Slashdot Mirror
Team Slashdot leads SETI@Home
Rowag writes "Team Slashdot leads all the groups in SETI@Home data evaluation, with over 500 members and more than 6000 result packets chewed up so far. If it helps your team spirit, that's more than 2x the amount from 'Microsoft'. Those of you already signed up, let's keep those packets coming! For those that missed it before, if you've got clock cycles to spare, check it out!
" I hear there is is still a split and a redundant
Slashdot.org team- I suggest we just make this one official
so we can get more of a lead...
Fine. Run it as non root and chrooted.
rc5 rocks. i'm keeping my (well, not really *my* but close enough) little cluster of ancient AIX boxes doing rc5. As cool as the possibility of alien life is, it's not gonna have any short term effects on my life. encryption is an issue that needs much more short term attention... but i encourage everyone else doing rc5 to switch to seti so i can rise up the ranks... nah, on second thought, let's kill rc5. =)
nugget is my hero!
>Unfortunately it seems that the SETI@home team should've done a bit
>more testing before starting the project.
A completely unfair assessment. You're assuming, like a lot of posts I've seen on this topic, that the SETI@HOME project is intended to a) provide amusement and b) give Joe Random Hacker a lottery slot at immortality. WRONG.
The purpose of the project is to analyze the data, perhaps to get lucky and find evidence of intelligent life. So far, the project seems to be fulfilling the scientific requirements just fine. The clients aren't fscking up people's machines; if they fail, the worst outcome seems to be that a person doesn't get credit for the packet they let their spare CPU cycles analyze. And, dear dear, some packets are getting analyzed by more than one person! (Last I heard, before acceptance, most scientific experiments are repeated numerous times by different people. Oh, the unfair drudgery.)
Meanwhile, they are fixing reported problems, probably in the order of priority: scientific requirements first, team ranking silliness last.
If I may be permitted an opinion here: BIG WHOOP.
Get a grip, people!
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I think there are a lot of people missing the point with Seti@Home.
I fail to see how it's a "race". Chances are, and the chances are great, that nothing will come of this. No new ET signals are going to be found.
We, and I mean humans, need to see that instant result or we get bored.
Wait about a year when nothing new has come of this and see how many people are willing to continue running the program.
I will.
Could you name the huge, expensive satellites that SETI is using? The bulk of SETI's work is done with Earth-based radio telescopes that they either lease time on, use at academic institutions, or own outright. Or if SETI uses, for example, observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope, does that mean that the huge Hubble bill is all for the benefit of SETI? :-)
The bottom line is, again, that SETI is privately funded and it has been for quite some time. The funding for SETI was taken away in 1993 by an amendment written by Nevada Senator Richard Byran. (And at that time, SETI funding was less than one tenth of one percent of NASA's budget!) Complaining about SETI is like complaining about Jerry Seinfeld owning dozens of Porsches. They've got the money, it's not yours, and they can do what they want with it.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Well, this is probably a troll, but what the hell ..
.. you've got some issues of your own to work through, I'm afraid.
#1.) The probability of intelligent life "evolving" (let alone more than once within the range of minimal detectable signal strength of the SETI satellites) is statistically absurd.
Elaborate. People often point out that in any advanced society, "radio will be a short-lived phenomenon", and then demonstrate that we are rapidly moving towards digital communications. This is true. These same people conclude, then, that looking for alien EM signals is a waste of time. These same people neglect to mention, however, that even if all of our communications were digital, the Earth would still be very radio-noisy; the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) is detectable for well beyond a thousand light-years. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we can go without BMEWS just yet.
#2.) If God had created intelligent life elsewhere and there was any chance of we humans finding it, don't you think he'd have let us know?
Sigh. Let us know how? Through the Bible? This is the same book that states that the value of pi is three (see I Kings 7:23), that the entire universe is between six and eight thousand years old, and that the Earth itself is the center of the universe and does not move (witness Joshua commanding the Sun to "stand still.")
The Bible may be many things, but a science book it is not; Biblical literalists who would have people ignore science by sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly shouting "is not!!" are completely missing the boat. If you honestly believe in a God that will send you to hell for using the brains, curiosity, and common sense that you were given, well
#3.) Even if there was ETI, who says it would broadcast its existance via EM radiation?
See above. Who says that it wouldn't?
My advice:
Okay, here's some of my own:
Stop complaining. SETI's efforts are not using any of your resources, time, or tax dollars. You have absolutely no right to whine about what other people decide to do with the idle CPU cycles on their own machines. You do have the right to believe that SETI and its purpose are silly, and you can express that belief by choosing not to participate in SETI@Home.
Beyond that, why do you care? If you're right, then how has SETI@Home negatively affected you? Does it "chap your ass" (as Palmer Joss put it in Contact) that people are participating in an effort that you have some deep-seeded religious objections to?
If so, please ignore it.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Yup, read the FAQ.
They can increase the amount of data available to process by getting a second recorder.
MY response is only to #2...
/HUMANITY/, alien cultures anmd lifeforms would be highly irrelevant.
Why would God tell us about life on some far away planet? You can say that there are no "aliens" because they aren't in the Bible. however, the Bible is only God's instructions for
(More importantly, it's just darned ARROGANT to assume that humanity is the ONLY form of intelligent life in existance)
As one of the members of the Microsoft team, part of the reason might be because a lot of the people I know running the client are running it on their "test box", usually a P133 or something in that neighbourhood, since that's the box that gets the least use. I'd install it on my dev box, too, but I've found it's a bit disruptive at times. *sigh*
4. su; rm -rf
it is beyond me how someone who believes in 'GOD' can denounce the possibility that there is alien life out there
I find it superbly ironic as it's simply to tell how clueless you are by looking at your second sentance...
Tell me, just how does varying the load of your CPU reduce the KWPH that your computer consumes?
Last time I checked, never on a conventional PC.
If you contest that their client is poorly coded, then say so and why. Otherwise, you are wasting just as much bandwidth ;-)
ufdraco
Last time I looked, there were over 525,000 people registered, and the average processing time for one 250,000 byte work unit is currently just under 40 hours (My P350 does one in about 20 hours). So, that works out to about .00625 MB per computer per hour. With 525,000 people registered, that's at least 3281.25 MB per hour being processed, or 78750 GB per day. More than twice as much data as they're pulling in from Arecibo. Of course, that's assuming all the computers are working on it 24 hours per day, but I'll bet most every computer is putting in at least 12 hours of CPU time on this per day. So, we're already processing the data faster than they are taking it in._ __________________________
____________________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough
Be sure to add WebTV's totals to MS. I think MS
is cheating to capture the medium size company
lead with WebTV, but that's just uninformed opinion
It doesn't have to be *any* (/all) off-world
intelligence, just some.
But I agree, there are better things to do.
Even for those keen on the cosmos. Like, say,
going to mars?
Nobody saw that their were two Slashdot teams!
Number one and ten! Hum, the numbers look good to me! Add both of those totals, and I highly doubt M$ can touch "this".
Well, I've got mprime and rc5 running, with rc5 at a niceness of 16, and mprime at 19. It works out to about 70/30 % of CPU time when nothing else is running.
...the spare cycles of on Sun Enterprise 5500 box I have at work. Yum, 6 processors.
(For people who don't want to bother with the link, it goes to a page that gives a brief discussion of shortwave numbers stations.)
So far, the only rumor that links Seti@home with numbers stations is your posting here. There hasn't been anything in the recent past on sci.astro. Care to provide any more details? (Other than random paranoia, that is.)
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Notice how many top twenty spikes after the first week ?
Damn, svinto knocked me out of first place. :)
:)
I'm running seti@home on 35 UltraSparcs, an Enterprise 3500, and a few Pentium II's. I'm afraid to find out about svinto's configuration!
Jason.
We've got RC5, the Mersenne Primes and SETI@Home. How much longer do you think it will be before "mainstream" charities and projects get into the distributed client thing?
I can just see it now - 50% of all clock cycles wordwide will be running a distributed client for the computer owners' favorite charities.
Mark Edwards
-----------------------------------
Proof of sanity forged upon request
The update engine at setiathome has not been working correctly for at least a week. You'll find that individual totals don't come close to team totals. So, although Slashdot may be listed as number one, it's entirely possible that it is not.
Indeed, there are far more people participating than there is data to be processed. The site has already announced that they are re-sending data from a two or three day period to be processed again.
This is an interesting project, and I was involved early on with the Linux client. I don't believe that the organizers had any idea of how explosive the participation was going to be. I suppose that some people may perceive that as a bad thing (from a planning point of view), but I'm encouraged by it...besides, the Windows-based application has a cool looking screen saver!
Burning bushes are more likely to get the attention of the fire brigade.
A booming voice from the sky? ("But a booming voice from the sky is exactly what you've found, Doctor Arroway!" - from the film Contact)
Maybe he'd seed people with the inspiration of old-time explorers, driving them with a passion to listen, to search, to share that passion with others. And that is exactly what you're seeing: Carl Sagan's "Contact" (film & book). SETI@Home. The SETI League. Home-made SETI kits. A drive to share and explore, that is almost unrivalled.
My advice:
1. Don't kill SETI@Home. Kill the tamagotchi server, instead.
2. Shut off the X-Files, unless it's first or second-season episode re-runs. Those were the best. Put in a Sapphire & Steel video, instead.
3. Dip your motherboard in liquid helium, seriously overclock it, and run RC5 as an extra process.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Didn't someone get a spectrograph of liquid water from one of the nearby star systems? I think it was Alpha Centuri. (but that could be my mind playing tricks on me)
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
If there is a god, I don't understand why he would create this HUGE universe, and stick the only life on this little green and blue rock out in the corner of it.
Astronomers are finding more and more planets, all close to us. I would say the chances of there being life out there to be very good. Should I remind you that there are billions of stars out in our own galaxy alone?
Whose to say that there hasn't been signals traveling for hundreds or thousands of years and haven't yet reached us? The possibilities are endless.
X-Files is on soon.. don't want to miss it.
Repeat, this is not a collaborative computing project. This is a scientific project that uses collaborative computing.
The point is to analyze the data, not "let as many people help as want".
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It's a shame that they won't keep HP-UX up to date. The utilities, etc. could really use some work. Maybe, there are fewer exploits because HP-UX is being used less ?
At this very moment thousands (count 'em), that's right - THOUSANDS! of ET signals are crisscrossing our airwaves (and I'm not counting Smooth Jazz 101.9)...We just don't have an antenna sensitive enough- yet! Peace...
Hey me too!
CPU keeps my room warm now...
Here before all but 8486 of you.
I've been looking for Seti@home's dark purpose for quite a while now.. The output of the client is random, *MOST* of the blocks i've captured (NFR is fun) are EXACTLY the same, yet the client jitters it's numbers..
This is not what it seems to be..
Why does Slashdot even need a team?
Why not show some loyalty to your OS. Join Team Linux or Team FreeBSD and unify to show what a real OS can do?
Vanity....
From the top spikes page:
99998.820312 07ja99aa.2837.2844.396572.205 Mon May 17 16:19:11 1999
LastActionTubby
99998.703125 07ja99aa.2837.2844.396572.205 Fri May 14 23:47:06 1999
GlyRS-Work
Which one is more/less accurate ?
It's depressing that lack of source would give you the motivation to sabotage the work of thousands of people. I would argue that if the lack of an open source disributed computing project offends you to the point of action, then that action should be starting one and not simply attacking a group you disagree with.
Sabotaging a closed-source project like SETI or distributed.net will NOT prove your point. If you truly wish to show that distributed computing can be done in an open source manner, then the only course of action before you is to do just that.
The logical flaw in your argument is that you appear to be implying that if source were available then there would be no motivation for sabotage. This simply isn't true. There will always be malicious people intent on destruction.
For every person skilled enough to hack the binary, there are many more who would love to sabotage a project but cannot because they lack the sufficient skills to do so without source.
By raising the bar for sabotage, you restrict the set of people capable of sabotage to a group who (I would hope) are less likely to feel so motivated.
Nobody is arguing that closed-source is perfect security. If that's the point you wish to prove, then don't bother. We all know that already.
If your argument is that since some people can sabotage the project, we should just give up and allow everyone that opportunity, then I'm afraid I must disagree with that analysis.
If your argument is that it's possible to trust the work done by an open source client, then you're half-way there. All you have to do now is show us all how.
intelligence of poster: 2/10
effectiveness of troll: 3/10 (counting this reply)
overall troll value: minimal
sorry, please try again
TURN OFF THAT DAMNED DISPLAY. I did some tests on my pentium 100 which I installed WinBlows 95 on. [similar to MacClient in a way] and the Win Client. With the Screen Saver [the fancy graph on] it took almost 162.9 hours to do a datablock. While 52 hours for aboslutely no fancy graph. The fancy graph is one huge resource sucker.
No, I have completed a bunch of data blocks and as far as I can remember every single one has been from Jan 8. Is it a good idea to have 500,000 people doing the work of 50? It's absurd and SETI should tell us what's going on.
I just find it interesting that the average time a Slashdotter takes to chew through a block is 17.5 hours, and for Microsoft's team it's just shy of 29. That's gotta hurt them. :)
They mention on their web site that multiple clients may be working on the same chunk of data in order to cooberate results. If you keep shutting down the client and restarting it, it's no wonder it will assign you one you may have seen before - but aborted. SETI@home realizes that with the number of computers working on the process, they'll end up out of fresh data to give out, which is why they're duplicating it. I personally think it's a good idea.
Heh. That would explain my 60 workunits recieved and 2 returned statistics. Maybe the stats are perfectly correct on the web page after all. lol
I wonder if they classify the units processed by the first version of the software differently. They were probably just being tossed out the window until you upgraded to version 1.1
I have a few computers running the seti@home client and i have YET to see ANY other units other then from Jan 8. Nice to know all that CPU time and power that costs $$$ went to good use...
I have to return some videotapes...
Sure, it can be done without the source code, but it's a lot harder. Why give out the source code and make cheating easier?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have been thinking about this and I thought of the same idea. Everyone puts a generice client on their computers and then they just get the plug-in of their favorite nerdy cause and wham! Instant super computer.
Of course, the evil spin is this, some country like China mandates or offers prizes to people who run the generic client on their PC. Then whom ever's PC is responsible for the solution (What ever it is) gets a billion Dong (Or whatever it is). Then China does not need to get super computers from the US. In 10 years, %5 or %10 of the population (A HUGH amount) will have PC's and they can tap into that big pool of spare CPU's.
Linux O Muerte!
Me too. Go Team Slashdot go!
Cara Hart chart@eNOSPAMfurn.com Systems Administrator eFurn.com, LLC. and ARITEK Systems, Inc.
All this work to get a bitmap of the triple breasted whore from eroticon six...
When it comes to the SETI client, I think the people who did this project had no idea that this many people would be in it. I heard an interview with one of the head SETI organizers about a year ago and they sounded like the 100,000 mark was what they would get. Now, with 250,000 people running this thing, and growing, they bit off more than they can chew.
Here is their chance to show that they can manage the project or they will fail. Who will run the client if everyone cruchs the same data blocks because they screwed up?
Linux O Muerte!
According to their site there is more than 530,000 people running the client now
Finding out how to cheat may be a bit more difficult without the source, but you can't be serious thinking you are "proofed" against it that way.
Actually, there are some rumors floating around that this project has not much to do with finding extraterrestial life and quite a bit to do with this.
It's worth checking out.
Who are you cracking numbers for? Good question.
Whoops, that should have been 78.750 GB per day._ ___________________________
___________________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that SETI@home's half million participants are currently being assigned the same 115 work units over and over again, all from three different sky locations collected on January 7 and 8. If anyone has seen any other work units recently -- especially from January 9 or later -- please speak up.
According to their web page, they are having problems with their "data pipeline" and that they hope to have it "fixed shortly".
I was going to say something about that too, but I figured I was just stupid. That is very odd, I wonder why they keep doing that, it's really pointless. If they just continue this w/o an explanation I'm just going to stop processing data until they fix this problem. Very strange.
O.K.,
Go to their web site and click on Groups. Then click on clubs and then Team Slashdot and then Join this group.
Better yet, just click HERE
Porn's a lot bigger consumer of bandwidth. I suggest you go after the big targets first.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
very good, except that if ET was phoning us in a different part of the spectrum we're still screwed, b/c we just checked a small part of the spectrum over and over again
So you are implying that at any given point in time there are more unfixed exploits available for crackers to use on Linux system than on a HPUX system.
I don't buy this. Thing is that HP does not go out there and advertize that someone found exploit X or exploit Y until they have fixed it. CERT may make announcements that HP does not have a fix at this time, but I believe that HP, Sun, or any other Unix vendor knows about more exploits than CERT warns about. Just because Linux users are more "open" and admit problems right away instead of trying to keep them secret does not mean that it's less secure.
reverse solidus is right. Why do you think everyone was in an uproar over the clipper chip and it's SKIPJACK algorithm? Sure, some people were upset because of the backdoor put in there but true security people were more upset because they would not share the algorithm with the encryption community so that they could verify it's integrity. In fact, they went so far as to use a chip manufacturing process that was resistive to reverese engineering so that someone couldn't pick apart the chip and get the algorithm.
It's one thing for some people to agree with the government about key escrow but quite another for most to trust the government about the relative security of the algorithm.
Hell, on who's bill are you running up the load of 35 UltraSparcs?... ahhh rescinded... if they're not yours I hope you get away with it! ;->
just what would I do with that many spare boxes?
Hell... I'd Beowulf em and maybe start my AI research idea...
or... Beowulf seti?
too bad no source... wondering about a beowulf SETI@home client, could it be more efficient?
Unfortunately it seems that the SETI@home team should've done a bit more testing before starting the project.
I'm not quite sure how you test a project with 500,000 users (5x the original estimate). Even simulation won't tell you everything.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
What the hell is this "RC5" that the doomsayers keep refering to? I for one am enjoying this even if I don't find "ET". Just the fact that so many people are in league across our world contributing to this project is reward enough. It's great to see and paints a better picture of our future. Now, if only I could be added to the Team Slashdot roster already..I think they are having problems with their user database. I'm still waiting.... ;)
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
I just joined. Go team.
I know that Linux probably is the fastest platform out thare, but I did my best to sharpen my iMac to the fullest.. That included minimizing time doing graphics witch do take a lot of time.
Here's what I did:
1) Used a tool named Peek-a-Boo to make SETO@Home run och "high" CPU-usage, instead of "normal" witch seem to be standard setting for every Mac-program. I guess I put SETI@Home not to be very 'nice'.
2) I changed my monitor settings to 800x600, 16-bit
3) Made SETI@Home go to blank screen after 1 minute (shortest time available)
4) Put all SETI@Home-data on a RAM-disk. I would've put SETI@Home on the same RAM-disk if I didn't require it running from the startup-volume so it would function as a screensaver and blank the screen.
5) Started SETI@Home and quitted every other running process, inkluding the Finder, with the help of Peek-a-Boo.
With all of that i was able to lower time per package from about 28h to just about 18h.
Quite nice for a 233MHz iMac I think.. If people who run SETI@Home on their 450MHz blue/white G3s did the same I guess they would effectively cut my time/package by half, especially since those macines got double the amount of back-side cache witch seem to speeden thnigs up a bit.
Hardware: iMac, rev B, 233MHz, 64MB RAM, 512 kB cache, MacOS 8.6.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Rember all the teror in the world.
Rember all the suffering of young children.
Rember all the pain.
I like the whole idea of evelution.
The evelution through pain, suffer, and survival.
But.. A good christian god in all this?
I have no problem to place a God in this fantastic nature, but not the God from the bible.
Not everyone shares your amusing little religious reality tunnel.
-- $SIGNATURE
Completely bogus. If I modify my client poorly and return an incorrect "hit" to the server, the SETI@Home people would be stupid to make an announcement without first re-verifying the block of data that produced the "hit" on their own machines.
According to crayz, we've all been scanning the same 115 work units over and over again. That's a grand total of about 30 megs of data. Seti's own computers should be able to handle that. What a pisser. Unfortunately I don't have a record of the work units my WinDoze boxes have run, but here are the ones my home Linux box has done. Notice that there are several duplicates. Do these look familiar to anyone else?
_ __________________________
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.418886717 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420126951 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420126951 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420185545 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420439451 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420683592 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420869139 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420976560 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420976560 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.420976560 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.421142576 GHz
Sky coordinates: 10.5 R.A., 20.2 Dec Recorded on: Thu Jan 7 23:07:30 1999 Base Frequency:
1.421142576 GHz
Sky coordinates: 13.0 R.A., 12.7 Dec Recorded on: Fri Jan 8 00:51:05 1999 Base Frequency:
1.419101560 GHz
Sky coordinates: 13.0 R.A., 12.7 Dec Recorded on: Fri Jan 8 00:51:05 1999 Base Frequency:
1.419101560 GHz
Sky coordinates: 13.0 R.A., 12.8 Dec Recorded on: Fri Jan 8 00:49:44 1999 Base Frequency:
1.419404295 GHz
Sky coordinates: 13.1 R.A., 12.2 Dec Recorded on: Fri Jan 8 01:05:49 1999 Base Frequency:
1.419960936 GHz
____________________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough
Absolutely yes, it will compete with RC5. Both programs are designed to work on spare cycles, but SETI is so much of a machine hog that it will wait until the screen-saver (on a Win machine) kicks in, then it takes over. If RC5 is running at a lower priority, it won't get any cycles at all.
Basically, you need to pick one or the other an run with it.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Please remember that Seti@Home is only one of many distributed projects. Check out www.mersenne.org. The gimps project may have found a megaprime (We are double checking at this time), which if you recall, is worth $50,000 from the EFF (Not to mention a plug in the Guinness book of worlds records for finding the 38th Mersenne prime). Also, word is that Seti@Home is running out of data and is sending the same stuff to participants over and over again...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Unfortunately it seems that the SETI@home team should've done a bit more testing before starting the project.
Posted on sci.astro:
Greetings!
My name is Jeff Thomas. I am volunteering as a liaison between the SETI@Home Team and the community of users. I live near Berkeley. My goal is to try to improve information flow both ways. I will try to ensure that information is posted on their web pages, and here, in a more timely fashion than has been the case. (It took me some time before I discovered the blank screen, and I worked on 9 subbands in 10 32 45 RA, +20 12 35 dec...) Let me pass along what I have learned:
1. The duplicate work units problem has been fixed. It resulted from disk-space limitations (how many WU's will fit on a floppy?....), which have been dealt with. The new servers will doubtless help even more. This was not a scam or a conn job or whatever. They fixed the problem as quickly as they could. They should certainly have let people know more prominently about the problem. They have been a bit clueless about the importance of communication. My goal is to help with that.
2. Server-connection problems have been greatly reduced, and should also be helped by the new servers.
3. When a WU is at a very small percentage complete, and then jumps to 100%, it is because large amounts of Earth-based radio-frequency interference (RFI) have been detected in the work unit.
4. The 97.x or 98.x percent complete is a result of the algorithm and roundin errors. When the client is done, it is 100% done.
5. Regarding lost work units, and lost credit for work units, yes this has occurred. The 1.0 client deletes its results when it thinks the server has gotten them, and there have been server crashes, so some stuff went into the bit bucket. Server and client improvements should eliminate this problem.
6. What will be fixed in the next client, due out next week, includes:
o The proxy bug (partial or full fix), to allow use of ports other than 80.
o CPU time can be incorrectly calculated on Windows. This will be fixed.
o There will be better messages.
o The "Click OK" problem will be fixed.
7. Regarding stats problems, let me first say that I hope the guys who programmed this did not write the science code! I do not understand the full story here, but the following tidbits of information might help. I know that they are working on getting this right.
o The client sends stats to the server, but it also gets them from the server.
o The server updates the stats on the web page on an hourly basis, except for the domain and team stats, which are updated daily.
8. Regarding the 99999 power spikes, these are the maximum because of a cut-off at 100000. The spikes just under 100000 are outliers as well. All for now. I hope that I can help improve the flow of information. I will be writing things up for the web pages, and sharing information with this and other groups.
-- Jeff Thomas
Of course, this whole thing is based on the assumption that any
off-world intelligence is going to use exactly the same technology
that we are...
Which I find to be incredibly short-sighted... I know for a fact that
"ET" uses technology so far removed from ours that it makes this the
equivalent of searching smoke signals...
I can just imagine them in their spaceships laughing at the
arrogance that so-called "intelligent" people think they are
actually doing something productive...
There's a REASON that the Government pulled the plug on funding this
one - they're already in contact, and they know this is just a waste
of time..
.. not to mention the energy wasted by keeping your processor busy all the time! And electrical energy still costs money last time I checked.
Wake up people. There is no ETI to be found.
#1.) The probability of intelligent life "evolving" (let alone more than once within the range of minimal detectable signal strength of the SETI satellites) is statistically absurd.
#2.) If God had created intelligent life elsewhere and there was any chance of we humans finding it, don't you think he'd have let us know?
#3.) Even if there was ETI, who says it would broadcast its existance via EM radiation?
My advice:
1. kill -9 %n where %n is the PID of your SETI@HOME client
2. Shut off the X-Files
3. Go to www.distributed.net and download the latest RC5 client and put your CPU(s) to work doing something USEFUL..
At the moment, I am the only member of Team Linux and my lowly P150 is down with a bad drive so... No WU's for Team Linux.
Deleted
Just go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/tea m.html. The rest is easy.
If you step through the client with GDB you can see it's generating the display numbers through some function seeded with the output of rnd()
So what do we expect to find? Based on bandwidth usage on the Internet, my guess is that our first contact, once decoded, will turn out to be alien porno._ _____________________________
_________________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough
go team slashdot!
For any windows or mac users, please change the properties of your screen saver to blank to 0 [immedately] not 30 or never blank. I was wondering about why the Windows client performed so slowly compared to LINUX clients so I did a little test. On a P100, I installed RH5.2 and run the LINUX client and did one datablock and it took 45ish hours. Similarily, on the Windows Client [Windows 95 OSR2] it took 46ish hours to do one DataBlock with the screem saver set to blank IMMEDATELY. However, with it set to display teh graph constantly,the work took almost 160 hours.
That blasted graph in the Windows [probabay Mac too] Client sucks up way to much resources and that's why people using those two clients seem really slow.
If so then its been checked a few 1000 times already :-/
:)
PS: my 5x86-133 (486 class) linux box does a unit in under 2 days...you must be running Windoze
I have to return some videotapes...
Check out Cosm.
I've got 5 machines running Seti, and I've noticed too that many of the packets seem the same. But even with the same packets, it seems to be reporting different highest signal strengths and Gaussians. Of course, this is merely suspicion.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
They'll reuse the old data if they run out of the new data. The Seti@Home web page says they'll probably send the same data to multiple machines.
Not so. The SETI project at Arecibo is only recording 1/40th of the total bandwidth available through the spectrometer. Even factoring in a pessimistic 50% observing efficiency (time the telescope is actually availble for SETI data taking) we need 5.6 million 2 day average computers!
Woohoo! I'm in.
And it looks like Team Slashdot now has over 600 members. Have we really picked up over 60 people that quickly?! It's a rally - c'mon!!!
You might be able to chop your time in half again by ditching OS 8.6 and moving back to 8.5. Applications that monopolize the CPU are penalized by the OS in 8.6 by an overactive Finder (see recent articles on macintouch.com). I use Matlab (not a responsive-friendly program when running scripts) at work and suffered a near 50% productivity loss. Needless to say, 8.6 went in the trash that afternoon.
Maybe we are cracking things for NSA?
... I don't like sparing cpu cycles
...
;-)
At least
while not knowing what my computer does.
Without source, I don't run algorithmic/crypt
programms
My first seti block, downloaded the day the mac client was released, was recorded later than the Jan 7 and 8 redundant blocks we have all been working on. I beleive it was recorded the 13th or the 11th of Jan(my birthday is the 10th so I was hoping I would discover aliens at the exact time of my birth if we worked backwards(joke))
the first block behaved oddly though
my 266 g3 chugged through it really slowly, each transform took several minutes, some took a half an hour. After 6 hours(cpu time, a day of real time) I was only like 2% done and it sent in the data.
The blocks I recieve now are 350k each
they take approx. 24 hours to complete with rc5 running at around 150-300 k keys in the background.
Im gonna quit seti until the redundant thing is fixed.
Argh, talk about jealousy... :)
Nugget, please give us CPU/OS stats
Congratulations to the entire SlashDot team for processing the same two days of data over and over and over....I think it's safe to assume, thanks to Team SlashDot, that E.T. was not phoning us on January 7 or 8th.
According to their website, they are currently sending out the same packets for Jan 7,8 to everyone. Two of my 4 computers are currently processing the same data! I will lose enthusiasm (sp?) for this really quick if this continues much longer...
Big deal? You can't seriously expect a project like this to gain 500,000 and run absolutely smoothly for the first few weeks. While yes, it does suck the same blocks have been being checked over and over again, but at least we know it works now.
I was thinking the other day it would be pretty ironic if NSA were using a distributed project on the Internet to get people to unknowingly do their Eschelon dirtywork...
:)
With 500,000 users presently involved, that's a lot of passwords potentially being cracked
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I have a Macintosh PowerBook G3/266 laptop (1MB L2 cache 192MB RAM) and it will rip through a work unit at an average of about __13_hrs__. I (ThunderCorp) originally posted my suggestion on MacAddict, MacSoldiers, and the O'Grady web page and it works well. Along with running your Mac at 800x600x16bit, use Peek-A-Boo to assign SETI high CPU priority. Change the SETI blank function to 0 or 1 minute. Go to the Energy Saver Control Panel and put Sleep to Never.. set Display and HD sleep to its minimum time.. Move the SETI@Home Data folder from the System>Preferences folder to a RAM disk. Then alias that folder back to the original Preferences area. With this setting my PowerBook G3 is completely silent, no fan noise (all PowerPC G3s are cool and low-voltage anyway app. 5W I think), no hard drive noise.. nothing! All the while it's fierecly computing the work unit. If only the other MacAddict team members got this technique down, our average time could be shaved in half. We'd be as quick as the Slashdot team!!
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Hi,
I'm running a PII-400 (soon bringing a dual 500Mhz online also) and I'd really like it if I could join in!
Could someone mail me with the details. I've already got the software, just not on the right team (or any team yet). Been running mprime (prime number searcher) also. Thanks a lot guys.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
The Windows version sometimes seems to count the time that the program is open in the system tray but not processing as well as the time when the program is processing, leading to inflated cpu time figures. (ex: It takes Seti@home 20 hours to process a data packet, but I use the computer for 10 hours during that time. Seti@home reports that it was running for 30 hours, when it was really only processing for 20.) Also, setting "Blank screen" cut my time/packet down from 70 or so hours to about 20 hours per packet on a K6-2/300.
I don't know if slashdotters are still reading this topic, but I really need a Irix client for SETI. I was told that when it first started out, one was availalbe, and if I submit a bug report, it lists an irix build as one of my choices, yet I can not find it anywhere, and I have sent several e-mails to seti. If anyone actually has this client, could they please e-mail it to me at lnx@netcom.com
I'm pretty fly for a white guy
Switching back to OS 8.5 isn't necessary. Just command-option-escape the Finder when the SETI@home client is running as an application. When the screensaver kicks in, it doesn't launch a whole new set of processes-It just uses the preëxisting state of the application.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I've been running the Mersenne Prime search :-) :-)
http://www.mersenne.org
for a couple of years now. All of these systems
are fine if you're running on AC power,
but CPU-burners do Really Bad Things to batteries!
I'd guess it cost my employer one or two NiMHs
before I figured this out
Running ofr short times is fine, or draining your
NiCad to the bone if you want, but NiMH memory
doesn't seem to like that kind of abuse.
I don't know how the newer Lithium batteries feel about it
(but Lithium is no longer available on credit
Also, if you're using a background-version program,
rather than a screen-saver type, remember not to
use a CPU-intensive screen-saver - pick something
that draws or moves a picture every few minutes rather than something that's constantly moving, especially if it's doing complex graphics transforms.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When they said that there would be some processor enhancements for Mandrake 6.0 they were not kidding. It use to take my Celeron 333 (ocke'd to 416) about 24+ hours to compile a seti session when I ran under Mandrake 5.3, since I've been using 6.0 I've been compiling a session in about 13 hours.
--
I find that Team !Userfriendly! is #4.
;'>
Everything equals four. Trust me.
Then the ever present contest between Quebec and the rest of Canada is brought to the forefront, with Canada pulling in #50 and Quebec at #58.
And The Knights Who Say Ni! are on the board at #69 (hmm...)
I'm REALLY tempted to create Team486... my current estimate is it'll take me about 1000 hours to finish the first packet (I'm 200 hours into it)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm **NOT** going
to run anything without source code (specially not a heavy number crunching program getting its data over the Net). I have to mind my security too...
Instead of each project having to setup their own central servers, recruit people, work out authentication, stats etc... Why not create a generic client program that downloads plugins? You could have a SETI plugin, a primes plugin, RC5 plugin, and so on.
The generic client would install and validate each plugin and handle/encrypt the data traffic to a central server.
There would be a server component to this also, handling the web interface for stats and validating/receiving completed work from the clients.
Projects that wanted access to the distributed super computer would register with someone who had setup a server and distributed generic clients already. The project team would provide a plugin written to a specific API. The plugin actually does the work, it gets new work and transmits completed work through the API.
The generic client could notify you when new projects have been registered and give you the choice to download and prioritize the new project's plugin. (this way you could contribute effectively to multiple projects concurrently)
An extension of this would be to take it commercial as a way of selling your spare CPU cycles. The maker of a generic (commercial) distributed client could sell access to all the computers that run their client. Then you would get web goodies, points, discounts, etc based on how many total CPU cycles your machine(s) had contributed.
-josh
It's not the OS, it's the software. The Windows version doesn't log CPU time really, it takes the time when the first block was downloaded to when it's complete. If you're using your PC, and Seti isn't processing it still logs this as CPU time. Bit crap that :)
If you think it's bad having 2 Slashdot teams, look at Apple. There's at least 3 of them, and 2 of them have the mottos "Thinking different"
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
Of course, they could have been programming to a black box API, and been fooled too. Some other sd'ers must know others on the credits pane - speak up.
rbb
I thought the same thing....
Wonder why I am remaining anonymous?
If you run OS/2, there is a command-line client available via http://www.os2ss.com/seti/. Like the Unix client, this version has no GUI and runs at a low priority so that it doesn't interfere with your regular work. It does have the option to run at regular priority.
There is also an OS/2 Warp group, available via http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd =team_lookup&name=OS%2F2+Warp. We currently have 211 members and we're in 32nd place.
Of course, you don't need to be running the OS/2 client to join the group. In fact, I have one Mac, 2 OS/2 PC's, and 1 NT PC all running the client under the same name.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
i386-unknown-openbsd2.5: 11 hr 27 min
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1: 12 hr 06 min
Why I'm considering playing with openBSD on my next box (their security features look good too)
(back on topic) By the way... at first I was wondering about this sort of thing as a benchmark...
of course some data might be more empty than other spots... but since we're all seeing the same jan 7/8 data there goes that problem... and
at first I thought the time index was "CPU time" ie the same thing you see in ps or top (and wintop)... anyways it's an interesting comparison but i'm not convinced it's a perfect benchmark...
These people are doing a scientific experiment. They need to know what code people are running so the programs don't give false results. Think of the uproar if they announced the discovery of alien intelligence and it turned out to be some dufus's "custom" client.
Subject: [RC5] seti@home fraud!
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 11:45:44 -0400
From: Paul Cuni
500,000 users working on 115
work units?
Bob_Kanefsky
(M/California)
Jun
5 1999
2:28AM EDT
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that SETI@home's half million
participants are currently being
assigned the same 115 work units over and over again, all from three
different sky locations collected
on January 7 and 8. If anyone has seen any other work units recently --
especially from January 9 or
later -- please speak up.
After seeing a few duplications of work units a machine at work had
already processed (same headers,
same content), I ran a test. I instructed my computer to repeatedly
start the SETI@home client and
download a work unit, but then just kill it, record the name, and start
again. The result: Out of 2500
work units, the same 115 kept showing up.
Two of the 115 work units are slices of different coordinates and have
the following names (as shown
on the fourth line of the work_unit.txt file):
name=07ja99aa.10912.26555.213914.156 [got this one 6 times out of 2500]
name=08ja99aa.16286.4081.917340.30 [got this one 4 times out of 2500]
The others are all subband slices from one location (but only 113 of them).
They all say
name=08ja99aa.12769.4418.68748.*
where * is one of these subband numbers:
0 2 3 4 5 6 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 21 22 23 24 26 27 28 29 31
32 33 35 36 37 38 39 41 43 44
45 47 50 52 54 55 56 60 61 62 64 65 66 67 70 72 74 76 78 79 80 85 86 87
88 89 90 91 92 94 95 96 97
98 99 100 102 103 104 109 110 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 122 123
124 125 127 131 132 133 134
135 138 139 140 142 143 145 148 149 150 151 152 154 158 160 161 163
The only other data unit I've seen was one I downloaded on May 27 and
then had to release the
machine that was working on it.
I hope the SETI@home project will fix this problem soon, or at least
acknowledge it and promise that
they're working on it.
P.S. Kris, you may be right about the cause, but I doubt it. Web browser
clients may be configured to
use caching proxies, but there's no reason that the SETI@home
client/server connection would be built
only anything that complicated when a direct connection is easier to do.
But not having seen the
implementation, anything is possible.
END OF MAIL
--
Weasel
look for a client for my commodore, eh?
-=Knowledge of software commands does not mean mastery of concepts=-
Could someone check if this is a bit of a good script? I use it for startup control.
# #################### /dev/null.
# ####################
# ####################
# ####################
# ####################
# ####################### /dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
# #################################
#!/bin/sh
###############################################
## A rather quick hack to control the startup
## and stopping for setiathome. This is totally
## untested, so hack it and gimme some feedback
## please. Especially the test for pidof is untested.
## I'm not very much of a coder, this was just done
## to organize this and that. Any structural comments
## are welcome, but if this script fucks up your system
## don't blame me. Flame's go to
##
## made by wayout
## slack at wayout dot iae dot nl
## June 7 1999
###############################################
## It's distributed under the Artistic License as I
## have a hunge that it's impossible due to the closed
## nature of the setiathome binary.
###############################################
## Okay, I've changed it a bit, so it now does something
## on solaris too. For linux's without the pidof binary
## it should work too. Now it tries to check if pidof(8)
## exsist, if not it tries to make a subroutine with the
## same name and behaviour.
##
## Uncomment below to set debugging
# set -x
###############################################
## Variables.. Set you own here.
spool_dir=/var/spool/seti
seti=/usr/local/sbin/setiathome
seti_prog=`basename ${seti}`
log=/var/log/setiathome.log
###############################################
## Here is the test for pidof or the form of ps you're using
## I use whereis 'cause it seems to have the most standard
## behaviour over several defferent Unix's. It is the intention
## of me to let this run on a lot of Unix's.
which_pidof=`whereis pidof | cut -d':' -f2 | awk '{print $1}'`
if [ "X${which_pidof}" = "X" ] ; then
if (ps ax 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
pidof () {
test_pid=`ps ax | grep $1 | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'`
if [ "X${test_pid}" = "X" ] ; then
exit 1
else
echo ${test_pid}
exit 0
fi
}
elif (ps -ef 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
pidof () {
test_pid=`ps -ef | grep $1 | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "X${test_pid}" = "X" ] ; then
exit 1
else
echo ${test_pid}
exit 0
fi
}
else
echo You are running a strange UNIX I do not know about.
echo Check this script and hack it.
exit 1
fi
else
pidof () {
${which_pidof} $1
}
fi
###############################################
## Options..
help_me () {
cat
true
else
cd ${spool_dir}
exec ${seti} ${args}> ${log} 2>&1 &
fi
exit 0
stop|-stop|--stop)
kill ${PID}
if (pidof ${seti_prog} 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
kill -9 ${PID}
fi
exit 0
restart|-restart|--restart)
kill ${PID}
if (pidof ${seti_prog} 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
kill -9 ${PID}
fi
if [ -f ${log} ] ; then
if [ -f ${log}.0 ] ; then
rm -f ${log}.0
fi
mv ${log} ${log}.0
fi
cd ${spool_dir}
exec ${seti} ${args} > ${log} 2>&1 &
exit 0
status|-status|--status)
if (pidof ${seti_prog} 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null) ; then
echo 'Seti@home is running..'
else
echo 'Seti@home is NOT running..'
fi
exit 0
email|-email|--email)
args="${args} -email"
shift
version|-version|--version)
${seti} -version
exit 0
countries|-countries|--countries)
args="${args} -countries"
shift
nice|-nice|--nice)
if [ "X$2" = "X" ] ; then
numb="1"
else
numb=$2
fi
args="${args} -nice ${numb}"
shift
shift
login|-login|--login)
echo You are making a new login for ${seti_prog}.
echo This will start ${seti_prog} in the foreground.
echo Kill with CTRL_C and restart to run in the background.
echo
echo I will assume you have a ${spool_dir} and you have rights
echo to it. If not either make that dir or look in $0 and
echo change the spool_dir variable to your own.
sleep 2
clear
cd ${spool_dir}
${seti} -login
exit 0
*)
help_me
exit 1
esac
done
exec ${seti} ${args}
###############################################
## Bye bye
The MacAddict team actually has more members, but the Mac cleint sucks and I think many /.ers contribute more CPU time than the average MacAddict member.
Anyone know if there are so many people doing this that there's not going to be enough data? Now that would be awesome.
Let's think: 35Gb of data per day from Arecibo. Each block is 250k(maybe more, but that's what I'll call it). so
35000 4 = 140,000 blocks/day.
There are at least 350,000-400,000 people running this. So means if everyone complete about 1 block every 2-2.5 days, we'll be able to process the data faster than they get it.
I wish the damn moderator who censored my post would go read the guidelines! Not agreeing is not a reason to lower a post.
I hold that my point is *VALID* no one else here had expressed concerns about S@H's bandwidth usage.
Perhaps I could have stated it more calmily, however, that does not make my point any less vaild.
Obvious TROLL IGNORE
The scripts that calculate the team totals are broken, so it is actually impossible to know how far Team Slashdot really is ahead of Microsoft. It is really starting to annoy me that they haven't fixed this yet though since it causes Team Sweden to be ranked much lower than it should be.
---
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks pretty disappointing so far. Let me get this straight:
1. There are 500,000+ computers all crunching the exact same data. In addition different results are produced.
2. Even if/when they fix the identical 'work unit' problem there is still too high a ratio between participants and the total amount of work that can be done.
3. The team stats are messed up, S@H has acknowleged this.
So if I understand correctly 500,000 people are processing the same information all in the hope of 'beating' another team when team stats are openly acknowleged to be buggy.
*Sarcasm*
Sounds cool, where do I sign up?
*/Sarcasm*
Like someone said before at /.
What if this is just a trick from some of the Nazi like BigBrother agenies of The United States Of America?
One thing is for sure. I would have made a project like this if it was me who had the responebility to make the president look good, and life a living hell for the citizen.
It has been on my lists of things to rebel against for years.
I would love to contribute if it was safe..
Do NOT trust annyone! Remeber how easy it is to trick annyone.
It's interesting to compare how long it takes to process one unit on different platforms at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/platforms .html
Alpha/Windows: 8 hr 16 min
i386-unknown-openbsd2.5: 11 hr 27 min
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1: 12 hr 06 min
alpha-dec-osf3.0: 13 hr 08 min
i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static: 13 hr 50 min
Macintosh: 28 hr 13 min
Pentium/Windows: 48 hr 59 min
It seems windows is faaar behind all kinds of linux, but also the macs, so it's not the more graphical client that the win-users (I guess mac-users get a graphical client too?) get, which slows the chewing down. Must be the os.
And exactly how do you propose doing that?
Troll.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The FAQ claims no source code is available "for security reasons". Hasn't the whole "security through obscurity" thing been discredited?
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
I suggest we keep both teams... in fact, some people should switch over to Slashdot so we can capture first AND second place! ;-)
-Computers hate being anthropomorphized.
Well I don't want to rain on your parade but seti@home stats are WAY OFF. For example, for a while, my completed resutls figure would rise for no reason. Now currently, I have sent at least 3-4 results which have not been counted. Also note that Team stats are not being updated.
Setiathome has some serious problems these days. I wonder how hard it can be to keep a simple stats database going?
How does this program work? Does it chew cycles
like rc5, and will it conflict/compete with the
rc5 client?
if you will read in sci.astro you will discover that ALL this has been wasted effort... everybody has been working on the same time slice since day one... this may have been fixed today, going by the most recent posts... but alot of people are up in arms about the fact that SETI has been lieing to everybody
What I'm wondering now is how many teraflops this distributed computer is! Anyone have a rough idea?
If you are such a believer in "security through openness" then why don't you get rid of your firewall and unshadow your passwords?
Let's face it, "openness" isn't the solution to every problem. A binary-only client is a good way to prevent cheating.
I know I will get moderated out of everyone's sight for posting this message, but I'm doing it anyway. Fuck moderation.
You are insane.
My p133 w/64 is barely useable on nt4.
Because everyone is analyzing the same 30 megabytes of data. One Linux box I am running it on has processed 16 work units. FIVE of them have been duplicates.
_ __________________________________
It is a waste of bandwidth - with 525,000 users it's somewhere between 35 and 70 GB per day assuming their statistics are correct (average 40 hours per work unit), and that each of the 525,000 users put in between 12-24 hours of CPU time per day. I was putting in about 60 hours total CPU time per day until just now, and averaging about 20 hours per work unit, so these numbers are probably low.
I have stopped running the client on all my machines until I hear that they are sending out new data. Once I hear there's new data, I'll start up the clients again. I love the idea, I just wish they hadn't been so premature about releasing the clients and announcing the project everywhere.
____________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough
this is a real problem that we at distributed.net have been looking at for a long time. As have many other groups.
The basic problem is one of proof - can you prove that results returned were actually done and the the result returned was the result of that work.
The specific problem we are looking at in the distributed.net code is : given a block of data (keyblock) we need to prove that someone actually tested all the keys in that block and is returning the result of those tests. things to be proofed against - if the client is OSS : rewriting the test loop to skip over most of the testing ( so you can get an excessive rate and cheat in stats), returning a "no find" result on a success and claiming the prize yourself,
dave
On Linux whichever had the higher priority ('niceness') would win and probably mostly squash the other one. You could set the priority the same, then they would compete for CPU time, but why crunch keys when you could be looking for ET's TV signals?
_ _______________________________
Hmm, based on bandwidth usage on the Internet, I wonder what the probability is that our first contact will be picking up alien porno...
_______________________________________
Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't like other people but aren't coordinated enough