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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."
Who knew leaving a bank of computers on 24/7 costs money?
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.
I guess they're too busy allocating all their resources trying to find intelligent life in their class rooms...
That's not completely true. A computer that is idle uses less power than one at 100% cpu utilization. So it is costing the school more money for their electricity. 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.
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.
If that CPU time is being used, it has to be paid for.
We've come so far since the 60's mainframe days.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
What the hell are you talking about? How can something use the same amount of power, but emit different amounts of heat under different circumstances? Unless it has a *very* large capacitor or some other form of energy storage, or it emits radiation (light, etc), every watt used comes out as heat.
If it is getting hotter, it means it is using more power.
This is slashdot, news for nerds. Nerds don't buy computers from Best Buy. Real nerds don't ever even shop for anything at Best Buy. Best Buy is where wannabe nerds go so they can pay higher than advertised prices on products that the salespersons know little about, but they still know more than the wannabe nerds. I could go on, but I think you get the picture, and the rest of the people reading this already knew these facts.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
There's no ignorance in her remarks, she knows exactly what she is doing. I've worked at a school district in Arizona for the past 5 years and what is happening here is typical. A new superintendent comes in and wants to fill all the high paying jobs with cronies. This guy just didn't leave quietly so they trashed his reputation (they do that all the time). Arizona school districts are some of the most corrupt organizations that i've ever dealt with. BTW don't feel too sorry for him, he more than likely got his job the same way, its the way things are done here.
We're talking about school computers. Not the rig you built to play Crysis at 4096x3092 with all settings maxed. And I'm not knocking that, my rigs are self built, but most people (including schools) usually purchase pre-built computers from companies. And those pre-built machines usually have low end processors (thus using less electricity) and use the IGP. And, because of that those machines usually have lower end power supplies.
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.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Not only does the lady who fired the guy demonstrate how ignorant she is, the reporters demonstrate astounding ignorance too: http://www.fox5vegas.com/video/21785181/index.html
How the fsck do people not know about this program or not consider it research? My wife (not a technically adept person) has run this program for years and in schools, too. Ask the guy to uninstall it if it costs to much in a recession (he had approval of the previous administration to run it though!). Don't fire him because you're stupid.
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.
"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."
Very true. A computer fan spinning at 100% 24/7 is far more likely to suffer a early death due to dust and hair, as you can see from these photos:
Dust in computer
What can happen to the Computers of Pet Owners; with Dirty Pictures
Computer Killers – Pet Hair, Dust and Cigarette Smoke
If the computer is shutdown or in low power the fan isn't spinning so it's not sucking in dust and dirt.... or bugs
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"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.
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.
This depends entirely on what "resources" we are talking about.
Memory, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, as unused memory is wasted memory, but that's mainly because your system RAM will consume the same amount of power regardless of whether or not it's holding anything of value. One or multiple sticks of zeroed pages is still data that has to be stored, after all, so you might as well fill it with something (standby pages, or "disk cache" if you prefer).
CPU? That's entirely based around your willingness to pay for the greater power consumed by a loaded CPU, as well as your tolerance for the heat it would generate, and possibly the CPU's own tolerance for the heat generated if it doesn't have an adequate cooling solution (but whose fault is that?). This is, incidentally, why a processor's C-states are configurable in the BIOS, you can disable everything up to the C1 state if you damn well please, and you can even disable the SpeedStep/PowerNow functionality if you damn well please, and you can run the CPU at full utilization all the time if you damn well please, just be aware that it's going to cost you more than if you leave these things enabled, let the computer run idle when not needed, or gods forbid, shut the damned thing off.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Electricity and Heat are two very different things
True, but I'd have to say that electricity, and your understanding of electricity, are also two very different things.
Can you tell me what 17x16 is?
It's a multiplication, sir!
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
Arizona school districts are some of the most corrupt organizations that i've ever dealt with.
I assure you that Arizona doesn't have a monopoly on school corruption.
Want to hear an example of how it works in my state? There's quasi-state agencies called 'Boards of Cooperative Educational Services' (BOCES) that provide various services to the school districts that join. The theory is that shared services between districts will offer cost savings. Good theory, but it comes with a few catches. Once a district joins BOCES they can't ever leave and must continue to pay their membership dues even if they elect not to use any of the services offered.
I used to work for a company that was contracted with two local districts to supply internet services, workstations and servers. We were always able to beat BOCES by a fair margin when the annual bids rolled around. Then New York State changed the law so that the school districts couldn't receive matching funds from the state unless they went with BOCES, even if the overall cost of doing so was higher.
The internet services that we were offering were cheaper, provided more bandwidth and were eligible for a large amount of Federal funding out of the universal service fund. The internet services offered by BOCES were more expensive, provided half the bandwidth and weren't eligible for Federal funding. But the districts had to choose them anyway, because they were "cheaper" (due to the state matching funds granted exclusively to BOCES) and the fact that they were wasting their contribution dues to BOCES if it didn't use their services.
In effect, my state is subsidizing a monopoly to do a worse job for more money. In the end almost everybody loses -- the school districts, the taxpayers and the private enterprises that could offer a superior product but find themselves shut out of the market. The only winners are the employees of BOCES. Our local one happens to be staffed with ex-politicians at the administrative level and their cronies at the lower levels. Nice, isn't it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
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.
most consumer CPUs idle at ~40 watts and cap out around 95 watts under max theoretical load. That 450 watt PEAK power output is for system max load which never happens.
Yes, I know, and you want a pony. But we're better than that, aren't we? We have to be.
Maybe we should start by teaching a bit of history, starting with the Reformation and the Rennaisence.
We have had personal computers and the internet for about a decade now. A decade. We have utterly no clue how that's going to affect civilisation in the future. But do we want to look back and say "Yes, for the longest time there we could have had it all, but nobody wanted it" ?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I have been using computers for 12 years. I have never turned off my computer unless I had to upgrade a component (duh!) or I had to go away for more than 48 hours. None of the machines I used had any failures whatsoever just because being on all the time. Sure, I had a couple hard-drives which broke, because power went off unexpectedly, and also a few optical drives, but that's because I play lots and lots of DVDs and such. But motherboards, CPUs, graphics cards and memories? Zero failures. I still have a PII@400 MHz in my closet, used as a secondary backup server for my work (on a 40 GB HDD) and it is on all the time. And works.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Sounds like your state needs to look into something that Washington and Oregon (and perhaps other states) use. We call them Educational Service Districts (ESD's) and they operate in a highly entrepreneurial fashion. If a district does not like the service and/or price they are getting from one ESD, they are free "join" another ESD even if it is hundreds of miles away. They would still be in their original ESD's legislative area (determined by geography), but are not bound by their prices or policies.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
17x16? That's easy. Any self-respecting member of /. should know that 16x16 = 256. Therefore, 17x16 = 256 + 16 = 272.
No they are not.
I do work for others at about $55 / hour. Just spend the time I did on researching the unlockable Sempron/ ACC vs Athlon II 240/245/'e" version vs an Celeron E3200/core2 duo HT/VT/x64 and the boards that support the various options [ firewire, esata/sata raid, 4x240 pins slots ddr2 [ i have a lot of it , thank you ] took hours. Frys sale on this, Amazon sale on that, NewEgg sale on .. wait there is a combo deal but it only uses ddr3 . - how much more will I spend vs my own ddr2 ...
No, you won't save money.
proc & board , $100
memory, $80
case $50
power supply $30
hd $100
$360
you could buy a dual AMD/Intel for around that money and have a guarantee and have someone with tiny fingers put it together and ship it in a nice box.
I really have better things to do to try to save under $50.
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.
you have no idea what you are talking about. It is true that power output is independent of frequency but this is only in an ideal situation where the charge required to switch a transistor is zero. As the CPU frequency is increased, the time between stable outputs of each transistor in a chain must be decreased. The only way to decrease the time is to increase the rate at which the charge builds on the transistor base, this can only be increased by increasing the supply voltage. As the voltage is increased the power output increases EXPONENTIALLY for a fixed resistance (current = voltage squared divided by resistance without factoring in integrals). As for your electricity/heat thing you're just plain wrong, the supply voltage (amongst many others) are fixed. Voltage does not equal current. Voltage applied across a closed circuit results in current flowing across that same circuit. However, since the CPU is a discrete device and thus must be doing something when it is on it performs an OS specific "no-op" loop. In windows this is known as the "system idle process". This process just wastes time, it doesn't do any heavy lifting and as a result much of the CPU's hardware is left open (no current flowing across it) and thus, the total current flow is fairly low. Low current at a fixed voltage implies a very high resistance over the whole circuit which is analogous of parallel circuitry in which a number of the circuits are open. If current is not flowing through your CPU it certainly isn't flowing through your power supply either, and your utility provider certainly isn't counting it as used.
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.
I've worked in cluster computing for quite some time (though I don't admin them anymore, still work in an HPC shopt). Know when you get lots of nodes on a cluster failing? When you power it down. Some percentage won't come back up. Same with disk arrays.
We dread electrical work in the building.
Seriously, power cycling computers is bad for them.
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.
Q. Do I need permission from my employer to run SETI@home on computers at work?
A. Yes! Of course! We've been saying that for 10 years, and despite what some bloggers have said, Niesluchowski wasn't the first person to lose his job over this. The first time was many years ago.
This should have been the beginning and end of the Q&A. Regardless of the relative merits of SETI@Home or what it does or doesn't do to a computer or network, the bottom line is pretty simple: Install unauthorized software on computers that aren't yours and you get spanked.
A public school can't "write off" an expense. Only a private company or individual can write something off--i.e., count it toward a tax deduction. For the school board, the money comes out of tax revenues.
.sig withheld by request
This sad truth will continue to occur until intelligent, capable people begin to devote their lives toward the education of our children.
She loves teaching but has had to go back to graduate school in order to escape the bullshit pay... You want good teachers? Fucking pay them.
My impression is that, even if you go back to grad school, you're still not going to be paid anywhere near what you'd get paid if you went and got a job in industry with that same masters or PhD. As long as our society expects bright people to suck it up if they want to teach, we're not going to get as many of them to teach as we'd like.
Of course, I still don't understand why we require teachers to have a bachelors or masters degree to teach grade school, or why schools need so damn many administrators and experts to "optimize" the teaching process.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
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.
That's my justification for running SETI/Folding@Home. I only run them in the winter, and I almost never have to turn on the heat in my apartment.
Unless the school is (a) being heated with electricity and (b) not having to *cool* its computer labs, this is untrue.
Electrical resistance heating is a terrible waste of high-grade energy.
If you *were* to want to heat with electricity, a heat-pump would give you two or three times the heat for the same electrical input. (And thus $$$, CO2 emissions, etc.)
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
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.
I love the part in "It's a Wonderful Life" when you sucker punch George Bailey and Martini kicks you out of his bar. You were totally believable.
Not everyone believes SETI is real science - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI#Criticism
I'd love to, but none of the schools around here have courses in fucking for me to teach.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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
With BOINC , you can easily set the amount of system resources that will be used , so you don't have to use 100% is the systems resources.
The point is , it's the schools money , and so it's their choice what they do with it .
Personally , i think this is a great opportunity for schools :
- the distributed computing project benefits from it , so they might make mention of the school on there sites . ...
- it has some educational value : students will be interested in it , it can be discussed at classes , etc
But in the end , it's their call.
Slipping shoelaces ?
This was the technology supervisor. So you're right, "it's their call," and I believe this guy is arguing that he was the "they." It appears now that some other committee is, retroactively, trying to decide otherwise.
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.
Unfortunately, waste heat comes at 1:1 efficiency, while most buildings are heated with 4:1 or better heat-pumps, so, while the waste heat is offsetting some of the heating costs, that only forgives about 25% of the cost.
If you're paying to cool the building, then the waste heat makes things much worse...
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.
Wow, does NC have a super low cost of living?
Move to NJ
I work at in a school district and I just pulled it up on http://php.app.com/edstaff/search.php
The numbers vary depending on subject taught and grade level.
There is a HS Biology teacher with a BS and 7 years experience making 77k.
On the lower side there is a health/gym teacher with a BS and 7 years experience making 45k.
I can't speak for the average school department; but at the school department that I am familiar with, the standard computer of choice is the off-lease-refurb GX620. $200 a pop, monitor and peripherals included. Boring, but homogeneous and easily fast enough for all but specialized uses.