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New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects
An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc"
will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user).
This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."
What kind of authentication process will be in place? Basically, what will stop someone from using this for illegal/dishonest purposes under the guise of academic research? Will this be exploitable for virus/spam propogation?
GL
Not cooler, but better. More important ones, like folding, for instance. A very (VERY) small chance of finding intelligent life out there isn't quite worth it, I don't think.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Unless you give it away for free.
Is the cost of power that you use while you are running these programs tax-deductible?
Doing something out of the goodness of your heart is awfully sweet. Getting the government to lower your taxes because of it is sweeter.
they're going to do what distributed.net has already done, provide a client that can work on multiple projects, chosen by the user. Oh well, in this game I suppose it's really the size of your user base that matters.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Medical research receives millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars a year. Private charities donate, universities donate research in the form of science and laboratory labor, the government funds research and offers grants, and private individuals who've had a personal interaction with a particular disease strike up their drum bands to thump for whatever cause is now very near and dear to their heart due to the affliction of a loved one.
SETI has to fight and claw for resources. Space in general is very not in vogue in the US; other countries are leapfrogging ahead of us. The US' best chance for space these days is private ventures such as the XPrize teams. And of Space ventures, SETI is the recipient of endless eye rolling and 'funny' comments that liken it to a waste of time. None of the eye rolling bothered me all that much as long as SETI@Home was in operation, because I knew it was making a very real amount of progress in the search.
This change in SETI@Home upsets me very much. I was interested in donating to SETI@Home, that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Not the other searches, THIS search. The other searches have quite a bit of help and resources; SETI has very little. It very much confuses me why the SETI@Home team, which has done amazing and ground breaking work in not only the SETI field, but also in distributed computing, would choose to splinter and fritter away their computational resources like this. Opening the SETI network up to other projects does nothing but subtract resources from an already strapped scientific endeavor.
To put it bluntly, let the other projects go back to their wells to get resources; there is no well for SETI. And now what well we have is being pissed away.
This is not a good change. This is bad for SETI@Home, and is a serious setback for the project. Every computer that shifts from a SETI work unit to something else that's part of a well funded area of research is a waste.
Well you better shut your computer down and quit posting on slashdot. Every little bit counts right? Wouldn't want contribute to global warming in any way. Might as well get rid of the computer and tv (if you have one). Back to oil lamps and candles. Of course, production of those is done in factories often which requires power to run so we better not bother with that. You might as well roll your own candles if you need any light while it's dark out to do something like read a book. Make sure you don't buy any books coming off a printing press though. Those things require power to run nowadays. Can you believe it? It's insane! Maybe the best idea is to stand in the middle of a square foot chunk of land and just wait until the whole world magically becomes better. Anyways, back to my mud hut for the night.
...perhaps because worms can't talk.
Atleast not on our level.
Trying to explain 10th grade algebra to a worm might be somewhat pointless. But.... we CAN indeed communicate with them at the level in which **they communicate amongst themselves.**
We can trick them into thinking it is time to reproduce (thru pheramones), lead them to food by leaving a chemical trail, ect. This is the level of communication that they are capable of. We understand it, we can replicate it (maybe not perfectly because we lack precise feedback). They respond to it.
To us, we are spraying a chemical on them to get them to screw (do worms screw?). To them, we are playing the equvalent if Luther Vandross over the stereo and pouring a glass of chianti.
My analogies are somewhat suspect, but you see my point I think.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.