliate of SETI, not a directly controlled part of the organization. He told us that SETI itself has a very large quantity of unprocessed data to sort through, but without the proper infrastructure to get it to the S@H users, there's no easy way to handle them. This IS being worked on though, so don't lose faith yet.

The second thing that he pointed out was that there are people inside of SETI, including HIM (remember, he's on the SETI@Home board), that want to see the client opened up. In fact, he pointed out that this very topic is already on his agenda to be brought up at the next board meeting. You know why he's on our side? Because, in addition to his many other amazing talents, he's a programmer! (yeah, a blind computer programmer...this man has just earned my respect for life). He described the hoops HE has to jump through to get access to the code, and he's a friggin board member! While he couldn't give me any promises, he was MUCH more receptive to the idea than any of the other SETI guys I've seen quoted on Slashdot.

In the meantime, he gave me this suggestion: Apparently a small part of the problem is that Dr. David Anderson, the head of the SETI@Home project, isn't entirely convinced that OSS developers could really bring about any significant improvements. Dr. Cullers stated that the best way he could think of to change Dr. Andersons mind would be to email him suggestions as to possible ways to improve the performance and reliability of the client. According to Dr. Cullers, getting him to open it is simply a matter of impressing on him the fact that we can help, and that we wont just be getting in the way. I realize that some people may have a problem sending coding suggestions to a closed-source project, but according to Dr. Cullers it would definitely help further the cause.

And on one final note, I'd like to tell you all something. I walked away from that lecture with an entirely different take on SETI. They're not a tired old organization desperate for government funding anymore, they've got some cool new projects already underway and in the works for the near future (SETI Optical, new arrays for Phoenix, etc.) Dr. Cullers made a very realistic projection (explaining the math and technology) that Phoenix will have out entire galaxy scanned in less than 50 years (they haven't even really touched it yet). Please remember, SETI has little direct control over SETI@Home, so don't let your poor opinions of the S@H project ruin your views of the entire program. SETI is worthy of our support.

--

There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.

Re:You may find this interesting by jd · 2000-01-21 23:07 · Score: 2
I'd be happy to e-mail!
And, if you get the chance to talk to any more S@H board members, here are a few things to bring up:
- Multicasting - Whilst a lot of clients won't be on multicast networks, a lot will. This may be useful in reducing bandwidth consumption.
- Proxy networks - You don't -actually need- to have data transmitted from a central point, if you can get a network of caching proxies set up. The main server can connect to all the proxies, simultaneously, via a multicast connection, and then the clients can fetch data from their local proxy.
- Compress the data. Raw radio data should compress very nicely, with delta shift encoding, or some variant thereof. That way, there's less surplus information to send.
- Read The Manual, especially the one marked "RSVP", describing resource reservation on the Internet.
--
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Re:You may find this interesting by BrianH · 2000-01-22 00:08 · Score: 1

Well, I doubt I'll be speaking with any of them in the near future, this was a public forum after all :) He did give me his email address though, and invited me to send him a message if anything else came up so I will definitely pass those on to him (a proxy network sounds so obvious...why didn't I think of bringing that up ;)

Don't put too much faith in this development though...he's still just one voice in SETI, and his primary job is figuring out new ways of removing radio noise without degrading the original carrier signal. He doesn't have the power to open up S@H by himself, but the fact that we've got someone receptive to the idea on the inside, who also happens to be a skilled programmer, means that there's hope.

--

There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.

Already does by artemis67 · 2000-01-21 22:33 · Score: 1

Check the Preferences, it already has that feature. On my Mac, I have it show the screen saver for 5 mins before going to a blank screen.

Off-topic: Gamma Flux by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-21 23:09 · Score: 0

Have you checked out the Gamma Flux project at dcypher.net ?

Then they are worthless, they do not understand by Fyndlorn · 2000-01-22 00:45 · Score: 1

the purpose of this project, and most of all are not scientists. This isn't about credit, its about opening up humanity to new possibilities and reaching out into the unknown.

disassembled client shows code SUX! by Potatoswatter · 2000-01-22 05:11 · Score: 1

Just downloaded the new 2.0 client, to see if it adds any features/optimization. It sucks.

Just to give you a grasp of this incredible suckiness: viewed w/ a disassembler, the code appears to be cross-compiled from x86. And it wasn't any incredible TransMeta cross-compiler technology, either. How can I tell? Variables are put on the stack, their registers used for two instructions, then taken back off. They get taken out of the stack and put back for a single add operation, or seemingly just to move somewhere else on the stack. This is fine on a PIII w/ the stack being an alias for the internal registers. Not OK on a RISC processor of any type - I don't want to know how much Alpha power is giong to waste here, too.

Example: the function GLIB_PANEL::FillSolidRect, 41 instructions long, contains 4 instructions that are not load/store operations (ex. the pro/epilogue), and its sole purpose is to call another function. All 4 operations are 'add r0, r3, r0'. And why write this function at all when there's the Mac API?

Apparently they didn't know how to compile Mac programs either, or they wouldn't have exported all the debugging info I used to do this analysis... so much for discouraging hackers! They also included OS libraries directly in the downloadable binary! I'm not sure exactly why or how, tho... Also, it's distributed as a control panel, which means that all that fatty code is kept in RAM at all times!

This isn't a way to put your spare CPU cycles to use, this is robbery!

Non-x86 users, get rc5. And multiply the benchmarks at their site by about 5.

--

Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra

Re:SETI@Home *IS NOT* useless.... by Arcanix · 2000-01-22 06:09 · Score: 1

You should go look at the sites, they are not just for cracking codes, there are useful math problems that require massive computing power that need to be solved...

Re:OPEN SOURCE[ing] SETI (is a very, very, bad ide by Hard_Code · 2000-01-23 21:02 · Score: 2

"So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client."

And how, pray tell, do you enforce a compatible client. If the client is trusted, there is no way to ensure it is valid. You cannot trust a liar to tell you he is a liar. This whole discussion has been had before on the QuakeForge list, where the security architecture of an open source quake was discussed. So if we cannot enforce a compatible client, then the few people at the project have to waste all their time chasing down and removing accounts of bad people, who will just make more accounts. Sure, the closed-source version is not a great solution, but I don't expect these guys to make more headaches for themselves for the heck of it.

"False negatives can be easily caught by issuing the same blocks to other clients."

Even if you only send out one duplicate, that already doubles the workload. I guess you could randomly sample, but then your trade-off is that you will miss some.

"False positive results are even easier to catch."

Being able to catch false positives won't be of much use if your whole network is down because it was flooded with false positives.

Open sourcing opens a big can of worms. It /forces/ you to create /correct/ and clever solutions. That is a benefit of open source. It is also a detriment, because these guys are scientists and want to work on the project, not hire a whole programming squad to make clever solutions to new problems they have generated, which are being handled, while not /correctly/, at least "good enough" already by the closed-source client.

Open sourcing would be a good thing...but it has to be handled very slowly and rationally and carefully.

Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla

--

It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?

Re:OPEN SOURCE[ing] SETI (is a very, very, bad ide by ethereal · 2000-01-23 23:28 · Score: 2

I don't think that all of the issues you raise will be as much of a problem as you say. Why would someone invest time into using a hacked client that produces incorrect results? The most likely reason (going by the history of this sort of project) is to move up in the ratings for the project. But to do this, you need to build up a history of past efforts, which will be destroyed every time your hacked client gets caught and you get banned from the project. As long as the project organizers can detect hacked clients, the thrill of using them will quickly wear off when people realize that there's no payoff for doing so. As for detection, see below.

And how, pray tell, do you enforce a compatible client.

OK, so I was a little glib about that. Let me explain my reasoning. There are really two kinds of compatibility that we care about: does the client's communication with the server follow the established protocol (data formats, ports, CRCs, etc.), and are the client's results compatible with the computations which the project intends to be running. If the client doesn't use the right protocol to talk to the project server(s), then you can ban it right there and move on. It's easy to tell if a client isn't sending data in the right sized chunks, etc. You can ban clients automatically when this happens, with no overhead in manpower (other than setting up the initial system). If I hacked the closed SETI client right now to talk to their servers on the wrong port, you can bet they would drop me like a hot potato - it would be obvious that I'm incompatible. By definition, networking protocol incompatibilities are detectable, because if you can't tell that the client isn't following the protocol, then by definition it is compatible with the protocol. If, on the other hand, the client's calculations are incompatible, then see below and my previous post.

If the client is trusted, there is no way to ensure it is valid.

Exactly correct, which is why no clients can be trusted. Closed source doesn't prevent hacked clients, it just ensures that hacked clients are only created by the more motivated. As I explain below and in my previous post, even a non-hacked client can't be trusted 100%. Distributed computing will need to be run on a basis of clients proving that they are trustworthy, rather than the server assuming they are innocent until proven guilty.

Even if you only send out one duplicate, that already doubles the workload. I guess you could randomly sample, but then your trade-off is that you will miss some.

It's true that there will have to be duplication of error, but as I explained before, even with perfect closed-source clients and perfect good will on the part of their users, you would still want some level of redundancy. Somebody's processor could be overclocked, they could have bad memory, a random cosmic ray could strike because they have the box open, etc. If you really want to be sure of a scientific calculation like this, you have to run it multiple times (preferably with different but equivalent algorithms) and compare results. Redundancy slows things down, but did you really expect these projects to finish up next week? Remember, compared to the computing resources which SETI has available in-house, they're still getting a tremendous performance boost at very low cost.

Being able to catch false positives won't be of much use if your whole network is down because it was flooded with false positives.

Once attackers realize that there's no glory (ratings advantage) in doing so, they'll quit with this attack. A huge mass of false positives can be solved by temporarily banning the source IP address or address blocks, and contacting the source's upstream provider just as you would do if you were ping flooded or attacked by any other DOS.

Open sourcing opens a big can of worms. It /forces/ you to create /correct/ and clever solutions.

Agreed - which is why open source is a good idea in the first place for this client. For all we know, there could be a computational error in the client. Sure this is unlikely, the SETI folks really know their stuff, but it's happened before with software released by very professional developers and it can only be caught by a source code audit. At the worst case, SETI could use crypto in their networking layer and release that as a binary-only library, while opening up the computational parts of the client. This would allow people to experiment with the algorithms involved and the screen saver part of the code.

Open sourcing would be a good thing...but it has to be handled very slowly and rationally and carefully.

Agreed. I'm not advocating any overnight changes in SETI@Home. It would take some work to run a secure distributed computation with open sourced clients; possibly this would outweigh the expected advantage of the open source. You really won't know the benefits of open source until you try it, just like any other software project, so it's tough to make a case when we know all the possible problems but can point to few known advantages. I just feel that there are definite advantages for them to move in the direction of open source, and the difficulties of doing so are not so great as some would say, or at least are not insurmountable.

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