hiberation
SETI@home is in hiberation
71–80 of 145 posts
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#72wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first crowdsourcing platforms...
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep sending out to space. By the time it gets to its destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from noise
That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish communication and learn from each other - the 40 year round trip time means we can only ask long term questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up for both (though sorting through all the things we already know will be a big effort). They m…
Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably low.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#74Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade ) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal. The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
Sigh. I miss websites like this.
Small personal web is best web.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#75This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way. For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#76Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"!
:)
Wasnt this the original wording?
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#77I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#78It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is also running, though it has had struggles since moving datacenters, and it seems their external stats are still out of commission.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
When conspiracies were a bit more fun. Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year. I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
IMHO, the whole social/psychological aspect of the "conspiracy" or phenomenom or whatever you want to call it is at least as interesting as the phenomenon itself.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#80[deleted]