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SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
is BOINC really the best acronym they could come up with?
I still can't see any information on their website as to when they will upgrade to BOINC.. Which is a shame.. I'm a top 5000 user and I want to switch ASAP :)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Java? Really? I love Java and Sun, but Java isn't the fastest thing in the world. For something that uses advanced algorithms that are usually optimized in Assembly, is Java really a good choice?
Fortress of Insanity
Expanding the scope of SETI@Home, eh? So like SETI@Work, SETI@Car, SETI@Vacation, SETI@LunchBreak and such? Sounds good!
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
I have been pwned because my
..we're geeks, this is the only BOINC we're going to get.
Why don't we combine this new idea of distributed computing with a P2P network? It should be technically feasable, and then the eff people could run an ad campain such as, "The RIAA is against Kazaa. Kazaa cures cancer. Therefore, RIAA is for cancer!" similar to the campain comercial in Head of State.
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Squirrel
Yes. Yes I agree. You for one should put some clock cycles towards fixing your goddamned grammar.
Hint #1: Don't spray apostrophes everywhere. Pretend there's a worldwide shortage and use them sparingly.
"Boinc".
(extremely obvious)
My father's cancer is gone thanks to a treatment that was just an EXPERIMENT several years ago.
People are only fooling themselves if they think that by running these that they'll see prompt effects.
Research needs experiments to validate/invalidate it. Successful research experiments can lead to experimental treatments, which can become standard treatments.
So coming from someone who has family members who were cured by things that were at one point just "an experiment", I say learn what you're talking about, and until then shut up.
Bill, shamelessly plugging.
Indeed. He should probably look up the difference between their and they're too, seeing as he used neither correctly.
So they are now looking for help in order to find those farting solar E.T.s ???
Trolling using another account since 2005.
SETI ... Ug says SETI good ... Ug says Sun baaad
Sun
Oh no, Ug says make pain stop!
In the past SETI@home had many network problems, with Berkeley throttling down the available bandwidth for SETI... Will BOINC adress this issue? There doesn't seem to be any information about this on the BOINC pages, and additional clients will probably increase the demand for bandwith further. I guess it's feasible to place the BOINC servers outside the Berkeley network infrastructure.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
or looked at JXTA recently,
it just got a *lot* better.
Check out the main website
and this review of JXTA 2 by DeveloperWorks
Cheers, Joel
Old S@H protocol was full of security flaws. Due to lack of verification of returned data it was possible to modify the workunits. And people did it, just to make them compute fast. In the fisrt 100 places of current Top 1000 list there is at least 10 cheaters. I've heard some time ago that approx 30% of workunits results returned to Berkeley was fake.
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.
How about various DRM and TCPA cracking projects? I'll donate cycles to anyone who wants to publically humiliate Bill Gates, Senitor Fritz (he still around?) or any of the other crack heads that fancy controlling what i do with my own computer in my own home.
Maybe they can give me a spell check too?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Am I the only one who read the title and thought that SETI was somehow using the Sun to pull in weaker transmissions, or maybe using it to threaten some rather anti-social aliens? :P
Considering that SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the context was rather amusing...
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
I know i am going to get modded flamebait here, but i dont care.
What a typical fundamentalist christian statement you have there. "The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God."
Translation: Dont be searching for ET you sinners, cause if you do find proof of intelligent life out there, it shoots giant fucking holes in our dogma. Thats why the catholic church, ever an institution thats quick to condemn anything that crosses their ideology, burnt
Giordano Bruno at the stake for even suggesting the possibility of intelligent life that was not on earth.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
That I've had with friends - why the hell are you using your computer to look for little green men (who, even if they contact us, are near enough to come to us, and do so, will probably make us into gourmet ready-meals for their home planet, or smething) when they could be running something like the UD Cancer Project
This gives SETI more legitimacy IMO... as a fun project attatched to one with real value. Of course, I suppose Sun probably couldn't stomach donating to a commercial venture like UD, so I won't criticize them for choosing SETI.
How about a "community" distributed computing project? A true P2P thing where anyone can upload a job and have it processed by folks, and in return provide computing power to others. No centralized server and formalized infrastructure, just a bunch of geeks crunching data for each other.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
How is this a troll? Unfortunately capitalism means people can spend money how they like, though. However, what ya also have to notice is that the money does not stop in the hands of SETI - it is used to purchase equipment, materials, bandwidth, etc, and stimulates the economy. Also, sun can use this as a massive tax write-off, since they can overvalue their own equipment to sale price :) Since I doubt starving children would have much use for things that Sun makes... (mmm... the tastiest bit is the lead solder...)
I don't understand your post at all. There is no "whole premise" as you describe it. Science has found no reason why sentient life on Earth should be unique. Rare, maybe (maybe not), but not unique. So, the hugely interesting and important question arises of just how rare it is. SETI is one of the best sets of investigations we can undertake now to try to answer that question. Astrobiology is the other area where we hope to make progress, and which could help us constrain some of the terms in the Drake Equation.
Non-sequitur of the week, maybe month. communications != travel. Also, we've been using RF communications for about 100 years, so there's every reason to believe that only listeners in a small volume of space could know about us by those means. Also, if "they" were monitoring us from a safe distance, how would we know?
Helium balloons want to be free.
Same acronymn as SETI, except replace ET with slashdot.
...
Still looking
the sun is no help to the search for extraterrestials
;-)
for one, anything in it's part of the sky is blocked or drowned out by the suns electromagenetic emissions
additionally...
oh wait, nevermind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's a hard enough job to find intelligent life on THIS planet. How much harder is it going to be to find it elsewhere in the universe??? :)
I'm hoping with the upgrades they will start looking for sexy green women.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
He got more right than wrong. Surely he should get some credit for that..?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
What else is SUN gonna do with all of them AMD servers? Sell Em???
Your attempt at persecution sympathy is noted, but ultimately fails. I occasionally browse at -1, and I've seen tons of anti-religious posts modded down, sometimes justly, sometimes not. The post you are replying to was no more full of hate than any other energetic critique of a dogma.
Hate: "All Christians should die."
Not: "Christians perform symbolic ritualistic cannibalism. That's freaking weird, man."
I know Christians in America love to tell each other that they are a persecuted minority, but it doesn't hold water under scurtiny.
There's an idea that since your computer isn't doing anything anyway, the seti screen saver is zero cost. Not so. My CPU runs 5 degrees Centigrade hotter when running seti@home than if a basic screensaver is running. Thus there is even more strain on the hardware. Currently, about 1100 years of CPU time per day are devoted to seti@home. Not sure what the increased power usage is, but for each watt that's roughly 10 megawatt-hours per day of energy going up in smoke (or CO2). Since the idea of finding an alien signal by these means is clearly a non-starter after so many years, it's about time more justifiable projects were found.
Awsome troll. I read your other work... you're on a roll.
Here is a bit of nitpicking.
The SETI Project is much, much larger in scope than just the SETI@home component. There is an incredible amount of research, all hard-science, going on under the umbrella of SETI that is not SETI@home related. SETI@home is certainly one of the most promient, publicy accessible parts, so the generaliztion is understandable, but not for this "academic" crowd.
Swing on by their site and educate yourself: www.seti.org
I know Christians in America love to tell each other that they are a persecuted minority, but it doesn't hold water under scurtiny.
Now you're generalizing.
As a Christian, I expect to be persecuted. I don't claim that I am. So you see, I just disproved your statement.
Waste of money? An entire project that, in order to survive, has to litterally get people to come and give them free access to their spare clock cycles? I suppose you're either dumb, ill-informed, or just want to piss people off, but you should read up on an issue before developing an opinion. Any issue. For example, SpaceGuard, which looks for earth-crossing asteroids, has the funding and staff roughly equivalent to a small urban McDonalds franchise. SpaceGuard has SETI pwned six ways from sunday for all that, too. SETI is more like a small rural McDonalds franchise that only opens on Friday and Sunday because that's when all the city folk are driving up to their cabins at the lake, but the other five days, nobody ever uses that dirt road. The only way SETI gets anything done is by leeching clock cylcles off of other people. What the fuck can Sun do to stop hunger, poverty, etc? And with Microsoft, Apple, and everybody else giving computers to schools it's really the school's fault if they don't have computers. You can get a million dollar lab of them for free if you whine to the right people.
And don't forget Sun is one of those companies that is donating products (mainly StarOffice and JDS) to thousands of schools and colleges all over the world
If, for example, I dedicate some fraction of my spare cycles to drug research, am I essentially giving this information to a big pharmaceutical company, which will then patent it? Or will the data be "open-sourced" somehow?
I won't be donating any of my spare CPU time until I can get an answer...
Sean