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YETI@Home

Dark-Helmet writes "YETI@Home, the search for the missing link? Or something else? Anyway, a very good parody of places like SETI@Home." One thing lacking on this site is Team Slashdot's ranking. We spot strange human-like creatures all the time (usually in our mirrors).

24 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. LOL by Money__ · · Score: 2
    Coming Soon! Download Version 1.00 of YETI@Home for: Windows, BeOs, OS2, Linux, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST, Altair, TRS-80, Vectrex, Babbage's Difference Engine, Palm Pilot, Sega Genesis and Timex Indiglo (sorry, not available for Macintosh).

    LOL! a Babbage's Difference Engine client that won't run an a mac.

    Once installed, the YETI@Home client will not interrupt your daily computer usage. In fact, the application can run virtually unnoticed in the background for years, much like the Libertarian Party.

    LOL!
    _________________________

  2. what is this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    I no understanding "yeti"? Is joke? I new to this country. Back in home we not having yeti. Is qake level? Is BSD? I am run BSD at home, if yeti is BSD then is good to have at home.

    I no understanding pictures of hair people. Back in home we have plenty of hair people, but none know yeti. Am thinking people are mistaking two? Please to help!!!

    1. Re:what is this? by steelhawk · · Score: 2

      yeti
      n : large hairy humanoid creature said to live in the Himalayas [syn: {abominable snowman}]

      --
      Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
    2. Re:what is this? by JustShootMe · · Score: 4

      As opposed to Burt Reynolds, a large, hairy creature, last seen in the Wilds of Hollywood. Rumors abound that he has appeared in a film but has never bveen seen in his natural habitat - Loni Anderson.


      If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
      --
      For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
  3. q&a....this is great. kudos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    What image capture devices are supported? Some of them. What should I do if my computer detects a yeti? Nothing. The software will automatically connect to our local servers to begin the second stage processing. You do not need to do anything -- it's all completely automated. No, I mean...what do I do about the fact that there's a yeti in my yard! The processing takes many hours per image capture, so by the time the software has gotten a positive ID, the creature is either already long gone, or has kidnapped you and taken you to his lair as his chosen mate.

  4. I just had a bright moment... by arnoroefs2000 · · Score: 3

    or maybe not...

    For all you people that think that SETI@Home and Distributed.net is actually quite useless, listen up.
    I imagine that CPU cycles are actually wordt money, don't they? So wouldn't it be possible to set up some kind of system that runs like SETI@Home but actually does useful work?
    You could sell the CPU cycles collected by all those computers, and...here comes the catch...do something useful with the money. For instance supporting The Red Cross, or Greenpeace or whatever.
    There could be voting on what could purpose would be supported, and...and...well I see alot of possibilities.
    Ofcourse I can also see a few problems...but would it be possible?
    Anyone wants to share his opinion on this? Am I being very naive or might this actually be a good idea?

    Arno

  5. Don't hate me just because I'm hairy by Ogre332 · · Score: 3

    I wish those people would stop taking pictures of me frolicking naked in the privacy of my own backyard.

    --
    Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
  6. Home Computers by delmoi · · Score: 2

    I don't think you'd really get that much money off your home computers, for two reasons. Even the baddest ass Athlon box is still way, way behind the really powerful vector-accelerated super computers. Beowulf clusters with 500 or more nodes rarely get in in the top 50 supercomputers.

    So, you might make $20 or $30 a month, at current rates. But if everyone was able to sell there CPU cycles on a free market, I doubt you would even be able to make that much. Think about it, how much processing really needs to be done? You probably only own a few hundred millionths of the total CPU power in the world. I just don't think it would be worth it.

    [ c h a d o k e r e ]

    --

    ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
  7. There's Already a Few Places Like That... by Coldraven · · Score: 2

    Cosm (cosm.mithral.com) is one such place; check out their FAQ.

    While not actually working on the level of shared clock cycles, some of the more of a grassroots-oriented efforts include the Peacetree/Food Not Bombs Network. USENET's alt.beograd and some of the spider networks during the Gulf War, Soviet Upheaval & Tiannamen Suare Riots have been important communications relays.

  8. A serious problem with this client by Denor · · Score: 3

    You know what?

    Yeti@home is using inferior, close-sourced clients . Reports have already shown that people with "hacked" clients get two to three times better performance. Clearly, there are ways to improve the yeti@home client so that it can make better use of people's CPU cycles! This is a call to the slashdot population - I'd like you all to join me in demanding that yeti@home be open-sourced! Only then can we-

    What? Yes, I do see the icon by the story. A foot, kinda like the Monty-Python one.

    What do you mean, 'Think about it!'

    Oh.

    --
    -Denor
  9. The Yeti IS Bill Gates by grahamkg · · Score: 2

    ... as evidenced by the lack of a Macintosh client. It's just another example of Redmond anti-trust actions.

    Graham

    --
    Graham
    Linux - Fast Pane Relief
  10. YETI@Home hits the nail on the head by CvD · · Score: 2

    THe YETI@Home parody is quite funny, but it actually conveys the problem of SETI@Home quite well. I don't run the client because it eats resources like anything. I don't have or need a very powerful computer, and I find it unacceptable that the Linux client takes 12MB of memory. Not even Netscape is that resource hungry. Leaving the client running in the background under Windows slows everything down to a crawl too.. it seems to do a crappy job of 'nice-ing' itself.... and if I let it complete it's job, it submits a packet that took 60+ hours to complete, while under Linux it takes only 20 hours... The 60 hours would seriously do bad things to my average completion time for one block. :) Ok, maybe that's not the point, but I wonder what goes wrong under Windows...

    Cheers!

    Costyn.

    1. Re:YETI@Home hits the nail on the head by AstroJetson · · Score: 2

      The difference is that the Windows version has all the eye candy (perty color plots and graphs), whereas the Linux version doesn't. If you really want to use Windows, I believe there is a text-only version at the SETI@Home site. I agree that the Windows version is not very nice and on my Windows systems I use it in screensaver-only mode. On Linux, I run it all the time and I never know it's there (except for all the memory it uses). It *is* a memory hog; not sure if it's worse than Netscape, but it's definitely in the same league.

      --
      Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
  11. Mirror by Slash+Mirror · · Score: 2
    I have a partial mirror (not all pictures) here:
    ftp://128.253.254.56/yeti/index.html

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

    --

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

  12. *cough*rippoff!*cough* by Manuka · · Score: 3

    This is old news. There has been a YETI@Home at evilinternet.com since mid-1999.

  13. Yes, dismiss the Yeti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    First, it would not be a Homo sapiens neanderthal descendant. Neanderthals were restricted in range to Europe.

    Second, genetic drift of humans is excessively unlikely -- languages drift many orders of magnitude faster than genes. The population of humans who originally settled the Americas ("Indians" or "Native" Americans) was separated from Asian populations for at least 10,000 years, and was separated from the European and southern African populations even longer. Many Amazonian tribes have not has contact with other humans of the Americs for as much as several additional thousands of years. But their skeletons, DNA, etc. are for all practical purposes identical to those of Europeans or Khosians which they have been separated from for tens of thousands of years.

    Then, given range restrictions for the various great apes, the only reasonably possible ancestors of a "yeti" or "sasquatch" would be Homo erectus, which ranged the temperate and tropical Old World; or an offshoot of the ancestors of the orangutan, the only non-human great ape of Asia.

    In both cases, the odds of one successfully making it to the New World are as close to zero as imaginable. There are no existing non-human apes of any kind in the Americas, nor have any discovered bones or fossils of any non-human apes ever been discovered. Sasquatch, given the lack of any possible ancestors or any identifiable remains, must be considered an utter fantasy.

    The Yeti is mildly more possible, due to geographic proximity of Homo erectus and the orangutan to the proposed habitat. Again, however, there is no fossil evidence, skins, skeletons, or other direct evidence that it or any ancestor of it exists or existed.

    In short, the "preponderance" of evidence is the same that there is for aliens and the same that there was in Victorian England for faeries -- stories and some anomalous but circumstanital bits of evidence. The faeries were proven a hoax; I suspect the others are as well.

  14. Re:what is this? (explanation) by Coyote · · Score: 3

    Hello, international friend.

    I understand your pain and confusion. "Yeti@home" is a parody of the American desire (dare I say NEED) to make everyting do something at all times. It is a bit of an obsession with us, because we want to be #1 again, and to do so we must charge blindly and patriotically down every avenue that will let us overcome the lead cureently held by The Republic of Gates.

    Perhaps if you visit these similar web sites, you will gain an understanding:

    http://www.spaghetti@home - the client offered at this site steals unused time between microwave oven beeps to create a tasty pasta salad.

    http://www.betty@home - in the black screen time between channel changes on your TV, searches a tape in your VCR for the famous lost Flintstones episodes.

    http://www.confetti@home - like yeti@home, this client feeds video from Times Square in NYC to your computer, but this client uses the idle time during "Server Error 425" messages to scan for bits of paper left over from New Year's eve and directs Legos robots with brooms to clean them up.

    http://gritty@home - this site is on every slashdotter's bookmark list; a heavily modified IRC client is scripted to search /. reader comments during the time between the user's refrigerator door opening and the time the light comes on to scan comments and adjust the threshold to a level that assures no comments with the words "hot grits" will be seen.

    I hope this helps you, international friend. I tell you this in hopes it will increase world harmony and peace.


    --
    My metamoderation cancels your moderation
  15. Congratulations - You failed Engish101 ! by FallLine · · Score: 2

    I believe the word you are looking for is "you're", not "your".

  16. The best line... by MattXVI · · Score: 2

    In fact, the application can run virtually unnoticed in the background for years, much like the Libertarian Party

    --
    When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
    -Tom Jones
  17. Explaining away. by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 2
    You cannot prove the nonexistance of a thing 'x' if you mean by that a thing with properties 'a, b, and c' when non of those properties are constraints about time and place: i.e., you can demonstrate that no fat man in a red suit who flies around in a sled pulled by reindeer is at the north pole at any given moment, but of course you can not demonstrate that for all moments.

    However, you CAN 'explain away' by demonstrating that the causes of the belief in 'x' at no point relied on the existence of 'x'; if you can demonstrate that the origin of the belief in Santa Claus is fully explained without recourse to the existance thereof, you have effectively 'explained him away:' the belief in his existence is no longer necessary to explain the belief in his existence.

    For things like Santa Claus, unicorns, and fairies, that they don't exist is actually *part* of their feature-list. They have, for example, through selective breeding, bred a goat with a single horn in the middle of its head. Is it a unicorn? Most of us believe that if you genetically engineer a unicorn, it isn't a 'real' unicorn because it fails of one of the tests of unicorness - i.e., it exists! So instead of proving that at no point a creature with characteristics of faeries ever existed, it is more sensible and more persuasive to demonstrate that the belief in fairies is completely explained by causes A. B. and C. (The encounters with early pre-Celtic european cultures, hallucinagenic drug use, documented hoaxes in the 19th century, etc.)

  18. No... by FallLine · · Score: 2

    you are merely viewing a bug in slashdot's code. The bug makes it appear as if I replied to a comment, when I actually replied to a reply of that comment (that happens to be -1...below your threshold in all probability). Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/01/28/23242 03&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&mode=threa d&pid=11 to view the actual sequence of events.

  19. Yeti != Simian by razvedchik · · Score: 2

    Duh....

    The yeti is a rare species of Himalayan bear that lives above the treeline, according to the great alpinist Reinhold Messner.

    http://www.parascope.com/en/articles/yetiBear.ht m
    http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/1998/10/6_6.html

    Besides, how can "The Wild Man of the Forest" be a monkey? Hello, People, wake up!!!

    One other false positive: furry, unkempt Linux programmers wandering out in the backyard to do routine maintenance on the camera.

    Here in Eugene, OR, we have scores of treesitters, and they have the ideal location for helping with yeti@home. To wit: They live in some of the oldest growths of forest in the Pacific NW; they stay in the forest 24-7; they have names like "squirrel" and "sequoia". Further info: http://www.efn.org/~redcloud/

    --
    I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
  20. faeries by / · · Score: 2

    faerie also faery n., pl. faeries.
    1.A tiny, mischievous, imaginary form; a fairy.
    2.The land or realm of the fairies.

    fairy n., pl. fairies.
    1.A tiny imaginary being in human form, depicted as clever, mischievous, and possessing magical powers.
    2.Offensive. Slang Used as a disparaging term for a gay or homosexual man.

    The part about "disparaging" isn't necessarily true if "fairy/faerie" is reserved for the specific meaning "a long-haired effeminate gay man", as any of these sites would testify.

    --
    "If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
  21. Missing dog head by Captain+Zion · · Score: 2
    What "Bob" Dobbs then learned is a matter of Church,
    for he fell to the ground with a stumbly lurch,
    and he spouted and ranted and started to shout,
    "THE X-ISTS ARE COMING! ALL YOU YETIS, GET OUT!"

    For "Bob" learned that the Yeti were the original race,
    and the humans came later, and there went the place!
    They both were created by creatures from space.

    The genes of the Yeti to this day survive
    in those called SubGenius, those few left alive,
    who are different as different as different can be.
    Do you think one is you? I know one is me!

    (from The Slack FAQ)

    Also check the Fobonics Institute, accept no imitation!