While debating in the BOINC forums about putting a site together that combined all the projects, I found out a few things...
There already ARE places that have everything one could use. All beit, those site's dont participate together all that much.

Most people prefer that anyone that can write code (A science Project) should be able to run a project and the ones that run that code.. I.E. crunch their numbers, should have no say in the the usefulness or ligitmacy of that project. I understand that every one running a client of BOINC can pick and chose what they want to crunch, however, there is NO ONE or GROUP as far as I can tell, that are governing all the new projects that are coming out. There are last time I looked, no less than 3 projects looking for the largest prime mumber (I'm NOT ranking it as ligit or not here!). I'm sure someone has a use for it but how is one to know that while a project is running, its code was actually created by a crazy with a master plan? All I put up there was an IDEA to some how stop the chance of that happening.

When I proposed making it a requirement to place ALL info about a proposed project up for study by the 'people of boinc' to study and decide if it was valid science or something that could be useful in someway, a few 'to be nameless' project admins flipped out. One even quoting their education follow by something very similar to this.. 'what gives you to right to think you know enough about science to decide if a project is ligit our not' I wonder if that same person relizes that Enistine (Yea.. the father of E=MC^2) dropped out of highschool?
I was shocked to see a project admin post such nonsense. It left me stunned and feeling very much 'put in my place'... I'm just a number cruncher that cant distingish science from hogwash??!! I shut my systems down, when to bed.. and today, thought very hard and long about all this. I guess that some of these project admins are scared their project MIGHT not meet with the approval, if it were to be set out there for all to study and 'vote on' weather or not it was worth the effort. I am thanking 'the maker', the admins here are no where near being arrogant, unlike some out there.

After thinking hard about what took place in the boinc forums, I came to this conclusion, I like this place. Almost all members here are kind in their post and respectful of other's ideas and opinions. Yeah.. There are always a few low lifes that get a thrill from bullying in the forums but hey.. in the end... karma will make things right ;) As long as I stick with SETI and never run someone else's project that is not linked to from BOINC, Im pretty safe from a 'crazy' with bad intent. I highly recommend no one crunches a project that is not on BOINC's project list.

I have complained about the lack of seeing the results here. You will NEVER see me complain again in these forums. The Staff is doing their best in times of 'input overload' but ARE working to crunch the master science database and the numbers are starting to show up on the science status page. In time, after the software is developed for this, I'm sure the science status page will start to fill with the results. I need to STFU and just give the staff time to finish this coding. It has to be, just by the nature of what they are trying to find, a mind boggling task.

I have talked about coding with flash and got some interesting replies in the forums here. flash is a programing language.. unlike php, c++ or any language but it does have the ablility to do animated graphics and that is the main reason so many sites have those useless adds all over the place, done in flash.. "hit the bear and win.. what the F' ever" crap. Flash uses a coding style called 'Action Script" Part of that language is its great ablility to do math and communicate to php and other languages used in web design. For those that think flash is nothing but BS. You need to understand more about it.. I agree its way over used at sites for advertising AND I too absolutly hate when I visit a site and some poorly done advertising starts making 'noise'!!! Some times if I have had my sound up listening to music, I have jumped clear outta my chair.. but the worst was the phone ringing one.. I actually reached for my cell phone! I have posted links to the flash I did to show the current status of the servers and got back from, "great Job" to "it's garish" .. I had to look that word up LOL.. it means... from Dictionary.com "crudely or tastelessly colorful, showy, or elaborate, as clothes or decoration" That's fine with me. I did it just for kicks to learn more about the flash/xml connection and thought id get some feed back on the colors and overall feel for it by posting it here. 'thanks all that did, btw :)'
Where am I going with this.. well.. is a good choice to represend data with, do to its great math routines and also the fact, its self contained. When I subjested that maybe it could be used to show data here, some flipped out.. Its ONLY a subjestion for crying out load. NO need to panic.. SETI will never look like POGO or a game site and I think the prefered language used by the site coders is php.
Hey.. while im on that topic, if these forums are done in phpBB, which it looks like they are "use BBcode tags to format text", there is a spell check program called "PHPSpell" that is VERY easy to interface in to phpBB.. all you have to do is insert two lines of code in the posting script and its done. You can get an english word dictionary at their site that contains over 130,000 words. I can't spell real well and often need help.. it would be cool to add that if it's not to much trouble :)

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Not Ready Reading BRAIN. Abort/Retry/Fail?

Hey Mike!!!

That was a very entertaining post, describing your trials and tribulations.

Thanks!!! ...and keep up the good posting and coming up with ideas. :]]

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Mike I'm glad you can see the bigger picture. I'm glad you were not too put off by what we discussed in that message. Remember Mike, it was just a discussion!. You cannot make gains in anything if you don't beat out all the possibilities. So its good to get lots of different angles on the topic of Unification of BOINC.

Every project is 100% separate. In reality they have nothing what-so-ever to do with each other. Its only BOINC enthuses that compile information about the projects on websites. Currently there is only one thing that links the projects together, that's the statistics websites like Boinctstats.com and others.

If you have an interest in science, then like me and thousands of others, you will stick with the projects you enjoy!

As for the bad spelling, i got a Google toolbar. The toolbar has a spell check and i use it before every post i make on a message board!

I'm glad you were part of the discussion Mike and I'm glad you are going to stick with it!

John.
John37309/Johnney Guinness.

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Very nice post Mike. Thanks for the interesting read!

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. . . Great Post Sir - maybe some of the SETI Cruncher's want to see your WebSite

- keep up the reason these Forums @ Berkeley were Originally created . . . Thanks Mike

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

I'm glad you decided to stay. We're happy to have ya!

I personally am not new to Seti, I joined under a different id years ago, I was involved in crunching for them shortly after they released their distributed platform. However, I moved, changed ISP's, new email address and forgot to change my id and password from the old account to the new one. and have since forgotten the id and password that I logged in to.

Eventually, seti sent me a "I want you back" email, kinda reminded me of the old days of columbia house music club, anyway, I think I just showed my age... be that as it may, I went to sign up and found out I needed to run BOINC.... wft is BOINC I remember saying..... only to find out it was a pig of a piece of software and it wouldn't run on my new amd 64 bit chip, not so much the chip as the ATI video card. Hmmm, cpu freeze constantly...(read "I was not amused") having to reboot my computer every time I came and sat down at it. I wasn't getting any number crunching done, so I ripped out BOINC with my bare hands... so to speak...

4 years go by and I get another "I want you back"... I hesitated remembering the crap I had to endure the last time I downloaded BOINC..... but here I am, let me tell you, but not until after three solid days of cpu freeze, locking up my brand new quad core, dual 8800 gt OC cards... again.. WTF am I doing here running this BOINC piece of SH**.

I read through the BOINC Helpless files, I looked for an email address to send my concerns. I have no use for SKYPE, being on a satelite isp, I am not about to even try voip, to much lag.

After a pile of pissing around, changing overrides within the SLI command interface for the application BOINC and still having freeze up, I decided to delete the climatecontrol project.... hmmm, I had that installed the last time I was running BOINC.

Well, guess you have no control over who actually sits on a project and calls themselves a programmer, (being a former IBM GS employee on an application developement and maintenance crew, I saw a lot of hacks come and go. Me included, they say it takes one to know one.... I admit to it, but when you are dealing with a bunch of... wait how did the boinc page put it? "people that use their computer as a web browsing and email appliance"... you have to program a lot better than... "oh, sorry, we don't support that card." or "I have no idea why your machine freezes, our is working fine.."
That is pure BS.

So, I deleted climatecontrol and seti is running full out on 4 cpu's at 100%. I have gone from 345 points on May 2 to over 1200 as of May 5 MDT. And most of that occured since late on May 3rd.


I like the idea of Seti. I think it is absolutely a definite that life exists outside of earth. I believe with all certainty that the universe would be a lonely place if it were just us in it. I believe we will find life out there, there has to be life, strictly based on the #'s.

The pure enormity of the universe, the number of stars, the number of planets that must exist based on known statistics. There are likely 100,000,000 other life forms out there and more than likely, they are more intelligent than us, and trying to avoid our caveman like mentallity.. and I do mean that. As much as we can type and build machines, we still kill ourselves in hughe numbers. From heart disease, automobile accidents to homicide to genicide and just plain war. We are still infants in a universe that is as old as time itself.
Can you imagine a paranoid society like the good 'ole US of A, coming face to face with an alien race, intelligent enough to travel intersellar space. The Americans would be hyped to accept them as invaders and blow them out of the sky, something like Independance Day. But imagine a race capable of travelling those vast distances... if they could actually build a machine to get them here, I don't think a MAC virus is going to take them down. Resistance would be futile, and maybe, just maybe they really did arrive in peace.
But our arrogant - "We are the center of the universe" mentallity would prohibit them from thinking about the bigger picture.

That finally, the answer is we are not alone in the universe and just maybe they are here because we are ready to meet our neighbors. Or more precisely, our neighbors are ready to meet us.

On that glorious day, when the answer comes, our lives will in fact be changed FOR EVER! There will never be the opportunity to go back. It will be a day when we can move forward technologically, and stop killing ourselves with hydrocarbons. When we can learn that electro magnetic energy is more than just a dream, and that energy really is free. We will be able to eliminate poverty and wealth and build a world that should embrace our universal brothers and sisters and join a universal neighborhood.

One where intollerance to the colour of ones skin is a thing of the past. Where we recognize that differences are a part of nature and that we are now the newbies in the hood and have to learn our place is at the kids table of the galactic christmas party.

As for Mike O's comments about legitimacy of one's project. He is essentially correct, if not for the scientific value, but maybe for the testing of one's code before they send it out and screw up some unsuspecting user that has no idea how to configure an SLI command over ride. If Boinc wants participation by uninformed computer users, they really need to test code. Maybe they wouldn't need so many volunteer help line folks to help people through the install process.

Just my opinion.

signed...
Bits_of_guy.

If anyone is interested where the name comes from... it was a night of joking but started with the comment on a Mars Bar wrapper... May contain traces of nuts...I thought it should read "may contain bits of guy"

"sometimes it just isn't worth chewing through the straps"

While debating in the BOINC forums about putting a site together that combined all the projects, I found out a few things...

Saw your flash stats page and thought it was pretty good. Then saw Dr. S.E.T.I's link to your website and thought the videos were terrific. Sent an email to you through the site and when it was sent it took me to Yahoo. Not sure if you got it or not. Had a couple of questions so if you did not get the email let me know and I'll send you a PM.

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@ Bits_of_guy. Great thought provoking post. Wish more people on this planet thought like that - if they did, maybe these projects wouldn't be struggling for funding?!

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Very mice post Bits_of_guy.. and cool nic.. lol
I feel very much the same as you on all counts. I have told this to others.. If an alien race showed up at earth, it wouldn't take them long to see we are NOT a very well adjusted race.

funny.. the guy that told me 'I wasnit smart enough to decide if a project was real science' is an admin for a climate project :)
<-- wondering if it's his project you tried to run.
lol

Im glad you all enjoyed what I posted.
If nothing else, my experience in that boinc forum made it clear why I will only do crunching for a project that has its S*** together!
SETI is ALL I will EVER CRUNCH! (unless the SETI scientist do another one)

Arion, I will check my email.. I worked 17 hours yesterday and was very VERY busy over the weekend trying to write code to filter a huge CNC tool path coordinates file. IF the email is not there, I'll PM you OR you could signup in the forms and send me a PM there at my site :)

If anyone is using my flashstats and you get 'cutoff' PLEASE let me know your IP address.. My site is the target of many many attacks from spammers and hackers trying to mess with the forums there so I block their IPs.

Mike_O wrote:

funny.. the guy that told me 'I wasnit smart enough to decide if a project was real science' is an admin for a climate project :)

Hi Mike

To be fair, when Les Bayliss posted on the boinc _dev forum in this thread, he didn't say exactly that. There was a discussion about how to tell whether BOINC projects are worth crunching for, and he said

But don't start assuming that you know enough about all areas of science to decide if it's worthwhile.

I don't think he meant that you or anyone else isn't smart enough to judge; he meant that nobody can possibly know enough about every field of science to know whether a project's workunits are well-designed, or worthwhile. He probably didn't say this quite as tactfully as he could have done, which is why you misunderstood him.

I'm also an admin on the same CPDN forums as Les. But we're not programmers and we're not in Oxford where ClimatePrediction is. You could say we're enhanced moderators, able to do more things than moderators usually can. Some other CPDN moderators are in the same position. This is so we can save time for the real project administrators in Oxford by doing more stuff; there are only two of them and they're very overworked. A lot of the extra stuff has consisted of getting rid of large numbers of forum spammers.

Anyway, I just wanted to make those things clear. Certainly, if you look at the CPDN forums, none of what I've pointed out here would be immediately obvious.

I do agree with a lot of what you said on the boinc_dev forum and in this thread.