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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice attitude buddy, maybe the problem was you. Companies regularly waste 1000x more on executive salaries.

Heh Heh Heh. I knew someone would take that approach. Put it this way. Explaining to the customer higher ups why that crap was running on their central billing cluster servers when an outage occurs and the place loses revenue ($mil's). "Job ending" for the manager in question is a good description. ;)

This has little to do with seti.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh Heh Heh. I knew someone would take that approach. Put it this way. Explaining to the customer higher ups why that crap was running on their central billing cluster servers when an outage occurs and the place loses revenue ($mil's). "Job ending" for the manager in question is a good description. ;)

This has little to do with seti.

This guy was literally running SETI@Home on the production billing cluster servers for a multi billion $ telco, and would not stop doing so.

He didn't even work directly for the Telco, but for a consulting place (Accen...). Think of the liability factor for that, when there was a production outage on the cluster. Try proving the software (maxing out cpu, screwing up instruction cache + context switching, etc) wasn't part of the cause. :(

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has little to do with seti.

This guy was literally running SETI@Home on the production billing cluster servers for a multi billion $ telco, and would not stop doing so. He didn't even work directly for the Telco, but for a consulting place (Accen...). Think of the liability factor for that, when there was a production outage on the cluster. Try proving the software (maxing out cpu, screwing up instruction cache + context switching, etc) wasn't…

Your employee’s lack of discipline and/or proper systems job control is the root issue here. Trying to associate it with seti is unfortunate.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#344
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a K6-233 which was always on the verge of overheating (or maybe I was obsessing a bit too much about monitoring it). I envied my friend's K6-200, which was more stable it seemed.

My K6-233 got so hot it demagnetized its CPU fan. I noticed after the floating point unit fried the first time I tried to play some post-quake FPS. After that, it would boot, but the antivirus software I was running said it had a virus. I guess that was the only msdos program in the boot sequence that performed floating point.

I had a K6-II which I put a big heatsink and large fan on (had to ghetto mod the mounting), sawed a 120mm hole in the case just above the cpu and put another fan there. It overclocked handsomely and stable after that. I don't remember the exact frequencies but I think it was 266MHz stock and clocked close to 400MHz with some modifications.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#345
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-s…

> and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Firebug changed my life when it came out!

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#346
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 90s I had a 486sx33 with one of those Cyrix 586 upgrade chips for the math co-processor slot. It was so hot it had a fan on it! Crazy! I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95. I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.

CyrixInstead ™ represent!

Waay back in the day.. 286 12mhz with 1mb ram and a 10mb RLL drive. Setting the jumpers on the drive controller block was a nightmare that I still have. I think there were 16 or 32 pins and all the jumpers had to be just right or no dice (no drive). Further along I had a 40mhz Cyrix 4x86 I think, with 4mb ram and a Trident VGA 256 color card. I remember the ram being old school block chips and not SIMM modules. It's been a long time, so I could be mistaking the memory type between mobos. Was a great 3.11 machine for the time.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#348
So, what about the hypothesis that aliens 'released' the concept of crypto currencies on Earth, resulting in that idling computers and whole data centers would start mining bitcoins instead of investigating signals from extra-terrestrial life forms? It'd be a nice plot, trying to hide themselves a bit longer from our search...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#349
post #72

Did SETI@home accomplish anything useful with its 21 years of computing? Outside of the general "it's always good to do science, even with negative results" which I agree with. I ran a large cluster of university machines surreptitiously for this project many years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a

So, is this all they did in 21 years? Funny people don't criticize it for wasting electricity when people complain about how Bitcoin wastes so much which seems like a far more practical utility than SETI.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#350
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to currently be a thing. It's a little premature to say it's going to apply to all cultures across all time. In fact I'd take the opposite side of that bet. The thing is if there's any culture for which that's not true, like Mormons, Orthodox Jews, some groups of Muslims, whatever. In a few generations they replace the cultures that don't have a lot of children like our own. Then expansion continues. I cou…

Well, while they're still dominant, all the other cultures might decide to band together and discourage, eradicate or dilute the one that keeps growing. Anyway I agree that we can't say for certain whether population will grow or shrink. In fact in the context of this discussion I think that's the most important point. Many discussions about alien civilizations tend to assume that they'll evolve into huge multiplanet…

That's a good point, and one I often wonder about too. Maybe advanced civilizations are not expansionist. However it doesn't make a good solution to Fermi's Paradox because all civilizations would have to not be expansionist, if there were just a few exceptions they'd expand all over and we'd likely spot them.
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