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SETI@Home Faces Funding Problems
blamanj writes "The aussie version of ZDNET is reporting that money to continue the SETI@Home project is in jeopardy, and it may fall by the wayside unless further funding can be found."
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Protein folding distributed analysis by IBM...folded. I heard something about cycles for cancer, but I can't find a link.
RIGHT NOW, what can I use my spare cycles for, besides SETI?
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jonathan barket
If Seti@home goes bankrupt, will the creditors come and repossess my extra cpu cycles?
Maybe they should start looking for RICH aliens?
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
.. Can't they just get ET to wire them some more money?
Trolling is a art,
THey should ask SR Hadden for money.
There\'s no place like ~
would it cost to keep this up as a private thing?
...That they don't go the way of KaZaA and other P2P clients and start bundling spyware in with their client.
1. Start search for alien life with idle time on home computers.
2. ???
3. More funding!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I use seti on a lot of workstations here at the office (don't tell the boss :-) and am pretty high up the ladder. I think of it as doing something nerdy, something helpful for humanity, and something fun. My coworkers and I make a competition of getting more work units than the other. I know chances of one of my computers discovering an alien signal is about 1 in 1000000000000, but I still really enjoy SETI. I don't know if I could give money, but I would hope that some big donors would come in and help out.
Wasn't Spielberg paying for some of this, or was that a one-time thing?
Those pesky Martians!
First they shoot down our spacecraft, now this!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Are they going to put adware/spyware to subsidize the cost?
Seems like the thing to do these days..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I've been crunching numbers for SETI for a while now. It's sad that they're running out of money, but it's a part of how their program works. All that bandwidth, and nobody paying for it. They don't get any ad money, and bandwidth is very hard to come by these days. Heck, every one person has to download a few hundred KiB of data every few hours.
That may not sound like much... but when you have 4,027,337 users, it's a lot. Even assuming that only 1/4 of those users actively contribute, you're still looking at a million people downloading > 2 megs a day. Also, some of those million people run whole server farms, and that can build the cost up to 100 megs a day.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. If they run out of funding, I'll be sad to see them go.
More cycles for the Optimal Goulomb Ruler search!
Good, this project should fail. It would allow us to real work on things like AIDS and cancer, instead of wasting cycles on one method that is the least likely way of ever finding any alien life.
:)
Sorry, someone had say it...
Say it ain't so.
I'll tell you what the 'effect' is! It's pissing me off!
They don't want us to find out where they come from.
Maybe they could start selling some of the extra processing time to pay for the cost of the project? It would annoy me if they were making money off of it, but not if they were using it only to cover their costs.
1) Gain access to volunteering bank accounts.
2) When the account is idle for a bit, slowly draw a few cents every so often.
3) ???
4) Profit! Errr, stay in 'business.'
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Primenet/GIMPS.
http://www.entropia.com/ips/
They search for very large mersenne primes.
Unlike distributed.net, they're computing something new (distributed.net searches for decryption keys to a message whose contents is known!), and unlike SETI@home, they've had actual results: three of the largest prime numbers known to man were found through Primenet.
If those spare cycles are on a Windows machine (maybe you're not using it anymore!) you could always try www.uniteddevices.com, at http://members.ud.com/projects/cancer/index.htm, and help find a cure for cancer.
Around 97 I took a class on ET life at the University fo Texas. We had to write a paper at the end and I chose to write about SETI@Home and utilizing the power of distributed computing to crunch SETI data. This was before SETI@Home had released a client to the public and there was only a simple 2 page website explaining what they were working on. I was so mad because he gave me a 'C' on the paper because I didn't use any "print" sources and he couldn't "trust" Internet sources. This was also only about 6 months after distributed.net started up and it's not like there was a whole lot about this in print. I heard he know includes a bit about SETI@Home in his class, the rat-bastard!
Anyway, this isn't exactly related but I thought it was interesting!
That's not what I meant.
If all else fails, I think they'll resort to encoding advertisements in the transmissions sent to millions of PC users.
Ma! These aliens are going to torture us with IGIA(tm) beard pluckers!
We *need* to finish it so Parkes can double their city's science output!
Perhaps they could include banner ads to generate more revenue. It would kinda suck, especially considering that you're the one providing a service to them. But if it's what it takes to keep the project going I wouldn't mind...
In news today, it was reported that, in an attempt to deal with a funding shortfall, SETI has spawned a daughter organization SETF (Search for Extra Terrestrial Funding). One of the biggest obstacles that SETI officials face is determining the appropriate exchange rate from the intergalactic rugblat to the dollar.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
You can contribute to a cure for cancer with a project managed by Oxford University's Dr. Graham Richards. This is currently in a second phase using LigandFit virtual screening software.Powered by Accelrys (scientific software) and United Devices (Global Metaprocessor). Link is here
Worth it? Oh yes, most definitely.
I consider SETI@Home to be one of the most inspirational projects ever attempted by our generation. Really, it's my equivalent of the moon shot (which happened two years before I was born).
I don't get misty-eyed very easily, but when I think about the films of JFK's inspirational speech... well, I hope the Kleenex is handy.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important. Human beings striving for something new, working hard to discover whether they are truly not alone in the universe. I consider that to be an outstanding effort and achievement, even if we never find ET. I am proud to donate my computer's spare CPU cycles to such a noble effort.
God, that sounds so cheesy to go back and read it. But there it is. There's not much in the world today I get to feel good about. SETI@Home is definitely one of them.
Distributed bank access clients...
Perhaps they can set up a Donate icon on their application, perhaps through Paypal...
I'm sure there would be tons of people willing to donate.
- funding from big contributors (without commercial obligations), not likely to continue (forever)
- funding from users. If 500 000 paypalled $5, it could be enough. Would you?
- advertising, 4 million users. Could work, would you accept it.
- become a subproject of another (commercial project), search ETs only with certain percentage of available CPU power.
- be eaten by an OS vendor (at some stage, a distributed client will become a fixed part of many operating systems, I believe) this might provide a kickstart for doing it for some vendor.
- run it by volunteers, reduce staff costs.
Can you come up with something else?
This is another Entropia project, they test millions of candidate drug compounds against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses.
What fun is being "cool" if you can't wear a sombrero? (Hobbes of Calvin & Hobbes)
When has Seti@home actually provided any useful knowledge about interstellar ANYTHING? They just chew bandwidth and cycles for what purpose? Using FFT's to find seemingly coherant signals buried in electomagnetic background.
This project does seem quite interesting, in that it's trying to determine signals of life, but hasn't provided a thing (unless I'm wrong).
Why not let them die?
Now, if they could just borrow everone's pocket change overnight while they are not using it, collect the interest, then give it back in the morning... That should solve their finance problems.
Would it be possible for someone to come in and buy the name "Seti@home", along with the list of signed up computers, and then use that processing time for completely other purposes that might not be nearly as desireable as scanning for intelligent life?
I know that getting out of any such trojan use would be as simple as uninstalling/turning it off, but if there's a significant group of people who aren't smart enough to find out that the hands have changed and ditch it, what keeps the person who purchases SETI@home's assets from turning all those CPU cycles into something nefarious...like cracking the encryption on bank accounts or something (you're right, that was a lame idea, but I'm sure someone would come up with a better one).
And it would seem that given the universe of AOL/Windows users, there would be a significant number of folks who would fall into that category.
Or perhaps the End User Agreement or other documents prevent this? I've never run SETI@Home, so I've never seen their agreement.
In Short, just how exposed are people?
The Parkes facility is more powerful than that currently used to record the data at Arecibo, Peurto Rico and its addition would widen the search for extra-terrestrials to the Southern Hemisphere.
I would think it might be more productive to scan outer space instead of the southern half of our own planet, but whatever floats their boat.
Maybe they could use the CPU cycles to analyize the voices in my head. Maybe the aliens are transmitting the entire culture to me. That is probably why I'm so far ahead of the times.
Got Extra Money?
... they should direct their antennas towards wherever rich, powerful people live (e.g. Washington D.C.) and search for intelligent life there. (Some do believe in it's excistance, but it's only a matter of belif.)
Look a monkey!
te "noise" we are filtering, is actually the message?!?
How do we know it's not?
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but United Devices has a distributed computing project up that helps find a cure for cancer. Phase II, which began late last summer, is called LIGANDFIT, and 'helps scientists to characterize therapeutic targets and identify and assess drug canididates by performing automated docking of flexible ligands to a protien's binding site.' I'd encourage anyone who has a box with cycles to spare to check it out- i'm pretty sure they've got a linux client, as well as a windows one. I've been running it for 80+ days now, and i haven't noticed any problems with performance- and it's the least we can do for the public good.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
As others have said, I will also be sad to see S@H finish, but alas their job is done since we have found life on venus.
Ok, so it might not be "intelligent", but define "intelligence". I assume the S@H definition of "intelligence" is the ability to generate radio waves somehow.
They should have copyrighted the name. There is an alarmingly high number of me-too spin off companies that start there marketing pitch with "It works like that Seti@home project"...
Of course I was denied 2 hours ago.. how long could that story have existed? Maybe I took too long by ACTUALLY READING IT :P
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I agree that UD is better for the human race in terms of technology utilization, but remember that without seti@home, there probably would be no UD. Seti@home made distributed computer popular enough that other companies could start, and succeed, in a previously unheard of field.
Internet organizations just don't work! You can't just give things like seti@home away. You have to charge for access.
[Head hangs in depressed manner]
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Now, maybe finding intelligent life outside our Solar System isn't very important, since we currently have no way of actually effectively communicating with them, but...
Distributed computing research is important. I really don't see why this kind of research isn't flowing with money, if for the only reason to fully understand how to effectively handle a network of computations that number in the millions. In 30 years, I get the feeling computers are going to come with low priority generic network computing clients to off load research of varing projects onto, what else are we going to use that 20Ghz machines for when we go to work?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Here at home it's taken about 4 Billion years for the technology to evolve allowing for an intelligent search for extraterrestrial life. If the Galaxy is 14 billion years old then older technologies should have at least sparsely spread over the Galaxy by now. Numerically, with a few long shots, it looks like we're alone around here. But hey, metaphysically we're the Universe on a course of self discovery. Not bad for a bunch 'o apes that lost the forest on the savannah and stood up to take a look around. Unless you go with the idea evolution of sentient beings follows a path akin to an EMF, sort of a take on the idea of a thought thinking itself a la Spinoza's take on God. (although I think the idea of a thought thinking itself as a definition of God goes back to one of the ancient Greeks, probably one of the neoplatonist, maybe Plotinus?)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
All scientific endevours, especially the ones that go against conventional thought are considered to be a terrible waste of money and many people want them canceled. However, when these projects are sucessful, they rewrite conventional thought and their deiscoveries can change they way everyone lives their lives.
Columbus was considered insane to want to sail around the world to reach India. He was ridiculed and almost didn't find funding. His discovery completely changed the world. There was a time when the suggestion that the earth was round and not the center of the universe would get you killed. I'm not going to list any more examples of going against conventional thought but I'm sure all of you can think of plenty of them.
I'm sure that all of you reading this know, with out a doubt, that there is life on other planets. It is not hard to imagine that there is intelligent life out there too. While this project is trying to find a needle in a haystack, the cost of searching for it next to nothing vs the potential return, and actually finding it would be the greatest discovery ever made.
I believe there are many other projects that we should contribute to such as cancer or aids research, but do you honestly think that canceling SETI will make the vast majority of SETI users switch to another program?
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
You mean SETI@Home has been distributing recordings of interstellar noise over a P2P network? I'll bet RIAA has something to do with their demise!!!
"...I would while away the hours, talk'n to the flowers, if I only had a brain..."
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
1. Write a paper on something that doesn't yet exist. ...???
2. References: none
3.
4. Get an A+ on the paper
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Seems that they could be taking some of the load off of carnivore. There's an aweful lot of data to process, and the gov't could provide the funding they need to stay in business...
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
If they are only going to sell their research to non-profit organizations, what happens to the cancer sufferers?
Pfizer is going to be able to use the information to generate a drug more quickly than some non-profit lab.
Another example of the GPL mentality crippling good research.
actually they also have the Ruler search for Optimal Golumb Rulers. Yes, they are not as 'cool' as primes, and nowhere near as cool as searching for ET life that we won't be able to find, but it's still neat.
If you installed SETI thinking that you were actually going to HELP find ET, then I've got some land in Florida to sell you.
SETI can be just like kazaa, they can just piggyback stealware and make money like those $$ guzzlers over at kazaa
They should just release a "special" version for bank employees.
I know more than you drink.
Wouldn't the winner of that contest (assuming your computer is a major part of performance) immediatly label themselves as being the least productive person at work.
So when it comes time for the axe, your boss, who isn't as dumb as he looks, has everyones SETI account profiles on his desk as he calls everyone in one at a time.
So many people installed that stupid client. Why not just make people pay for the priviledge of finding ET life? I know many people would. Just sell the client on a cd with an alien doll.
Think about it, they could even give you data sets on the CD so that you don't have to down load them.
Sure, you'd lose some clients, but from what I heard, they have too many people for too little data anyway.
And when the cures for cancer and AIDS are discovered, it could very likely be the result of a global distributed computing system modelled after the groundbreaking work of Seti@home. So they didn't find any aliens, but they did find a new way to supercompute. What have you done for humanity lately?
;-)
Sorry, someone had to say it...
At the bottom of the comments, this random quote is up: "I wish you humans would leave me alone." Be careful what you wish for, little green man...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Imagine how much power would be saved if everyone set their computers to go into hibernate mode during periods of inactivity. I never ran any of these distributed clients for the simple reason that I felt saving power was of more immediate benefit to my electric bill and to the enviorment.
If the SETI project ends and you've still got that do-good feeling - enable your OS's power saving features. It's the OTHER good thing your computer can do when its processing power isn't needed.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
And I'd say that it's probably not even the biggest cost. Bandwidth really isn't that expensive any more. It's probably 1/10 of what it cost when they started... maybe closer to 1/100. I would imagine the biggest cost has got to be the use of that giant friggin radio telescope. Considering it's the biggest in the world (lucky me... I got to see it in person, and even go into one of the control rooms), it can't be cheap to operate.
"Animals that went extinct quickly must have tasted the best."
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Why can't they bundle a distributed computing program with SETI? So 50% (or whatever they agree upon) will go to SETI, and the rest can be leased out to any company willing to pay for some number crunching, I mean Kazaa is already doing it, without our permission of course. And besides I've grown accustomed to their funky "screen saver", it would be a great shame to loose it... Besides, the clock speeds seem to be going higher and higher these days, and I don't think SETI will notice a significant drop anyways...
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
I remember once hearing a statistic about how many tons of coal were burned a day to run SETI@Home. I'm sure there are lots of people who were in fact using "spare cycles" on a computer that would have been left on anyway and had no power management capabilities, but I would be that a high percentage of the computers running their program would either be turned off or be in a lower power mode if they weren't running it.
For a short period of time, I had SETI@Home running on 3 or 4 computers where I used to work (more to pump the company's stats than because I thought we'd find anything). All of those computers would have been turned off during the majority of the day when I was not at work if SETI@Home weren't running on them. So I don't buy the line that running it on another computer doesn't cost anything. Nor, frankly, do I think it's worth the extra cost that is incurred by running it.
Other distributed projects that have been mentioned in various messages here, on the other hand, I think are worthy causes. As long as the people (or companies) running their programs are willing to pay the cost of running the program, I think they're great things to be contributing to.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I think seti is one of the most important things in science. Aids, cancer, etc are just bandaids to death. But to know before you die whether or not we're alone, etc is priceless.
And they were so close too!
This story quotes the Parkes facilty in NSW, the same as the Parkes in the movie "The Dish" that captured the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The story in the movie is how they lost the link and barely got the tracking back in time for the landing.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I guess Apple will have to find a new way to prove the processing power of their chips...
If we feel this is a good cause towards humanity's future, let's not sit on our hands, and consider donating to this worthy cause!
Here's the URL... I hope many of your readers use it:
PS: I do not work for SETI@Home. I just think the Internet could work in it's favour if we all shelled out $5+ a piece
When the probability of success is essentially zero, perhaps the time and money could be better spent elsewhere. At least those cure for cancer projects COULD POSSIBLY MAYBE produce useful results. Then again, this is the same crowd that likes having 84 text editors to choose from, when Notepad is better than all of them! *rimshot*
On a side note, is there any way to convert the work units back into audible files?
There is plenty of money. But it's not available for anybody other than big business and the military.
Basically, we're always in a funding crisis. I personally spend a huge chunk of my time here at the SETI lab writing grant proposals. That's what academia is all about. I've been working in this group for 6 years now, and we've always been just scraping by. This is NOT NEWS.
In fact, we're pushing forward on all fronts. Please see:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/setifuture.html
- Matt Lebofsky - SETI@home
so why should we continue SETI/space/etc... i think, quite simply, we owe it to the generations still to come. the most uncommon trait among us human-animals is to continually go beyond our habitat. so, once in a while, lets quit grazing without thinking in our selfish 'commons' ["The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin, Science, 1968] and do our part as one of the continuum...
Sure we may never come in contact with any alien life, but think about the side benefits.
Aside from being a total waste of human energy, electricity, natural resources, pollution, heat, and misplaced hope, what good was SETI@home?
MANY distributed computing projects long existed prior to SETI@home. It would have been nice to have the public excited and contributing resources to something that might have made a real-world difference (cancer cure, perhaps?) rather than simply trying to justify and/or maintain your pie-in-the-sky childhood fantasies. If you want to find space aliens, why not just grab a telescope, an aluminum hat, and a flashlight and spend some time in the desert in NM? Why waste so much valuable technology that can do some ACTUAL good elsewhere on something so lame?
To me, SETI@home is the secular equivalent of a massive distributed project to find a hidden proof of God in the Bible.
The explosion of the Internet virtually guaranteed that distributed computing would catch on-- that it's best-known application is for something so fantastic as detecting extraterrestrials is a real shame and waste of the technology.
Keep dreaming, people.
Sure, finding a signal from ET is a longshot. But the project is also useful for real science in astrophysics.
The large computational power available is unique and makes it extremely useful for finding many kinds of time-variable radio sources (not just ET). The project is also being used to map the Hydrogen in the galaxy as detailed here.
Even though getting signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence may be a pipe dream, the project still has value from a pure scientific standpoint.
They just need to change the name to SETI@INSPACE or something, I wouldn't want any association with another bankrupt @home...
But seriously, I have been a seti member almost from the beginning. But lately I have lost interest in turning out work units, this is mostly due to the length of time to crunch each unit. Using both of my dual 1GHz PIIIs I was only able to do about 6 units in 24hrs (running 1 session per box). If I ran 2 sessions per machine I could get 11-12 units done. But this would make the machines kind of sluggish and made a noticable difference in my power bill.
Never the less, I'd hate to see seti fold and go away, I still think it gives the average joe the feeling that he/she's doing something usefull.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Has anyone thought about how much better off the aliens will be if we don't find them?
For instance, we won't be broadcasting advertisements to them, we won't be exploiting their natural resources, we won't give them the chickenpox....I think the aliens should be rejoicing!
[In all seriousness, I've donated many billions of cycles to SETI@Home... I just worry what we'll do when we find'em!]
The University of Kansas' 'Lifemapper' project ...maps where Earth's species of plants and animals live, and could potentially live.
http://beta.lifemapper.org
Don't forget that when using Entropia, your computer's cycles are used for some commercial tasks to earn Entropia money. I have no idea what the ratios are for commercial vs non-commercial. They don't say, which makes me suspicious.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
So they need money. Maybe we should get beyond money before doing this kind of thing. Imagine a single person in a spacecraft--would that person need this "money" to do a SETI (or obliterate the earth for that matter)?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
According to this graph the total amounts of donations have just fallen from a few thousand to a few hundred dollars (yes, thank you, I located it from this informative post).
/. might solve the problem. But then again, maybe there are more material issues, maybe they missed a grant or something...?
Is this the extent of the problem? If so, it seems like just bringing it up once at
Tor
And how many ETIs have they found? It's obviously not a very good investment.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Prehaps SETI should try a different approach to finding aliens.
Launch a bunch of AOL disks into space and see if any subscribe.
The only problem is if they use AOL's techniques, they will get plenty of responses, but *still* be broke.
Table-ized A.I.
From: sved@big_alien_ship.galaxy_9875446.spa.ce
To: jimbob1@setimail.ssl.berkeley.edu
Subject: Woe Now!
Jim Bob,
Hey Jim, how's it going? Just wanted to ask a bit of a favor. It seems you earth folk are getting close to finally finding our message, but we haven't really got everything quite ready for the grand unveiling. If you could stall the SETI@Home project for a little while... that'd be great. In the mean time, we're gonna go back to making something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea for the party.
Toodles,
Sved
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
What would happen?
First off, I wonder how long the scientists around the world would bicker and argue over what signal to send back. This may take years based on all the egos I have seen in academia.
Then we would have to wait for the signal to be sent and then reach the aliens. Since we can't determine how far away the aliens are just from their signal, how long would we, as humans, wait for a return signal? If it from the Andromeda Galaxy which is like 1000 light years away, the aliens would probably have stopped listening after 2000 years of waiting!
Even if they did get the signal, would we as humans be willing to wait for their return signal?
If seti@home is getting funding problems after ~10 years of funding, can we even dream that they would be around 50 years from now? I bet even after receiving the signal, after 20 years, most people would probably have concluded it was some type of a glitch, and moved on or stopped listening altogether, leaving the hardcore, ham-radio/X-files geeks waiting for another sign.
SETI@Home is not out of funding... it's a Microsoft-Martian-AOL conspiracy to keep us from learning the Elvis isn't dead; he's just on tour in another part of the MilkyWay.
Sorry couldn't resist.
However the issue is what is a good cause. Taking it to the extreme, I wouldn't like my spare cycles to be used by a password cracking system. The real problem is that computation can be easily "faked". I.e. multiplication of two large numbers can be done with FFT. So in order to be sure that nothing "funky" is happening, the system should be opensourced.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
Ok, you could eliminate polution by sending the same thing to multiple users, but that seems to kill the advantage of this kind of distributed computing (the overhead of distribution, comparison, etc, becomes comparable to the computation itself, so why not just do it locally ...)
The Raven
The Raven
If they can't find academic, gov't, or corporate sponsorship.. put up a donation box a la Paypal.
Forget not, SETI@Home is as much a search for extraterrestrial life as it is a dorky eyecandy screensaver. I'd definitely shell out a few bucks to pay for it just *as a screensaver*, and I'm sure many, many others would do the same. Certainly beats "Starfield Simulation" or whatever.
At my school www.uncc.edu they run seti non stop on all the winXP boxes and slows the net work down. I don't know how much network activity seti uses, but I'm sure hundereds of boxes running it on a 10baseT network doesn't help the situation. We also run lots of dumb terminals, by which I mean computers just running X, so that needs a lot of bandwidth. Computers should be used for something more useful like folding.stanford.edu the distributed folding project.
MAKE YOUR TIME
RC5-64 was supposed to take something like a hundred years when we started that, and it managed to be completed in about 5
The amount of processing power used for Distributed.net's RC5-64 effort hadn't grown exponentially but rather pretty much linearly. There's a limit to the power of even word of mouth.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hasn't anyone read The Forge of God ?
Cautious civilizations don't broadcast out of fear of attracting attention. If we do hear something, it will from a species wiped out by the Killers long, long ago.
I'm guessing part of what is draining their budget would be the hardware to hand all the data units send back and forth and the storage for these numbers. In the last few months, it seems like the Seti@home site has been down more and more for maintenance.
I would guess that the sheer number of people working on this is getting outside of their scripting limits. I suspected trouble when the page for my group, Team LifeUniverseEverything, stopped updating after new units. I can use my password to manually refresh it, but doing that weekly is kind of a pain.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these???
They don't really need to splash out for all this gear just to find aliens. Here, let me save you SETI labcoats some cash.
Take 1 (one) RMS and dangle it in front of one of your telescopes.
Ask it about algorithm patenting, or the Bitkeeper license. Make sure the RMS is dangling mouth to the dish. Doesn't have to be that close. The RMS can actually be dangled from several miles out.
Wait for someone to crunch the WU and get back to you with a positive hit.
Buy new tux for Nobel Prize ceremony.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Just remember to check the settings after you join. When you install the UD client, you give them the right to run whatever project they want, unless you change it in the settings!
If you want to support a project where the privacy of the participants are taken seriously, you should take a look at Distributed Folding. This is not the same as the Folding@Home project, but it is doing something similar.
Unlike UD, there are clients for a lot of platforms and they are going to add more soon.
Important: Be sure to read the readme for the client! You'll regret it if you don't.
Instead of looking for what to do with spare CPU cycles just turn off the computer and save some of Earth's resources.
Finding a cure for Cancer or AIDS would be great. However, when it is found, all you will have is a cure for Cancer...But I use my spare cycles to hunt for aliens. When Aliens are found, they will already have the cure for cancer, aids, alzheimers, etc.
I know that's silly, The aliens will probably want something in return.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Comedy "give your extra CPU cycles to something that's actually useful" option.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
You sound like one of these people who questioned the usefullness of the first sattelites[sp]. Thanks to sattelites we now have more understanding of the weather (saving lifes and products by better weather forecasts), we know where to find water and are able to communicate from all over the world to all over the world.
:-)
Imagine what we could learn from finding intelligence[sp] from outside this world... maybe they will teach us to be tolerant to each other (that would be a big win
bash$
Well, how long will it take for them to complete looking at the entire sky? How much have we covered already? If we are close then, I'll buy that for a buck.
Great. Just Great. Now my screensavers are going to have pop-up Ads. Click here to buy MIR debris.
-516
It's a totally trivial back-of-the-envelope calculation to deduce how many cycles it takes to find the key for an encrypted message by brute force (the way that distributed.net does it). Why do we need to corroborate that statistic via one very expensive sample?
The government does not need a lesson on the value of strong encryption: these figures are easy to work out, and in any case the NSA already has supercomputers that they use (presumably) to do the same thing. (Except, they likely have better technology than brute force for some ciphers...)
Distributed.net is not about "breaking" encryption. The ONLY thing we learn from it is the encryption key. The key was generated by the contest organizers, and if they wanted, they could have just saved it and we'd be one bajillion cycles richer.
I think it's much more interesting to put my cycles towards something where the answer isn't known! The various folding@home, aids@home, etc. efforts are tantalizing, though it's not clear that they will ever have actual results. Personally, I'm using GIMPS (primenet), which searches for very large prime numbers. (If you want to float your encryption boat, you could recall that asymmetric encryption often uses large prime numbers, though these primes would be totally useless for that.) This is the distributed computing program I know of that has had the most tangible results: three of the world's largest known primes were found by it. (It's also one of the oldest... I joined about 7 years ago.)
GIMPS is here: http://entropia.com/ips/
considering aliens do not exist.
I have been afraid of this for quite some time. And as I said in my /. interview of July 2000 I think the answer has always been to serve some ads. Ads like those here on /. would be fine by me and would keep us from losing this valuable project.
The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.
Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.
Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.
We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.
That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.
Support SETI@home
Last week I said it here and I'll say it again. This is seti@home's plan for BOINC. Modules the that download automatically without user intervention. BOINC is bad. It is going to be a huge security hole.
I like the seti@home project and I hope BOINC never happens. It will sap the project of its spirit and it most likely will drive many volunteers away.
Virtua|Mod Version 0.0.1-2
--
Troll, or dimwit?
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Neither. Sarcasm.
Virtua|Mod Version 0.0.1-2
Given that it is a University project, any eventual commercial product will send much of its profits to Oxford or the UK government. Which doesn't all that bad.
I will be willing to trade food for the knowledge -- let's ship them our Congressmen.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
http://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html
:)
Install the google-bar and you to can use spare CPU cycles!
The amount of funding for advanced weapons during the last century should give us pause to consider the truly paultry amount of funding for basic scince like seti research. It's pathetic that basic science like seti@home has to starve and yet the latest proposal for a science/technology that goes boom etc, gets all the money. It's no wonder that loony dictators like saddam like to emulate the bigger superpowers and develop wepons, it's monkey-see, monkey-do....
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
We're in the process of attempting a new solution to this problem. We're open sourcing the distributed computing framework (essentially the operating system) and allowing the computing application to be closed source. This method opens the code signing/verification and data encryption code to be viewed by anyone who is interested, but doesn't necessarily allow untrusted application code to return a result. (Look here for more info).
Support SETI@home
Ha, ha, ha.. ha.... ha.
Oooh boy, you crack me up.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Oh, and another thing. You know how Microsoft puts ads all over Slashdot? Well, every time I see one, I click on it to get Slashdot some money (and to cause Microsoft to have to spend money) but I never look at the content^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgarbage they are advertising. In other words, I click, and after their trash finishes loading, I click the back button. Thanks, Microsoft. Where do you want to bang your head against the wall today? (I'm saying this because there was one such ad on this page when I opened it.)
Don't run any distributed programs. You get to save in two ways:
1) Your processor(s) won't be running at max all the time and will draw less power.
2) You won't have to spend as much for cooling in the summer since your processor(s) won't be generating as much heat.
Even on our own planet, we have a hard time mapping our concept of 'intelligence' onto other animals.
Our brains have a very 'human' view of the world, and it's this view that we call 'intelligence'.
Our minds are only general in the sense that they can solve the range of problems we face.
An 'intelligent' alien species would have to have gone through a similar evolutionary path as us,
to develop something we would recognise as 'intelligence'.
It's not pessimistic to estimate this probability as extremely low.
We have one planet, and one chance, and there is no universe teeming with little green men who will help us fix out future.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Umm - 'cept were we to find aliens - and beleive me I do beleive we may one day do so, then their physiology would be nothing like ours. They may have the cure to "Alien Cancer" and "Alien Aids" - but its about as much use to us as a cure for spider impotency. Though if they want something in return- I would suggest vapourizing the white house for its ores... Occupants and all...
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
There is a reasonable limit to practicality.
By your argument, the time, energy, and wealth spent creating art, music, literature, and other cultural achievements without a tangible effect could have been better spent baking bread or building roads.
"Quantify" for me the value of the works of Shakespeare.
Good lord, we are talking about a question on the order of profundity as to the existince of God himself.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Charge for the client :)
Actually, setting up a paypal account for donations could generate a signifigant revenue stream. $1US ain't much, but 2-3 million users chipping in a buck could lead to a large amount of play-money.
If seti's (or could ne) set up as a a non-profit, it's even tax deductible.
How about these guys?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Cancer, viruses, natural disasters, etc. are natures way of population control. Remove that and we suffer an even greater toil.
The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the one.
There are many useful projects out there, and they aren't hard to find. From Medical research to complex mathematical problems. Its up to you to decide what you want to do. For myself, I stayed away from SETI, basically because it was worthless. They really weren't doing anything. I also stay away from the for profit organizations, or project's that claim to be not-for-profit but retain the rights to the results, to sell at a latter date as they see fit. That tends to eliminate most of the medical research programs. I like distributed.net myself, their client is easily the best and least invasive I've found. I like the way their individual and team stats are managed (I just wish they had a better record of keeping stats up and available). They choose the encryption projects with a cash reward, and a large portion of that reward going to a charity that is 'voted' on by the participants, they keep a portion to help fund Distributed.net. They will have a new encryption project, RC5-72 shortly, and are currently working on OGR. The framework of Distributed.net allows for them to work on many different projects at once. What they can do is almost limitless. Distributed.net is the organization that has proven the value and practicality of distributed computing. Until I find something better, more useful, with a quality non-invasive client, I'm sticking with D.net. But, here are some other projects: Protein folding (predicting protein interactions): http://folding.stanford.edu/ Genome prediction (learning about the genetic map): http://gah.stanford.edu/ Cure for cancer (maps molecules against cancer): http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html Cure for anthrax (maps molecules against anthrax): http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/anthrax/ Fight influenza (a very prolific virus): http://www.popularpower.com/applications/influenza .html
Calculate pi (3.1415927...): http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/pihex.html
GIMPS (finding Merseinne prime numbers): http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
Proth Project (find Proth prime numbers): http://vamri.xray.ufl.edu/proths/index.html
Fermat factors (another "large numbers" project): http://www.fermatsearch.org/
Verify the Reimann hypothesis (an "extremely important" problem in modern math, trust me): http://www.zetagrid.net/
other miscellaneous "math" projects: http://www.mersenne.org/projects.htm
United Devices for profit Cancer research:
http://www.ud.com
.... but the client didn't to be refined enough at the time. If only these auxiliary projects had the amount of time and effort spent on perfecting the clients as SETI or United Devices...........
.... seems to be just the opposite of what you described about the cancer project -- it uses an absolutely amazing client, but a project with a rather frivolous goal. Too bad they can't get any more help on refining the client, and getting it to run *nix..........
Not for profit companies that have nothing to sell to the aerospace or drug industries.
I use SET@Home as my home PC screensaver, just so my computer is always productive. I would assume that SETI does have to pay for extra hardware to store all the data they are collecting from us, and programs probably need to be written/maintained to analyze that data, no including the people are are analyzing manually. Cheap means to an expensive end, if you get my drift.