i'm sure the electric bill could go down a buck or two. and my laptop runs DD@H(alpha) and it's out of work, what is my laptop doing right now you ask?

It's not generating any heat or using electricity.

---

I recommend Secunia PSI: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
Go Georgia Tech.

Threed!

Results out in the field 2,548,398
If we are out of work I think it's better to resend to us this results.
So we have to crunch and this pending can be granted.

Bye,
Francesco

Probably the best reason:

Because BOINC isn't designed to do that, and without some major changes, probably can't be reasonably tricked into doing that.

The second reason, which has been presented on other threads: it's unreasonably selfish of BOINC to use processing that could (read it again: could) be used for something other than expediting work that will take care of itself eventually anyway.

We forget that BOINC crunchers are not the only community to be considered: BOINC projects have feelings and needs too you know.

Add a second project, give it 10% resource share or so, and not worry about running short of work.

---

or grab a bunch of projects.

---

I recommend Secunia PSI: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
Go Georgia Tech.

I dont mind no new work. Ive shut down the Old P4 for a well deserved rest. The i7 when it crunches the last four Ap's will get shut down as well. My Mac still has 2-3 days of work,but i also run milkyway on that, They fight to see who runs.
Id run milkyway on the i7 but 6.6.36 cant play well with others. have that problem with the mac but once seti WU's get low it will get milkyway WU. So untill a new version fixes that little bug, only the mac will run another project.

And anyway its not the end of the world if we cant get work.

---

[/quote]

Old James

6.10.3 mostly plays nicely with Milkyway and SETI for me.

---

A law that specifically prevents money to go to SETI...

Link please.

A law that specifically prevents FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS from going to SETI.

As a SETI@Home supporter, I of course think that the work is worthwhile, but I understand that other tax payers might not want their tax dollars to go to something that does not interest them.

Google "William Proxmire SETI" and see what you get. That should get you close enough....

I hope Proxmire burns in hell. People call debating about Gay Marriage trivial, and yet there was NO CNN coverage about this.

Or maybe there was and I wan't even born yet.

---

30+ Computers heading our way! Currently at the "Zomg we need to talk to our tech expert at the co-op about this first!!!" stage. 16 Lab machines and 14+ Staff machines each with 2.2Ghz CPUs and 256MB ram. Think they balance? The RAM certainly is bad

A law that specifically prevents money to go to SETI...

Link please.

A law that specifically prevents FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS from going to SETI.

As a SETI@Home supporter, I of course think that the work is worthwhile, but I understand that other tax payers might not want their tax dollars to go to something that does not interest them.

Google "William Proxmire SETI" and see what you get. That should get you close enough....

I hope Proxmire burns in hell. People call debating about Gay Marriage trivial, and yet there was NO CNN coverage about this.

Or maybe there was and I wan't even born yet.

LOL...

Well, Proxmire's Golden Fleece award was given to SETI in 1982, but thanks to personal intervention by Carl Sagan, Proxmire softened his view and the projects continued.

The real bad guy is Richard Bryan in cutting SETI off from government support, with arguments which only served to show he didn't have a clue about what it's all about. ;-)

Here's the link to the thumbnail summary you asked for.

Alinator

So there actually is a LAW with the terms "SETI", "no", and "federal funding" in the text?

---

30+ Computers heading our way! Currently at the "Zomg we need to talk to our tech expert at the co-op about this first!!!" stage. 16 Lab machines and 14+ Staff machines each with 2.2Ghz CPUs and 256MB ram. Think they balance? The RAM certainly is bad

So there actually is a LAW with the terms "SETI", "no", and "federal funding" in the text?

No, of course not. Funding may have been killed in 1989, or 1993, whatever, but budgets are yearly, and money went out LEFT & RIGHT to other non-traditional programs this year if it would help create *JOBS*. Lots of Gov't programs return bumpkis, but they got funded anyhow. Fist waving at Proxmire considering he's been dead for years and out of office for decades is, well, misplaced.

Part of SETI's failure is they didn't play ball in a political arena that rewards recipricol contracts for constituants ... SETI was too self sufficient and efficient for it's own good, and that was 20 years ago.

I wish I had better answers, but I think multi-purpose initiatives (such as the Allen Array) where we can piggy back on the same signal collections, and the existing well-managed methodical approach coupled with the High IQ guys constantly evolving the search algorithms is as good as it gets.

And another good read: http://history.nasa.gov/garber.pdf

LOL...

Yep, just look where the ATA is located and you get a pretty good indicator why Bryan's wrath was aroused! ;-)

@ Vistro: Ah, grasshopper...

Get a few more years under your belt and you will come to understand the true nature of the world of man! :-)

Alinator

A law that specifically prevents money to go to SETI...


Link please.

There is no such law, though as other posts have noted there was enough opposition to kill funding of NASA's SETI search. The National Science Foundation may still provide grants if the proposal falls within one of the categories they have established. There's Astrobiology, for instance, and grants such as this one for a program at the SETI Institute.

                                                               Joe

A law that specifically prevents money to go to SETI...

Link please.

A law that specifically prevents FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS from going to SETI.

As a SETI@Home supporter, I of course think that the work is worthwhile, but I understand that other tax payers might not want their tax dollars to go to something that does not interest them.

Google "William Proxmire SETI" and see what you get. That should get you close enough....

I hope Proxmire burns in hell. People call debating about Gay Marriage trivial, and yet there was NO CNN coverage about this.

Or maybe there was and I wan't even born yet.

CNN wasn't born yet.

My friend, you should be much more tolerant.

I don't know how well you did your research, but while we would not always agree with Sen. Proxmire, he basically had a good idea.

Tax dollars are taken from from the taxpayers. When you've been a wage slave for a few decades, you'll know more about it than you really want to know.

In turn, the government is obligated to spend the money that they've taken on things that are important. If you read history, you'll see that the Federal government is mainly intended to provide for the common defense (i.e. one army instead of each of the 13 colonies having their own) and to regulate commerce between the states.

Pretty much everything else should be left to the individual states, and certainly that isn't how it works 230 years later.

The government does some things that I really like, but on average, it also does a bunch where I personally wish they'd get as far from as possible.

The senator, with his Golden Fleece award, tried to target things that were an amazing, incredible waste of those tax dollars.

Things like a U.S. Department of Justice study of why prisoners wanted to get out of Jail.

On SETI, he was wrong.

I still wish the government spent less money, and let me allocate that tax savings as I see fit.

If the late Senator was alive today, he'd have tons to say about my tax dollars buying other people new cars.

More reading:

http://books.google.com/books?id=f7YKgXxyQmwC&lpg=PA104&ots=7w2P65Hvev&dq=proxmire%20seti%2013%20things&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q=&f=false

---

<snip>
If the late Senator was alive today, he'd have tons to say about my tax dollars buying other people new cars.

More reading:

http://books.google.com/books?id=f7YKgXxyQmwC&lpg=PA104&ots=7w2P65Hvev&dq=proxmire%20seti%2013%20things&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q=&f=false

In a way I am sorta glad that seti isn't government funded. I don't think the money in v. results out would please the government bean counters.

In a related note about the CARS program. By simply buying a car with decent mileage I have saved about $12,000 over the course of owning my car so far vs one rated at 18mpg.

---

SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

My friend, you should be much more tolerant.

I don't know how well you did your research, but while we would not always agree with Sen. Proxmire, he basically had a good idea.

:-D Ned, you got Vistro fired-up and de-railed on the topic in the first place with your challenge, as follows:

A law that specifically prevents FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS from going to SETI.

Google "William Proxmire SETI" and see what you get. That should get you close enough....

No such law, as lack of political & constituant support achieves the same effect. Sooooooo... moving forward, as a voter in whatever country you live, folks should write their present & living representatives to make sure they know you support the sciences in both the near term, long term, and long shot categories as they all produce quantifiable benefits for society.

SETI might not have found intelligent life in the Universe but it found it on the Earth, via SETI@home which spawned BOINC. We all belong to a community, which a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, called "noosphere", the sphere of knowledge, before Internet was even born. He died in 1954 and is buried in New York City.
Tullio

---

My friend, you should be much more tolerant.

I don't know how well you did your research, but while we would not always agree with Sen. Proxmire, he basically had a good idea.

:-D Ned, you got Vistro fired-up and de-railed on the topic in the first place with your challenge, as follows:

Vistro made a suggestion about Senator Proxmire's eternal soul that seemed a little intolerant, especially if you read a little more of the history.

Senator Proxmire was fighting against government waste.

Did the FAA seriously study "the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the 'length of the buttocks.'"

I don't know the applicable law on SETI funding, I've simply seen many references from credible sources, all saying SETI can't be funded by the U.S. Federal Government. Maybe there is something on snopes and this is an urban legend.

... and on the CARS program: It isn't the idea that an efficient car will save money, especially if gas prices increase (and they will), but the idea of a government rebate to help people buy cars.

As a good conservative, I like efficiency. I'm all for a better use of resources. What I object to is reallocating my resources (tax dollars) to others. Leave it to me and let me fund what I see fit.

Incidentally, I telecommute, so I've saved even more. :-)

---

I don't think there is a specfic law which outright prevents government funding SETI related projects.

Don't forget the old axiom;

"Politicians are liars and cheats, and if they aren't kissing babies, they're stealing their candy. However, they always try to keep their options open."

IOWs, why make it illegal when merely cutting the purse strings serves the same purpose in a less absolute manner.

For example, Sen. Bryan did his damage by getting the funding for the SETI related projects NASA was running or supporting cut from their '93 budget, effectively killing them and seroiusly slowing down other projects which were dependant on the raw output and/or results from them.

However, the mainstream (or enthusiast for that matter) media often descibes that as '... law passed banning X!'.

As far as those other matters go, don't even get me started on that!! :-D

Alinator

Results out in the field 2,548,398
If we are out of work I think it's better to resend to us this results.
So we have to crunch and this pending can be granted.

Bye,
Francesco

Bad idea since this is not a race from a science POV, and it means that every host running a task above the minimum quorum when it forms is wasting its time time running useless tasks so others can get useless credits sooner or maintain a RAC value running busy work like Classic did.

Or worse, a host get's their originally assigned IR task 221'ed, just to satiate some other big gun battleship's empty cache.

The simple truth is that if the project doesn't have any new work to send, then that's just the way it is. Time to find a backup project or save a buck or two and shutdown until new work is available.

That's just my opinion though. ;-)

Alinator

The "out of work" problem is not really mine, having a 4~5 days work buffer.
Can be a problem only for GPU cruncing, because the number of CUDA Tasks received is not adeguate with the work buffer. And If I am "out of work" with GPU, the number of other projects to Join is very low.
The problem is an other, I think.
I see that I have Pending credit: 155,623.71 and some of them are of July. May be in some days the workunit reaches the deadline and the task is redistributed to an other computer.
I wander if in this period of "out of work" SETI can anticipate some long deadlines and distribute them to CUDA owner. They reply very quick andso we van obtain: a) less pending; b) less results out in the field
Bye
FF

---

The "out of work" problem is not really mine, having a 4~5 days work buffer.
Can be a problem only for GPU cruncing, because the number of CUDA Tasks received is not adeguate with the work buffer. And If I am "out of work" with GPU, the number of other projects to Join is very low.
The problem is an other, I think.
I see that I have Pending credit: 155,623.71 and some of them are of July. May be in some days the workunit reaches the deadline and the task is redistributed to an other computer.
I wander if in this period of "out of work" SETI can anticipate some long deadlines and distribute them to CUDA owner. They reply very quick andso we van obtain: a) less pending; b) less results out in the field
Bye
FF

You're still not thinking this through all the way with a big picture POV.

It is irrelevent whether the host has GPU capability or not.

The point is a host could be completely on course to finish the task on time right at or just before the deadline (as mine frequently are).

What you suggest means that arbitrarily the project comes along and reissues the work early to a host which burns through it immediately. Now the previous host will be wasting its time running the task at all if the other original wingman has reported already, or it will lose one of its cached tasks (to a 221 abort), even though it hasn't done anything wrong.

Consider that in the case where SAH is the low share 'backup' project. Personally, I don't like the idea of getting shot down by friendly fire. ;-)

The answer to having too many tasks in the wild is to not let too many get out there in the first place, rather than change the rules on the fly.

Worrying about how much pending credit you have makes about as much sense as worrying about the moon suddenly flying out of its orbit. There's nothing you can do about it per se, and 99 and 44/100 plus percent of the time it gets granted eventually.

Alinator