SETI@home shuts down after 21 years • Hacker News Board

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#351

Post by justinclift » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #343

justinclift wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, fully agree about that.

It just seems the SETI@Home (and other BIONC) projects seemed to attract people that do that kind of thing. Haven't seen it with anything else before, though I'd kind of expect cryptocurrency miners would have been similar. ;)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#352

Post by takeda » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

growt wrote: post #339

takeda wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt cloud computing fits for their use case. They need constant power, and using "cloud" would be much more expensive than to have their own hardware (and of course even more expensive than using someone's else's computer). 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…

You're right, that might be the real reason. But did they report a decline in users or cpu hours? What I thought of was more like Amazon, Google or Microsoft "donating" some idle instances, or something like that.

Well, I don't think they reported it, but back in 2000 a lot of my friends were running SETI@home, today I don't know a single person that does it. Frankly I thought it was shutdown much earlier.

As for Amazon, Google, Microsoft donating, the same thing applies, it is no longer free unused power, it actually cost money to do it. It's weird to think they would just let use their resources that way when they also work on optimizing their power usage to the point of having system that automatically shuts down idle computers.

If they want to donate to a cause, it's more efficient for them to give them money, or at very least provide service with some discounts. But IMO if they were doing it, they would not do it quietly, so I doubt public cloud providers contribute anything to SETI.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#353

Post by necovek » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

jtms wrote: post #254

pmarreck wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, hover link styling and dynamic HTML in IE3/4 did push the web forward a bit. Not necessarily for the better, but it was influential, and defined some of the things that became standard.

But that was probably a bit earlier, since I was off Windows by '98 or '99.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#354

Post by learnstats2 » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #300

learnstats2 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several gaps in logic here but in my opinion the most remarkable assumption here is: - the only way that alien life could be intelligent is if they exploit the resources of their solar system maximally. Don't we have enough evidence yet that maximal exploitation of resources is a Very Bad Idea?

I wouldn't call using 1% of the mass of Mercury to create enough living area for a quintillion people and using most of the energy our Sun produces anyway to be analogous to anything you're alluding to on Earth thus far. But the point here isn't to dive into the moral issues. It's not even to ask what MOST civilizations would do. It's simply to ask would ALL civilizations restrain themselves this way? If the answer i…

My claim is that no civilization would engage in this kind of growth, yes.

Maximally exploiting your resources is not civilized.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#355

Post by benevol » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #289

benevol wrote: post #283

I find it quite funny that people still think that we'll "find" ETs by looking for them. ETs gave us their DNA. They are our ancestors. Which is why "contact" has been a reality since "our beginning" on Earth. Physical contact will (officially) happen when humanity is ready for it, measured by the maturity of our shared consciousness. Marina Jacobi is among those who currently are in direct and constant telepathic co…

... This is HN -- you post unscientific crap and it will be called out -- that lady seems like a crackpot. She does not channel or contact ET life.

It's unfortunate that you are so close minded. You will be surprised in a couple of years, at most.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#356

Post by FranklinYu » Mon, Mar 16, 2020, 12:28 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #271

simonh wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.

That's also the case at my workplace. On some machines, IE11 was still the default browser, despite it not being supported.

Do you work for banks or something?