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SETI@home Turns Five Today
mfh writes "Five years ago today, SETI@home launched a comprehensive program to search for Extra Terrestrial life in the universe, using millions of home computers to help compile useful data that could some day lead to the discovery of advanced extra terrestrial life. Since inception, SETI@home has found 2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet. SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."
"we ain't found shit!"
I for one welcome our new Gaussian overlords!
Those bastards I'm competing against have accumulated thousands of years of credits.
I ran SETI@home for months but I got bored when I didn't find any aliens. What's the point of the game?
... here
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
In related news, ET turns 22 today
Must-not-watch TV!
I bet the aliens have better computers. When we find them, they'll be able to simulate all that protein folding in SECONDS.
Maybe we need to redirect SETI. We should spend all computing cycles finding intelegent life in Washington.
Evolution or ID?
Problem was that something went slightly wrong with the Solaris server resulting in a crash of the server. This was probably unrelated to my setiathome processes (?), but one of the memory dump files had my user ID on them. Nearly lost my privileges - luckily the university IT folks were kind enough to let me off with just a warning.
what's really weird, is when you decode what they're saying it works out to "i-d-10-t", which is the same as an error code i got from the tech support desk..
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
readining this reminds me of my best joke on a work mate ever.
He was always forever installing bloody seti on every machine server in the building..
So i played a joke, installed a app on his machine which at random points (i controlled) ping up and say it had found a singnal etc etc etc.. i used the seti gfx etc etc.
He got really excited, so of course we went one stage further.. The seti app told him that the signals were getting sent off for analysis, and someone would contact him shortly.
We then (other had now joined in) continued to make him jump out of his seat and explain "its happened again." while the rest of tried to stop laughing.
So an spoofed email address was setup and we emailed him from seti.. told him they were getting looked at etc..
Over the period of a couple of weeks we got the noise off the film contact, and mixed it with white noies.. luckly he had not seen contact. it started off really quite quiet in the background, and each email it got better and more and more clearer.
It was genuis.. we couldn't stop laughing.. he was telling his friend family etc etc etc that hed discovered possible alien life contact..
Of course.. we then relised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..
he was not a happy bunny..
Um, the aliens have those cures. that's why we're looking for them
DUH!
> Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"?
All they got so far was this:
"Dear sentient:
Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Altair IV Chambers Of Commerce And Industry, I have the privilege to request for your assistance to transfer the sum of 47,500,000.00 (forty seven million, five hundred thousand Rigellian quatloos) into your accounts [...]"