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Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"
I use CPU cycles to reverse engineer an AVI just by it's size and checksum.
:-)
So I don't need to leech movies about global warming
of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)
searching for ET is not profitable so it must be bad
Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!
for using my computer to do what I want to do with it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Fighting fire with fire?
"Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project"
Does this attempt to determine how much global warming is being caused by donating CPU cycles.
You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap.
People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time.
Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project.
Funny....I think that all the Slashdot gaming rigs out there are contributing quite a bit to global warming, but you don't hear us bragging about it... ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
bittorrent seems to be distributing everything quite well
As for SETI@home, maybe the aliens can't be detected using radio telescopes?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I don't like the way that some animal charities get more money than children's charities. Obviously the people making donations disagree. The point is the donor decides, if someone is giving something away then they decide.
> 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project.
Everyone involved in SETI is doing just that - turning power into wasted computer cycles and heating the environment through directly heating the room the computer is in, and requiring energy be used to power the PC.
http://www.grid.org/
No unix/linux clients, but then I don't really want my linux boxes running at 100% anyway.
Deleted
"Today, Seti@Home is to distributed computing what AARP is to social-security reform."
Well we know what his position is on social-security.
Lets face it, they aren't exactly the first...
Obviously there is the statement that the guy in question doesn't want to tell people what to do with their own CPUs, but that is exactly what he, and the article, are doing.
If the people want to search for ET, let them.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Why would we want to contact another civilization until we are unified as a race and have advanced military and consumer technology? The ultimate in naivete is the projection done by utopian academics who equate advancement with peaceful civilization. If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become and the more intrusion we tolerate from the authorities. For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its own right!
Let's face one little truth. Going on OUR evolutionary path, we MUST proceed with caution into space. We should avoid seeking out other races until we can approach them with confidence.
There are better things to do with you're spare CPU cylces.
None of you are going to "find" alien signals, it's a waste. If you're using it for a cool screen saver, then that's fine.
Granted, if it's a choice between running SETI@home or nothing, then it doesn't matter what you do becuase those cylcle would be wasted anyways. However, if you're trying to really make a difference with your computing power, try dedicating it to programs that do research for things that actually have a plausable goal.
ps - shocking that a load os slashdot readers would get all pissy when someone says SETI@home is a lost cause, even though I think most people (even geeks) know that it is.
BS. Humans have shown that unless faced with a challenge, they tend to become lazy and stupid. Only a truly daunting challenge brings out the best in human nature, so it makes sense that only the challenge of facing an advanced alien race could possibly get us all together with the same agenda.
Of course there will still be the fringe whackos who actively work against the rest of the human race (we welcome our alien overlords!) but the majority always rises to the challenge and a challenge presented to everyone without bias or exclusion will get everyone's attention and focus of effort.
You make carbon based energy expensive. It's that simple.
While that isn't happening you know your government aren't taking global warming seriously and if they aren't, you should probably ask yourself why you should take it seriously.
Deleted
If the setiologists themselves are claiming that hey - this pretty much aint going to work, then yes it would seem to be an utter waste of time.
/. are really getting to a profoundly low level.
They are NOT saying that searching for ET is useless, they are saying that the current method for doing so is not going to work due to the overwhelming background noise present in the universe that will stop valid signals getting through.
Hence - instead of crunching uselessly on numbers, it might be a nice idea to actually contribute those cycles to something that matters.
The comprehension skills on
Maybe people don't help drug research or any other causes because they often times have the money to conduct the research. Helping find a drug, for example, to cure a disease doesn't reap any recognition for an indivdual person, but rather the drug company, for example. Ah! But find an alien in outer space and be able to communicate with it - the individual making the discovery with SETI will be recognized at a personal level. Personal gain always wins over collaborative gain. The human race is greedy by nature.
"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
This is merely an opinion piece. It's easy to take the pragmatic road and dontate personal computing cycles to cancer research or something as equally earth based - citing return of results arguments.
I postulate that the returns for finding out if there is intelligent life in outer space has greater implications for the world's population. Not immediate concerns mind you (unless something extraordinary happens), but the practical usage will eventually seep out of the acedemic and scientific circles and benefit the population in ways that we cannot possibly imagine.
The opinion the journalist writes is the simple (IMO shallow) doubts of doing science for it's own sake.
Besides, this whole opinion is practically moot. There are MORE than enough extra computing cycles out there. People can choose to which project they wish to donate too. Slow news day perhaps.
-FlynnMP3
It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can see the guys point where protein folding does us more good. But also, what the hell does he care, its someones computer, let them do whatever they want with it. I am still waiting for the Search for Intelligent Life on Earth distrubuted computing!
But I am wondering, the ones that are doing cancer, protein folding, all that stuff, what ones actually are for the good of us all? I do not want to be doing one that is going to be going to some mega-corp where it gets patented tomorrow and sold to us for 349843904893 dollars in a week.
SETI might seem like a waste to everyone, and maybe it is... until joe 6-pack running it in his basement finds an intelligent, alien signal. Then all bets are off!
stuff |
He should start kissing my ass if he wants to presume to tell me what I "should be" donating my spare computing cycles to.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on advertising, Merck, Eli Lily and Pfizer should be buying computing clusters to do their own fucking research. They're the one's who'll get rich(er) off of it.
This asshat really thinks he is taking the moral high ground? Fuck him. It's my computer and it's my decision what I'll do with my spare CPU cycles.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Seti found some interesting signals. Not proof of intelligent life but enough to start pointing in those general directions.
Anyone else recall this or have more details?
Even worse; the guy took the time to write an article about how he thinks other people are wasting CPU time. He could have just NOT written that article and let his computer spend all that wasted article-writing-CPU-time on actually useful projects.
I would complain more, but I've used too much CPU time on my computer already; people are dying because of this post.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Personally, I always felt SETI was not very philanthropic - more like an amusing experiment in grid computing.
I have been running grid.org for many years. They focus on medical research. They provide great features for managing all your computers that run the grid projects. You can even choose which research to participate in. And, to satiate a geek's lust for power, they have rankings for your aggregate compute time.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Sure it is being done poorly -- how many times has the /. effect actually had a positive impact?
Yes, keep searching for extra terrestrial that use radio frequencies..
here's a hint: not a single UFO group uses this tecnique any more. You don't need to belive me, ask many people who do commute with them (you'll be quite surprised to find how many people who are not considred by society as "crazy" do communicate with them) how do they communicate.
The do laugh at SETI project, quite a lot.
You want to figure out how do they communicate? here's a hint: try to investigate Telepathy.
I'm sure there are lots of people who would support using thier idle PCs for alzheimers research. They just forgot.
However they do it, whatever it takes. Drug companies weren't formed for altruistic reasons.
this sig deleted by another sig
Thinking@home would never work, because it would involve thinking ;)
The AI recommends a complete shutdown and immediate termination
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If one group has the technology to reach the other, the other stands no chance in the first place.
Join Tor today!
I used to run the SETI@Home screensaver. Now I run Folding@Home. But the point is that it's my PC, I'm paying for the cycles - so it's my decision how those cycles are used. If a PC owner wants to search to extra-terrestrials, factor primes, fold proteins, or whatever - it's their decision.
[Insert pithy quote here]
ps - shocking that a load os slashdot readers would get all pissy when someone says SETI@home is a lost cause, even though I think most people (even geeks) know that it is.
I've bought lottery tickets in the past knowing full well the chances of my numbers coming up are pretty close to zero.
I don't see it as a waste of money, while there is a chance that I can win I can dream what it would be like to win, what I would do with the money, how my life would change. Similarly with SETI, sure we probably wont find anything, but it costs very little to do and the value is in the fact that while there is that chance it might find something you can always dream, what it would be, how it would change the whole world etc.
And like the lottery you have to be in it to win it.
Someone needs to set up a Yeti@HOME
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Perhaps because we have some spare time on our radiotelescopes. I for one have no interest in uniting with the rest of humanity under anything less than the United States Constitution.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its own right!
I think you are exaggerating a bit. Isn't it prudent to put security cameras on a few street corners and in the subway considering they have been attacked already by Islamic terrorists?
As an American the only inconvenience I have found post 9/11 is having to put my shoes through an X-ray machine before I get on an airplane.
Even if we contacted a distant civilization, a dialog would take centuries. A physical meeting would take thousands of years. This is more than enough time for your Utopian dreams to be realized.
an ill wind that blows no good
I hope congress doesn't read Slashdot or the next thing you know they will be proposing a new amendment to the constitution to fix this. It would fit in perfectly after the amendments to limit gay marriage and flag burning.
Hobby Robotics
That summary is more than a page and a half long on my screen (800x600), because the author doesn't know a thing about Slashdot and submitted a summary that looks more like a WSJ article.
Why can't the Story Accepters do a little editing on the side? It would have looked perfectly okay if you'd cut it off at "likely to yield results":
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes
It seems perfectly interesting and complete just like that. Why did we need the other two thirds?
Hint: That's what the link is for. You provide a good summary of the issue being talked about, and if we find it interesting, we click the link (or we head straight for the comments section and argue about it). You don't provide an entire page of stuff on the issue, because that's just not the format that we come to Slashdot for in terms of regular news stories. That only works for book reviews, editorials, and odd news stories that need the extra detail.
This, on the other hand, is an opinion piece on distributed computing. It's a very typical Slashdot article, and should have had a very typical Slashdot summary.
Okay, I'm not finding a cure for Alzheimer's, but at least I'm exploring the world of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with http://www.darwinathome.org.
I currently work for a pharmaceutical company, and in a visit to a research lab I learned just how much computing power they throw at these problems. They do have supercomputers, intranet clusters, etc. to try to solve these problems. They are so incredibly complex, however, that those are not enough.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Inflation can only go through the roof if the government print lots of extra money. Money's a commodity like anything else, supply and demand.
Do you think inflation is something magic which only applies to money? Did you think money just magically decreases in value? It decreases in value because either nobody wants it (they don't believe it's worth anything) or because there's lots more of it around. e.g. The government prints a load of money to... say... finance a war, instead of raising taxes.
Funnily enough, the dollar has been falling in value rapidly against gold, it's nearly $600 per ounce now. In 2000 it was about $270 per ounce. Hmmm I wonder what is magically causing the dollar to decrease in value over the last few years.
If you live in the US, you have a boatload of inflation coming your way in the next few years.
Deleted
I think the point is missed. It does not matter how long it takes to find the little green men. The arguments it is a big waste of time and the odds are against you completely miss the point. The point is your doing it. If it takes a thousand years so be it.
(oblig.) Me fail English, that's unpossible.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
The only thing they ever claimed was "finding the WOW" - one signal in 1977 which could have been explained by a radio signal bouncing off a terrestrial satellite or some space junk.
As far as I know, there have been no other signals detected. SETI seems pretty pointless to me. Their whole basis for study is the "drake equation" which was an estimate, based on 1950's understanding of cosmology and evolutionary biology which estimated the likelihood of finding sentient life. What we know of cosmology has dramatically changed - even in the last few years as discoveries have invalidated long-held theses about planet formation.
It seems to me that the SETI project is a complete waste of time. You can use your computer for whatever you want. I prefer to make investments in scientific research rather than fanciful speculation. (Searching for Mersenne primes is demonstrable science, and will yield technical benefits as well increases in ordered knowledge.)
YMMV
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Number 1 - The Seti Experiment was not a waste. We now know that there are no signals of the kind we were hoping for in the areas we looked at. This is a finding. It is not a failure. Do not underestimate the importance of negative results in science.
Number 2 - Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation. It was directly responsible for the development of BOINC, which is a very valuable tool for all the scientific community.
Did they not know that SETI runs on the BOIC platform, which is open-source? So if you want to do some modelling, just write a BOINC plugin, and maybe people will install & run it.
Chip H.
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
Distributed computing is very energy inefficient. I'm sure the irony is lost on him.
Sure, we look for patterns. But a radically different intelligence might communicate in a way that seems random to us. Hell, they might have discovered or evolved whole mathematical systems that would seem chaotic or meaningless to even our brightest minds.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Cool down some. Nobody is using force against you. There is simply an aruguement (partly rational and partly emotional) about what you can do with a resource that you have and that you can share at almost no cost to yourself. There is a competition between scientists for your free clock cycles. People have opinions about which ones are valuable, and they want to share their viewpoint and attempt to sway your opinion. That all that is happening here. If this causes to to curse him, I think you need a bit less coffee.
Think global, act loco
People can go on about how useless SETI@Home is due to the physical and mathematical laws involved, but I know what's really running the world, the laws of irony and drama.
You know, those same laws that dictate that in a house fire a fireman must, on the urging of a crying child, run back into a collapsing building one last time to rescue a kitten.. or that an exploding car must send one flaming wheel bouncing amusingly away.. or that a torrential rainstorm will immediately break out upon someone exclaiming "Well, at least it's not raining!"
This same unalienable truth will ensure that as soon as most people are sick of running SETI, almost everyone has moved on to more "worthwhile" prospects, and the whole thing has become a laughing stock, then one of those last few remaining nerds with nothing better to do than keep the faith ends up getting a friendly visit from Spock, E.T., Doctor Who, and Princess Leia, and becomes the one who will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for all humanity.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
We have already made contact with ETs back in the 50s.
We traded technology for biology. (stupid trade if you ask me)
SETI is nothing more than a distraction to the real truth.
Anyhow,
Watch this if you are skeptical
http://tinyurl.com/eslxh
As you can see by their actions, rather than their words... Notably at Stanford University, Washington University, Munich University, Scripps Research Institute, Oxford University etc.
p
http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.ph
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm
So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?
Deleted
The reasoning behind this is straightforward. If you accept the idea of a technological singularity, and believe that our technology has brought us to the point where we are on the threshold of such an event, and that this is the natural evolution of a technological civilization, then in the blink of an eye, in astronomical terms, our footprint will be everywhere in this galaxy. (That's assuming of course that we can keep from destroying ourselves for a few more decades.) The same would be true for any other technological civilization.
It's the same idea that Enrico Fermi had in mind when he asked: if there are other intelligences in the universe then "where are they?" You wouldn't have to look for them. They'd already be here. Conclusion: don't bother listening. We've met the spacemen, and they is us.
Most of my machines run FreeBSD, the rest OS X. The last time I checked, that meant that the only BOINC projects that I could run on all of them are SETI@Home and Einstein@Home. If the other projects want my cycles, they need to support my platforms.
The crushing absurdity of leaving a computer running in order to study global warming is beautiful...............
If you're doing software development, how about using those spare cycles for random testing? I find lots of bugs this way.
No, seriously.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Turn your GD computer OFF!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
While SETI@homes's managed to retain nearly a million members, the claim that it steals participants from other projects is absurd. Most of those other projects would face far greater obstacles to acceptance by having to woo new participants not already familiar with DC. Probably the originators of those other projects would not have even heard of DC themselves, or at least would have started several years later without a clear success story to look up to.
I looked into running oen of the protein folding clients a few years ago, thinking it a good idea to help with cancer or aids or whatver it was instead of the dnetc thing. But they were looking for lots of volunteer computer time to create something for them to patent. Sorry dude, but if they ain't gonna share the results, then they can pay for the computer time.
Is "Human Proteome Folding" the same as Folding@Home, the one run by Stanford? I like the philosophy of the Stanford project (results will be free, all papers published to journals will also be published on the 'net, etc.) so I'm interested to know whether WGC's Folding project is the same one, or a competing one.
Also -- although I guess it's less important now than it would have been a few years ago, WCG is x86 only. You can't run it on your G5 or your Itanium (or SparcStation, or Alpha) like you can with some of the Boinc-based projects.
I don't know who's been installing separate applications for each project -- Boinc has been around for a while, and it runs as a daemon that controls small "worker" programs that are specific to each project (and downloaded automatically when you sign up for a new project, along with the initial datasets).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.
... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.
Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.
Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.
So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges
However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I always thought that the thing SETI could detect, were radars on other worlds, since they send out a lot of radiation. In addition to that, they have been used for a long time in our civilization, and are still used even when radio is disappearing into the internet.
It would be nice having a picture of a part of an alien planet made from their radar reflections.
Kim0
I would like to donate my spare cycles to the cause of global warming. Mostly because I'm freezing my ass off.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Which project can generate the geekiest screensaver from your precessed data?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
What this all boils down to is choice and since it's my computer, it's MY CHOICE what I do with it. This means I can use the damn thing as a door stop, anchor for a crab pot, fish fryer, or any of the current distributed computing projects. So someone feels that Seti@Home is a waste of effort but I'll tell you this, without the Seti@Home project getting the ball rolling, we'd never have any of the other distributed projects nor would we be pushing the boundries on what constitues a computer cluster.
An example of computer clusters that many don't see is already being developed. It's called a traffic mesh network and instead of a centralized control system (single point of failure) traffic will operate using a local mesh network. This means that each vehicle will contribute to the flow control and if the system design follows the "KISS" principle, it will be very reliable.
On June 1, 2006 on the Coast to Coast radio program, Steven Greer (of the Disclosure Project) stated that a "senior official of SETI" had information about successful receipt of "multiple extraterrestrial signals."
I don't think any of us can adequately imagine how such a discovery would affect life here on Earth (for good or bad). I know that any life detected would be too far away for actual communication, but simply knowing another civilization exists and the possibility of learning from or helping them - wow.
Of course, I'm waiting for a project that hits closer to home, YETI@home. Damn, those things are elusive.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The point is that if SETI actually manages to make contact with an alien intelligence, it's going to be the biggest discovery in the history of mankind. Finding a cure for cancer is going to be a minor footnote by comparison; how many people remember who cured polio, or how, or when?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Wow, the hypocrisy of it all. SETI@home essentially invented donated distributed over the internet, over a dozen other projects are benefiting from it in the form of Bionic and the WSJ is upset because people don't donate cycles with presumed morally superior choices the WJS sees. I have noticed an up-tic recently in attempts to kill SETI research of any kind. The reason is always "it's a waste of time." In other words the opponents of SETI always know better that it is a fruitless search, but they have no scientific basis for making that assertion other than that's the way it feels to them. Granted pro-SETI people similarly have little evidence that ET will be found soon -- but there are no wasted inquiries in science. If you search and fail to find something, you have still learned something, you now have a number and you can put some bound on a phenomenon. No one tells physicists to give up searching because they haven't found the Higgs Boson yet, or at the lower energies they initially predicted.
Most likely a signal won't be found in the next decade or two, but I still donate my free cycles to SETI@home. I believe that while in the short run the odds are not high, there are few other discoveries that could be so transformative as this -- and although they won't say it, this is why the opponents of SETI are so rabid to shut it down. SETI is the ugly step child of science, it will never get the support other branches will. This is why a volunteer effort is so important. Of course if a signal is ever found, well then step back and watch all the money and resources that will get thrown at it, then your cycles won't be needed. Also be prepared to hear all about how many politicians where a friend of SET way back when.
And now for a shameless plug of my new blog project Brink
An on going series of essays about possible world changing advances in our future, SETI among them.
Letter To Iran
And you know it's going to be some family of 4 living in a trailer park somewere in the middle of no-were-USA with no teeth and overalls on.
"Weeelll I just got this heeeree compute-r and started that there SETI and damn-nation I found it!"
wonderfull 1st impression of earth... god I just hope they haven't been watching Springer or we are all doomed.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Pro's: 1 You are contributing to scientific research done mostly by universities, which, by definition, are independant / non profit, and do not have the funding for supercomputer hardware. 2 The scientific software is highly optimized for PC processors, with assembly routines and SSE(1,2,3) optimizations, so even though your PC is using maximum power at 100% CPU, it is on the other hand working as efficiently as possible. 3 The newest processor designs are not just faster, but also aim at consuming much less power, so running the projects on these is even more efficient. Con's: PC processors are too general purpose for some tasks, and floating point performance is somewhat weak in e.g. P4's. Specialized hardware provides increased computational performance and on the other hand decreased power consumption. Older PC's have inefficient processors which consume too much power. Just a few considerations ;)
Most of us running Seti@home are not searching for ET, we're looking for interesting signals that appear to be how we think intelligent signals would look; most of these interesting signals are from the ground, some are from near Earth Orbit, hopefully few will be from deep space. Out of the ones from deep space most will be from known astronomical events, some will be from unknown astronomical phenomena, and maybe someday one will be from an ETI. I look for the unknown astronomical phenomena.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
well i think google should come here and join their paypal rivaling system of payments with some distributed computing software which would earn money for users running computations on their hardware for big bussiness companies paying. i would say that this would earn big bucks to everyone - and google will rule the world! its such a waste of money running computers at 0% cpu speed. i just hope for someone to send me some money for bringing this new idea to the world :)
Oh, you mean just like the challenge of meeting the Europeans helped the African tribes? Oh, wait, they were dragged in chains to be slaves on a plantation. Well, I suppose that sure prevented them from becoming lazy. (Although it did help with becoming stupid. There wasn't much education or a cultural life on a plantation.)
.50 heavy machinegun could mow down that compact formation without breaking a sweat. (A wooden shield and a bronze breastplate would _not_ stop that. In fact, even _steel_ shields and steel breastplates wouldn't, and the ancient greeks had no such things.) Or a couple of guys with grenades could blow that compact formation to smithereens.
Or like meeting the Spanish gave the Aztecs a challenge? Well, they were challenged all right. Their weapons couldn't even penetrate a conquistador's armour, and their battle tactics doomed them from the start.
Basically don't think that meeting an alien civilization will happen on equal terms, like in SF movies. Even assuming that the maximum age of a Sun-like star would put a maximum age cap on a civilization (although a star faring one might be even older), a civilization you'd meet could be _billions_ of years old. Stars kept forming and dying since the dawn of the universe, out of sync with each other, so a civilization you meet now might be from a star that's a few billions years older and just about starting to die. (Which would also give them a damn good incentive to take yours as living space.)
So basically roll a random number between 1 and, say, 3,000,000,000. That's the age of a civilization you might encounter. Compare it to the age of the human civilization. Teh oops. The aliens are _far_ ahead, aren't they. Even the odds of their civilization being "only" a million years old are of the order of 1 in 3000. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet on something at those odds.
But even "only" a million years old is _huge_. The technological difference, even if they were lazy and stupid and only advanced 1/10 as fast, would be well in the realm of "magic" for us.
Think what a difference of less than 200 years means on Earth: think a modern destroyer (not even a battleship) against Lord Nelson's whole fleet at Trafalgar. I mean, heh, with its engines it would have no problem staying just outside the range of their old guns, and could sink them quite easily even with just the 5" guns. It doesn't even need missiles or anything for that. Heck, probably even the _AA_ guns on a modern destroyer could simply cut through the wood.
And if you want to be a complete asshole -- e.g., if you're another species and feel no empathy for those aliens in wooden vessels -- you could use exactly one tactical nuke to wipe out the whole fleet in just one shot. One.
Now move on to a difference 10 times bigger: an authentic Greek phalanx, in bronze armours and with bronze spears, versus a modern mechanized infantry division. No, forget what you've learned in Civ 4, IRL the phalanx would inflict exactly zero casualties before being utterly wiped out. It's not just that their equipment is inferior, it's that even their tactics were utterly unfit as soon as anyone of equal tech level learned how to outflank. (See the complete wipe out of the Romans at Canae.) If you tried standing tall in the open, in a compact formation, against a modern army, and imagined that your wooden shield protects you, you'd be dead before you can say "ouch". A single
And again, if you wanted to be a complete asshole and get rid of some non-humans with the minimum fuss, you could just break out the chemical weapons. Their armours won't even start to be any use against that. Sure, we don't use them agains
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I see many comments leaning way over on the defensive side, and it's certainly true that you're all free to do what you like with your computers.
However... To help you understand how those who feel SETI is a collosal waste of time and energy, let me rephrase the story a bit.
Imagine the report of most distributed computing being devoted to SFAW that is the Search For Angel Whispers.
Can you at least comprehend how others who do not have the same faithed based system of reasoning may feel your efforts could be better used?
And yes, belief in extraterestrials is just that, and running SETI for all time knowing that SOMEDAY you'll hear something is faith.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Isn't it a better alternative to elitist pacificists surrendering their faux-democracies to the rising Islamic Fascist Caliphate.
At different times in our history you could have substituted Africans, Italians, Irish, Poles as the next great threat... We'll be ok.
an ill wind that blows no good
I guess I meant to say I am strip searched before I can get on a plane. And yes I get that special attention too, as a white male traveling alone. But I cooperate because I have nothing to hide and wish to contribute in restoring peace of mind to my fellow travelers that the Islamists took away. I would think your wife would be more apologetic for the transgressions of her brothers in faith.
an ill wind that blows no good
... a long time ago, at the exact moment when I recognized that radio broadcast, even assuming other life forms discover it, is just a quick stepping stone toward more efficient/direct means of distribution, like wires or fiber. Or drums. Or pherimones. Or telepathy.
It's happening right now for ourselves. The entire hi-power broadcast radio phenomenon on this planet will have begun and essentially ended within about a single lifetime, maybe two. We've no data to indicate that radio would remain a prefered means of communication anywere in the universe for any race that understands technology *that* well.
SETI has always barked up the wrong tree. Not because there are no intelligent races out there -- and I really do suspect there are -- but because if they *are* intelligent in a way that we would even recognize then they've moved on to other forms of communication, or settled into a fine state of just dealing with everyday as it comes and not worring about events in their version of Iraq.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because;
1) Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2) Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3) Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4) Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5) Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.
Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible.
Optical SETI paper
One time my manager showed me some statistics for drug discovery. Drugs need to go through various rounds of testing: it might start with assays with just receptors, move up through animal tests to full blown clinical trials. He showed me two interesting facts: firstly, the correlation between success at one stage and success at the next stage was low. This meant that the correlation between the earliest stages and the final in vivo drug activity was tiny. Secondly, the best drugs were often outliers in the sense that you could often discern some kind of pattern allowing you to predict drug activity for a class of molecule, but that the good drugs fell way outside this pattern. Because activity levels predicted from simulation are so poorly correlated with the first stage of drug trials, and we already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI.
It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and ant-human-progress.
(I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
And the CPU waste is freekin' incredible as wacking some NPC or beating some player
down is not even finding ET, much less biology or climate stuff.
What's worse is that people PAY to do it!
I am glad your wife is Christian. She is probably a lot better off as an Egyptian Christian in Canada than she would be in her homeland. My remark is not a racist remark at all. Islamist is an accurate description of the 9/11 hijackers and not a blanket statement about Muslims. You should not allow political correctness to prevent you from making honest statements of fact.
an ill wind that blows no good
It's political and financial willpower to do the right thing.
If there was a way to make as much money on a one-shot cancer cure as on pills to control stomach acid, we would have it now. Antibiotics are easy to develop, the test procedures have been refined by years of experience, they've been mass-produced for a hundred years now, yet no new antibiotics have gone on the market in the last 20 years. Does anyone really think science has run out of substances that kill bacteria? No, the problem is that there's no money on cures or prevention, people take them once and then recover (or don't get sick in the first place). There's far more money to be made in selling Americans with health insurance $3 purple pills to treat heartburn or baldness or enlarged prostates or to let old farts have sex until they're ninety than in saving hundreds of millions in Africa from certain death by AIDS.
If the drug companies that stand to benefit from current medical research want donated CPU cycles, then they should start acting like they really intend to develop and market (at affordable prices) a cancer cure or a vaccine for AIDS or some other miracle cure rather than yet another heavily advertised long-term treatment to help baby boomers keep pretending they aren't getting old. If they want to keep on milking the old folks' prescription drug benefits for all they're worth, they can use some of those profits to pay for supercomputer time.
0 1 - just my two bits
I'd love to switch back to ClimatePrediction.net, but they need a damn Intel Mac client. Until then I'm running SETI again and this Mac Mini is leaving my G5s in the dust (very odd).
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
We're not listening for their 802.11b access points you know. The hydrogen line (http://www.setileague.org/askdr/hydrogen.htm) is considered to be the best place to listen for interstellar communications. The only assumption that is made here is that other civilizations are bothering to try to send communications; if so this is the best place to do it.
While there is still a long ways to go as far as communications are concerned, I'd say we have the basics down pretty well. If you want to transmit a signal to another group of people (whom you don't know) a long distance away (and again, your purpose is for communication) you're going to try the most obvious means possible. This means broadcasting a lot of power in a very narrow frequency with a very high SNR in adjacent frequencies, in a way that would be both meaningful and obseravable to the most simplistic receiver.
Once again, trying to communicate with other (lesser) species using the most complicated system you have available to you would be inherently DUMB. I would hope a hyper-advanced civilization had enough common sense to realize that to maximize your potential targets you must seek the lowest common denominator. This means you don't 1. Use fancy encryption 2. Use patterns that are common in nature 3. Make your signal hard to find by purposefully hiding it in the background noise of the universe, etc.
While your points are valid in that they do affect our chances of finding a signal, you're completely wrong that SETI researches make a bunch of different assumptions that are inherently flawed. The only *real* assumption they make is that another civilization WANTS TO BE HEARD. Everything else follows from that assumption.
When I first heard about SETI@Home, I thought it was a really cool idea. At that time, it was in beta, and they were not accepting any more beta testers. Rather than wait, I went looking for another distributed computing project, and found distributed.net. So I started brute forcing an encrypted message. About 6 months later, SETI started accepting regular users, bit I was hooked on monitoring my stats, and did not want to give it all up to move to a different project. By the time the message was cracked in 2002, I was pretty bored with it and decided not to work on the next (larger key) project. I looked around again, and found Folding@Home. I realized that contributing to biological research would be a lot more satisfying than seeing how long it would take to brute force an encryption key, or look for anomalies in radio signals from space. Over the years, I have looked for good deals on refurbished boxes and put them into service folding proteins. I only have 10 boxes folding, but I can definitely relate to the "expensive hobby".
I've been running the UD cancer project and related softwares for over five years. I didn't mind donating my computer time, but all that changed a couple of days ago. I signed up for their forum at http://forums.grid.org/ just to browse. I didn't even post anything. I left the site and came back an hour later, only to find my username and password didn't work. I tried to register again using a different username but the same email address, and discovered my email address was banned.
When I emailed United Devices to find out why I was banned, my email was returned by the Mailer Daemon, with relaying denied from my address. About this time yesterday, I filled out a form on their website and told them I resented their shabby treatment of a longtime cruncher, and I want an apology, or at the very least an explanation that makes sense, of why I was banned from the forum and why they are bouncing my emails. I have yet to hear back from them.
Big fucking deal. My CPU cycles cost me money. In electricity, the upfront costs, etc. Yes, my money. Not my parents' money, not a government grant, and certainly not a tax write off along the lines that they can. Oh, I guess I can write it off. I just won't be getting as much money back or getting it nearly as quickly. Not to mention, I must subtantiate that I use it to generate a income, which isn't always easy.
Why bitch then? Because the WSJ is complaining that I give away my CPU cycles to bullshit causes. Well, they are mine and I did pay for them. And if the WSJ wants, the pharmas can pay me for what they consider worthwhile. Until then, if I want to use my car to go hang out with friends rather then serve as a personal chauffeur (for free, nonetheless!), guess what? I'm going to fucking use it to hang out.
Boycott Sony
One of the biggest differences between charitable use of cpu cycles and other forms of charity is that at present time charitable cpu cycles are not tax-deductible. Which is a shame, because if they were tax-deductible we'd see a lot more computing power devoted to whatever distributed project you could name...and no, I have no idea how one would implement such a system... Still, a large corporation that otherwise left its myriad desktops alone all night could thereby stand to benefit as much as the recipients of project data.
Well, that reminds me... seeing the recent story on /. about people becoming more immature, I've also been wondering about going a million years down that path. You might just get a civilization where you don't just get Steve Irwin, but people who travel half the galaxy just to cut a crop circle on someone's farm or to tip their cows.
I'm still waiting for the day when someone will decode a SETI signal like "asl??? u wanna cyber??? what u wear???"
Or better yet:
"Lol, d00d, watch this!!!"
*BOOM a star goes supernova*
"OMGWTFBBQ!!!"
"LMAO!!!"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think this points out another benefit of folding@home over SETI--we'll never know whether those SETI cycles were wasted or not unless one of those computers actually discovers ET. But every hour put into folding@home (I was on the Spymac team when I had a desktop) is actually an incrementally useful result that contributes to those papers that are being published on an ongoing basis. Every protein we come to understand is itself a real breakthrough in biology--many of them appear not only in humans but in other mammals as well. It's the difference between donating to Oxfam and playing the lottery, saying that if you win you'll start your own charity--sensible people generally do the former.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
..just because you personally haven't means little. I know I saw a ...craft..when I was a teenager, and it was A-a flying intelligently controlled craft, and B, certainly not of any normal human technology I have ever seen or heard of. Myself and several of my friends all saw it, at very close range. Since then, I know two bits of data, although I cannot prove it. The government is lying through their teeth about it(I have confirmed this since then with off the record interviews with semi high ranking dot mil folks, in positions where they would know about this sort of thing because of what their jobs were), and, people who say that we are alone in the universe are just plain wrong.
I don't know exactly why the world seems to fall into two camps on this subject, but for me, the issue is strait forward and proven. I cannot tell you of who or what was controlling the craft(didn't see inside of it nor see anything exit), but it wasn't moon a ducks back or a candle in a plastic bag or anything like that. A small 30-35 foot oval, classic saucer in other words, roughly 50 feet or so off the ground over a neighbors house. That one sighting changed my life completely, I mean, awesomeness..I cannot easily describe the range of emotions other than just thunderstruck, it was so damn cool! Watched for a couple minutes before it flew away, slowly at first, just creeping along slow, totally silent, then at *ludicrous speed*, just hit high speed and vanished within a few seconds. And no, no drugs or alcohol, etc involved, and we all saw it. I am going to post AC but I am a regular here, just don't need the hoot factor.
"that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results"
Err, according to my dictionary definition of 'scientific results', SETI yields results with every completed workload. The result says: "This patch of sky doesn't have the nonrandom signals we are searching for".
Scientific investigation yields results, whether they're sexy or boring.
/ runs Mersenne, because I'm greedily optimistic that way
I've been kicking around the IDea of making a Intelligent Design At Home project by sifting DNA code "ATGCTGCATTA...." for patterns that may be of intelligent origin.
Long-shot, I know, but so is SETI. Great for kicks.
Table-ized A.I.
The numbers you're talking about are only indicators of the real underlying inflation. Here in the UK we have the Consumer Price Index and the Retail Price Index. Both are indicators of inflation; They're simply guesses at the real level of inflation.
ok. no money printed/"borrowed" you have an essentially closed system, the money can't devalue. If you increase the cost of gasoline, yes the production cost of things based on it will increase and the retail prices may well increase, but with every dollar spent on those more expensive goods the value of the subsequent dollars you are spending becomes higher, the dollars become more scarce as the supply of money decreases and each one has more buying power. You have a temporary deflation until the money comes back into circulation. Overall it's a stable system which naturally reaches an equilibrium.
With extra money being printed or "borrowed" there's no increase in the value of the dollar when money is spent because there's an increasing supply of money, so no equilibrium, in fact it's a self re-inforcing downward cycle, the money devalues, the prices go up, the government prints more money, the currency devalues further, the prices go up more. The currency just continues decreasing in value until it's essentially worthless. With this cycle you get chaotic booms and busts as the money supply is increased and decreased using interest rates. This is the cycle we're in at the moment, it's been this way since the 1920s when the gold standard was broken. It's how wars are financed you see.
The national debt is an indication of just how much extra money has been pumped into the economy/spent by the government. How much additional supply of money there is. At the moment 28,000 US dollars for every man woman and child in the US. Say only half of them are working we're talking 55,000 for every worker. How long is it going to take to pay that off? In the meantime the dollars become more and more worthless. The UK national debt is running about half that level at the moment.
The other thing, inflation (the devaluation of currency) doesn't affect everyone equally... The people who spend it first get to use the money at the full value. It's only as it spreads through society that prices increase in response to the increased supply and therefore decreased value of money. The people who get paid by the government (or whoever's printing the money) get to spend it at the previous value. That means government employees like the military and government contractors like Haliburton get the first crack at spending money before the inflation really kicks in. Inflation doesn't affect everywhere in the economy at the same time.
Money is a commodity, just like coffee or oil, it's traded just like coffee or oil. Increased supply decreases it's value, just like coffee or oil.
Deleted
...to send SPAM and perform DOS attacks on Internet-connected systems. Well, at least on the Windoze box. The Macs seem to just sit idle. Weird...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I agree.
I used to run the Seti@home client on all of my machines, but stopped running it when they ended support for the old client.
I haven't have time to RTFM and write custom shell scripts to install so all my machines now just run a blank screen when idle.
Is there a yum rpm repository ? Even Skype have a yum rpm repository.
Make it as simple as
then I'll install it.Also, the Seti@Home project seem to have changed their target audience.
For me, the sheer scale of the project was a major reason for contributing to it.
Seeing stats on their home page showing "x years cpu time in the last 24hrs" was a major WOW factor.
The new site no longer seems to show the collective stats for the project as a whole. Everything is geared towards competition between the individual users, with leage tables of groups and users showing how much they have contributed.
I don't care how much CPU time individual fanboys have contributed, or who is 'star user of the week'.
I want to know how many tera flops the whole project has managed to accumulate, that is the impressive figure.
I don't see it as a competition to get yourself higher on the list.
I (used to) see it as a collective contribution to a large scale project that couldn't be done by any one single institute.
Now, I can't be bothered.
I don't know why anyone finds negative SETI results offensive. Nobody ever suggested the search would be easy. The occurrance of extraterrestrial civilizations is still mapped by the Drake Equation. Certain parameters (fc, fi, fL) are being adjusted down by the SETI effort. At the same time the success of planet hunting and planetary mission results are positively effecting others (fp, ne). A negative result, although less exciting, is still a result.
an ill wind that blows no good
my spare cycles go to this worthy endeavor: http://www.13thlabour.tk/
Folding@Home (the Stanford project, distinct from WCG, but not exactly "competing"), is accessible to both x86 (Windows/Linux) and PowerPC (Mac G3, G4, G5) processors. Mac systems make up around 5% of the total CPU's in Folding@Home, and 5 of the top 100 folding teams are Mac-oriented, well above Apple's 3.5% US and 2% worldwide market share.
(By the way, the above link provides access to Folding team home pages; click on a team in the list and a link to its home page will appear near the top of its stats page).
Folding@Home is developing a BOINC client, currently in closed beta testing, which will supplement (NOT replace) the conventional F@H client. It is coming along slowly because BOINC itself is a moving target. However, as far as I know, SPARC/Sun/Solaris support is not part of the Stanford group's plans.
As a long time participant in Folding@Home, I appreciate the project's achievements in basic research, the participants' respect for scientific endeavor, the atmosphere of mutual friendly support in the project forum (slow-loading; wait for it) and team forums, and the project leaders' commitment to free and open disclosure of scientific results. In contrast to the WSJ's description of the SETI project, Folding@Home is a d.c. project for grownups.
Aside, the avalanche of arguments about Big Pharma seems to me totally beside the point, as it has only the most tenuous connection with Folding@Home and even less with SETI.
"Leave these programs running for a month and check out the huge difference in your power bill." You're not married, are you? When I started running folding@home 24*7 I also started turning off the lights & tv's my wife was no longer using. Our electric bill dropped 8%. A fair exchange IMHO.