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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
maybe thye culd use disributed computingto fix all teh speling errors on salshfot!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It would be interesting to use this to try and find more digits in pi. Maybe we will finally find a repeat. Barring that we will have very accurate circles :) There are a great deal more mathmatical problems that would benefit greatly from this!
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
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.
Can I use it to find intelligent life in my apartment complex? The neighbors are keeping me up all night with their parties...
Scientific progress goes "BOINC"?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Will this new client allow for platform specific optimizations? For instance, the RC client took advantage of Altivec which allowed for Macs to absolutely dominate the small computer benchmarks in those ranking whereas they did not perform nearly as well in the SETI rankings. And just so the Wintel weenies don't feel left out and flame me, other platform specific optimizations could also be taken advantage of for Pentium specific calls or even SGI specific calls.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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The fake Gzip Christ isn't not user number ~0xA6CA7
Do you know why? United Devices filed a law suit over some bullshit IP non-sense. BOINC did not have the $ to fight so they had to give in. One of the stipulations was that it could not be used for commercial purposes for the next 18 months. I tried to find the page on BOINC's web site that had the lawsuit info but can't. Rest assured that they will make it OpenSource (OSI approved) as soon as possible.
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?
However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.
There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here) or myself (here). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!
Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute, Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?
In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:
MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.
DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.
Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)
So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding or in the future to Nano@Home. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.
Robert