Daniel:

Sounds like extortion to me. I don't think that's in the spirit of a community dedicated to a grand search for ET. I think you might need to reconsider your motivation to participate in this project.

Thank you. I have reconsidered my motivations, and decided to shut down my entire fleet once the transition is complete. 23 machines will be going on sale soon. But not here.

Regards, Daniel.

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Daniel:

Sounds like extortion to me. I don't think that's in the spirit of a community dedicated to a grand search for ET. I think you might need to reconsider your motivation to participate in this project.

Thank you. I have reconsidered my motivations, and decided to shut down my entire fleet once the transition is complete. 23 machines will be going on sale soon. But not here.

Regards, Daniel.

Daniel,

You have the "volunteer tester" tag -- did you not help with the Beta? Did you not comment on the crunching time or granted credit?

Did you think it'd somehow be different when Enhanced went live?

It is of course your decision: no one asked you to build 23 machines just for SETI (or any other BOINC project).

Ultimately, you have to decide what you will, or won't, crunch.

It just seems silly to get so upset over credits with effectively zero value.

-- Ned

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Daniel:

Sounds like extortion to me. I don't think that's in the spirit of a community dedicated to a grand search for ET. I think you might need to reconsider your motivation to participate in this project.

Thank you. I have reconsidered my motivations, and decided to shut down my entire fleet once the transition is complete. 23 machines will be going on sale soon. But not here.

Regards, Daniel.

Yikes!!!

Don't leave, Daniel!

I have drawn my own conclusions out of the chaos we have right now -
an outrageous discrepance in claimed credit between the optimized standard and enhanced apps:

I threw out the standard seti app from my app_info files.

My RAC will take a dive, but fsck that, I'll be waiting there for you when the transition is done :o)

Regards Hans

P.S: I woudn't give much about anything being posted here, as many of the posts lack significance....

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Daniel,

You have the "volunteer tester" tag -- did you not help with the Beta? Did you not comment on the crunching time or granted credit?

Did you think it'd somehow be different when Enhanced went live?

It is of course your decision: no one asked you to build 23 machines just for SETI (or any other BOINC project).

Ultimately, you have to decide what you will, or won't, crunch.

It just seems silly to get so upset over credits with effectively zero value.

-- Ned

Exactly my point. The credits DO have value. Not only to me, but to thousands of other volunteers. It is a measure of our own personal accomplishment within each project we decide to participate in. Since my accomplishment, and the accomplishment of others who feel as I do, is apparently no longer wanted or needed, it shouldn't make any difference if all those of us who also crunch for competition leave the project.

Regards, Daniel.

Daniel,

You have the "volunteer tester" tag -- did you not help with the Beta? Did you not comment on the crunching time or granted credit?

Obviously the whole relase of 5.12 came out of nowhere. It was a surprise to me and i think to Daniel too that while knowning this app is to buggy to be released.

It is of course your decision: no one asked you to build 23 machines just for SETI (or any other BOINC project).

And noone asked for fpop counting...

It just seems silly to get so upset over credits with effectively zero value.

Well if i look at your RAC or one of the other guys who only ... and look at Daniels RAC then ...

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Join BOINC United now!

So he said he believes optimized clients are cheating.

Yes, CLIENTS. Thats the BOINC bit.

Not the Science app, which is what we're talking about in this thread.

I beg to differ. The BOINC piece is the manager. The client is the science app run under the manager. The Boinc program manages multiple clients or science apps.

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Yikes!!!

Don't leave, Daniel!

I have drawn my own conclusions out of the chaos we have right now -
an outrageous discrepance in claimed credit between the optimized standard and enhanced apps:

I threw out the standard seti app from my app_info files.

My RAC will take a dive, but fsck that, I'll be waiting there for you when the transition is done :o)

Regards Hans

P.S: I woudn't give much about anything being posted here, as many of the posts lack significance....

But, you see, it won't make any difference if I leave. It won't make any difference if ALL of us who crunch with competition in mind leave. Our accomplishments mean NOTHING, because we also think about "credits". Don't worry, because even if ALL of us competetors leave, there will still be at least 100 or so hosts left crunching by people who crunch only for SCIENCE. That should be enough.

Regards, Daniel.

Exactly my point. The credits DO have value. Not only to me, but to thousands of other volunteers. It is a measure of our own personal accomplishment within each project we decide to participate in. Since my accomplishment, and the accomplishment of others who feel as I do, is apparently no longer wanted or needed, it shouldn't make any difference if all those of us who also crunch for competition leave the project.

Regards, Daniel.

And there will probably be many more to follow. Those of us who are in this for the science AND competition make up a large majority of the crunching power on this project. Those of you who seem not to care, crunch with what, 1, 2, maybe 3 machines? I like Daniel have over 20 machines at my disposal. Some of my team mates have many more than that. When the last of the non-enhanced WUs run out, I will look for another project or failing to find one that feeds my competitive nature, sell off my excess machines. And so the exodus begins.....

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But, you see, it won't make any difference if I leave. It won't make any difference if ALL of us who crunch with competition in mind leave. Our accomplishments mean NOTHING, because we also think about "credits". Don't worry, because even if ALL of us competetors leave, there will still be at least 100 or so hosts left crunching by people who crunch only for SCIENCE. That should be enough.

Regards, Daniel.

I'll notice if you leave, that's for sure :o)

I don't see competition stopping after the transition is complete, as everybody's RAC will drop by the same percentage.

At the moment, the easiest way to stay "on top" would be avoiding enhanced completely, but that's not my piece of cake.
So I took the other option and sort of quit the competition for a while.

Running enhanced and standard at the same time is more like a lottery, and pretty much invalidates any credits gained.

Regards Hans

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I'll notice if you leave, that's for sure :o)

I don't see competition stopping after the transition is complete, as everybody's RAC will drop by the same percentage.

At the moment, the easiest way to stay "on top" would be avoiding enhanced completely, but that's not my piece of cake.
So I took the other option and sort of quit the competition for a while.

Running enhanced and standard at the same time is more like a lottery, and pretty much invalidates any credits gained.

Regards Hans

Thanks, Hans. But after the complete rollout of enhanced is complete, with the lower credits, there will never be any more competition. SETI.USA once had a chance to compete directly with Seti.Germany, and a chance at becoming the #1 team. Now, with only 1/3 of the credits, this overtake cannot possibly happen within MY lifetime. And that is just in TEAM competition. As for one on one competition, I won't be able to move any higher in THAT respect either, in MY lifetime, unless I end up hitting the lotto. So, remove competition, and you remove most volunteer's reason for being here. Compound that with those telling me and the other competitors that we don't matter, because we also think of credits, and the choice is clear. Why bother crunching for a project that considers it's top participants to be pariahs.

Regards, Daniel.

Thanks, Hans. But after the complete rollout of enhanced is complete, with the lower credits, there will never be any more competition. SETI.USA once had a chance to compete directly with Seti.Germany, and a chance at becoming the #1 team. Now, with only 1/3 of the credits, this overtake cannot possibly happen within MY lifetime. And that is just in TEAM competition. As for one on one competition, I won't be able to move any higher in THAT respect either, in MY lifetime, unless I end up hitting the lotto. So, remove competition, and you remove most volunteer's reason for being here. Compound that with those telling me and the other competitors that we don't matter, because we also think of credits, and the choice is clear. Why bother crunching for a project that considers it's top participants to be pariahs.

Regards, Daniel.

You have a point there.



There might be some things in the future that will make this whole mess just look like a bump in the road, though.

- further optimizations (I'm not sure about the possible speedup, though)

- faster crunching hardware (intel conroe et al, the "cell" cpu of the PS3)


Regards Hans

P.S:

I'll be selling part of my setup, also. These boxes become obsolete at an alarming rate :o)

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So he said he believes optimized clients are cheating.

Yes, CLIENTS. Thats the BOINC bit.

Not the Science app, which is what we're talking about in this thread.

I beg to differ. The BOINC piece is the manager. The client is the science app run under the manager. The Boinc program manages multiple clients or science apps.

You’re free to use terminology peculiar to yourself, but don’t be surprised if others don’t understand you—or vice versa—in consequence. Unlike S@h Classic, the apps that do the scientific processing under BOINC aren’t normally referred to as “clients” because they don’t perform any of the functions required for communication with the servers. That aspect of the system is handled by the BOINC “core client”, which is usually—but not necessarily—bundled with a manager that provides a GUI for interacting with it.

Separation of the client functions from the scientific work was a major raison d’être for BOINC, as it allows the various projects’ development teams to concentrate on the high-level coding that does their specific kind of processing, without having to deal with all the ‘nuts and bolts’ of communication protocols, server configuration, and so on.

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So he said he believes optimized clients are cheating.

Yes, CLIENTS. Thats the BOINC bit.

Not the Science app, which is what we're talking about in this thread.

I beg to differ. The BOINC piece is the manager. The client is the science app run under the manager. The Boinc program manages multiple clients or science apps.

You’re free to use terminology peculiar to yourself, but don’t be surprised if others don’t understand you—or vice versa—in consequence. Unlike S@h Classic, the apps that do the scientific processing under BOINC aren’t normally referred to as “clients” because they don’t perform any of the functions required for communication with the servers. That aspect of the system is handled by the BOINC “core client”, which is usually—but not necessarily—bundled with a manager that provides a GUI for interacting with it.

Separation of the client functions from the scientific work was a major raison d’être for BOINC, as it allows the various projects’ development teams to concentrate on the high-level coding that does their specific kind of processing, without having to deal with all the ‘nuts and bolts’ of communication protocols, server configuration, and so on.

Either way, he still called us cheaters......

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[/quote]

I don't see competition stopping after the transition is complete, as everybody's RAC will drop by the same percentage.

[/quote]

I check my ranking at Boincstats, so it's not only a S@H game. At my benchmark computer, a Prescott 3.2, I got:

75 credits/hour running Crunc3r 4.11
65 credits/hour running E@H U41.04
35 credits/hour runnind CPDN standard
25 credits/hour running Rosetta
25 credits/hour running S@H 5.12

So, if I change the share of S@H from 50% to 5%, and increase the share of E@H, my RAC will not drop dramatically. People that care about science, but also like the competition DO have a choice.

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It looks like Enhanced has the value of my dollar dropping to 33 cents. That kills the fun of the competition. I hope this is resolved so that I don't have to take my measely 130 machines elsewhere to get my money's worth. Optimizing helps one get more bang for the buck without corrupting the science. Credit is important to a lot more people than a few here may think. I believe that I may have to follow Daniel if there is no improvement. Electricity isn't cheap and about 26 of these machines eat up power at home. Individuals such as Crunch3r and Trux should be commended for all the time and effort that they have put into improving this project. So what if people are credit whores. That gives more incentive to crunch and is a cheap way to reward them for doing it. By all these people going after credits and adding machines the science has been helped. To not realize that, one would have to have a short circuit above the neck.

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This is only a test...

Well, it looks like between me, SargeD, and Lazy, this project could be loosing at least 175 hosts alone. And this is just 3 people. There are hundreds more who feel the same way. But, like someone said, none of this will make any difference, because we "credit mongers" don't count. Our contribution to this project and our crunching ability is worthless, because we also care about credits.

P.S. In regards to the comments about us cheating, the last person suspected of ACTUALLY cheating had his account deleted not too long ago, after an entire thread was devoted to that investigation.

Regards, Daniel.

Acknowledgement of people’s contribution is required to keep a majority of people involved with distributed computing. The conundrum that the developers of BOINC have been working on is how best to do this fairly. The benchmark idea was great at the time when only 1 or 2 projects were on BOINC and only a few individuals were optimising, but as more projects came online and optimised apps and clients became available en-masse, its limitations were discovered pretty quickly. Resulting in peoples preference for projects that gave good credit. The idea of counting the number of operations performed came out as a good replacement, but now very early in its public infancy we are seeing that it has problems as well. So how do the developers ensure that the same computer claims the same amount of credit no matter which project is crunched?

Do we just want to rely on having faster or more computers to boost our overall RAC? Do we, the volunteers, want to see a fair credit system? Are we for a socialist credit system or a free-market capitalist style of credit system? Do we want a credit system that is transportable across all BOINC based projects? Do we want to see a credit system that is only good on a specific project where we end up only counting the number of wu’s completed and validated per project?

Live long and crunch.

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Paul
(S@H1 8888)
And proud of it!

Good Morning,
I'm still here. To clear up a few points, I was refering to the BOINC client, not the science application. I did say if you had read all of the post carefully, I use the optimised Seti apps and my complaint and accusation was about the over-inflated credit claims brought about by using 'optimised' BOINC clients.
(The BOINC manager etc. on our computers are clients of the main BOINC programs on the Project servers)

no one asked for Fpops
Maybe nobody did, but why were these or similar questions asked frequently;
Why am I only getting 25 credits when I claim 43.
Why does this hostid claim 6 credits and granted 23.
Why do I only download 10 units for a one day cache when my computer can do 16 units per day.
Why has my computer gone into edf mode.
On my dual OS machine do I claim 10 credits/unit using OS1 and 26 credits/unit using OS2.
etc. etc.

At the beginning of last year these questions/complaints were almost daily, and they are all caused by the benchmarks. John McLeod VII (JM7) helped by proposing and then programming the scheduler, which helps in downloading the correct amount of cache units and ensures that work is returned before the deadline, if its left alone.

There were many dicussions about the claimed credits problem and the ways to fix it, quite often led, even if not started, by Paul D. Buck. Most of the proposals were non-starters and the systems similar to the present Fpops method were rejected because it was thought it would lengthen the time to crunch a unit. Other methods discussed were for the projects to send every x days a reference unit, and base future claims on how long that took to process. A system of calibrating against standard computers, where your computer benchmark was adjusted every time you met a 'standard host' doing the same unit. etc etc.

So we may not have asked for Fpops, but we certainly asked for a system where each computer claimed approximately the same credits for the same unit.

For those credit hogs thinking of jumping ship to Einstein;
1. Look at the sever status page
2. Read the S4 search will take more than 200 days to complete

I predict you have less than 30 days to fill your credit basket.

and in reply to RJM Bubois, my figures are;
CPND 16/hr
Einstein 12/hr using standaard app
Einstein 36/hr using optimisation
Seti 4.18 14/hr standard app (June 2005)
Seti 4.11 45/hr using Crunch3r's optimised app
Seti Enhanced 16/hr

all of these figures are without using an 'optimised client'

And to all those using enhanced 5.11, have you read this forum_thread.php?id=30709#305178

Andy

I'll notice if you leave, that's for sure :o)

I don't see competition stopping after the transition is complete, as everybody's RAC will drop by the same percentage.

At the moment, the easiest way to stay "on top" would be avoiding enhanced completely, but that's not my piece of cake.
So I took the other option and sort of quit the competition for a while.

Running enhanced and standard at the same time is more like a lottery, and pretty much invalidates any credits gained.

Regards Hans

Thanks, Hans. But after the complete rollout of enhanced is complete, with the lower credits, there will never be any more competition. SETI.USA once had a chance to compete directly with Seti.Germany, and a chance at becoming the #1 team. Now, with only 1/3 of the credits, this overtake cannot possibly happen within MY lifetime. And that is just in TEAM competition. As for one on one competition, I won't be able to move any higher in THAT respect either, in MY lifetime, unless I end up hitting the lotto. So, remove competition, and you remove most volunteer's reason for being here. Compound that with those telling me and the other competitors that we don't matter, because we also think of credits, and the choice is clear. Why bother crunching for a project that considers it's top participants to be pariahs.

Regards, Daniel.

I don't know where you think the competition has gone. As long as we are crunching and getting credits, the competition still exists.

And as for you and seti.germany, it looks like you think that germany is going to continue with the old system while you have to use the new system. Talk about a persecution complex. In case you haven't figured it out seti.germany is using the new credit system also, not just you.

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98SE XP2500+ @ 2.1 GHz Boinc v5.8.8

And God said"Let there be light."But then the program crashed because he was trying to access the 'light' property of a NULL universe pointer.

And as for you [Daniel / SETI.USA] and seti.germany, it looks like you think that germany is going to continue with the old system while you have to use the new system. Talk about a persecution complex. In case you haven't figured it out seti.germany is using the new credit system also, not just you.

Well, in fairness I think you're missing his point: the existing lead was established under the old system, so it's proportionally greater under the new. For a greatly exaggerated analogy, suppose you're in a rally race and the car ahead of you has a 20-km lead and averages 100 km/hr; you're doing 120 km/hr so you expect to catch up in one hour. Suddenly the roads become impassable and you’re both forced to proceed on foot, the leader at 5 km/hr and you at 6 km/hr (magically maintaining the same ratio), so that 20-km lead will now take you 20 hours to make up.

Looking at the Top Teams page, I see that SETI.USA’s RAC is about 100,000 greater than SETI.Germany’s, and their total is about 80 million less. So if the status quo were maintained they could expect to catch up in 800 days, somewhat over two years. If we accept, for the sake of argument, the premise that both teams’ production will now drop by a factor of three, the time required to overtake will increase to 2400 days or six and a half years.

Note, however, that this is also based on the assumption that all the members of both teams are running optimized v4.x apps. A more realistic assessment would take account of the actual prevalence of optimized workers, considering that the earnings per hour of the standard app and the Enhanced are pretty similar. If half the members of each team are running stock apps, for example, still accepting Daniel’s claim of a 67% earnings drop from optimized 4.x to 5.x, the overall RAC ‘devaluation’ will be only about 35%, yielding a time-to-overtake of three years or so.

IMO even two years is a very long time in the computing world. I’m reminded of the story about a layman attending an astronomy lecture, and becoming quite upset on hearing that the Sun will become a red giant, vaporizing the Earth, and then burn out. The lecturer points out that five billion years is an unimaginably long time in the future, with no relevance to anyone alive today, or even their great-great-…-grandchildren. Much relieved, the visitor says, “Oh, that’s all right, then. I thought you said five million years.”

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