Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
for using my computer to do what I want to do with it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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
There's a logical fallacy in there somewhere. Just because it's coming from the WSJ doesn't mean the point isn't valid. And I would have to agree with them, because I think there are better ways to spend extra computer cycles than searching for possible signals from outer space. I'd rather see extra cycles go towards things that have a larger impact for people on Earth: weather analysis, drug creation, protein folding, etc. But that's just me.
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.
And as for global warming, I'm no climatologist but I've got to think that turning your damn computer off is more valuable than anything you could run on it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
However they do it, whatever it takes. Drug companies weren't formed for altruistic reasons.
this sig deleted by another sig
I think his point was that since pharmas make billions of dollars in pure profit, they can afford to invest some of it in highpowered computing clusters.
Nobody is going to do the same for SETI.
I bet the pharmas could even write it off on their taxes.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Wow you are a genius. Since you are so smart, please tell me how this would work when the populace enranged that inflation has gone through the roof because of government mandated high gas prices votes the guys who raised the prices out of office?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Heaven forbid somebody actually make a profit as a reward for finding a cure for cancer.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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
Odd, I can think of few things that would change life on earth more than a verifiable intelligent signal from outer space.
This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again.
For great justice.
Actually I see the problem as being two-fold. All those free computer cycles are not that free. Modern CPUs consume more electricity to do more work and someone has to pay the electricity bills. Busy CPUs need more cooling and fans that run at full throttle for a year do wear out and fail (and you risk burning some important component, even if the PC is designed to shut down when it detects overheating). That's simply because desktop PCs are desktop PCs and not workstations and the assumption is that the fans will have to run at full throttle for maybe half an hour at a time. The real costs are not easy to work out, but it might, just might be more efficient to donate the money to charity.
The other problem is deciding which project deserves most attention. I think it's well beyond me to judge whether computer time is better spent running climate change simulations or protein folding for some medical research. Hence if someone wishes to donate computer time it will be useful if all one had to do is to download a BOINC like client that will then run whatever the server sends it. Of course you'd need a reputable institution with a sensible scientific board running the server...
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.
I hope everyone see that they are not simply donating spare cycles that cost you nothing.
Modern computers enter a powersaving mode in the times their CPU is not busy. Enabling Folding@Home or SETI@HOME on your machine consumes these powersaving cycles and draws more power.
Leave these programs running for a month and check out the huge difference in your power bill.
Ironically, the distributed system to calculate climate change could actually contribute to it!!
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
Well, maybe if the pharmaceutical companies threw a little more of their obscene profits at the problem, it would be enough. The Board of Directors and the stockholders might have to cut back on Cuban cigars, though...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Honestly, it always amazes me how some people are willing to spend so much time cutting and pasting and href'ing, and none on reading.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I upgraded from the old SETI@Home client to BOINC when it became available - but the BOINC client required too much effort on my part and was getting in my way.
I know you what you're gonna say, I guess could have configured it better, RTFM, yadda yadda, but that's the point really isn't?
I'm donating my CPU cycles to some altruistic cause, I don't want to have to RTFM. I just want to install and forget. For this reason I miss the old SETI client, and have, as a result, now stopped contributing.
I simply can't be bothered.
[sig]It's a secret to everybody[/sig]
I don't think anyone would disagree that running these programs has a real impact both financially and environmentally. However, I think the real question is...
1) For the cost of the additional electrical energy you consumed, if you instead donated that money to whatever group you ran, would they be as effective in pursuing their goals?
2) For the environmental impact of producing more electricity (the manufacture and delivery of your computer are already "sunk" pollutants), could the group who runs your project achieve their goals with the same footprint? (i.e. for the pollution of some additional electrical power production, could they build/rent a server room, pay to have additional computers manufactured and delivered, power those computers, A/C those computers (much more likely to need A/C for a bunch of servers in a server room than in my apartment), etc.
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.
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
That's not a fair criticism, for two reasons:
1) If a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the benefitial product they hoped to give to the world. So what would you have them do? Commit organizational suicide so they can manufacture medicine to cure a few people, and lose any chance of contributing to the engineering of a better, more accessible solution for the world?
2) Companies are not soul-less collections of worker drones, however much karma it may provide to claim that they are. Most of us work for companies. Most of us are not horrible, soul-less drones. Individuals within companies make decisions, and those individuals usually do the best they can to make the right decisions based on several important angles, like:
a) what is best for the people that make up this company (see #1 above)
b) what is best for the community we serve
c) what is best for the people who invested in our success
...The Board of Directors and the stockholders might have to cut back on Cuban cigars...
It puzzles me why people who complain about the profits of various industries do not invest their money in them. If they have these record profits, why not invest in those companies and use the growth and dividends to improve your life and be able to afford the product?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Due to the very inelastic demand for a cure for cancer, people would pay as much as it costs (mortgages etc)
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
Because we have morals? There's some things more important than money. In fact, I really can't think of anything less important.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
... 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
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.
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 think you're underestimating the quality of a desktop PC. I ran SETI and climateprediction.net for about 4 years straight on a dual G4 PowerMac. Ran like a champ. 100% CPU for months straight. Never had a problem. They can take abuse.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
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
I am running SETI@Home 24/7 on two, power hungry computers in my apartment that used to be on 24/7 anyway. The difference in my monthly power bill is somewhere between $5 and $10 a month. This includes the extra power I use from my AC unit to cool that room. I understand this may be a problem for some, but I would be hard pressed to lable this a huge difference.