coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release:
"What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."
SETI is important not just because it could find aliens. There is the distinct possibility that we are alone in the universe (not that likely in my opinion). A positive result would be more interesting than this constant negative we have been getting but it is important that we find out what is going on. Just because we may never see a positive doesn't mean we should stop. Having the evidence that we are indeed alone is just important as having evidence that life exists out there.
Only if BOINC has learned to be a good neighbor. I took it off my machine about 2 years ago because it thought it had an unlimited right to every cycle my cpu had. Setiathome NEVER ran that piggish. The planetary folks have so far ignored all pleas to run it at about nice 20 so we could have our machines back. The old setiathome client always ran at a high niceness. I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.
Informative? BOINC has always run applications at nice 19 on unix and at low priority on windows. It also has the option of watching every tty and the mouse for input in order to stop processing if anyone is in an interactive session. The parent poster has no idea what they are talking about.
Holy cats, can you also tell me who'll win the US Presidential election in 2008? I'd like to get a few bets down on tradesports.com...with my chutzpah and your omniscience, we can't lose!
I guess it depends. You could always argue that An alien race was found and they were technologically advance or already found a cure for many of the diseases and were willing to share. Or they were a warlike race bent to destroy Earth cause we spied on them... Either way, you might not have to worry about cancers and disorders anymore.
Probably true -- except that if there are other intelligent races out there, they've probably been unwittingly transmitting their equivalent of radio and television entertainment out into space for at least as long as we have, and the way things are going here it's very likely in that case that their entertainment is orders of magnitude higher in quality than what we've been turning out for the last few decades.;)
There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, so then my life's great priority list is as follows
1) Breathe
2) Sleep
3) Procreate
4) Eat ...
1444) Find Cure for cancer ...
2137832) Find extra terrestrial intelligence
Ergo when I have some computing power to spare I'll devote some to the cure for cancer, when I have the United States's entire Internet worth of computing power, I'll spare a little to extra terrestrial intelligence:-)
No, he said the earth was not the center of the universe. Buy a history book. The ancient Greeks accurately measured the circumference of the earth about a millennia before that.
I used seti@home when it first came out. Ran it for a couple years. Then I had reinstalls and other issues and other priorities, so I stopped. When I decided to give them some more time I found that their new client, BOINC, was cryptic and difficult to get established so that I got credit for my prior packets. They also changed the way they calculated things. I liked it better when I completed a packet and got credit for that packet. After having upgraded to so so many more modern computers (I must have
They started and demonstrated that distributed computing was a viable way to solve huge problems. SOmetimes basic research doesn't have an immediately applicable product - but sometimes the groundwork they lay provides for fruitful endeavors - e.g. Apollo program. No one thought electricity would be terribly important when it was first discovered, or the phone either. Give it a chance - maybe finding aliens might make us put aside our petty differences as countries.
Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?
When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.
Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:
Protein folding is important, however discovery of ETI ranks up somewhere along with; fire, wheel, tools, calculus.
Find a protein, you change many lives for the better.
Find ET, and you change the course of the human race forever.
I will choose what to do with my extra CPU cycles myself, thank you very much. To me, ET is more interesting.
(Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?)
My only regret is BOINIC runs so crappy and is so hard to manage (come on, install a program that crashes upon resume, gotta dig out the right profile, gotta figure out how to sign up for projects = fail).
Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?
Congratulations! You accomplished nothing and yet managed to get on TV for it. You're right up there with Paris Hilton.
We're obviously each free to choose whatever project we want to donate our spare CPU cycles to (or none at all, if we so choose). Nonetheless, I would encourage people to support projects like Folding@Home over projects like SETI@home, mostly because even if we do discover the existence of ETI, the consequences are unpredictable; assuming they're not close enough to visit or communicate with in a reasonable timeframe, then the sole effect of the discovery would be to cause chaos amongst humanity (how many religions would go berserk apeshit if they discovered that Earth isn't God's special place after all? -- on the other hand, maybe a lot of religion would go away once people realize that We're Not Special, and that'd be a nice side benefit -- but still, very unpredictable).
It's also exceedingly unlikely that SETI will ever find an ETI, regardless of whether there are any ETIs out there. F@H, on the other hand, has already provided us with a lot of useful information about biology, and is clearly advancing the cause of science toward the specific goal of curing diseases. As a result it seems like a much better investment in MY long-term health for me to be spending my cycles on F@H.
ET is more interesting to you until a very near relatives comes up with a serious illness like Cancer, AIDS...
Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be t
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net [malariacontrol.net], rosetta@home [bakerlab.org], predictor@home [scripps.edu]). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.
If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.
Me too.
Last time I used it the Linux install involved way too many steps.
It is packaged as a 'generic' Linux binary, and left up to the individual to tweak it to fit their particular system.
I am quite happy to contribute spare cpu cycles to the project, but at the moment I don't have the spare sys-admin cycles required to setup, configure and babysit the software.
If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository.
If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL,
then ReadHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported.
When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs.
To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project.
It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.
Now everything is listed as teams competing for 'credits', whatever they are.
I didn't join to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in one of the largest collaborative computing projects in the world.
If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then RedHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.
It is on the Ubuntu box I'm sitting in front of at the moment.
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.
You can still see this - login to your account (from boincmgr) and it shows you that - if anything today you get more stats - I know how many total users there are - it still is very much one of the largest computing projects in the world. I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday January 03 2008, @08:27PM (#21904082)
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-two minutes declination... no sighting. Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination... no sighting. Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination... no sighting.
i was kinda interested in this at one point
then when I installed SETI@home i realized that it made my proc max out 24x7 and shoot up to it's load temps (obviously) and of course use more electricity.
i decided that I wasn't willing to stress my equipment or pay for the electricity to run this type of software ( I do of course realize you can set the amount of cpu it uses.. but still)
I think that all these distributed projects kinda try to gloss over the fact that it isn't free to participate... and given the $100+ a barrel oil at the moment people that chose to participate should probably be made more aware of what the costs and wear and tear impacts really are.
Yeah, I don't know what universe you're living it, but the one I live in, we don't have cool running processors. There are no desktop (or even laptop) processors today that are incrementally clockable. There's a few that can halve the clock speed.. there's a few that can even quarter it.. but that's about it. That means for every second that you only need to execute 1000 instructions because you are idle, your 2GHZ processor is actually executing 1999999000 "nop" instructions (if you prefer, insert power
The difference between idle and full load power use on processors nowadays is on the order of 20W (though admittedly this is more like 60W on processors like the Core 2 Duo if you have SpeedStep enabled). 50 hours at full load before you've used a kilowatt more energy. Given an average energy price of $0.13 per KWh that's a pretty small amount, on the order of $2 per month. It's still something, but to me the work done for SETI or Folding@Home is at least worth the price of a cappucino every month.
Processors are also built to run at full load, as long as it holds a good steady temperature (say 50C) you might see its lifespan decreased from 30,000 hours to 20,000 hours. What they're not built for is constant temperature cycling between load and room (off) temperature. Turning your PC off at night will likely have the same affect on its lifespan as constant load does. Again, to me at least, it's worth it. I replace the CPU every 2-3 years anyway and have yet to see one KIA.
I do think, though, that Folding@Home is a better investment than SETI. Not that I'm not curious about finding life out there, but there are more important things to do here first.
Yep, that's why I stopped participating in this kind of project. It's worth mentioning that this was less of an issue back in 1999, because processors didn't have the ability to clock down when they were idle. So there were indeed cycles "going to waste" though I guess it still took some extra power to use them.
I'm just curious how much energy the SETI project has used with zero results thus far. Is the amount of resources and time they are contributing to this cause really worth the incalculable chance they get a signal from an alien civilization? Having millions of PC's running at 100% doing pattern searching seems like a huge waste of energy. I'll run distributed clients myself like folding@home that actually have research results. Usually, only during the winter though (since electric heat is my only option anyway).
Fine, I'm burning cycles running a project that may (heck, when it comes to SETI, probably) won't see any tangible results.
But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.
Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday January 03 2008, @09:20PM (#21904524)
"Oh, but it uses my precioussss energy!"
Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!
I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.
Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.
These folks have millions of compute nodes. And very little resources, which is why they set up this network in the first place. You really think they have time to go chasing after silly little bits of data that matter only to you? Next you'll be wondering why GW Bush never returns your calls.
Women are more easily and more deeply terrified ... generating more
sheer horror than the male of the species.
-- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold", stardate 3615.4
sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
come on, people! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All the evidence says that us being alone in the universe is next to impossible.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I got the plea to rejoin the effort, and told them exactly the same, no way Jose till its fixed. No reply, as if I expected one.
--
Cheers, G
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hey Nostradamus! (Score:2)
FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent is right. (Score:3)
The cancer and other medical projects your can donate your processing power to are far more important then a fruitless search for aliens.
Re:Parent is right. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
oh I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Parent
Re:oh I dunno (Score:5, Funny)
1) Breathe
2) Sleep
3) Procreate
4) Eat
1444) Find Cure for cancer
2137832) Find extra terrestrial intelligence
Ergo when I have some computing power to spare I'll devote some to the cure for cancer, when I have the United States's entire Internet worth of computing power, I'll spare a little to extra terrestrial intelligence
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:oh I dunno (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding this in the parent's post is left as an exercise for the reader.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
After having upgraded to so so many more modern computers (I must have
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Benefit of SETI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
So what are you doing here, wasting your important CPU cycles?
Parent
Parent is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you think you know what people should do, doesn't mean you do.
Parent
No, You're Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?
When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.
Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]Parent
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a protein, you change many lives for the better.
Find ET, and you change the course of the human race forever.
I will choose what to do with my extra CPU cycles myself, thank you very much. To me, ET is more interesting.
(Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?)
My only regret is BOINIC runs so crappy and is so hard to manage (come on, install a program that crashes upon resume, gotta dig out the right profile, gotta figure out how to sign up for projects = fail).
Parent
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:4, Funny)
Congratulations! You accomplished nothing and yet managed to get on TV for it. You're right up there with Paris Hilton.
We're obviously each free to choose whatever project we want to donate our spare CPU cycles to (or none at all, if we so choose). Nonetheless, I would encourage people to support projects like Folding@Home over projects like SETI@home, mostly because even if we do discover the existence of ETI, the consequences are unpredictable; assuming they're not close enough to visit or communicate with in a reasonable timeframe, then the sole effect of the discovery would be to cause chaos amongst humanity (how many religions would go berserk apeshit if they discovered that Earth isn't God's special place after all? -- on the other hand, maybe a lot of religion would go away once people realize that We're Not Special, and that'd be a nice side benefit -- but still, very unpredictable).
It's also exceedingly unlikely that SETI will ever find an ETI, regardless of whether there are any ETIs out there. F@H, on the other hand, has already provided us with a lot of useful information about biology, and is clearly advancing the cause of science toward the specific goal of curing diseases. As a result it seems like a much better investment in MY long-term health for me to be spending my cycles on F@H.
Parent
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Yes, but spending your spare cycles on protein folding will actually accomplish something.
Re:FoldingAtHome (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Distributed computing isn't an either/or proposition. Right now the BOINC infrastructure hosts at least 42 projects, and at least three of those are health related (malariacontrol.net [malariacontrol.net], rosetta@home [bakerlab.org], predictor@home [scripps.edu]). When a volunteer starts BOINC and joins a project, they are presented with a list of many projects.
If SETI@home gets the 3 to 5 fold increase in volunteers that they hope for, it's a very good bet that every other BOINC based project will see significant increases in their volunteer base.
Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too. Last time I used it the Linux install involved way too many steps. It is packaged as a 'generic' Linux binary, and left up to the individual to tweak it to fit their particular system. I am quite happy to contribute spare cpu cycles to the project, but at the moment I don't have the spare sys-admin cycles required to setup, configure and babysit the software.
If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then ReadHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go.
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world.
Now everything is listed as teams competing for 'credits', whatever they are. I didn't join to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in one of the largest collaborative computing projects in the world.
Parent
Re:Left seti when they went to bonic (Score:5, Informative)
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects
boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client
kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client
kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms
Parent
YETI@Home (Score:5, Funny)
Arecibo Shutdown? (Score:3, Interesting)
To sum up what this increase in data will bring: (Score:5, Funny)
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
etc. ad infinitum
are the cycles really "spare" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:are the cycles really "spare" (Score:5, Informative)
Processors are also built to run at full load, as long as it holds a good steady temperature (say 50C) you might see its lifespan decreased from 30,000 hours to 20,000 hours. What they're not built for is constant temperature cycling between load and room (off) temperature. Turning your PC off at night will likely have the same affect on its lifespan as constant load does. Again, to me at least, it's worth it. I replace the CPU every 2-3 years anyway and have yet to see one KIA.
I do think, though, that Folding@Home is a better investment than SETI. Not that I'm not curious about finding life out there, but there are more important things to do here first.
Parent
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carbon footprint? (Score:5, Interesting)
Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? (Score:5, Interesting)
How wasteful is SETI? (Score:5, Insightful)
But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.
Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?
Fucking ignorant (Score:3, Insightful)
Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!
700% increase (Score:5, Funny)
What seems to be overlooked about SETI (Score:3, Insightful)
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
Aliens vs. Foldator (Score:3, Funny)
wow, really seems like 50/50 to me...
BOINC better be inobtrusive! (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
I hope people realise (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.
Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)