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SETI@Home Version 3.0 Client Preview
zAmb0ni writes "We have posted a preview of the upcoming version 3.0 client for SETI@Home. The preview is based on the beta version 2.70 in limited release. You can check it out here: Team
Ars Technica Lamb Chop." I wonder if it will run on this pci thing we mentioned yesterday.
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.
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You are a fucking moron.
What I've found is that the client's TCP/IP code is easily overloaded. If you can fake a TCP/IP packet in response to its connection, you can initiate a buffer overflow in the client. Boom - instant security hole.
Not only that, but I suspect that the server has the same sloppy coding. I didn't want to try it, because I don't like crashing public servers, but it would be very possible to take down SETI@Home, or even to get root, if you were l33t.
You've been warned.
I never jumped on the SETI@Home bandwagon for a bunch of reasons. The program seemed to be very poorly written, at least compared to the d-net client. I was already involved in the never-ending RC5-64 project. But, the biggest deterrent, was the simple fact that SETI@Home didn't need my processor time. They had 6 billion Windows lusers running their screensavers and a very finite amount of data to be crunched.
Has this changed recently? It seems like just as many people as ever are running the client. Since they only get x amount of telescope time per week, do they actually have enough new work to hand out to all their users?
I love the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I think they've got it well covered. I'm sticking to d-net and optimal golomb rulers. At least I feel as though my processor time is helping to achieve a goal.
We must respect evil, and we must make evil respect us.
Well, yesterday, I was checking my SETI@Home progress, and something odd seemed to be happening. The display started shifting rapidly and the graphical part seemed to be scrambling around instead of updating in chunks like normally. A few seconds later, the imagee swirled and coalesced into a message: "Welcome, Jacob, we've been expecting you." I don't know what happened next, but my power went out. That's when things began to get _really_ weird.
First, the walls started glowing blue, even though the power lines were dead. Then, I saw two shimmering images in front of my eyes. At first, they were just swirls of dust, glimmering blue from the light. But that dust soon formed into two blue creatures with three arms and three eyes. Apparently the standard theory about the green face, large eyes, and pointy chins was wrong. I didn't have a chance to speculate more because at that point I was knocked out by a strange device held by one alien. I do not know when I awoke because the clocks stopped when the power went out, but when I awoke, they were gone and in their place was a message: "There are exactly seven hours until the destruction of the human race. Do not attempt any communication with the outside world and you will be saved."
Well, I wasn't going to listen to them. I now have exactly seven minutes left on my battery. I plea for you to listen and heed my call, even though it may already be too late. Even more than I fear my detection, I fear for the human race. They will come for me any minute now; it is up to you to stop them. I saw their critical weakness right before being knocked unconscious. It is--
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
How about an Arstechica Slashbox? That way all of their stories could still be posted and we could get on with discussing something original. This story was posted on Arstechnica yesterday.
Hmm, still doesn't look like the seti@home client can buffer more than one unit at a time...
/. then?
what a great bit of code. seriously, run dnet instead, if only for the client.
why don't new dnet clients get announce to
Yes, maybe the /. crew should read at least the highest moderated posts before cross-linking.
Anyways,
OT:
to continue the arguments as to why this is a hoax, I can add the following:
As the picture shows, there's no seperate PCI interface chip, so the PCI interface would have to be implemented inside the CPU.
Although possible, I doubt that the army would be surplussing CPU's with integrated PCI bus interfaces. These would be pretty new devices, especially in army terms (like, they are still using leading edge 386's a lot)
Any PCI board designer knows that you can have only two PCI devices per board maximum, if they are directly glued to the PCI bus. So the board with six devices would require a PCI bridge of some sort. Which does not appear in the picture.
The FAQ states that only one PCI board is supported per system. It is pretty much impossible to design a board that can not work when an identical board sits in a different PCI slot. That's just the way the bus is designed. It's like saying that you can not have two systems with the board in the same house.
The only reason why you couldn't have two boards would be driver related, which is not the reason they give, and could be easily solved.
Breace
Supposing that you sent erroneous data to them, they would want to flag you as being unreliable. I would imagine that this is the purpose that that serves. I doubt that they are getting demographic information from that.
We're all different.
Eh...