Slashdot Mirror
Seti@Home Now Has Teams
Madoc writes "Was just over at Seti@Home's site, and saw that they've introduced teams now! There are 2 Slashdot teams, we should probably standardize on one:
Slashdot.org
and
Team Slashdot "
I vote for Team Slashdot. Go seek out new intelligence if
this rocks your boat better than cracking DES keys.
Two points:
1. The statistics for CPU time for Windows 9x include the time it is staying minimized in a System Tray doing nothing.
2. To speed up processing time in Windows 9x dramatically (about 3x in my experience), turn on screen blanking in the screen saver properties.
Account maintenance should be finished soon.
-Peter of the SETI@home team
Run it in screensaver mode and configure it to blank the screen. It goes 3 times faster when it's not bothering to draw the pretty pictures.
Sure, but I think that the rc5 project has already proven it's point. Even if we do finally finish rc64, all we will have proven is that it is crackable, but that it takes even distributed computing a really long time with today's technology, but I think that this point has already been adequately proven already by distributed.net. If they do finally crack the rc64 challenge, I don't really think it will add to that point at all. I think that it is already understood now that it can be cracked, and that the average time it would take to do so is really just a fairly simple mathematical exercise complicated only by unknowns like the increase in processing power from year to year, and how many people participate as time goes on. Actually doing it at this point holds little more point than the prize money in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I think this was a vital project when it began, I just think that it accomplished what it needed to do, that's all. Now if they ever get their OGR stuff going, I might be tempted to switch back to work on that for a while, but for now I'm sticking with SETI.
Shawn Asmussen
Suppose you're a government agency, and you get hold of some important encrypted data. No problem -- just dump the key into the seti@home processing queue. Instant free cycles from enthusiastic geeks all over the country, of whom many are privacy advocates who've been participating in various distributed cracking challenges over the years in attempts to protest your authoritarian policies. O, sweet irony.
Dan Wineman
Which one of the two systems is more useful? Distributed.net or Seti? I think Seti wins between those two... Though, isnt there another one of these types of things that looks for extremely large prime numbers? That one is probably the most useful out of them all.
We've also got a Team on SETI@home. You can find out info about it, along with tips on optimising your SETI@home client software on the Club Team homepage.
Enjoy,
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
I have an AMD K6 233 Mhz, a P166, and a 486. I've been running rc5des on my AMD K6 and was running SETI@Home on the P166 and 486. I noticed the P166 and 486 seemed really lagged when connecting to them (even though they where connected via 10BaseT Ethernet). When doing a top, SETI@Home was using majority of CPU (how suprising), but a LOT of RAM too. This was on both machines, which really seemed to suprise me. On my AMD K6, rc5des was using almost no RAM.
Has anyone else noticed this? I'd like to know to see if it's just me or not. Because if it's not, I can wait for new clients and hope that the RAM usage is less.
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But the nice thing about Linux is that you can bolt the program down so tightly (separate user, chroot) so that it cannot do any damage - it'll never find my pornography or any of my other dirty secrets ;-) (hmm, me reaches for the man chroot command anyway)
Having said that I think it's not really feasible for these guys to give out the source code, because it allows malicious people to write something that'll send fake packets back saying "okay - I've found nothing". This would be a grossly irresponsible thing to do but I wouldn't rule out a cheat who would want to bump up the team's "block count" up a little or religious fanatics whose beliefs depend on there being nothing out there. Security through obscurity, perhaps, but I can't think of any other way of protecting against cheats.*
Despite that I'm still a little irked off about it myself as I'm forced to sit behind a non-transparent proxy and twiddle my thumbs with a cluster of about ~16 decent machines that are just itching to join in the search for extraterrestrial life. If only I had the source I could have written that proxy bit myself already!
*By the way it's probably only a matter of time before someone actually reverse engineers the program. Security through obscurity has always ended in tears.
I second that.
;^)
Team Slashdot, we find aliens and crash wussy webservers.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
My Pentium-II 300 takes an average of 40 hours of CPU time to process a block running NT. I noticed that i686-pc-linux, the average time is about 11 hours. All of the average linux times are faster.
Is the linux client faster? Or are linux users just running faster computers? Maybe it's all the graphics the Win/Mac versions draw that slow them down.