Back in 2000, I was working for a small dotcom startup and I remember we came into work one day to discover that our production servers were all running at a crawl & unable to serve traffic. Turned out that one of the devs had installed seti@home on all our servers (this was before devops was a thing) and it was hogging 90%+ of the cpu. I think he'd installed seti on every machine in the office that he could get access to, even other people's workstations. He was utterly obsessed with the thing.
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#252I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
I ran it before I went to school in the morning and before I went to bed at night for a few days. Then the novelty wore off. Also, it interfered with my downloads. I also remember I watched Contact on tv around that time and it got me hyped about doing my part to discover extraterrestial life.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#253My high school physics teacher offered one point of extra credit per n work units. I had a fairly beefy computer, for a high school kid, and since he never put a ceiling on the number of points offered, I ended up accumulating up enough extra credit to bump my grade up a whole letter.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#254Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002. We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany. I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002: https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer. S…
I was a new web developer in that era and the bad taste in my mouth left by that era's Internet Exploiter is still strong. LOL. ugh.
Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#255Isn't it a bit early given that we've just entered the era of machine learning which could be a big help for the project?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#256Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002. We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany. I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002: https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer. S…
Just wanted to say thx for writing a blogpost. Rare to see great history snippets left as a comment on HN with any link to a longer form content from the author’s perspective if one is curious.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#257Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#258Wow, I've been using it for 21 years?!
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#259Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#260Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…
> space habitats What about gravity? Is it possible/feasible to have long-term habitats without any meaningful gravity?
You spin them to create “gravity”, which is really just centrifugal force.