311–320 of 356 posts
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“This site best viewed in Chrome”.
Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).
Not 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…
That's a fascinating comment, thank you. I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization. Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be des…
You don't need "a system" for doing this. You only need one. 9,999 of 10,000 habitats could be staring into their naval, but the one building more will still be building more. So, I think you ought to flip the intuition around; it's not a question of keeping everyone on board, it's a question of what it takes to extinguish everyone's ability to do this, which, once it gets going, would basically amount to "a local supernova".
"I have even the remotest faith we could manage space habitats politically"
Again, I think maybe you're envisioning a world in which all the space habitats are just peacefully co-existing... but this is not a necessary precondition for them to exist, or propagate. Yes, they'll war, and they'll split, and they'll join into groups, and there will be diversity that makes the current diversity on Earth look like boring homogeneity, because there won't be such a strong force pulling people back towards a single species mean. It doesn't have to be utopia to exist.
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I just bought a powerful mac mini, but due to other projects arising, it sits idle. I am curious if anyone has suggestions. I looked through a dozen or so BOINC projects, but they all seem dead. The amicable pairs project had some 2020 results and activity in its forum, but I couldn’t draw a line to any practical goal. That said, maybe the sorts of projects that have practical outcomes don’t need to rely on the compu…
Rosetta@Home seems pretty alive : https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533
I have run BOINC on my own computers for about 20 years. I really like it because it always properly steps out of the way whenever the computer is being used for something else (including config to do that when simply other processes need more resource), and because it's cross-platform.
In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way: > "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated. Maybe it's PR speak, but it does mak…
Perhaps, in the era of cloudcomputing, "crowdsourcing" computing power is no longer needed?
The reason why SETI@home is not popular anymore is because how our hardware adapted. Back in the days the CPUs were constantly operating at the same speed. So if you left your computer on, it was using the same amount of power and generated the same amount of heat. SETI@home took advantage of it, by saying, let's make use of that wasted energy to do something useful.
As computers became faster the heat and power consumption became a bigger issue, mechanisms were added to allow CPU scale its frequency down, and have "micro sleeps" during the time there's nothing to do. OSes similarly adapted. Instead of having an interrupt triggered at regular interval they implemented so called tickless mechanism, when those house keeping operations are fired when needed instead of regular intervals.
All those advancements helped a lot with portable computers (laptops, pads, phones etc) but also made it to the desktops and servers.
Because of those advancements it is no longer "free" to run SETI@home. If you run it, your computer will get warmer, it will turn extra fans too cool down and it will use more power, so people are less motivated to run it. That's what made me stop using SETI@home myself.
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> Dude, IE was Windows-only. Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.
It was available on MacOS as well.
In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way: > "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated. Maybe it's PR speak, but it does mak…
Not 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…
That's a fascinating comment, thank you. I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization. Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be des…