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SETI@Home Breaks 500,000 years
BoogieGod writes "The SETI@Home project has finally broken 500,000 years of computing time. They haven't detected any Extra Terestrials yet but there have been some interesting close calls. Now if only all 2.6 million of their users could join distributed.net."
Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.
Folding@Home
Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.
And they let you vote?
With PCs sporting 450W power supplies these days, containing as many as five fans, and having video cards that get hot to the touch, turning the whole thing off is a good idea. 5 fans are nothing. What about those of us using water cooling and peltiers? Perhaps it is a frivolous use of electricity, but it is a hobby. But so is auto racing, and that burns resources like nobody's business. We all have something that we like, and may sacrifice a little to keep us happy. Now Christmas lights... those are a waste! :)
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Running SETI@Home is very much a waste of time
If thereare Little Green Men, and they have such advanced technologies as to flying around in saucers all over space.... they know we're here... and they'll contact us when they're damn ready to speak to us.
Put your CPU cycles to better use... like curing disease or creating stronger encryption.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.
I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?
As opposed to SETI@Home, which in the past has provided already-searched blocks to clients to search again? Not that I necessarily have a problem with redundancy, but I got the impression at the time that nobody knew this was going on and there was some upset about the issue.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The number of units can be determined by multiplying this figure by the average time per unit.
Yes, a "number of units" milestone is more meaningful in terms of data processed. The number of years figure is a better measure of participation, which is also an important statistic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hillary (Hilary?) on Everest:
Because it was there.
Perhaps because the spirits O'Neil, Einstein, Fermi, DaVinci, Aristarchus, Curie, Alexander of Macedon, and definitely Sagan might say
Because it might be there.
and I and a great many other people do think
Because it might be there.
And we hope it is.
And to purposely annoy people like that schmuck Senator from Wisconsin who's name escapes me right now who railed against it saying
Don't spend money on little green men. Give me all the money to make more cheese. Or less cheese. Give me all the money. Science is bad.
Idle CPUs are the Republicans' workshop.
I browse at +6 so you better be God.
> Single handedly...5000 hrs.
What were you doing with the other hand ?
I think it's safe to assume we'd be around the middle of the pack, evolution wise, if all life started at the same time as it did on Earth. A few asteroids, slightly different conditions... We could have arrive anytime around now, plus or minus a hundred million years.
Now even 200 years is a huge difference, to our culture. We weren't using radio/etc at all back then, let alone as much as we could.
If there's a bell-curve distribution of times at which races achieve our level of sentience/society/etc, and we're at the middle of that curve, then there're races which are at either end, the ones at one end may still be protozoa now, and the ones at the other end would have had civilizations like ours before mammals existed on Earth.
So, relative to what you must assume the high-end would be, we're probably fairly low, having come only far enough to recently begin asking these sorts of questions.
Then, there's the theory (is it fact?) that stellar evolution is faster towards to galactic core, with brighter, hotter, much more shortly lived stars, which would have produced those elements that life (as we know it) requires in a small fraction of the time that it took for our small cool stars to do it out here on the rim of the galaxy.
And a quick note, I think the original poster knew the speed of light lag was for both directions, I think they refered to that when they said we've only been broadcasting for a hundred years so only systems under 50ly away COULD be responsing by now. I think you just misread it.
Check out www.processtree.com; someday day they hope to pay you for your spare CPU cycles.
There is already a distributed.net worm. More info.
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'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
If had had that much computer time, I wouldn't spend it on finding aliens.
I'd do something useful like encoding MP3's!
yeah, seti@home had bunch of problems in the begining, one of those was that people were patching clients to improve their speed. seti@home didnt want to accept those patches because they were not being validated by scientist, so they started discarding units from lots of ppl, later they found that they still might be lots of units that were accepted and were coming from patched clients....
when it comes to redundancy they do every unit 3 times, which is i guess okay if you want to be sure that there are no chance of units being wrongly processed. distributed.net does every key/node twice...
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
but there's a lot of idle cpu's out there with nothing to do - and even then only a small % are connected to SETI@home. And investors are wondering why PC sales are tanking.
Can anyone say, "Market Saturation" ?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You can also disconnect your phone if you are not interested to know what happens outside your house. Don't use internet. Don't watch TV. It's all waste of time and energy, because you don't not care about the outside world.
Cool, someone caught the reference...
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
yes...and a refresh cleared it up.
Hey I didn't attack anyone.
Do we quote just to look smart and rational or to illustrate a point other than that I'm a bad guy.
My suggestion that Seti@home is a search for god is perhaps a bit too philosophical for you. Let me explain.
For many, faith is assurance that the hell that is their life will not be an eternity. It embodies hope in the face of hopelessness. It is the greater purpose to match that horrible feeling of smallness and powerlessness. It suggests that their efforts in faith will endure for their children after they are gone. That is the believer's search for god.
For others it is a routine that helps them feel superior to others. They make no contribution, no real effort. They just partake and think that's enough.
The search for extraterrestrial life is the search for another place like home, but perhaps better. A more advanced, evolved human-like creature is often imagined. It gives meaning to drudgery of every day life. We technology folks are not just going through the motions, we are part of something colossal, like having an active hand the evolution of man. This is the athiest/agnostic science worshiper's search for, err, god (by a different name).
For others it is a routine that helps them feel superior to others. They make no contribution, no real effort. They just partake and think that's enough.
Or maybe I missed something. Maybe it is REALLY REALLY important that we find that we are not alone. Oh, because we'll solve our fossil fuel dependence.
Or maybe this IS about our definition of ourselves and how we fit into a grander scheme. And maybe grander scheme DOES mean grander scheme no matter how you go about searching for it.
Nah. You're right. Or rather, I could say you were right, IF YOU EVER MADE A POINT.
Oh, my imagination gland hurts. I need to rest.
Sounding smart and being smart are not the same, dude.
/Jarrod
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
Obviously you've forgotten that unless we explore space and set up permanent colonies all the Earth exploration won't do our species much good when the supervolcano erupts, the next big rock slams here or the Sun finally dies killing us all.
> This is the o/s that will defeat windows???
Nope. Windows now uses Alien Technology (tm).
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Huh? It would appear that linux-gnu systems have contributed an infinite ammount of computation to the project! 6) linux-gnu 12672647 NaN years 2147483647 hr 2147483647 min 0NaN sec Weird! heh. here
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I might be talking out of my ass, but from the little I've read on distributed.net it seems like they make redundant goals. Break the RC5 algorythm by brute force? Whoop-dee-do. They know they have the computing power, they know how to do it, and they knew that with enough time they'll break it. So why are they trying to prove something they already know. It's kind of like "let's dig a hole, and fill it back up just to see if we can do it". Yeehaw, go to town fellas!
At least Seti@home has a goal with a defined purpose, and it's something that many everyday people see worthy enough to dedicate their resources to.
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
The best argument that we are the first or most advanced species in universe is simply the fact, that we are alive. Sounds strange?
Even without faster-than-light-travel a species with slow interstellar spacetravel could colonize our whole galaxy with a virus-style expansion in less than 30 million years. These are very conservative numbers done by some very anxious physicans, I would guess that it could be done in much less time. As our galaxy is around 10.000 million years old, it could have been colonized more than 300 times even before humans as a species had formed.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I'm guessing it means that the number of real-world-time seconds that machine have put into processing blocks adds up to 500,000 years.
10 seconds on a 8086 and 10 seconds on a PII is a total of 20 seconds - regardless.
That's what the OGR Project on distributed.net is for.
Some actually scientifically useful work to do, unlike looking for ETs with a chance smaller than for cracking a 256 bit key...
IMHO, distributed.net should've dumped the RC5 project after the encryption export laws were changed and fully concentrate on useful stuff.
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I tried browsing at -1 (everything visible) for a while. That became annoying. Then I swithced to 0, so you filter out everything that was moderated down. After a while I still had to browse to a shitload of first posts and flamebaits. So regretably I had to switch to +1.
I created the signature that apparently pisses off you so much to piss off these people that caused me to do this. It really works great because invariably the moderated down replies to my posts are either insulting or meaningless trolls.
Jilles
I do care how fast encryption can be broken, and you should too. It should also serve as an example to not let the government get like they did in france because in 5 years the best encryption we have will broken by one computer in a matter of minutes, of for frances case a few seconds.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
It does mean something...
You have a cause that was important enough for you to set up and run this client, others have done the same. In total it's impressive and it's nice to see that they have alot of support.
Now they should also come out with a unit of work -> time index to show how much "unit time" was used. That was the could say they have passed 100,000 hrs of PIII700 time or 90,000 of SGI time.....
http://totl.net/STI/
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Peter
Look at the results per CPU/OS... ;-)
5th entry
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
That's great, but this thread was talking about Folding@Home. They're not so friendly to Macs.
One problem with Seti is that you only get a couple days to turn in a completed unit before they give up on you and send the same unit to someone else. So if your machine is only idle for an hour or so a day, the work is wasted.
ding!
skribe:
Perception opinion +1
Sounds a bit odd to me. The tin foil hat brigade would probably think they were trying to cover something up with that lame explanation. I think they're just being a bit too cavalier (read "incompetent") about the whole process.
-- Alastair
Think of how far human society and technology has advanced in the past 1000 years (since the Dark Ages). Now imagine that Rome or Greece had never fallen, or that the ancient Chinese empires had continued their technological advances and expanded outward to become a world power at that time. Our species could have reached its current level of development by 1300 or so, and considering how the rate of change accelerates, would be almost an entirely different species by the present day.
My point is that technological change accelerates quickly, and any other life forms would have to have their histories work out in exactly the right manner to have a civilization at our level right now (this isn't to say that the life form itself isn't advanced - humans have probably had the requisite intelligence since more-or-less prehistoric times, just not the tools and knowledge to go with it). Almost any life forms that we find in the Universe will either be grinding out the millions of years necessary to evolve sufficient brains and manipulative organs, or have already passed through their relatively brief period of technological advancement (it's really only been 10000 years for us, after all) and moved on to What's Next. I hope they'll still want to talk to us at that point, but in my heart I doubt it.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Not meaningless. What "500,000 years" measures is involvement, not results. I think it's pretty cool that they have produced results equivalent to the entire population of the United States giving up a month of their lives.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
This isn't a slam - I find the stuff interesting. My point is that there is probably a much broader appeal in the science of SETI.
The chances of locating some signal from space originated by intelligent life is, of course, very very small. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of people think it is non-zero. The potential impact to human society of discovering ET intelligent life is huge. That's what draws people, I would think. (plus, it is a pretty screensaver).
It is a lot easier for people to understand the potential impact of SETI than that of discovering Golomb rulers.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Err, you don't have to be so marvelously aware as yourself when you have never run it on Windows or similar graphic-oriented OSes. Regardless, on a hearty FreeBSD box, I have watched it grab all it can. And yes, it can be 'niced' but 'nicing' does not bring you any closer to idle than non-niced. And idle resources will become available sooner than 'niced' resources.
But thanks, uh, for the good thoughts.
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
Single handedly...5000 hrs.
Thank and good night
fp?
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
you are missing the point: I want a client that turns on automatically after I have stopped typing or moving the mouse. I don't want to bother turning it on and off every 2 hours when I leave my desk. Does distributed.net have that?
I think the only thing that they have shown is not that there is any intelligent life out there, but that the power company probably is now richer than bill gates, andrew carnegie, and john t. rockefeller combined ever were.
I am !amused.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
They have some nice graphs of user statistics. What I would like to see is average time per work unit vs. time. This would provide empirical evidence of Moore's "law".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Does that mean that SETI@Home lacks intelligent life?
hahahaha.
I already run both - doesn't everyone?
Hey, what about an application to count votes ?
In TUX we trust
... Is a pretty client. Get a nice screensaver-client that shows you what you're working on, and distributed.net will get more users.
(There may already be a client like this that I have missed.)
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
But the larger goal is to solve these problems, not get the greatest efficientcy. If the pretty client waists 10% of the CPU power, but attracts 20% more people in using it, your ultimate goal is more achived.
Just my $00.02
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Wow! I think the parent is the highest rated and perhaps, first legitimate use of a goatse.cx link!
I think we should look for intelligent life on THIS planet first.
Nothing good can come of us meddling in offworldly affairs
Couldn't agree more. Extrapolating this concept, I shall now spend the rest of my life locked in a small box. Nothing good can happen from meddling in outboxly affairs.
1) We find them hostile. And we upset them, and trigger the apocolypse.
2) (More likely) We find them doctile, and attempt to colonize their world, or somehow make "them" inferior to "us".
Missed out:
3) We find them, but are unable to engage in interstellar travel for decades/centuries and instead get some interesting (if very, very) long information exchanges that benefit both cultures very much indeed
4) Another possibility...
n) Yet another possibility
resources could be much better spent searching Earth for a new deposit of fossil fuel
Wow. Just wow. Yeah, that's a good alternative. Not looking for a non-polluting source of fuel then. Just another way of ruining God's Glorious Creation in a new and unique fashion.
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'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
I switched from distributed.net to SETI@home, and here's why: I know a key can be broken with brute force; I wonder if there's life on other planets. It's the mystery that draws me to SETI.
> It seems the link for the "close calls" is forbidden?!? Anyone care to repost what it says somewhere?
I can get to it intermittently.
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
Spoiler alert...
It basically says that they got some funny clusters of spikes in their data, and couldn't explain them... until they noticed that the spikes' dates correlated with downtime for the 'scope.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
isn't strange that they obviously spent time getting exciting about the spikes before they realised that their gear was broken? Makes me think of all those people who flood police switch boards with UFO reports after seeing the local nightclub's lights shinning in the sky. Why don't people assume *mundane* possibilities first? (This is a question for you headfreakphycology people out there - i'd really like to know.)
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time?
You (and others who were also bitching/wondering) are missing the point. The reason for celebration isn't that a x amount of years were done; nor is arguing that it could have been done in x/100 hours on decent machines a worthwhile consideration.
The point is that 2.5 million people, between them, have been running their computers collectively for half a million years. Doesn't matter whether this was on 8088s or top-of-the-range z80s, the owners' computers were running, in total, for that time. This is, IMO, a phenomenal achievement.
So how about some help?
I mean, what's the point in discovering extraterrestrial life if we can't crack their private key? :)
SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.
This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:
The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home will hopefully get comparable attention.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I stand corrected.
Though...the snipe and Proxmire's party affiliation were not supposed to be...related...
You got me.
I read a quick bio on him. Makes me respect him. A bit.
I shot off on him because when you are a punk teenager remembering how he punched out against VLA searches in the 80's...it sticks.
Not enough self editing 15 years later.
...but...
Idle CPUs are Gopp allies.
Except when the CPUs are cracking encryption.
Or monitoring.
Or intercepting.
Or preevaluating psych profiles on 2 year olds who
are nationally dna libraried who are location monitored by satellite and.....
Only these "Acceptable Use" ACTIVE CPUs are Republican allies.
Rampant paranoia. But also my point.
But I think you are ruling with "what I think is interesting" onto "what everyone else thinks is interesting". I used to work in a RNA structure analysis lab; I know protein folding is important and difficult but I just can't care. Some people are pure math - apparently you are not; why can't we chalk up unjoinable differences?
If the universe is "only" 15-20 billion years old, and those other life forms would be chemically similar to us (hey, that's as reasonable as any other postulate here), they'd require the same elements available, which would mean the same stellar processes (current theories require a few cycles of stellar formation and nova to provide elements above Lithium), and would take the same time to form. If they're out there, it seems more reasonable to think they'd be "only" as advanced as we are.
Therein lies the flaw in your argument. The Earth has been "human friendly" in its present form for several hundred million years, and yet the human family tree only stretches back a few million. You forget that the Earth existed as a pristine, life-friendly planet long before we came along.
So what if, instead of the dinosaurs evolving 225 million years ago, we had instead? It's only quirk of fate that allowed Dinosauria to evolve into the dominant life form, instead of our primitive pre-mammallian ancestors. If our evolutionary path had remained the same, but the timeframe was bumped up to that point, the modern intelligent human species would be over 200 million years old, instead of the measly few hundred thousand years we have today. Where would we be, had that been the case? How many stars would we have colonized, or new technologies would we have invented? Think about it, a quirk of evolutionary fate is the only thing that set us back.
Now, who's to say the same situation occurred on all planets? There was no real reason why our species didn't evolve 225 million years aago, and there's no reason to think that other species couldn't have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. When you also take into account that some sun-like stars are billions of years older than even ours, the possibility arises of billion year old civilizations in our own galaxy. I don't know about you, but I'd expect that they'd be far more advanced than we are today.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The point is that 2.5 million people, between them, have been running their computers collectively for half a million years. Doesn't matter whether this was on 8088s or top-of-the-range z80s, the owners' computers were running, in total, for that time. This is, IMO, a phenomenal achievement.
I kind of disagree. With 2.5 million users, and Seti@Home being around for a couple years now, that's a lot of time people AREN'T running the screensaver. Let's say over a period of one year, at 2 million users. They've been around longer than that, and they've gotten more users, but let's just use those numbers. So, that's two million years worth of potential computing time and they've racked up half a million years of actual computing time. So each person is dedicating less than 1/4 of their potential computing time to the project. That's an average of six hours a day. Most people sleep more than that and you can't tell me, no matter how much time the average slashdotter spends on their computer, that most people are on their computer 18 hours a day.
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
Of course since the largest group of SETI@Home contributers are running Windows I guess we should forgive their poor uptimes.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
they would have to be within 25 light years..since we have been broadcasting for 50 years, it would take 25 to get to them, and 25 to get a reply back. Of course this is assuming they even use radio technology.. I would imagine that as a civilization progresses, the hindrance of light speed communications would become an issue.
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This kind of inability to manage their webpage seems symptomatic of other things I've heard about the SETI approach (like reprocessing the same data over and over for a while, etc.)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I kind of disagree. With 2.5 million users, and Seti@Home being around for a couple years now, that's a lot of time people AREN'T running the screensaver
That's just silly. Would you judge the success of the Beatles based on the number who've never bought one of their records?
No, SETI@Home isn't getting very high marks in the dedication department. More people would rather turn their PC off than allow it to run overnight to help out SETI.
And I'm one of those people. So what? Could the 35 years of time that I've contributed been higher? Yes. But the aim for most users isn't the same as yours; they (we) feel that we're making a contribution, and that we're not dedicated simply because we don't leave machines running all night. Nor are we guilty for the occasaional game of freecell or quake 3 that means fewer units get done.
I can't speak for others, but I'm happy that I'm contributing to a project in the way it was intended.
Not to be redundent, but from time to time I have access to 5 to 10 4-way RS/6000 machines which have become idle for a few weeks. I fire up my setiathome clients on them and take a lead forward in the stats. When the machines are re assigned to new projects, I turn off my clients.
Blar.
The Climate Model they give you takes a year or more to run on a typical PC, unlike SETI@Home 3.0's work units, which take my single-CPU 500 MHz G4 about 6-7 hours to chew through.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I think that the distributed.net project is a proof in concept thing.
We all know that brute force can break encyption. By doing it, we demonstrate how simple it is to do.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I didn't mean that there is probably no extraterrestrial intelligence, there almost certainly is. I just meant we're not likely to detect a signal from any of them.
- Have a picture
Wow! Where did they get that? I suppose from watching our Star Trek reruns.
"No, thanks I'm trying to give them up." :) The goon show was great!
2^5
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Senator William Proxmire represented Wisconsin from 1957-1988, famous for the "Golden Fleece Awards" for "wasteful, ridiculous or ironic use of the taxpayers' money." Some of the awards were
on-target, but probably tended to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially.
Given the existence of spyware, I would guess that they already are. We just don't know it yet.
Speaking of which, I once saw a Web page where a guy talked about a demo Java app he had written, which would harvest "spare" cycles from client machines where it was running.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Try running the folding@home client instead. That project produces actual, useful scientific results about protein folding. SETI is just an inefficient search through a million billion haystacks for a needle that probably is not there.
- Have a picture
I know they're short on time and staff, but with significant web site updates (newsletters and the like) happening on the order of months, I've seen a lot of people drift away from the program because they don't have a good sense that anything is happening.
After all, a significant aspect of any successful distributed computing project is good old fashioned PR.
After the first layer of signals has been crunched, is the next step to map all of the spikes for patterns? I read somewhere that this was going to happen. It was predicted only a year and a half ago, that they wouldn't be even half as far along as what they are now.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
And it has a really small memory footprint compared to SETI@home.
- Have a picture
> I hate to nitpick, but Arecibo is not a volcanic caldera,
> in spite of what the tabloid press might report.
Not entirely a nit - thanks for setting me straight.
I can't remember where I heard it was a caldera, but I'm sure it wasn't the tabloid press. Please!
I think the best view I've ever had of it was in the movie Contact.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I agree that the RC5-64 project is pointless, but Optimal Golomb Rulers are supposed to have some scientific uses.
Your opinion is noted.
And your evidence to support this would be.... ?
Are you saying that an extraterrestrial signal will be somehow equivalent to the discovery of a Diety? Are you saying that Seti@Home has anything to do with religion at all?
I'm sorry, but this post just illustrates your lack of imagination and courage: the imagination needed to encompass the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the courage to pursue that possibility, which you further compound by denigrating anyone who does have the imagination or the courage.
You're right... you shouldn't be spending time working on Seti@Home. You should be examining, and working on, the flaws in your own character.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
It has been shown that Hero had invented the steam engine in 1000 B.C.
His designs were lost as were many wonderful discoveries by the Fire at Library of Alexandria.
Had that fire never ocurred, we might have been living in a vastly different world. However, we should also remember that we can play the what if game until we're blue in the face. It won't change the fact that we actually know extremely little in the grand scheme of things. Our understanding of physics and math is rudimentary at best.
There's just too much unknown to make substantial claims about where our civilization stands with respect to other civilizations.
First, Since there is absolutely no hard evidence that there is anything alive outside of our own Earth, it is silly to say that ours is a "relatively primitive" culture unless you are comparing us to some fantastic culture from your own imagination. I do not mean to say that modern (western, too) society does not have problems or shortcomings, but to imply that there's more advanced cultures "out there" is wildly speculative at best. Even if you believe the modern scientific dogma about evolution, why should any ET culture be further advanced than our own? If the universe is "only" 15-20 billion years old, and those other life forms would be chemically similar to us (hey, that's as reasonable as any other postulate here), they'd require the same elements available, which would mean the same stellar processes (current theories require a few cycles of stellar formation and nova to provide elements above Lithium), and would take the same time to form. If they're out there, it seems more reasonable to think they'd be "only" as advanced as we are.
Furthermore, non-zero bandwidth is required by physical principles. No matter how "advanced" whatever culture anyone has, it doesn't change how the universe operates. Higher data rates always require a wider channel. Yes, we can use coding schemes that encode more than one bit per symbol, such as cramming 56,000 bits into an 8-kHz phone line. These schemes degrade noise immunity and impose tighter tolerances on channel quality as it becomes more difficult to differentiate between symbols. Nothing is free.
Oh-- about your point #1: if somebody fifty lightyears away started receiving I Love Lucy and immediately sent a "hello" message, we'd not get it for another fifty years! C is the same number coming and going!
What if we start a project looking for a message on PI?
We can even try different rational numbers...
Lets imagine, that we found "thou salt not travel faster than light...."
And the road goes ever on....
Aw hell, who needed 42 Karma anyway.
PS. This is "Offtopic", or "Flamebait", not "Troll", and so was the previous.
After seeing the stats, I can't stop wondering what the fuzz is all about. 500 000 cpu hours, is that much? That means 1369 users for one year doing nothing else. Assuming they only use the computer for 8 hours a day, means 2053 users donating their spare cycles for one year. Considering the price of the Arecibo radio telescope, they should probably just buy some computers to do the processing themselves.
Beside looking for E.T.? Any research on AIDs, complex math equation, etc.?
:)
Thanks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Who, with Walter Mondale, later to be VP, killed the "Station" part of the "Shuttle/Station" project in the early 1970's. That's right, we could have had a real space station, 20+ years ago.
And as for Idle CPU's. . .as I recall, Proxmire was a Democrat. . .
The problem with SETI is that most life out there isn't intelligent enough or advanced enough to broadcast anything. The window for a civilization to use broadcast methods is relatively small, if you look at earth as an example. I'm sure that point to point communications will replace broadcast within the near future (100 years), a mere instant on the cosmic scale. I would love to see distributed computing used to help the human genome project, protein folding, etc. There are much clearer benefits to doing so.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
5.97 x 10^20
Not bad, eh?
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Also fun is the Countries "Sorted by Most CPU Time per capita":
Link
USA at number 12 behinda Antarctica, Pitcairn Islands, Tokelau, Niue (wtf?) and other assorted specs of fly-shit on the world map
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
I run the software on several servers. It runs at the lowest priority level possible, so any other work gets done first. The SETI software just scoops up all the leftover cycles. These servers have to be left running anyway, so there is no waste of power.
World Beach List, my latest project.
wow, what a waste of good ascii letters. Im so upset, you spent 1 minute writing that, when you could have been sniffing for your users' pR0n passwords to whack off too. Run seti@home cause its pretty, but dont use the screensaver, it runs at 2-3x slower when it displays the graphics.. go go go text only ppl. Im off to waste my time and cpu and power and fossil fuels on some counter-strike, cause IM a power usin seti usin loser! I caught that previous sig :-) virus
Why do we search? Simple. Our race is curious. What better reason do we need? Without curiousity, and the resultant incentive to investigate and invent, you would probably never have been able to post your short-sighted and fear-blinded statements, just as I would never be able to post a rebuttal, because computers wouldn't exist.
In any case, could you explain just HOW we're "playing God" by searching for the neighbors, as it were?
I think humankind, as a race, feels pretty lonely. I think there's a lot of reasons for this which would take up more space than I choose to at the moment, but I see SETI as trying to answer the question of whether we are truly alone in this part of the multiverse (FWIW: The vast number of star systems Out There says 'no' to me, but I also have doubts as to whether anyone else has developed a viable FTL drive).
If God didn't want us to find what's Out There, He would not have given us the means to investigate. Our knowledge of radio astronomy, and even the very ability to think that there might be life on other worlds, would not have been within our grasp to discover.
To take that a step farther: If God doesn't want us to find anything, we won't. And there's absolutely no way for us to control that. But we don't know this for a fact, so we continue to try. That's in our nature, and since it is I would have to assume that God, since he created us all, made us that way. (FWIW: I think BOTH theories, evolution AND creation, have elements of truth. After all, if evolution is true, then God would have to have created it).
I find it significant that your FIRST assumption, if we did find another civilization, is that they'd be hostile. We have no proof either way, and won't until the day that we do make 'First Contact.' It may not happen in this segment of our lifetimes, but I have no doubt that, if we look long and hard enough, it WILL happen. Call it part of my faith.
Point of interest: "Doctile" is not a word. Not in the dictionary at all. If you meant "Docile," that's closer to my own beliefs but still not very accurate. Docile, from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary site, is defined as easily taught, led, or managed.
Somehow, I just don't see a star-faring race quite fitting the profile of "docile." And why would we want to "colonize their world" in any case? We've got a perfectly nice one of our own that we really do need to learn to handle responsibly before we even THINK of how to expand.
I don't know what to expect. Anyone who says that they do, like yourself, is indulging in sheer speculation. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be tagged as such.
I will agree with you on one thing. The search for extraterrestrial life is all very well, but I'm wondering how we, as a race, could possibly deal with First Contact when we haven't even learned how to get along with each other. Assuming SETI yields positive results, we could be rushing into something that will either mature us in a BIG hurry, or destroy us as utterly as if Billy-boy Clinton had pushed The Button.
And I'm not talking about extraterrestrials doing the destruction. We're perfectly capable of doing such to ourselves. All that has to happen is for a neutral third-party (an e-t race) to hold up a metaphorical mirror to how we treat each other and our homeworld. I guarantee that'll cause more of a fracas than a nuclear winter.
Finally: If dirty, non-renewable fossil fuels are all you can think of to search for, then you need to sit down and do some hard thinking. We need renewable, clean energy sources, not more oil.
I don't want to have ANYTHING to do with Distributed.NET. I put CPU cycles to Distributed.NET a few years ago, and it was a big waste to me. At least SETI@HOME is something I personally care about. The same thing goes for Fold@HOME. Is it usefull science? Sure. Is it more likely to get usefull results that SETI@HOME? Sure. But I don't care. SETI is something I care about, and I'm sick of the naysayers blasting the people who support it.
SETI is the search for the answer to the most fundamental question in the universe, and probably the most difficult question to answer, and I'm not stopping my support anytime soon.
there is some science now :)
check out ogr projects. ogr homepage on distributed.net has more information what ogr is and how it can be used.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
...a number of posters have commented that Seti@Home is a waste of time and energy. Perhaps it is, but it is a waste of time and energy to an altruistic project, and it sounds so much better than giving your free cycles to some brute force encryption project. Another cause mentioned was protein folding research, but you've got to admit this sounds boring to the possibility of your computer being the one to find an alien broadcast signal. Everyone knows that the chance of finding a signal is virtually zero, but even the act of ruling out alien broadcasts is worthwhile.
Whilst trying out new code breaking algorithms on distributed.net et al is a worthy cause, recent code breaking attempts do not seem to be in the cause of improving methodology.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Why should we, the SETI@home users, do a distributed program for folding proteins, when IBM is paying many millions of dollars to create "supercomputers" to do just that?
Glen
Track your fuel economy
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java,
Is it really Java on Mac? My cube completes a work unit in 21 minutes, while my dual-cpu linux box takes 35 mins.. Is the Mac client not native?
Your Working Boy,
written like a die-hard shell user!
:-)
What on earth for?
The only references on the distributed.net page list esoteric mathematical papers - not one mention of a practical application. It sounds to me like distributed.net is desperate to do SOMETHING, so it simply picks a hard, but useless, mathematical novelty.
Why not just calculate pi to a zillion places? Or better yet, a still higher prime number (which IS actually useful)? Or render a raytrace movie?
They're going to lose their users very quickly unless they re-tool and start doing real work with those cycles.
Okay, so it seems lots of people are dissing this project...but what if you, the user, could get something tangible out of it? How about applying this model of processor sharing to an ISP. Give users FREE DSL or higher access to the Internet, without banners. All the funding comes from "rent" which corporations pay the ISP to use their customer's CPUs during idle time. Seems like a winning model to me!
Checking out Seti's results by OS shows some interesting info. In the 90 OSes listed, MacOS is #3 in results and OS/2 is #20. Linux is #6. Based on SETI's results, F@H should have done the Mac client BEFORE the linux client.
What proves a bit more interesting is the sort of analysis done in Newsletter #4. An extraterrestrial emitter, assuming it's constantly sending a signal, would trigger a gaussian detection rather than a spike. The only problem with the analysis that was explained in Newsletter #4 is that by looking through the top 10,000 gaussians only, one is pretty much guaranteed to only find signals from satellites passing over the telescope.
The "heavy lifting" analysis (going on right now) essentially involves mapping all 125 million gaussians against the sky, filtering them based on how many times the telescope passed over that part of the sky, taking into account redundant signals and equipment problems and RFI, and finally looking for areas that have a disproportionately high number of gaussians. When one of these areas is found, it's checked more carefully, the tapes are reanalyzed, the area is checked again with other telescopes, etc, before an actual ET claim is made.
Other SETI projects (such as SERENDIP) usually continue data analysis a few years after the project is done. In other words, the proof that we're all looking for could be buried in the S@H database, we just have to wait a while for it to be found!
What if the nearest, most benevolent alien civilisation in the universe... talks like static? We could be bathed in signals from all directions but can't see it through all the legitimate static.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Given the assioma that a monkey, typing randomly, has a non-null chance to type in the Amlet (or your preferred novel of your preferred author), I propose a distributed computing project to do just that (after all, world's whole computer set should reach the same intelligence of a monkey)
Ciao
----
FB
I don't think so... until laws are changed that prevent patenting of genetic sequences (which is a crock in itself), I won't help their creation when it means that I cannot afford treatment with them...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
"Programming eventually leads to addition with letters"
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
There's been quite a lot of talk lately about PC and computer equipment being responsible for energy shortages. Seen in this context, the IMHO pointless and so far unsuccessful search for aliens seems a waste of energy. Computers are so much more energy efficient when suspended or turned off!
Jilles
Also, if eye-candy is so unappealing, then why all the fuss in the Linux world about SKIN'ing everything?!?!
Also is quite possible that radio is a very primative form of commication. We already know that lasers have a lot more bandwidth, and lasers used as a quantum channels would square that ammount of bandwidth.
Finally with 80% of the universe made up of thus far undetected dark matter (~40%) and dark energy (~40%), it's very possible that the hidden sector physics may contain mediums a lot more suited to communications: shadow photons? axions? massless scalar fields?
Every thousand years
This little sphere
Ten times the size of Jupiter
Floats just a few yards past the Earth
You climb on your roof
And take a swipe at it
With a single feather
Hit it once every thousand years
Till you've worn it down
To the size of a pea
Well, I say that's a long time
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Wow.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I hate to nitpick, but Arecibo is not a volcanic caldera, in spite of what the tabloid press might report. In fact, it is a large limestone sinkhole in the karst terrain of Puerto Rico: check out this link for more info. (I promise its not a goatse.cx link.)
One of the cuter stories is that when they were searching for the perfect site on Puerto Rico, they took a dime and slid it around on a contour map of the island - and where it fit nicely inside the contours, there the dish went... Its amazing to look at, and I recommend a visit if you vacation in PR.
OTOH, your other point is completely correct - Arecibo only sees a limited range of the sky, and cannot view anything south of a certain declination (14? I forget). Not being able to see the Gal;actic center is particularly galling! That's why the new GBT (100m, unlike 305m at Arecibo, but the GBT is fully steerable) is so exciting.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Try OGR, the Optimal Golomb Ruler project. Finding better OGRs is actually a lot more clueful than brute-force cracking encryption keys (we've demonstrated that can be done, enough already!) - these interesting mathematical objects actually have many practical applications in comms, radio astronomy (so you are helping to find the LGMs) and other funky areas. And they even make beautiful necklaces....
Microsoft should integrate the SETI@Home client into their newest Office suite. Using Office the hardware is idle most of the times. CPU cycles are used better with the SETI@Home client.
I participate in Seti@Home, it seems more valuable than distributed.net's offering. However, I can see much better uses for such projects. A while ago I heard of the Casino-21 project, which is about climatic modelling. I think that this is something very useful, valuable and important to us, and I wish they would get a move on and start up. The web site of note for this project is: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/. At this time you can only register your interest (I think that they're still in the planning phase.) I do recommend that people register as higher numbers might increase the chances of the project happening. Presumably registering will also sign you up for future announcements, such as when they have client software to download. Although they make comparisons to SETI@Home, I think they will operate slightly differently, with work units perhaps taking more than a year (one of the things that I think makes SETI@Home successful is that people get feedback via wu completion, and get to compete).
So that we can help cure cancer, als, old age, etc.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Don't you people realize that the SETI@HOME Screen Saver is NOT mandatory? There are console versions for Windows NT that you can run as a service.
You can also do the stupidly easy thing, turn your screensaver OFF and set SETI@HOME to run all the time.
> They haven't detected any Extra Terrestrials yet
We've got some spares, if that's what you're looking for.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For a while I ran a terminal version of seti@home on MacOS X in the background. The client was originally made for rhapsody, but worked on OS X too. Even something that simple would probably get at least a few CPU hours out of me for folding@home.
Damn. After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative. Or maybe the underlying premise of SETI is flawed. Or our concept of communication is too primative for the advanced alien armada now flying towards us after seeing the final episode of M*A*S*H yesterday.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I wouldn't say it to loud or sadaam will use seti to link his PS2s.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
I'm part of the Mac observer team. My 8500 G3/400/200/1M upgrade with 120M ram does a work unit in 12 hours.
The client is pretty slick for SETI@home, and they're working on SMP clients for those G4 towers or older 604e SMP machines such as the 9600.
I think that the search is a useful thing, and, besides, it's something for the mac to do while I'm at work and the work machine to do when I'm home...
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
Modems already sound like static except when they're dialing up. If a little green man heard that how on earth could he distinguish (say) intelligent discourse on slashdot from meaningless static?
You assume that every single synapse of every single neuron is doing something useful during every single synapse firing cycle.
Of course, IANANS (I am not a neural scientist), but I would expect a far smaller percentage of the brain to be active and/or doing useful work at any given time. If that's true, Seti@Home may have already achieved a computational rate equal or greater than the useful rate of the human brain.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I used to run the distributed.net client myself but (as odd as it sounds) SETI@Home manages to be more practical. Not by very much, but there is at least a minute chance that something might someday come of it.
I ran the SETI@Home "screensaver" so long on my work machine that it burned in the cheap-ass Gateway monitor.
But my Mac runs closr to 40 watts after shutting down the CD, HD, video hardware, and monitor. Now, my Linux box, which runs continually with no power save as it is a server, consumes probably 150 watts continuous.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
I also noticed, during the brief interval when I was able to access the pages, that they are looking for a web admin... I no longer wonder why...
Measuring computing time in years doesn't mean anything; these "years" are mostly being done on slow, outdated machines like at my school, where the average time is about 26 hours (that includes some G4 cubes, Blue G3's, but mostly really old all-in-ones from 5 years ago). Some of the machines like Sun's team does one every five hours or so along with SGI, but most of the time is from us slowpokes, it doesn't track any real data analysis or progress.
# debian/rules
if all of the resources of SETI@Home were directed towards booting up Windows, would it take less than 10 minutes?
I ran it for a while but it sucked up way too much RAM and ran too slowly for me to feel like I was contributing in a concrete way. I don't have enough machines at my disposal to make it worthwhile - I run distributed.net
The close calls are generated from a broke telescope. It goes down after it was fixed (assuming that it was fixed). Now I wonder if it got destroyed, we can detect life out there... :)
---
Keep in mind that the people running Seti@Home aren't sitting in Arecibo, PR with the dish. I would imagine when the dish goes down, the primary goal of the operators is to get it working again, not to call Berkeley and say, "hey guys, the dish is broken, just disregard all the garbage data we're collecting today."
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I should have turned on my brain before I write something. "The frequency of interesting work units goes down..." and "if it gets destroyed".
---
Well. We've been working on the the RC5 64-bit encryption for over three years now and we've only exhausted 37% of the keyspace. There was at one time a point to the RC5-64 project, but now it seems rather pointless. Yes, we broke 56-bit encryption in a day, but can't we just recognize that 64-bit encryption is good enough? Aren't there other, more worthy uses of our spare CPU cycles? Such as, say finding Optimal Golomb Rulers, which is actually a valuable contribution to the mathematic and scientific community.
I believe distributed.net should give up RC5-64. Let's all just swallow our collective pride, forget the prize money, and work together on something useful.
my dnet stats page, for those interested....
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
The FAQ on their site states:
Too bad: I've got a few pII Linux boxen running seti, with a few other functions, and they have 32mb each for that and the other things they do. The text-only seti client runs very nicely; I didn't see any indication from the FAQ that I could do the protein-folding stuff neatly on the older machines.
I'd think that they'd have some interest in making sure it can run on 486s; lots of distributed computing is done on extremely old machines with very limited RAM.
Guess I'll keep looking for little green men for the time being.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Just look at mexico guys....If they were running techtonics@home those silly people would be evacuating- instead of sittin there waiting to get cooked by some pyroclastic cloud (or whatever its called). Data could be recorded from all of the worlds seizmographs, and distributed, and using some formula greated by some math guy, and some software guy, and some geologists, ... you know .. some miracle happens and we know when the next earthquake will hit, or volcano will burn down some trees in mexico.
Just think, if we got rid of brute force key crackin, and let the aliens look for us (they want our resources like those last ones did) , Los Angelos would never have been fried a few years ago by that eruption in the tar pits. So many lives were lost.
Obviously you've forgotten that unless we explore space and set up permanent colonies all the Earth exploration won't do our species much good when the supervolcano erupts, the next big rock slams here or the Sun finally dies killing us all.
Er... isn't the expected lifespan of the sun another 5 billion years? I think if we survive without any major catasrophe's, we probably won't still be worrying about space travel... nor would we likely look the same as evolution would probably have a couple things to say along the way.
Big rocks, supervolcano's, and omnipotent monkeys made of pure energy could still do us all in long before that, though.
Exactly what do they mean with 500.000 years computing time? 500.000 years computing time on a 8086 is something entirely different than the same amount of computing time on an Athlon 1 GHz, so I don't really know what their statement is supposed to mean.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Based on which computer? I had a P166 that took about a day to crunch a block, but a better PC would take a considerably shorter time to do the same task. If I dedicated a c64 to the task, it might sound impressive to state it had been crunching blocks for 1 year solid, but if it hasn't finished it yet, it's hardly useful.
Psychos do not explode when the sunlight hits them, I don't care how fucked up they are.
Given the reasonable success of these systems I wonder when people are going to start exploiting this sort of system comercially. Given the amounts being Invested in many-many processor systems (ASCI white et al) there has to be a market. This could even pay for free web access [ie I guarentee that my computer will give them X MIPS/year of processing, they give me free net access the rest of the time] It could also provide network revenue for internet backbones.
..but then again, the administration might cost more than increasingly cheap compu time ;o( ...
Apart from this surely these things should have even more users. Im surprised that govenment dont require schools, libaries universities etc etc to give away there free compu time to govenment projects this could then be used for whatever in return for larger IT bugets.
It seems the link for the "close calls" is forbidden?!? Anyone care to repost what it says somewhere?
I need a funny sig
I don't understand the concept of a "close call". A "close call" would mean that an ET was out there and they almost detected it, or that they detected something and it was almost an ET.
A broken telescope is hardly a "close call", at least in this context.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Got about 2,15years of cpu time at the moment. Let's find us some aliens!
Insert nifty comment here
By my calculation, a human brain cranks at
100 Giga-neurons x 10 kilo-synapses/neuron x
100 Hz synapse firing rate = 100,000 Tbits/s
Assuming (a) one synapse firing = 1 bit data,
and (b)1 Flop = 32 bits, then 1 brain = 3000
TeraFLOPs. SETI@home is cranking about 1% of
that
Given another factor of 100 increase in cpu
power applied to the problem, rather than
searching for an extraterrestrial intelligence,
we can BUILD and extra terrestrial intelligence
(a non-human one)(pun intended).
Daniel
A bunch of people get data from a central server, and all the computer analyze this data. In essence, what they're doing is cracking encryption.
I'm pretty sure I'm right on that, but I still don't understand why. Are you trying to find security loopholes? I think this is the point, in which case I find the whole project rather pointless - anyone who pools together millions of computers can crack encryption eventually. As an analogy... Imagine that you are testing a new computer for Mil Spec - it has to be extremely durable. I see Distributed.net as the equivalent of stacking up 40,000 tanks and dropping them all at once from a helicopter. Oh my gosh! You found a problem with the server. But in reality, who on earth is going to do it?!
Again, I might misunderstand - this project could be something that is done for "fun" (let's see who can crack the code quickest), or for more devious purposes... Please reply with your comments; I think I misunderstand the project.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/
Helium balloons want to be free.
This guy is nuts, you're saying. But wait. What I'm saying is that the only "sane" alien society that would actually make the effort to contact us is one that wants to destroy us. And I don't think that's very likely either. You just can't advance to that stage without learning some very important lessons along the way. Lessons about war, peace, and morality. And don't forget that these "people" are completely self-sufficient. They don't work for a living like we do. They do work, of course, but only out of the desire to further their technological placement among other societies. In other words, they aren't out to destroy the earth just to confiscate our plutonium supply.
Now, suppose there really is an alien race intending to destroy us. Why haven't they done it yet? What are they waiting for? Discovering intelligent life, for an advanced species, does not involve exploration ala Star Trek. They automate it. If they do exist, they already know we're here.
So, what happens if there really is some form of communication floating around just waiting for us to discover it? I don't think it's likely at all. They wouldn't be that careless. They clean up after themselves. They generate no pollution, no tracks of where they've been.
Here is another reason. Imagine what kinds of technology these aliens use to communicate, given that they are capable of interspace communication. It ain't radio. In other words, we're trying to recieve smoke signals while they're using light, or black holes, or plasma, or who knows what.
The only way we could possibly make a discovery like that is if another society exists just like us; that is, at the same stage of technological evolution, within our range and with the same curiosity and motives as SETI.
For the record, I do believe that intelligent alien life exists. Absolutely. But I don't believe that we're going to find them anytime soon. Not until we've earned the right to.
Who's wasting ascii? At least I made a point with my ascii.
Oh, and that's to, not too. See 'The Elements of Style' for a clue on how to make a point and how to use the English language properly.
My interpretation: you don't like what I wrote, you are upset by what I wrote (don't know why), you think I wasted time, you think I'm a script kiddie (supported by?), you think I whack off (a safe bet, I suppose), you are a smarty pants about this Seti app and think I don't know that graphics are CPU expensive (err, your assumptions allow me to assume you are overgooeyed, Windows more than likely), you think text only ppl is a political cause of which you are the O.G. champion, you are proud that you like Seti (unexplained), and you make obscure sarcastic remarks just to exercise your sarcasm glands even if they are non-sensible.
Okay now, what was your point?
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
well difference between mac and gnu/linux is not as big as it might seem on first glance. for example on that list mac0s is mentioned 2 times while gnu/linux is mentioned 6 times. now if we add together all those units:
Macos: 22714077+73=22714150
GNU/Linux: 12672647+5929716+2269+1+1=18604642
now difference is not longer around 8 million units but 4 millions instead. with that many units linux moves into #4.
so linux users contribute 81% of what mac users contribute.
lets now take a look at another huge distributed project. distributed.net has around 500 000 users, of which 50 000 are active every day. ( i wonder how many active users / day seti@home has).
project OGR25
MacOS
macosX on powerPC is #14, rhapsody on powerPC is #16 and MacOS on powerPC is #4.
gnu/linux
linux on x86 is #2, linux on alpha is #12, linux on arm is #22, linux on MIPS is #24, linux on S390 is #30 and linux on sparc is #31.
that means that macos has 22 054 256 gnodes while linux has 108 845 111 gnodes. mac users contribute 19% of what linux users contribute.
this shows that doing linux client before mac client is actually smart choice by f@h.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
That's a buffer overflow somewhere...
The number listed is (2^31) - 1.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
No, Hacintosh (at position 69) is the OS to beat everything.
I hit the SETI@Home page tonight and discovered that they've upgraded the client _again_.
I was reading the note about their new client, which basically says that they've made the client slower.
Seems like they're running out of bandwidth on their server, so they've made the client do more research per packet in order to increase turnaround time, hence decreasing the rate that results are turned in.
It just seemed ironic in view of the 500,000 year announcement; SETI@Home has gotten too big for Berkeley's network.
Another option, in the "pure math" category, is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at www.mersenne.org.
Team Slashdot on Seti@Home
follow the 'close calls' link from slashdot. that third plot looks very much like the illustration at the beginning of the _Hashing_ chapter in Donald Knuth's _orting and Searching_
I took a look at the current projects running from distributed.net, and couldn't find anything that appeared even marginally useful or interesting. Running brute-force hacks on encryption algorithms isn't much different than running a random number generator until your target value happens to appear. Both are equally useless.
At least SETI has a clear goal, and is a useful (and entertaining) pursuit which is naturally parallelizable. Other systems (PopularPower, etc.) also have useful things you can do with 'spare' cycles (at least if you're not the one paying the electric bill).
I fail to understand why anyone is advocating spending cycles on hunting for random numbers, a la distributed.net . Care to enlighten me?