SETI@Home - What's Been Happening w/ Team Slashdot?

StArSkY wonders: "I just had a quick look at the Team Slashdot page on the SETI site, and it looks as though only about 10% of the names are still active participants. Does Slashdot have limited patience? Have the Men In Black movies dulled our sense of commitment to the search for alien life? Or do we just rebuild our PC's too often and forget to reinstall the SETI client? For those of you who are interested, 'Team Slashdot' is currently ranked 27th in total results returned, and when I was typing this, we only needed another 6003 results to reach 1 million. Now that would be a huge achievement. So all of you Slashdotters out there with dormant SETI accounts get fired up, install the client, and get back to using those idle CPU cycles." not two days later, cybrpnk2 writes in with this update: "This week Team Slashdot becomes only the 28th registered group to process one million work units (basic blocks of radio data). Since the entire SETI@Home project has processed only around 600 million work units total, Slashdotters have made a pretty significant contribution to the overall project. Kudos to all involved, particularly slashdotter Mike Hardy for his team-leading contribution of over 23,000+ work units." A big hearty "Thanks!" to all current and future members of Team Slashdot. You guys rock! cybrpnk2 continues with this bit of history on Team Slashdot: "Team Slashdot was formed in Spring 1999 to participate as a group in the SETI@Home search for extraterrestrial radio signals. Over 2200 Slashdotters have joined over the past three years, with around 250 active today. You can join Team Slashdot here."

Comments

Because I'm on team Linux

[Gaetano]

We have 1327385 work units completed and are in 22nd place.

So if everybody on Team Slashdot would join Team Linux then we could almost compete with "The Knights who say Ni!" who are in 11th place. I suspect they are in 11th place because they have a cool name and I almost want to join them myself.

Folding@Home

[iofire]

I don't mean to undermine the significance of the SETI@Home project, but personally the reason I no longer contribute to it is because a cause that is more important to me is now receiving my spare CPU cycles...Folding@Home

Perhaps alternative distributed computing projects have gotten slashdotters attention lately...

While finding extraterrestrial life is certainly fascinating, computation that could lead to cures for diseases like the Folding@Home project appeals to me in a way I can't turn down. Perhaps Team Slashdot could expand to include Folding@Home as well?

In the mean time I'll consider donating a bit more CPU time to SETI@Home, since it's been quite a while :)

Under one million results not accurate.

[Speedy8]

It seems that if you take a look at the groups page of seti you will notice there are two slashdot teams. one called "Team Slashdot" and another called just slashdot. Between the two of them they have over 1.2 million work units processed.

Some motivation for SETI

[minesweeper]

Many people believe there are better things to do with their computers than search for aliens. That's fine. United Devices' Cancer Research project, for instance, is certainly a worthwhile distributed computing alternative to SETI@Home.

However, for those who need some motivation for running SETI@Home, the following quote from Carl Sagan's Contact is a bit inspiring:

"We're just beginning SETI. You know how many possibilities there are. This is the time to leave every option open. This is the time to be optimistic. If we lived in any previous time in human history, we could wonder about this all our lives, and we couldn't do a thing to find the answer. But this time is unique. This is the first time when anybody's been able to look for extraterrestrial intelligence... Nobody's guaranteeing success... Imagine them out there sending us signals, and nobody on Earth is listening. That would be a joke, a travesty. Wouldn't you be ashamed of your civilization if we were able to listen and didn't have the gumption to do it?"

Re:Seti@Home doesn't answer their mail

[Perdo]

S@H sends out so many e-mails, it is considered a spam site by most filters.

They will send you your password. Just disable your filters for the 20 minutes it might take them to send you a password.

I had the same trouble with web based mail provider filtering mail from seti

Not Perdy

[Trevelyan]

I was annoyed to find that the Linux (Unix) clients dont do pretty graphs, like the windows clients.
as far as I could tell all we get is a deamon, which is all well nice, but I was after a nice screen saver for X too.

At the mo I running dnet (rc5-64), but that dont do perdy graphs either.

How is Linux ever to become a desktop OS w/o the eye candy? ;-)

Re:Not Perdy

[windi]

I was annoyed to find that the Linux (Unix) clients dont do pretty graphs, like the windows clients.
as far as I could tell all we get is a deamon, which is all well nice, but I was after a nice screen saver for X too.

Actually, there is a nifty graphical application. Run 'setiathome' with the '-graphics' option and then run 'xsetiathome'. It might not be fullscreen, but you get a window with the exact same content as the Windows screensaver.

Why I'm not on there

[mosch]

I'm not in the seti or d.net competitions anymore because I'd rather spend my cycles on Distributed Folding, or a cure for cancer.

Why kill the earth?

[anthony_dipierro]

Sorry, some pipe dream about finding E.T. is not enough for me to waste electricity and contribute to global warming.

seti@home is annoying to use...

[stefanlasiewski]

Here's why my seti@home activity has dropped over time:

- I have a dual boot machine. I use Linux 50% of the time, and Windows the other 50% of the time.

- I only run the seti@home client in Windows, and only as a screensaver. The Windows client has an option to only run as a screen saver. But the Unix version runs 24/7, and is difficult to automatically disable and reenable. I gave up and have never tried again (and I haven't tried the xsetiathome client).

- I like to run Windows with a minimal configuration. Unfortunately, seti@home requires that you run a seti@home process all the time. Even if you just want to run it as a screensaver, the seti@home process is always there, sucking up resources. I wish it only ran during screensaver mode. I'll probably

- I often need to disable the the seti@home screensaver, and I forget to reenable it. Why? Sometimes I need to run Scandisk, run a virus scan, or need to run some CPU-intensive process. Before you do this, the seti@home screensaver needs to be disabled. The client (or Windows) isn't intelligent enough to NOT run the screensaver whent the load is too high. If I am running scandisk, the screensaver starts 5 minutes into the scan, Windows detects a change on the system, and scandisk restarts; over an over again.