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SETI@home Project Responds To School Firing
SETIGuy writes "SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has responded to many of the allegations made by Higley Unified School District administrator Denise Birdwell regarding the difficulties caused by the installation of SETI@home, which led to the recent firing of the school's technology supervisor. One of the project's founders, David Gedye, takes issue with Dr. Birdwell's claim that 'an educational institution ... cannot support the search for E.T.' Meanwhile, the fired supervisor denies misusing school computers."
From TFA: '"Unfortunately it says a lot about people who are theoretically educating our children," said Dave Farber, distinguished career professor of computer science and public policy in the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon.'
It seems that the folks who are in charge of education become further and further detached from technological advancement as time goes on. These are the same individuals who are given access to technology for use in the classrooms and barely use it for more than a glorified typewriter. Add to that those who refuse to utilize the technology either out of ignorance (don't know how to use it) or fear (refuse to know how to use it), you have a large number of classrooms with expensive space heaters.
Since it is winter now, if anyone uses electric resistance heat, then I can't see it mattering much if they use seti@home or folding@home. Electric heat is electric heat, and I doubt the fact that your also getting a few calculations done with it is going to matter much. Of course, if your primary heat source is anything other than electric resistance heating then it is going to cost you money. For instance, a heat pump might manage to add three units of heat to a house for 1 unit of energy, since it is pulling that energy from outside. This is in contrast to electric resistance heat which is pretty much 100% efficient, well, except for the heat your wires give off in your walls, since that heat may be partially lost to outside, depending on the location of the walls...
This is also why I used to care less when I left the basement lights on at my parents house in the winter, since we were using electric heat at the time, and, the lights, were little more than little electric heaters... I've upgraded the furnace to a 16 SEER heat pump a few years back, which of course makes things like lights left on matter quite a lot now. My only regret is not knowing that the sound of the heat pump running is actually somewhat annoying, which might be a factor in where people decide to place them. Of course, if your really planning for the long term, then a ground source heat pump, might help with that as well (as opposed to an air source heat pump).
It could also lessen the life of the computer. A computer that is shutdown at night would likely last longer than one crunching numbers every night.
This is completely false and has been proven with reams of empirical data. Keeping a computer running 24/7 give a longer useful lifetime than shutting a computer down every night. It's a lot easier on the machine to keep it running and warm with a constant feed of power than it is to subject it to cold starts and sudden jolts of electricity... all of which drastically shorten the lifespan of many parts inside the computer.
Add to the fact that even if a CPU had a certain number of "hours" in a pool that it could be used before it failed - the number would be so big as to be rendered completely irrelevant by the fact that the computer would be so obsolete and useless by the time the CPU failed that it would have been long discarded anyway. Even if you lessen a CPU with a 15 year lifespan by 30% by keeping it running, do you really think you're going to be using a 10.5 year old computer? In this day and age it's possible but highly unlikely.
"Real" nerds buy their computers... off the shelf and then quickly head off to using their computer to develop, write, model, proof, design, etc. things that are actually interesting and/or difficult.
The days are so far long gone when building your own box was a qualification for being a nerd (somewhat sadly, but only somewhat.) Now it is a qualification for being a factory worker, producing cheaply assembled and cheaply purchased commodities.
"Don't fire him because you're stupid."
Agreed. Have they thought how much it'll cost to replace him? He's been there 10+ years, he built the network they're on, he knows everything there is to know about the system, how do you replace that? They're probably going to hire whoever pretends to know what they're doing the most and get nothing done. How do you know the next guy won't do something far worse? This is a witch hunt that will end up costing the school district hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of embarrassment.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Memorizing a 10x10 table is certainly an indicator of intelligence. After all, it requires a lot of brain power to memorize 7*9. Can you tell me what 17x16 is?
The school should take pride in assisting with research and promote itself on the idea that it is the leading school in searching for alien life on other planets.
Really? Russian roulette is perfectly safe. I've just pulled the trigger five times and nothing has...
.sig withheld by request
No, you can't beat Best Buy's prices (on sale in-store items or HP machines). What you can beat is the components. By doing it yourself, you get to pick everything, so instead of having just one decent component in a heap of crap, you can have all moderate components that match up in capabilities. No point in having a 3 ghz quad-core machine with 8 GiBs of RAM if it's old, slow ram on a 400 mhz bus. And no sneaky 1 GiB of video ram on an integrated chipset that's robbing from the 8 slow system GiBs.
Instead everything will match up with no bottlenecks for your intended application, and a quiet power supply, but in a flimsy, but adequate case with sharp corners that's a little too big aesthetically.
But you're not going to save money. Get that idea out of your head.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think SETI@home is great and all, but it sounds like the school board didn't authorize this person to install the software on the machines in question. Whatever the pros and cons are in the abstract, he shouldn't have unilaterally decided to do this. It does cost money to run CPUs at 100% (the SETI@home FAQ estimates over $60 a year) and if there were thousands of machines running it, as there apparently were, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. Maybe the school district wants to spend its money on that, but it should be decided by the board, not by one employee.
.sig withheld by request
Yeah...we've come so far, that we're looping back around. This time, the Internet is your connection and Google's servers are your mainframe. Cloud Computing: The way of the future!
It isn't so much the application to find E.T. that astounds me, its the use of a distributed networking. I don't follow SETI, but I assume the power they have in distributed computing is something like or above a Super Computer. The students can learn about distributed computing, and maybe be the guy who builds the next big network. I mean, imagine a commercial system that pays for processing. So you turn your computer and get paid by the team. The team in turn gets paid by scientists with very difficult problems and need distributed computing.
Don't focus on it being "searching for aliens", focus on it being "distributed computing".
God spoke to me.
I don't know how you think that you won't save money. If you bother to go actually research this then you'll find you're wrong. I'm looking into buying a new computer and all the parts on newegg are cheaper than anything remotely comparable pre-built.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
17x16? That's easy. Any self-respecting member of /. should know that 16x16 = 256. Therefore, 17x16 = 256 + 16 = 272.
Unfortunately in the world of reality, the difference between Idle and Used CPU is at the very least money. My computer idles at ~180W use. When it's at 100% CPU, it's closer to 450W use.
If that CPU time is being used, it has to be paid for.
Well unless its summer time (when schools are closed) and the school is far enough north you could just think of these PCs running SETI@home as electric heaters. 100% of the energy they use is being turned to heat, so some/all (depending on the schools regular heating system) of the cost of running SETI@home can be subtracted from the heating costs.
This sad truth will continue to occur until intelligent, capable people begin to devote their lives toward the education of our children. Unless that happens, the majority of our public educators will forever be the people who couldn't pass math because they weren't able to figure out their calculator.
Bullshit, my wife is a teacher here in NC. Been teaching for 7 years now and she makes under 35k a year and spends 60+ hours a week at school. She loves teaching but has had to go back to graduate school in order to escape the bullshit pay, no planing period, no assistant and the ridicules paper work. Why don't you go become a fucking teacher and take care of 20 to 30 children with little to no help from anyone for less than what you could make at Wendy's flipping burgers...
You want good teachers? Fucking pay them. Not the text book companies or all the other leeches.. Pay the fucking teachers.
My time is more valuable than the minimal savings gained by assembling a computer myself. I'd rather spend it learning something interesting, not twiddling with SATA cables or burn testing memory chips. I've put enough together to know that it's about as complicated as legos and it no longer qualifies anyone for a "geek" card. A qualification for intelligence? Whatever, my 8 year old nephew assembled his own computer. Congratulations, you are as smart as a 3rd grader.
It doesn't. It saves money. Computer failures are much more likely as a result of regular power cycling than extended use, and the cost of parts replacement and down time far outweighs the cost of powering them regularly in low power mode.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Nope, all energy in the universe is eventually converted to heat. In case of your CPU, computations are just an intermediate step of that conversion. By making the silicon more efficient you are just reducing the rate at which electricity is converted to heat inside your particular computer.
If there were so many resources squandered over a decade then the loss should have been apparent immediately. Since this fellow adequately managed the school districts IT resources all of this time, then clearly he should be the best judge of the demand. And since he works for executives and a school board that are responsible for the oversight of all resources, then either Seti@Home had little or no noticeable impact on the operations, or else it would have been an issue in a few weeks. To say that after 10 years of complete oblivion that now suddenly, this is grounds for dismissing a 10 year veteran, is total and complete political bull pucky. These ego-maniacal incompetent power trippers are simply embarrassed at the fact that they were completely clueless about their school districts involvement in something clearly present in any search engine: Their network listed as the number one seti@home support. Clearly this is an educational usage, was not an embezzlement of resources, and contributed to a very credible UC Berkeley experiment. One must bear in mind that when Seti@Home was first released that its appeal was how it functioned as an internet wide application that utilizes unused CPU headroom. That concept does pertain to IT management of resources, irregardless of merit of alien white noise. I think these jokers showed exactly how clueless you have to be in order to fix a decade long IT problem by firing the guy who demonstrated that its clearly not a problem.
Or maybe public school in America isn't really about education, in most places.
How about we break up the family by pressuring the mother in to working outside the home, either by putting an extreme tax the husband's wages, or showering her with propaganda which implies a woman's traditional role in the home is some form of vile repression -- chains from which she must liberate herself.
With mother and father out of the way, working long hours, we can send the children to a state institution where they will be "educated". While they will receive perfunctory instruction in reading and writing, the primary sociological function of this institution is to indoctrinate the children with the state's version of history, to teach them obedience to authority, and to condition them to view agents of the state as authority figures. Ideally the child will come to view the state as a kind of surrogate parent, since they will likely spend more time in our institution than they will with their parents.
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
Teaching people ways to break down problems into smaller problems, ones that they are hopefully more familiar with, is one of the most important things you can teach someone. I keep doing this with a young friend of mine who frequently asks "how can you do that in your head?" because it seems impossibly hard to her. I've watched her gradually learn to do it herself... it's a very rewarding feeling to see her get better and better at it. And it's amazing that she was never taught this in public school.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
to elaborate: the GP implied that this happens because the board are religious nuts, while the one objectively bordering superstition is the guy that searches fo ET.Or, at least it finds an insane pleasure in being in the top crunchers list.
I have a 1 ghz Pentium M that surfs the web just as good as whatever shrine to video games you have on your desk. Why is it that Slashdot is so over run with a bunch of know nothings anymore?
Distributed cancer research wouldn't be here if it weren't for SETI.