Comments on: SETI@home needs you!

By: --

-- — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:06:16 +0000

Yeah well, leave it up to Australia to consider that as a newsworthy article.

By: ChaZ

ChaZ — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:36:12 +0000

Stupid stupid stupid. Came across this link… I don’t know what to say about those scientists anymore.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=377452

By: the new shelton wet/dry

the new shelton wet/dry — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:04:40 +0000

[...] SETI is the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It’s a project by a phenomenally dedicated and brilliant group of scientists and engineers to search the sky for radio signals from other civilizations. [...]

By: ChaZ

ChaZ — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:30:40 +0000

You guys should look at this interesting website about how far the radio signals travel in space:

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=219

So, I think it’s a waste of money to look for something that would never reach us anyways no matter how powerful they try to make it.

By: Optimus Primate

Optimus Primate — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:29:43 +0000

I’ll start running it again when they get it working with Vista.

By: marko

marko — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:26:58 +0000

Back in 1997, when I had a job at SUSE (”S.u.S.E.” at that time), we utilized most servers and workstations to participate. I think we were ranking as good as #35 at one day. It was a hot summer, working in sun-lit offices which didn’t have air conditioning, and two Linux boxes overheated regularly. Power management was at its beginnings (both hard- and software), and we didn’t worry too much about loud fans. At home, nobody I knew even had ISDN, and SETI@home over analog modem wasn’t fun.

Nowadays, working for a British outsourcing company, doing Linux/SunOS administration and writing all kinds of “glue” software, everything is measured: power consumption, CPU load, traffic. Our stuff runs more efficient without Boinc (yes, even when “renice”d (8) to the max), so there, no more distributed computing for SETI, sorry. At home, bandwidth wouldn’t be a problem anymore, but I like my Mac mini and my iBook silent. I like the iBook battery to last 4h (compared to 2h with Boinc). Sorry again.

Darth Borehd’s security argument is also true. Potentially, any sufficiently complex daemon/service task you add to your OS increases security risks.

Because of all this, I think nowadays this kind of number crunching is best suited for dedicated server/grid-computing farms.

By: Darth Borehd

Darth Borehd — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:02:03 +0000

I would dispute that poses no harm to your computer. Security flaws have been discovered in the past (http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030408S0001) and there may be others.