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SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
I have made the first post.
first@home
I'd say they lost money on power consumption. Not up keep.
Well, no. Those weren't his machines. Had he been fired for running it on his own PC it would be different.
Free Martian Whores!
But the "criminal charges" alluded to by the article would be ridiculous.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Too bad the only aliens we've found are the illegal ones. Go back to Mexico, learn fuckin' English, and come here legally if you're going to. Oh yeah, and when you go back to Mexico, tell the telemarketers there to stop calling here. Seriously, that's the new trend in telemarketing. Call a native English speaker but speak Spanish when he answers the phone. Yeah, gee I wonder why sales are down...
She said the software was authorized by a previous administration and her husband has better things to do to than look for aliens.
"We have seven kids together," Niesluchowski's wife said.
NEZ's wife thought "SEX@Home" not "SETI@Home", unlike NEZ.
I understand wanting to find aliens, but it would have been nice if this had been for the folding@home project. Then again, maybe once we find the aliens we'll discover they have a cure for cancer. It's really hard to know which one should take precedence.
I did this at my brothers company too. I thought that the program "ran on minimal resources" while the computers were being used. But shortly after installing them on a dozen programs, everyone was complaining about how slow their computers were, so I had to covertly remove them to hide the true reason why they were slow. Lesson learned. At least it didn't cost me my job.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
That works out to about $200 per machine. In what, electricity from no CPU idle?
Other than that, I don't see where S@H costs any more on a system than the resource hog called "Windows Vista".
Reading the article, you'd think the guy was some deranged tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist devilishly enlisting the school's resources to justify his own crackpot theories, not just some guy using the school's computers to help a scientific organization crunch data. Did he do something wrong? Quite possibly. There's no way he could possibly have committed an offense worse than using some variation of the phrase "alien seeking" that many times in a serious news article.
From TFA: "Gilbert police are now involved in the investigation and criminal charges may be filed." How is this criminal? He had legitimate access. What's special about the scale? If someone ran a single instance of SETI@home on the PC on their desk, would that be criminal?
So instead of teaching something useful with that million, the school had to pay for upkeep.
This is why I pay little attention in school, because most of its just fucking stupid shit. 90%+ of what I've learned about computers has come from reading online and learning things by myself (CCNA, Compsci1, AutoCAD). Maybe instead of wasting money, use it to provide a better education for the students.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I heard this story on NPR this morning.
He probably shouldn't simply be installing software that isn't essential to his work function on machines that he does not own.
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence. The criminal charges probably stem from that and not just for installing SETI@Home (haven't read the TFA so just speculating).
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
And not a single alien to show for it!
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
Weren't his computer so it was a bad choice on his part.
now if there was in fact authorization from prior administration, ok...just correct the problem.
As for the $1 million in lost money, I'd like to see how they came up with that estimate. Yes proccessing power and productivity may have been affected, but its not like 5000 machines where being utilized 100% 24/7 in the first place. And I fail to see how replacement parts, as reported in the article, factor into this number at all.
It's Seti@HOME, not Seti@WHEREVERTHEFUCKIFEELLIKEINSTALLINGIT.
Especially not somewhere that's funded by public money. I don't pay my taxes to waste them on looking for spacemen.
Wake up people! We're alone and adrift in a godless universe, and no amount of "I want to believe" is going to change that.
We're an anomaly. A bunch of selfish amino acids and various meats bagged up in fatty tissue. There's no aliens. There's only us.
And we can't even get THAT right.
This fucker deserves to be anally raped for the time and effort he's wasted.
Throw him on the pedo list too - He fits the demographic.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
We just all went up a spot!
Only 5000 machines and they want to pay $1000000 to uninstall the software. Good grief, I'll do it for 3/4ths of that, maybe even a half! Hell, I'll even pay my on airfare!
Little taken aback by the tone of the write up in the local news and the quote by the superintendent, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research, [..] however, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
The whole article implies that SETI is some out there kookie search for aliens and in no way a scientific endeavor that has at times been funded in part by the US government. That's local news coverage for you though.
The illogical basis for their claim is revealed with this quote:
"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
So.....it's not really about the cost, it's about the subject matter? What is your real reasoning for being upset, here?
In addition, he had gotten permission from a previous administrator to install the software. There is nothing here that justifies filing criminal charges.
Qxe4
It sounds to me like someone who understood nothing of the tech involved stepped in to squash what looked like some sort of unauthorized activity on their computers. Not understanding it they overreacted and are crushing the poor guy. The whole article is absurd, it makes it sound like he's actually done something wrong... really this is the equivalent of forgetting to configure the hibernate mode or something.
From the linked article:
"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
So the school superintendent would apparently have been OK with the computers running 24 hours per day, 365 days per year (Denise Birdwell's interpretation of these programs work) running Folding@Home, "slow[ing] down educational programs in every classroom and cost[ing] the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts," but not SETI@Home?
Someone needs to educate Ms. Birdwell, who is presented as overly dramatic in the linked article, about how these programs work. And how entirely appropriate it would be for local schools to donate unused computer time to running programs like these, and what a great opportunity it would have presented to the scientific education of the children in the district.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
'Apparently, the alien-seeking software had been running since Niesluchowski was hired nearly 10 years ago.
"Basically our processors were hooked up and running 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, every day of the school year," Birdwell said.'
Most businesses or schools will have an Acceptable Use Policy. To paraphrase the AUP where I work, A person must have permission to install 3rd party software. This permission must come from building administration or Tech Department administration. If Joe Employee installs Seti without permission, that could be cause for termination. If I install Seti in my buildings' computers, it will be because I gave myself permission to do so. (Which I have, so I did.)
However, this case seems to be with a difference of opinion. Ftfa: '"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."'
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons. To say he would allow protein folding but not seti is asinine. When I decided between the two, I figured that finding ET would have a greater impact on society that a cure for cancer. Who knows, maybe ET will be able to help us cure diseases while curing diseases will not help us find ET.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I'd have a lot more sympathy from the guy if this were at least folding@home. The SETI project is, to put it bluntly, a complete waste of time and resources. The odds of finding a coincidental, intelligent, and perceptible alien civilization that happens to be in the narrow technological window of using radio waves for communication, at any communicative distance from earth, is all but nil. This guy wasted way more human resources (resources that weren't even his own) than this project will ever be worth.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts."
Knowing vaguely how SETI@home and BOINC and Folding@Home work, I suspect this is a BS allegation. I know the programs are not usually that large, though that doesn't really matter to the school district's alleged issue of it consuming otherwise needed comptuer resources. A big program can take very little CPU time. Usually the @home stuff is set up to only use idle computer cycles, and not affect other programs. If the school district is trying to make something up to charge him with theft of government resources, I think the increased electricity expense would be a better bet. I hope he has a good lawyer, and some kind of documentation that he was authorized (or had the perogative) to load the programs. Though it would have been better if his user name was "Higley" rather than "Nez".
The bit about equipment from the school at home is interesting, but I wouldn't say it's outside the realm of possibility that he brought that sort of stuff home to work on it as part of his administrative duties. I'm not adequately informed to say one way or another.
As for the software being "essential to his work function", the machines in question are presumably used (or at least viewed) by school students at some point or another. I'd think the SETI@Home screensaver is, all else being equal, a fine way to encourage an interest in science among young children. Pretty wavy squiggly lines! Space! Aliens! Digital signal processing! Fast Fourier Transforms! Gaussian distributions! Cool!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
How did they quantify the $1 million dollar amount? It seems to me that this number was pulled out of the district's ass.
http://www.allometry.com
If you figure the electricity, air conditioning, bandwidth, and costs of disk replacements due to wear and tear across 5000 machines for a few years, $1,000,000 is not as outrageous as you might expect. It really does add up in a big environment.
They should have been proud of this, frankly. Distributed computing is a very interesting field and becoming more and more relevant. Certainly it would have been a great educational opportunity. Similarly, SETI really isn't laughed at much anymore ... Well, unless you're not too bright and take things like the Drudge Report and Sarah Palin seriously. Oh, crap.
One simple rule for its versus it's
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
TFA didn't say anything about finding school equipment at his home, just @home. Sounds like we need a better FA.
Free Martian Whores!
So no one noticed a 5000 x ~150 ~= 750 MW of usage? Over 10 years? Yikes. I would think at least some nerdy kids would have noticed at some point that there was SETI installed and asked some questions. Wouldn't people wonder why the computer lab was hot first thing in the morning.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
including accusations that he wasn't doing his job, like installing a firewall.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/12/02/20091202searchforaliens1202.html
... but unfortunately for him his brain was sitting in a jar on a shelf somewhere.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The article has the following quote:
"Niesluchowski's wife, Susan, insisted her husband is a good man and great father who did nothing wrong. She said the software was authorized by a previous administration..."
However, since he was fired, it's not likely that he was able to present proof of authorization to the school board. For the record, I can't imagine how they came up with $1M for damages. If the computers were running all night and day regardless of whether SETI@home was running or not, you're looking at component wear and tear and additionally power consumption of virtually zero.
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
The computers (and their software configuration) were not his to do with as he pleased. He somehow thought his cause merited the theft (in 5000 small instances) of resources. His lack of good judgment there leads me to not be surprised that he also may have taken school equipment home (stolen) for his own uses. The latter act probably the one leading to his resignation and possible charges.
It may be the cost of electricity that has given rise to those damages.
Supposing $0.053 KW/h cost of electricity. (Just happens to be the first cost of electricity that came up in my Google search.)
At 200W (electricity usage for a running computer) - 50W (electricity usage for an idle computer) = 150W (taken to be our excess electricity used by running Seti@Home instead of having the computer idle)
Over 5,000 computers
($0.053 KW/h / 1000) * 150W * 5000 = $39.75/hour hourly difference in electricity between idle and Seti@Home
At 18 hours a day that would otherwise be idle, for 365 days a year:
$39.75/hour * 18 hours/day * 365 days/year = $261,157.50 per year.
Over four years that's a cost above $1 million.
The above is by no means meant to be an estimate of the electrical costs actually incurred because of Seti@Home in this case, but I think it is illustrative of how the cost of electricity could be relatively large over a long enough period of time in circumstances similar to those described in the story.
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars.
You are aware the computers have a 99% probability of being powered-up 24 hours a day, right? And the bamdwidth requirements of SETI are a fraction of any popular BitTorrent repository. Geez, you bunch for holier-than-thou hypocrites.
I used to set up dnetc on many machines, it caused the machines to run flat-out all the time, using more electricity as well as more cooling. Whilst it did only use up otherwise unused CPU cycles, it definitely had an impact on performance for higher priority processes. Modern CPUs run very fast and depend on their caches to maintain performance, and any context switching and loading other apps, even small ones, eats up memory bandwidth as well as CPU cycles. I think this goes relatively unnoticed as most people naively count CPU cycle ratios between processes.
At work we have a large number of dual CPU/eight-core (16 with HT) machines with 24, 32 or 36GB running java VMs, and we notice there's a very big hit on performance if we try and run more than a few VMs on a machine, almost certainly due to loss of cache efficiency; this performance loss doesn't particularly show up in simply looking for CPU cycles used by the OS!
TFA is an exceptionally bad article on the story, only referring to the SETI@Home portion of the issue as if it were the only thing involved. It is not. As this East Valley Times story (which appears to be the original story) reports, Niesluchowski is "accused of taking at least 18 computers and other technology equipment to use in his home-based business, downloading pornography on school computers, and generally failing to do his job in the technology department" as well as installing SETI@Home.
Also, the $1.2 million to $1.6 million cost estimate seems to be identified as an estimate to fix all the issues involved; the article reports that the problems stemming from Niesluchowskis poor performance and misconduct "include a network system not designed to handle the district's growth, a system in need of substantial repair and a building needed to securely house the network. There are also cabling problems and a lack of tracking inventory for technology equipment that is three years out of date."
Furthermore, instead of having permission from previous administrators, the report is that he was told to remove the software by previous administrators, to whom he reported, falsely, that it had been removed.
Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell does not in fact welcome our new extra terrestrial overlords.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
If any of those machines had really found aliens this guy would have quite possibly become the most famous man who ever lived. Instead he's off burger flipping if he's lucky.
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
When I saw this guy on the boards I just assumed he did. I mean, who would be stupid enough to not ask for permission to run crap on computers you don't own, especially when it's at best orthogonal to the purpose of the machines? It's like if I were to run a personal webserver off the school's T3.
It sounds like this may not be the only issue, either. Apparently there was some theft involved as well?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
$.06 / kwh?! Wow, that's really cheap. Here in the UK I'm paying 6p / kwh, and I work for a nuclear generator and get "special" rates... Most people are paying over 12p...
If they are being billed one million dollars by a consulting company to do this, that's the real crime. I'll clean their entire district, and I'll be happy to do it for a couple grand with a few scripts.
If they are spending a million dollars to find and uninstall a program that /doesn't/ hide itself than I declare them incompetent. For a fraction of that money you could set up and license Altiris, SCCM or another similar infrastructure management program, buy your servers, set up a lab, hire some packagers as well as the architects and admins to run the whole works. Even without all of that a halfway decent desktop engineer could create a login script to look for and uninstall the application on any pc that was affected.
Tell that to all of the native people that thought they were all alone out there when the Europeans came along in their ships.
Yea, life is some magic anomaly that appears to have occurred as soon as it was cold enough to happen. And your assuming that were alone because we're not bombarded with evidence. It's like Robinson Caruso declaring the island abandoned after walking 60 paces..
weak
it turns out that the aliens have a cure for cancer.
If you read the article in the Arizona Central Newpaper(http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html) the bizarre thing is that though they found a bunch of the school district's PC's at his home, they sound more peeved about SETI. The quote from the superintendent Denise Birdwell; "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T." would seem to indicate that if he had picked one of the other projects, they would have been fine with that.
As is often, it seems that there may be more behind the scenes than before.
I don't intend to troll but to get a response.
Seriously, I don't believe in aliens beyond movies, and I don't understand the interest about this program. I'd like to know why would someone install this, can some users tell me about it?
(But please no conspiracies)
Did it ever occur to you that the search for extraterrestial intelligence might find alien life with a "cure for cancer"?
Evidently not.
Now you may return to your Sarah Palin fund raising drive .
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore Trout
Although I haven't done the research, it seems unlikely that the power supply would be maxed out by running the process. Usually there is some excess capacity engineered in and the video system will have shut down and disk access should be low, so it is really just processor and memory power with a little disk and network activity.
Also it seems unlikely that all of the computers are left turned on 24 hrs a day 365 days a year. If they are, that is responsibility of the school system management. Most people I know turn off their PCs at when they are done using them for the day.
I know it's off topic, but why did you set your post to a monospaced font?
Funning SETI@Home 24/7could indeed cause the premature wear and malfunction of computer parts over a long period of time.
IMO this would probably affect hard drives the most (as one of the most likely internal parts to fail due to extended use), but the excess heat generated
by running SETI could also prematurely age the CPUs and RAM modules to the point that they need to be replaced sooner that usual.
This of course would all depend on how intensely the program was run (was it being run as a 'low CPU utilization' background process or not).
Having said that, to claim that this program alone could have caused all of the maintenance/repair issues with these computers is specious.
These computers would have incurred maintenance/repair costs irregardless of whether SETI@Home was installed or not and it would be
nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly how much this one particular program contributed to the costs mentioned. Assuming these computers
would have been left on in some fashion even if SETI@Home wasn't installed, they would have been using electricity either way as the computers
would always be running some sort of background/idle process even when not being used.
I think the bottom line is whether or not this Administrator violated the School District's terms of acceptable use and whether or not the installation and
running of this program clearly contributed to those violations. And for what it's worth it may well have, but for this superintendent to make all
sorts of grandiose claims about the costs involved with running this program without a true knowledge of the technical nuances is just irresponsible, IMO.
If need be let the details be hashed out and examined in a court of law before spouting off.
To me the real 'crime' was that it took the school system 10 years to figure out that a resource hogging program like SETI@Home was being used in the
first place.
So the issue is not the installation of the program, which would have been okay if the technician had installed Cancer@Home instead.
Anybody wants Cancer@home?
Whats next, is somebody going to sue an IT guy for installing Vista on their PCs because it cost them millions in extra power used by the fancy graphics in the Aero GUI and increased memory usage?
At best this should be an error in judgement. Maybe grounds for dismissal, but sueing?
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I should change that. I was trying to post some code or something once and I set it to monospaced font. Never got around to doing it - I think I'll do it now... after I hit submit!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Turns out the guy was an alien, just trying to call for pickup. James Cameron just inked him to a $1 million deal for the story. He will be portrayed by Justin Long, with Bruce Willis as the Gilbert chief of police, Meryl Streep as Denise Birdwell, and Monica Potter as the wife.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
under police investigation for taking computers home, downloading pornography
Are the police certain the accused downloaded the pornographic images? Did some malware download said images unbeknown to the accused considering the well-documented cases involving such contraband piggybacking on otherwise legitimate web sites?
I don't know all the details of this but a decade or so ago I was a (volunteer) administrator of the IT system at our local rural school district. Sometimes I'd take computers home to install software so I could play with the kids while the software installed instead of sitting on my ass (for free) at the (empty) school and do it. Besides, they locked the schools up and wouldn't give me a key.
I discovered that the kids could find porn so used a proxy and some regexp filters to try to keep porn at bay. But it turned out that the kids could find porn faster than I could block it so I started grepping the logs for the seven bad words you can't say on television and then adding those sites. Then I started making headway. The HS math teacher was involved in this too. We'd see a suspicious site in the log, check the site for content and if it was porn we'd block it using a regexp expression. Simple and cheap.
But that took time... so I'd add them at home remotely (everything, including the routers, was on Linux boxes that I built and installed) but the teacher who was helping was observed after working hours going through thi process. Unfortunately the person watching thought the teacher was surfing porn (instead of checking sites for content) and turned him in. Quite the brouhaha. One parent was incensed that we used the students to "find porn". Good grief!!!
That incident very nearly cost the teacher his job but I attended the school board meeting that addressed the issue and explained what we were doing and why (no money in the budget for servers, software, etc.). The teacher kept his job and we got to buy some blocking software to work with the proxy and I didn't have to spend an hour every night checking logs. One problem solved.
The administrator in this particular case probably faced some of the same issues as I did. So they found school property at his house (they would have at mine too) and are investigating him for downloading porn (they would have probably done the same to me). I think getting the cops after him was overkill.
$1M in expenses for running SETI is ridiculous. However according to the newspaper report from his home town he was instructed by a former school district administrator to remove the software and did not. Of course, that admin might just be trying to cover his own ass. But at least someone knew SETI was on those boxes prior to the new Superintendent taking office.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
They've had the same PC's for 10 years? What CPUs were they, 386's??
Used all my mod points this morning. :-)
I'm not saying SETI or cancer research are bad things (who would?), but let's say you're in the voting booth and there's a school bond for you to vote yes/no on, and then another bond on the ballot, to spend $1M on research computation. Do you think each one will get the same number of votes? If it's such a great idea, then the funding doesn't need to be hidden.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The world's population is already too high, and growing beyond the unsustainable level. While it's nice to think we can get rid of something that causes pain and death, pain and death are part of life. If you reduce the death rate, you'll have to reduce the reproduction rate.
My school district's network of 8000 computers is running NUKES@HOME, helping our government figure out ways to build better nuclear weapons to save the planet for the right kind of humanity.
This is my sig.
... he may as well have installed Webshots on each machine. Why is this wrong?
- Near-constant background data transfers not related to any business need. This costs bandwidth, and competes with legitimate business needs for bandwidth. School systems do not have infinite bandwidth.
- Excess cycles consumed during idle time, costing power, creating unnecessary heat load, etc. In Arizona, heatload is $$$ flying out the A/C system.
- Unauhorized software, risking compromise and potential data loss without any business need or benefit. If you are going to install software on a machine, in a school environment, you should be prepared to explain why every single application has a genuine business purpose. This causes two subordinate problems:
1. Installing unauthorized software risks damage for non-business-related causes, and cannot be excused.
2. Installing non-business-related software tends to give users the impression that they can also install unnecessary software, which has obvious implications.
However you feel about SETI, this administrator just made a serious error. Sadly, he deserves to be let go. If for no other reason, but his successor will now be scouring the system for other problems, real or imagined. Many hours of unnecessary effort, if his predecessor had just done the right thing in the first place.
Any bets on what the technology committee would have said if he proposed this to them?
ps - I doubt all the machines were left on 24x7, unless this ignat instructed them to do so. Wasteful. Sad.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
As like most posters here, I ran seti@home, years ago, but I ran it on a Quad core PPC G5 - it ran one instance on each core, causing the machine to draw about 840VA - for about 20 hours a day...I figured out this was costing me about $30-35 a month. That's when I stopped running seti@home...
wha'? where am i?
If everyone is tagging the SETI guy for the electric bills for the computers actually doing something, isn't it fair to say that the district wasted an even larger amount of money to buy the computers to begin with?
Electricity at an industrial level is charged based on peak demand usage, which coincides with the working day. If the computers were idling during the day, then it kinda means that everyone who was assigned that computer wasn't actually working.
I would not be so quick to jump at the guy using the schools' computer as his "personal" playground, either. Large institutions are not impersonal things or machines that we must throw away our humanity to attend to them. We are not slaves to corporations or governments. They are us and should reflect us and above all should serve us. We demand good character of the people that run them because we expect the people that run them to use those institutions in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. Running SETI at home, was, at least, on some level, consistent with that ideal.
Put it this way. Let's say someone on his own initiative runs program on ALL of Exxon Mobils workstations. If the program accomplishes nothing, the guy might wind up getting fired. But... if the program finds a cure for cancer, you can certainly bet that Exxon Mobil would be running ads about how they cured cancer and how great they are, and the guy would at least get a trial promotion for being successful.
It's the same thing with SETI. If the guy had found aliens on the school computers, he'd have been hailed as a hero.
This is my sig.
Well, I heard that had something to do with redundancy to prevent dicks that couldn't resist cheating from bodging up the results.
I had about a dozen nodes running at school myself, back in the day. Random noobs weren't playing games and websurfing in the Journalism class, so the IT guys didn't have to constantly re-image those units. I think we were up for a couple years there. I hardly think any Harm came of it, in fact, the de-fragging I did seemed to perk up some of them quite a bit.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
TThat's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country;
They're not just doing it out there; they're also Folding@home.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
I would not resign.
I'd tell them, "Sorry I'll uninstall everything," and if they chose to fire me then I'd drag Mr. Birdwell into court to provide proof before a judge that I actually cost the school 1 million in damages. If they can't then it would be unjustified dismissal, and in violation of multiple employee-protection laws that exist when you work for a state government.
If he also took home 18 computers for his own personal use and was downloading porn as claimed, I don't think that'd stand up in court.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
LHC@home seems more promising to find _ANYTHING_ (the "God-Particle" as said in the media, but hey - it's a GOD-Particle) but it's being compromised by notorious Bread attacks from the future... ;-)
The Kebap i ate later this day is a proof that there must be an extraterrestrial intelligence - I'm really sorry for the Distributed Computing based projects ;-)
I did the same thing, I wanted to contribute to a conversation in ASCII art, and I'm too lazy to change back.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I've never met a sysadmin that DIDN'T have business equipment at home.
Back in the day I worked at larger internet search company that will remain nameless. There was one engineer who's main job was to keep porn out of the search engine. Anybody want to guess who's porn site was the #1 result. Right, his porn site was hard-coded. Of course I was completely clueless because I'm that heads-down hard worker, but one day I was called to the VP of HR's office. I had to ride one of the company bicycles across campus and when I got there I was greeted by HR, several lawyers and porn-king's Ultra 5. Being the senior sys admin I got to enjoy searching for porn on his system with all these people watching over my shoulder. I found it too. What a glorious day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase
Sorry, what was your point ?
Yup indeed, Telomere tend to act as counter limiting the number of divisions (thus trying to limit runaway cell proliferations like cancers).
That's why telomerases are present in stem cells and other cells that do indeed need to divide a lot.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Niesluchowski's wife, Susan, insisted her husband is a good man and great father who did nothing wrong.
...
"We have seven kids together," Niesluchowski's wife said.
Obviously it's not him. He has 7 kids. Cops always miss the obvious.
This person may have been the IT director or whatever but that gave him no right to install 3rd party software (both CPU and bandwidth costs)on machines he managed (the keyword here is managed, and NOT owned). If his contract specified that he could'nt run such stuff then he should not have. If his contract specified nothing of that kind, then this may be a gray area. That said, This guy did'nt abuse kids or spend school money to finance fancy hotel stays or trips. All he ran was SETI@Home on 5000 machines... This should be called more of a judgement error rather than an ethical violation...
In addition to CPU cycle, Folding@home may also bee using other resources, like RAM (leading to less in -RAM diskcache buffers and more virtual memory swapping), bad task switching (a badly designed OS putting F@H on the main CPU and the user's application on the hyper-threading virtual CPU), diskspace (leading potentially to more fragmentation on the partition), etc.
All this leading to slowdowns despite not 100% CPU usage.
If the machine is low on memory and/or CPU power, it's better to let F@H, BOINC or whatever you're installing to only start with the screen saver (when the user isn't using the computer anyways and won't notice the slowdowns) and asking it not to keep the workunit in RAM when not running (leaving all the RAM free for the user application when the user is back).
Last but not least, do not forget to inform the necessary people (administration, and perhaps user) of what F@H and BOINC are and why you're running them (so nobody will think of it as "stealing" resources).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm sure that more cretins prefer Palin.
That's $20/year/system. {...} $1m is real money, especially if you're a school district.
But it's still only $20 per year per machine. Thus only probably a fraction of all the other costs of said machines. When you factor in initial costs of the machine, the base-line power consumption, and yearly cost to maintain them (buying new hardware to replace old, damaged or stolen hardware) than $20 aren't suddenly that much impressive.
This $1m probably only represent a small fraction of the whole budget spent over the same period of time. And was used to doing science anyway (not for downloading porn or whatever).
and the results had been directly attributable to the CPU cycles this school district was "donating" to the cause? I'm sure this would have been a PR grand slam for the school district with the same detractors holding this guy in high praise for doing such wonderful things for the community.
It becomes real sad when you look to those general public computers and see the "cute looking" (but horribly programmed) screensaver using MORE processing/memory/disk (trust me!) than seti@home or folding@home.
If he gets sued, his lawyer should use this fact. Only remaining low power stand by devices are non smart phones, that is -if- they didn't enable flash lite or animated gif screensaver with lights on.
It is horribly stupid to install seti@home or any distributed computing client to machines you don't own but... Did you see the quotes? "Search for E.T." etc.
Scientists at SETI and Stanford should give them a little lecture about seti@home. No idiotic school manager has right to speak about such scientists as some UFO seeking weirdos.
SETI@home is a flaming piece of animal feces mixed with burnt hair.
when SETI is running, CPU usage is ALWAYS at 100%, which means energy consumption is at 100%, which means that 5000 PCs were running using max power consumption for 10 fucking years non-stop!
This idiot should get life in prison without parole, and maybe some assrape for good measure. Any retard with half a brain knows that analyzing static from space in the hopes of finding an alien to have sex with is fucking retarded. This guy is on par with richard heene and baloon boy.
I heard this story on NPR this morning.
He probably shouldn't simply be installing software that isn't essential to his work function on machines that he does not own.
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence. The criminal charges probably stem from that and not just for installing SETI@Home (haven't read the TFA so just speculating).
Right. I'm sure not a single other school staff person has a single item belonging to said school at their residence. Fucking niggers.
Does ANYBODY ever fairly calculate damages? Sometimes one has to wonder how they calculate these numbers they pull out...
SETI costs will not be as high as the legal burden on the system; sure the FA was missing some of the details but having seen some college IT workers who largely come from the student population and few stick around-- it doesn't surprise me they'd have some issues. Some of the top guys are just the kids who didn't leave.
As far as porn on a staff computer-- don't get me started. I'd say that is quite common; sometimes its not intentional... http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ strikes true in too many ways (on both sides of the IT/staff.) We have a situation where staff are encouraged to take laptops home, answer personal emails etc-- to blur the line between home and work so they can get unofficial worktime from people without them realizing it. Being on call with a cell phone without pay... etc. This clever movement to sucker employees with these kinds of "benefits" also has the side affect in that they think of the stuff as also being THEIRS-- or loaned; again, business tries to blur professionalism and friendship/family to get the best of both worlds.
I did IT for a bit. I found porn. The MEN who blurred the line the most also had the stuff or more of it and not really hidden either. I also found those with laptops INCREASED this tendency. If its partially THEIRS then they treat it as such. I think it is fair for them to do this simply because I strongly oppose the intentional blurring going on but a contradictory professionalism that comes up when the darker sides surface. Don't want abuse? don't "loan" your "family member" hardware for their personal use.
My IT job was harder because of these modern management methods; people were extremely upset if they couldn't run what they wanted to, have a laptop to take home, surf anywhere (from any location,) etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'd like to know if anyone has "run the numbers" on a wiring closet before? I'd love to see numbers comparing cost (in materials and time) for:
1) grabbing from a pool of 2, 6, and 10 ft cables and plugging things in so it works.
2) custom cutting cables so they're no more than say, 2" longer than necessary, and running them neatly with a few ties and loops
3) #2 + good cable routing including looms, trays, and plenty of wire ties. + the cost to maintain.
Cost to maintain a "neat" cable arrangement is high. And if you have to move or shuffle something, you either have to go to a lot of work to make the change, or it's gonna really look like crap because you'll have 98% of the rack neat as a pin, with a handful of wires that look like crap going diagonally and sagging.
I'd be willing to bet that #2 is quadruple the cost of #1, (mainly in labor, cutting cables is slow, tiring work, the money you save in cable is insignificant), and #3 doubles the cost from #2.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
it is called SETI@HOME and not SETI@WORK, doah!
I'll bet that you were running it on some of the older P4 machines with HyperThreading. If you have HT turned on, idle processing will NEVER work right under Windows, and it will cause the types of slowdowns you saw. (I experienced the exact same thing with Folding@home when I installed it on a P4 w/ HT.)
Here's why: Hyperthreading uses a single core, but presents itself to the OS as multiple processors. If you run power-hungry software that uses 100% of the CPU time, it actually shows up to Windows as using 50% time on two processors. Add in something that runs in idle mode (like the @home programs), and they see 50% unused processor time - so they go ahead and fill up that other 50% - which puts the processor's ACTUAL usage to 200% - causing everything to run at half speed.
Yes, this is an over-simplified and not-exactly-right explanation, but it's close enough to the observed reality to suffice.
In any case, turn off hyperthreading and run it again, and you'll have no, or very little, slowdown.
This is quite a setback. Now we'll never find alien life.
Think of the Aliens, please.
... it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
Agree. Only that the TFA was from kpho which is a local CBS station. I find that local CBS news are generally resort to sound bit reporting, overly sensational and generally make a big deal out of nothing.
I propose that SETI be re-purposed into STI, the search for terrestrial intelligence. The only downside is that it probably won't find much either. It sure wouldn't find this guy.
How ya like dat?
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
I thought the exact same thing. One sentence could have explained what exactly the software does.
You are approaching this from totally wrong angle.
The potential knowledge about existence or non-existence of alien lifeforms (or of ANYTHING, for that matter; except perhaps placebo in some way, but OTOH even this has quantifiable causes and effects) isn't influenced by whether or not you "believe" in them, but by actually checking the possibility (and it's not like we direct a lot of resources toward it that could go elsewhere...)
As for the motivation why we would want to do it, so many things possible here; greater understanding of Universe, of our place in it and of Earth and ourselves ultimately. Also long-term existential issues on one hand and potential for mutual benefit for the other. Some might even wish to see the likely changes it would bring to our world.
SETI@home is doing its small part in that, limited to very close stellar neighborhood and to technological civilizations that use radio waves. Even if won't find anything with this methods (which is extremely likely IMHO), it would be an important data point in answering the issues I outlined above.
BTW, why are you so skeptical about any alien life, anywhere in the Universe? Heck, even in our Solar System there are at least four candidates for extraterrestrial life (and that's when limiting ourselves to organic chemistry, basically). Given how unimaginably (really, our mind can't comprehend the vastness of space and number of stars and planets) immense the Universe is, I find the possibility that we are the only place with life extremely unlikely.
One that hath name thou can not otter
( yes, the above post of mine should start with
And why alien life and not something else
...)
And one another thing
Alright if you want it like that, why is finding mars men cool and not ghosts or something else?
Are you sure you're not trolling? Nobody seriously talks about "mars men", at least nobody at SETI. I'd guess you're more likely to find such people in their places of cult in the deserts/etc....
And ghosts...well, some people do research that. With the emphasis on research. As far as we can tell, its bollocks...
http://www.randi.org/
Left at most for psychology, neuroscience or evolutionary origins of religions.
One that hath name thou can not otter
From the http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847 article:
The dollar amount to fix the issues, including man hours to remove the software, is unknown but estimated at $1.2 million to $1.6 million. Removing the software will take several months, and should be done by the holiday break, Birdwell said.
"It's not easy to remove it," Birdwell said. "You just can't hit an uninstall button."
To find out what the problem was, Higley officials hired five technology experts to investigate. One of the technology companies, Todotech, put together a districtwide technology audit that cost $15,000. The audit was discussed Nov. 5 at a school board meeting.
Surely if it's that bad they can just wipe it and re-install, or better yet: Restore from an image! I could get the entire school done in less than a week!
At the high school I went to we had a 3D animation class running xsi softimage. It was a fun class and I eventually became the TA. I then discovered that all of the computers in the entire school district had been wired using fiber underground. This wasn't 5000 computers, but still it was a good 800 or so unused. For our 3D class most computers would be set to render and they would stay on all night. The next morning (usually over the weekend) we would come back to see if our work was done.
I had the genius idea to install the headless xsi renderfarm backend software (can't remember the name of it) on all of the computer in the district. This way the rendering could be greatly accelerated over the school district. The problem is the education license of softimage is everything the full retail version has with a limitation on multi computer rendering. After I ran tests on the software for a week planning to streamline the software into every computer, the school got a call. The xsi people called letting us know of our license restrictions. Because of this, the plan never went through. However, I never would of in a million years have foreseen a consequence like being charged 1mil because of the pissy school district.
Sometimes in the IT world when you think outside the box and it does genuinely help it only comes back to bite you in the ass regardless. *sigh*
Years ago, when S@H was new, a friend who was a sysadmin at the University of Auckland's Tamaki Campus and I installed it on all of the lab PCs. For a while our "team" was in the top ten for data returns!
Then one of the most despised academics in the CS dept at the time, Peter Dobscanyi, complained because his "distributed computing development project" ("Kalaka") was being impaired, so we had to pull the plug on our fun game.
Within a week the same fucking academic was in the top ten because he'd reinstalled S@H and was using his "team name" (whatever you call it) as an advertisement for his fucking distributed computing "development project".
(Unsurprisingly, the UoA bosses were unaware he was using their resources to sell "his" software via S@H)
The S@H guys eventually made him change his "team" name name, because advertising is/was not permitted, but he still touted his arsesucking warez via their project.
In my dreams he died a long and horrible death.
Just because of the magnitude of the role he held, the million dollars is easy to come up with. But also due to that magnitude, a million dollars is really not a big deal. When employers start holding people accountable financially like that, productivity freezes out of fear. I mean, what if when he purchased the machines, he bargained for a great deal and saved $200 on each one? Now he's even, but nobody's threatening to GIVE him that money. It's a bad path to head down - dollar for dollar liability at your job.
And besides, didn't thousands of children learn about Fourier transforms? That's got to be worth at least a few bucks per student.
http://monzy.org/seti/
"after a bit of VB coding, I had this nifty little program running on a coworker's computer (we'll call him "Klif" to protect his identity). It worked like a charm -- when I came in the next morning, Klif told me rather excitedly that his computer had discovered extraterrestrial life."
Wonder why no extraterrestrials have contacted us yet? There is no intelligence here.
Are you aware that F@H can be easily configured to: a) run as a screensaver only b) use any amount of CPU time from 1% to 100% when running constantly?
Folding@Home or any BOINC project but SETI are worth some of my PC cycles.
I thought newspapers are folding to take less space.
From the end of that article:
"...had been warned in a 2005-2006 review by then-Superintendent Joyce Lutrey and then-Business Manager Fred Stone of shortcomings in his job performance."
A big problem with education right now is that it takes at least 4 years for serious problems to get addressed in even the simplest ways. Even if you gave him a full year from the time of that review, that's three years of sitting on hands by the school district. If you thought schools were behind in technology, imagine what a school district is like when their head of technology has basically been a fraud for at least 4 years.
Has to be said
When will they start firing administrators for installing Windows!?
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence.
This is quite common practice in lots of schools. Maybe the guy wanted to investigate problems with the computer or install new needed software in the comfort of his home?
Of course, the bitch that wants to fire him in order to put her own crony into his position isn't going to tell that to the media...
4) spend the first two weeks chasing down machines that were were working fine but now do not connect to the network.
My thought was, what if the switch has mixed 100BaseT and 1000BaseT rows. I don't know what kind of wire management could be devised for a situation like that.
Their they're doing there hair.
Anyone with the tiniest amount of knowledge about SETI@Home and networks would know that the software does not pose any kind of security risk. It doesn't 'open a port allowing access to the systems' (an open inbound port) but rather an outbound connection once in a while to deliver processed work and receive a new workload.
Now, if the software indeed caused problems with the intended use of the computers, it must be removed. No discussion.But otherwise I cannot see a problem running that instead of another stupid screensaver that does nothing useful. This SETI-project is at least useful, maybe even commendable.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
It's alright for you surfing the web on a typewriter, this sort of thing isn't an issue.
At 20w extra per machine, they would add 341200 BTU's per hour those 5k pc's. Nice on winter, awful on Arizona's spring-summer. I can't think of a worst environment to learn that a hot and noisy computer classroom.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Not securing written permission to install it was his worst mistake. They would get him on court. Now, they sould fire the dumbass that put in place the policy of keeping the computers on 24h everyday. In Alaska that waste heat could have been useful, in Arizona is plainly stupid.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
The 'as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T' guy is wrong to suggest, on educational grounds, that the same behaviour would have been perfectly OK if the computers had been using power to do research on cancer. Doubtless the admin would have got the push for that too.
Newspapers aren't folding all over the country because people are looking for unbiased news... newspapers are folding because now people can search the Internet for news sources biased according to their tastes. People don't generally gravitate toward objectivity; they gravitate toward people whose subjectivity is most similar to their own (or loudest/most convincing, which believe it or not ARE synonyms).
Yes, they ARE that stupid.
They were asked "can we shut them down when not used" and were told "no".
I meant standby. Hah, yeah, it was humor- didn't mean to sound like a poser; I am a bit of a noob, never got around to memory management with DOS or any of that.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Unless you want to download the lost episodes of Top of the Pops with the beatles that were broadcasted into space between 1964-1973 I don't see the point of Seti@home
$1 million for five thousand computers......come on, even if SET@Home had completely worn down the computers that they had to replace every single computer, it would have only cost $500k.
$500,000.00 / 5000 PCs = $100.00 per PC Where are you getting new computers for $100 each? And if you had bothered to read TFA, that figure wasn't just for removing software and repairing PCs.
So the computers used some electricity. They also produced some heat. (For a dark screen, the numbers are FAPP equal.) The questions then become
1:"Did the school normally heat with electricity, or something less expensive?";
2:"Did SETI run during times when the school did not need to be heated?"; and
3:"Did SETI run when air conditioning was running?"
Obviously there is only one free-beer combination of answers.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
what if the switch has mixed 100BaseT and 1000BaseT rows. I don't know what kind of wire management could be devised for a situation like that.
Use different colors of cat6. You can use that to both separate speeds and separate subnets. (for example, red for LOPM, blue for internal LAN, grey for customer LANs)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
IT phone home...
Dear Dr Denise Birdwell,
How can you hold your head up high and call yourself a doctor of education? A doctor in any field is such because of a higher ideal of pursuing excellence and the pursuit of knowledge. It doesn't just stop with a piece of paper you can post on the wall. You might as well have received yours from an internet site. Clearly you haven't a clue as to what the meaning of doctor really is.
Using the district's computers for the search for knowledge, especially within the education system, could not be more appropriate.
You are an embarrassment, not only within your own district and the state of Arizona, but now around the world. You have amplified the international perception that Americans are weak on science. Shame on you. If anyone should be fired it is you.
***If everyone sends this email to the following recipients, the first being (Dr ;) Birdwell, there might be some action.
dbirdwell@husd.org
Cc: pcarpenter@husd.org, gland@husd.org, paul.howell@husd.org, kanderson@husd.org, dstandage@husd.org, vwhitener@husd.org, info@ostp.gov, dstine@ostp.eop.gov, rweiss@ostp.eop.gov, news-tips@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, national@nytimes.com, letters@nytimes.com