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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."
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.
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?!
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.
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.