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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#201

Post by Symbiote »

ETH_start wrote: post #195
kelnos wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriousl…

I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure needed to incorporate intermittent energy from solar/wind. Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are taken into account. One study found that the "true cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh": [pdf] https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame..…

With articles like "Save North Dakota Oil and Gas!" I'm sceptical of that study.

Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#202

Post by dale_glass »

So... what happened?

This just appears to say they moved on, but why? Is there some sort of conclusion from all of this? Was it a funding problem, an analysis problem, a lack of useful results?

What has been achieved in the time this ran?

This could use more detail.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#203

Post by Symbiote »

bboygravity wrote: post #162
makeitdouble wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution. It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple. Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight... > essentially limitless oh well

Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country. So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..

France has the same energy price rises as the rest of Europe last year, since so many of their reactors weren't working. Most of them are also aging.

Their average prices are only a little below the EU average.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#204

Post by grumbel »

fho wrote: post #101
Breza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. The early web was full of amazing opportunities but had trouble monetizing things. Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize everything but doesn't have practical uses.

Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

> looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

Steam and pretty much every other regular retailer dropped Bitcoin support five years ago. The state of Bitcoin feels even more hopeless today than it did back then. It is impressive how you can run a trillion dollar pyramid scheme on just digital nothingness, but I always hoped for cryptocurrency to eventually turn into a real digital cash. Bypassing the fees and incompatibles between regular payment schemes. But none of that has happened. Bitcoin is still slow and expensive and there is hardly anything you can buy with it anyway. Worse yet, most Bitcoin still gets stored in "banks" instead of being self hosted, so it failed on the whole P2P cash thing as well.

It's impressive tech, but for all the wrong reasons.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#205

Post by [deleted] »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #197
kalleboo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

Agree, I’ll probably never buy another Intel laptop as long as AMD and Apple keep killing it with these things. I was hopeful that the Surface laptops would be good with ARM too but they’re not using the latest chips, they went for low/mid-tier performance, and Windows on ARM still sucks / relies too much on emulation to be fast. Some day maybe we’ll get REAL ARM hardware with dozens of cores, tons of memory bandwidt…

[deleted]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#206

Post by concordDance »

kelnos wrote: post #129
Georgelemental wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.

You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima? I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?

Having a fukushima and a three mile island happen every year would be easily worth it if it made nuclear 20% cheaper (feel free to do the maths if you dont believe me). And it would actually make things fourfold cheaper judging by the difference in price per KW between the 80s and now.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#208

Post by concordDance »

paganel wrote: post #159
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

I don't think it's cheap, at least current costs of building new nuclear tell us that.

And why do you think current ones cost 4x as much as 80s ones even after you adjust for inflation and power output?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#209

Post by sph »

kalleboo wrote: post #191
dustymcp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

I have a great desktop, and every day I curse Apple and Tim Cook because I cannot get an iPad Pro that runs full macOS.

That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered.

It is really sad to have the tech to do something, but it doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#210

Post by matthewdgreen »

ETH_start wrote: post #95
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.

The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.

Uranium and expensive plant resources are much too valuable to waste on this application. Buy some solar panels and do your hobby/discretionary computing using the much cheaper and unlimited power from our sun.
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