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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.
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.