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| Personal background |
Hi, I'm from New Zealand but now live in Sydney, Australia. I'm a computer hobbyist (since I was as school in 1976), and professional commercial applications programmer.
How things have changed ! The computer I got hooked on (at school) was a Digital PDP-8f with 4K words of RAM and the CPU consisted of 3 circuit boards. Now we have 6 PCs for my wife, son and myself ... and I run seti@home on all the PCs that I can (my wife and son keep changing their screen savers).
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
I used to read a lot of Science Fiction (when I used to have time for such luxuries) and I believe that there has to be life out there somewhere. Admittedly the odds are pretty small of another race broadcasting a signal that we can receive (and recognise) just at the time we happen to be listening in their direction.
Oh, and what about searching the southern HALF of the sky ... after all, why the assumption that SETI must live in the northern hemisphere ? Gee those americans are so full of their own propaganda that most of them don't know that anything exists outside the continental states ... sheeesh !
I have looked at the other Boinc projects, but found it hard to relate to them. Climateprediction are trying to use our PCs to prove that their computer model is correct - and how can it any program model an entire planet ? THere are just too many variables. The other initial project descriptions went over my head.
So my message to SETI@Home is to continue writing the initial project descriptions, newsletters, etc. aimed at a non-technical audience. You already provide plenty of hard science for those that want (and can understand) it.
We have ADSL, but I still use setiQueue to co-ordinate. I have just upgraded to Boinc on my laptop, and I'm not very impressed. Obviously spec'd and written by computer geeks without much consideration for it's users.
1) My laptop is not connected permanently - usually will be connected after only a couple of hours commuting - but occasionally may be several days between connections. The preferences don't seem to allow for downloading several days worth of WUs, but connecting daily.
2) Are you assuming that everyone has broadband connections uith unmetered data transfer ? That would explain why there is no time window for connecting, and the way the "messages" when trying to connect sound like errors.
I personally find the "Messages" rather confusing. What is expected behaviour and what is unusual ? There are too many messages, making it extremely unlikely that an average user will bother reading them.
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