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Team Slashdot leads SETI@Home 172

Posted by CmdrTaco from the clockcycles-to-spare dept.
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...
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Team Slashdot leads SETI@Home More

Team Slashdot leads SETI@Home

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  • 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!
  • 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.
  • Well, this is probably a troll, but what the hell ..

    #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 .. you've got some issues of your own to work through, I'm afraid.

    #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.
  • Yup, read the FAQ [berkeley.edu].

    They can increase the amount of data available to process by getting a second recorder.

  • 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*
  • What evidence do you have to support that claim? I for one think it's inevitable that alien life must exist--somewhere. And finding it would pose incredible questions for us as a species, since it would finally be proven.

    If you contest that their client is poorly coded, then say so and why. Otherwise, you are wasting just as much bandwidth ;-)

  • 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.
    _____________________________________________ __________________________

  • WebTV (Score:1)

    by SaintN ( 51673 )
    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
  • 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".

  • Re:rc5? (Score:1)

    by huh_ ( 53063 )
    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.
  • (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
  • 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!
  • 1) Actually, it's statistically very good. I'll argue this in reverse, though. SETI@Home can detect an artificial signal of the strength equal to a strong Terrestrial RADAR at a distance of about 100 light years. Thus, if there's anything to hear, we have sufficiently advanced systems to be able to hear it. Now for the chances of life on a planet. The Mars fossils and the -potential- for microbial life on Europa near a suboceanic vent means that the Sol system may have hosted up to three different species, one of them even outside the ecosphere. A rocky planet and energy is all that you seen to need, and those won't be in short supply anywhere in the galaxy. 2) Let's say He "did" create such life. What form would such an announcement take, in the modern world?

    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.

  • The windows client is a lot slower than the Linux client. Under win98, it takes me over twice the time to do a block...my celeron @450 does a block every 8 hours in Linux (using the i686-glibc2.1 client) and about 17 hours with that silly screensaver shit in win98. My 300 in Linux goes faster than a 450 in windows....

    "The value of a man resides in what he gives,
    and not in what he is capable of receiving."

  • 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".
  • The windows client also takes about 7 times as long on the same (and I mean the exact identical, same, unique) hardware.
  • Hey me too!
    CPU keeps my room warm now...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Me too. Go Team Slashdot go!

  • 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?
  • 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.
  • Whoops, that should have been 78.750 GB per day.
    ____________________________________________ ___________________________

  • 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 [berkeley.edu] and click on Groups [berkeley.edu]. Then click on clubs [berkeley.edu] and then Team Slashdot [berkeley.edu] and then Join this group [berkeley.edu].

    Better yet, just click HERE [berkeley.edu]

  • Porn's a lot bigger consumer of bandwidth. I suggest you go after the big targets first.


    ...phil
  • 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
  • This makes absolutely no sense.


    Hey, let's reduct the MTU for all network packets to 64 bytes so computers can process them faster and more programs can bang on them!


    Ever heard of overhead? Larger packets of data cut down on overhead.

    I don't get the "collaboration" comment. Aren't we "collaborating" now with large packets?

    wag
  • Ummm...how would mainstream charities use my spare clock cycles? Maybe the Save the Children Fund would have some client that tried to find a way to end world hunger by writing random letters to a text file or something.
  • 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

  • RC5?? (Score:1)

    by Khan ( 19367 )
    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.... ;)
  • 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
  • Not everyone shares your amusing little religious reality tunnel.
  • 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
    _____________________________________________ __________________________
  • 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
  • Please remember that Seti@Home is only one of many distributed projects. Check out www.mersenne.org [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...

  • Explanations - newsgroup message (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06, 1999 @06:26PM (#1864673)
    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
  • well, i have a few E450's who weren't doing much good until a few weeks ago :) the nuber varies between 4-6, dependig on other load on them.

    i'm surprised to hear i beat 35 ultras... maybe the statistics really are broken...
  • 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.

  • Just go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/tea m.html [berkeley.edu]. The rest is easy.
  • 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.
    __________________________________________ _____________________________
  • Please don't put words in our mouths.

    You've never heard distributed.net claim that closed-source provides perfect security. To make such a claim would be foolish and incorrect.

    I do think, however, that it's fair to say that until an alternative is devised, that it's a good compromise.

    If the lack of an open source distributed computing effort bothers you, then I'd encourage you to research and devise a solution to these concerns. Until you have a solution, then there's little room to complain about the lack of an implementation.
  • And if they are "processed faster" the job would be done sooner and they would be back to sending duplicate blocks so that everyone would think that things are still happening.

    In other words, nothing would change, things would just become more inefficient, as was previously argued.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Check out Cosm [mithral.com].
  • 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.
  • It's about people polluting the data you moron.
    They state this at the SETI site, and it takes about 3 seconds of any person to figure it out. They can't trust the clients and not giving out the source keeps people from screwing with the data and sending it back to them.
    Now, I agree with you about the security of it. But what might help is putting the cleint on it's own account, and chrooting it. Not hard, and *IF* SETI is a trojan, it won't do anything to your machine or let people in.
  • Well, on my "windoze" clients I can set it to run all the time as a background task, and it doesn't affect my foreground tasks at all. That option is in the preferences of the client.
  • Well, it seems that you don't think it's all worth
    it. As to your first point, the amount of
    electricity used to power this is minimal, as many
    of the boxes running this task are operational
    100% of the time anyway.
    Second, the statistical chance is not 'absurd' at
    all. I have watched the evolution of electronics
    professionally for 30 years. If you told anyone
    back then that we would have virtually instant
    internetworking, you would have been told the odds
    of that happening were 'absurd'. I admit the
    chance is relatively small of finding an
    intelligent lifeform with a limited search such as
    this, but the chance exists.
    As to point #2.
    I don't think the researchers are relying on
    a divine intervention for this.. apart from not believing in such things in the course of
    scientific study, your argument has no merit.
    Point #3.
    Electromagnetics are unavoidable for many of the
    things we do - you might be surprised just where
    they show up - and the researchers believe there
    is a fair chance that any race advanced enough to
    have an advanced society would at least have found
    out the physics of electromagnetics.
    Perhaps you prefer RC5 ... great. Run it
    Disclaimer : I am not part of the SETI@home research team, although I run it on a number
    of clients



  • 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?

    ;-)

    At least ... I don't like sparing cpu cycles
    while not knowing what my computer does.

    Without source, I don't run algorithmic/crypt
    programms ...
  • Argh, talk about jealousy... :)
  • The work unit size can't be reduced b/c they would run the risk of missing a signal buried in the data. Also, the work units have some overlap in them, if they reduced the size, they would contain mostly overlap and little 'unique' data, which would be very inefficient.

    aj
  • 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 realize this is like pushing a rope, but...) You wouldn't mind providing some evidence to back up this claim, would you?


    ...phil
  • 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'm not exactly sure about how this works because I haven't tried it (yet), but wouldn't it be possible to use smaller blocks?

    I know they would probably have to make some changes on the clients, but this way more people would be able to collaborate. Besides, since the blocks would be smaller, they would be processed faster, as more people can bang on them.
  • 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
    -------------------
  • 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!!
  • 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.
  • If you're running the screen saver with the pretty graphics, turn the graphics off. They chew up a lot of CPU.


    ...phil
  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Why withhold it and provide just the motivation I need?
  • 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.

  • Doh... (Score:1)

    by I-man ( 95468 )
    My P150 has been at it 181hrs 7min and is 68.493% done with my first block. =p

    --

  • Let's see... If right now there's already more people than blocks, there won't be enough blocks for anybody unless they start sending duplicate blocks (which is a waste). I know there would be more overhead if they used smaller blocks, but it doesn't have to be 2k blocks. If blocks were half the size, twice as many people could have new blocks and they would be processed faster.
  • Maybe, there is something other than the screen saver causing the WIndows client to be so much slower.

    Like what? I'd love to hear a suggestion for this one... We're talking single-threaded data crunching here - the only variable should be the priority of the thread.

    *shrugs*
  • 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) ;'>

  • 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 :)
  • > 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.

    Actually, real OSes (e.g., Linux) issue HLT instructions when the CPU is idle, which basically shut the CPU down. Windows (9x, anyway... not sure about NT) doesn't do this, so if by "conventional PC", you mean "Windows PC", you're correct. Otherwise, reducing CPU load will reduce power consumption and waste heat (which is why there are overclocking utilities for Windows... they do the HLT thing to reduce the heat produced by the CPU).

    Technical points aside, I think the original poster has failed to multiply his "calculated" odds of a planet having intelligent life by the sheer number of planets in the galaxy... I find it inconceivable that only one planet in a mindboggling big universe would have life. Whether we have any nearby neighbors radiating on a frequency we're watching strongly enough for us to detect it and for long enough for the signals to have reached us is another question, and one we can't know the answer to until we look - which is what SETI is supposed to do.
  • 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"
  • Oh... uh... that's just uh... inefficient data... yeah... SETI's just biased against Microsoft... yeah that's it. Or it's probably that you have to reboot twice to load a program in Windows.
  • No...the answer is 47
  • I can vouch for two of the programmers working on the mac / windows clients. I've worked with both Brad Silen and Charlie Fenton at Berkeley Systems - the After Dark screen saver company - Neither of them are spooks. (heh!)

    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

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • As announced on WarpCast [os2ss.com], here's the information on OS/2 clients:

    If you run OS/2, there is a command-line client available via http://www.os2ss.com/seti/ [os2ss.com]. 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 [berkeley.edu]. 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
    --

  • No source code? (Score:3)

    by reverse solidus ( 30707 ) on Monday June 07, 1999 @10:51AM (#1864752) Homepage
    The FAQ claims no source code is available "for security reasons". Hasn't the whole "security through obscurity" thing been discredited?
  • No, in fact it works just fine. For example, there are a lot more exploits for LInux then there are for, say, HP-UX.

    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.

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