Posted by
emmett
on from the et-phone-home-two-point-oh dept.
Rafael writes "The SETI@home project, aimed at using a computer screensaver to search for alien signals, seemed almost as crazy as searching at all. However, it became a phenomenon and an ever-increasing Internet addiction. Now SETI@home is being improved. Check the history at the BBC's Web page."
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.
Linux and Slashdot on Seti@Home
by
retep
·
· 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)
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:
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)
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
·
· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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
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)
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."
I've disagreed with this before, so here goes:
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.
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 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