Dear Ned!
Thank you for stigmatizing me idiot. Is it guild that I want to help?
OK, I tell you the story: I can't upload tasks, and don't know why! There is no information about this on the website. I'm looking for the forum, and what I see? "Want perfection?"->"donate"

I see no where Ned mentions you by name. I think you may be taking his words personally.

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Oh, Ned, my friend - where has your sense of humor gone?

It has been beaten out of me by the sheer stupidity of my fellow crunchers.

In the meantime, computers here are crunching away, and they aren't stunned by the idiocy represented by most of the posts in Number Crunching and "Technical News."

OK fine!

Now where is the communication? I have spent over a decade crunching for SETI. If it isn't interested enough to tell me what the problems are, why should I bother spending what the electricity costs me?

Idiocy! Well shove that where the sun doesn't shine. People here volunteered. There is only so much crap volunteers will put up with. Simple really - tell people what is happening, or don't. Consequences follow.

You may be prepared to waste money on power - why should I?

I volunteer just as well as you do. I made no agreement when I signed up stating that as long as I paid my electric bill, the project owes me something in return. I also see no reason to give ultimatums and consequences for something so trivial.

I don't know about you, but the technical updates (or lack thereof) are not the reason why I started donating. I know I would not waste any power on anything at all. But I don't see it as a waste after all.

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[quote]Oh, Ned, my friend - where has your sense of humor gone?

OK fine!

Now where is the communication? I have spent over a decade crunching for SETI. If it isn't interested enough to tell me what the problems are, why should I bother spending what the electricity costs me?

Idiocy! Well shove that where the sun doesn't shine. People here volunteered. There is only so much crap volunteers will put up with. Simple really - tell people what is happening, or don't. Consequences follow.

You may be prepared to waste money on power - why should I?

You shouldn't........if you don't understand what this big science project is all about. It isn't about you - its slightly larger than that. If the costs are too high then by all means move on to something else.

I'm on year 9 myself soon to be 10.....I have PCs that would be on whether they were running BOINC or not...I choose to run it so there is mutual benefit.
It costs money for power - yep 5 PCs worth plus but in my meager opinion
I think the end result - whether anything is found or not is worth the search.

The project is shorthanded no doubt - I too wish they would communicate more often and maybe let us in on things but I'd rather they spend their time making it work and doing what the whole thing is for - the science.

The consequences ? If you don't do the work someone else will ...I'm always in need of a few more WU's..

I guess what I'm saying is don't get so worked up over something so (in the scope of things) minor. You were never promised continual work and in that they have met their promise <grin>

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on aimerais bien savoir ce qui se passe d'autant que tous les voyants des serveurs sont au vert.
merci
un utilisateur français

we would like to know what's the matter, cause all the servers are on.
thanks
a french user

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seti1 was pretty good, seti2 will be better ?

Oh, Ned, my friend - where has your sense of humor gone?

It has been beaten out of me by the sheer stupidity of my fellow crunchers.

In the meantime, computers here are crunching away, and they aren't stunned by the idiocy represented by most of the posts in Number Crunching and "Technical News."

OK fine!

Now where is the communication? I have spent over a decade crunching for SETI. If it isn't interested enough to tell me what the problems are, why should I bother spending what the electricity costs me?

Idiocy! Well shove that where the sun doesn't shine. People here volunteered. There is only so much crap volunteers will put up with. Simple really - tell people what is happening, or don't. Consequences follow.

You may be prepared to waste money on power - why should I?

Stunningly dull.

I don't work for the project. It also does not work for me. I'm a volunteer.

I don't spend a whole lot on electricity. I don't run computers just to crunch. No one asked me to.

At the same time, I don't expect the project to always run smoothly.

Why? Because they said they wouldn't.

Why should I get mad when the project says "we make no promises" and that turns out to be true?

Someone else took my rant and singled out "perfection? donate!" and true to form, missed the point completely.

Currently, donations barely cover salaries. February brought in $4,400.

To guarantee smooth operation, multiple redundant connections are needed. Bigger servers, more space, more electricity, more A/C. More staff would be good too.

Probably can't do that in the lab, where costs are artificially low.

Donations would have to increase by at least a factor of 100. That's not going to happen. Perfection is not an option.

I'd encourage donations, but I'm under no illusion that all of the problems will be fixed if we each kicked in $5.

... but picking out one bit because you don't like it, and attacking it, that doesn't work.

I personally think that you have a choice. You can recognize that this is the environment that BOINC is designed for: broken servers, undersized connections, random junk belonging to people who are not computing professionals, and fickle users who have never bothered to understand that this is what it is.

... and given all of that, it runs incredibly well.

... or you can choose to be mad because SETI@Home does not meet your expectations.

It's a choice.

It'd be different if they didn't meet their promises.

They promised that there would be downtime, and they promised that they'd run out of work.

When staff does tell us what's going on, they get a whole stack of advice, some of it well meaning, but much of it bitching about their inability to keep a stack of random hardware -- some of it "hand-me-downs" -- running flawlessly on a near-zero budget.

I think we'd get more communication from the project if people would simply adopt a kinder tone.

I'm under no illusions there either.

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Nobody asked me either. So what?

Limits of tolerance exist. Mine have just been exceeded. Yours may not have been.

Communication. There has been none. End of story.

[quote]Oh, Ned, my friend - where has your sense of humor gone?

OK fine!

Now where is the communication? I have spent over a decade crunching for SETI. If it isn't interested enough to tell me what the problems are, why should I bother spending what the electricity costs me?

Idiocy! Well shove that where the sun doesn't shine. People here volunteered. There is only so much crap volunteers will put up with. Simple really - tell people what is happening, or don't. Consequences follow.

You may be prepared to waste money on power - why should I?

You shouldn't........if you don't understand what this big science project is all about. It isn't about you - its slightly larger than that. If the costs are too high then by all means move on to something else.

I'm on year 9 myself soon to be 10.....I have PCs that would be on whether they were running BOINC or not...I choose to run it so there is mutual benefit.
It costs money for power - yep 5 PCs worth plus but in my meager opinion
I think the end result - whether anything is found or not is worth the search.

The project is shorthanded no doubt - I too wish they would communicate more often and maybe let us in on things but I'd rather they spend their time making it work and doing what the whole thing is for - the science.

The consequences ? If you don't do the work someone else will ...I'm always in need of a few more WU's..

I guess what I'm saying is don't get so worked up over something so (in the scope of things) minor. You were never promised continual work and in that they have met their promise <grin>

Communication. There has been none. End of story.

It's OK. It isn't required to volunteer. That is all.

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Nobody asked me either. So what?

Limits of tolerance exist. Mine have just been exceeded. Yours may not have been.

Very true, but for the life of me I can't understand why people's limits/expectations are that much higher than mine. Were they promised something I was not?

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Oh people, we are just swearing at each other! There is an other way to tell the people the facts and to ask wtf's going on, but somewhen it will work. Theratening won't solve our problem.

One idiot says he burned his work on a CD, and is mailing it in. How arrogant.

I thought that one was pretty funny ...
.
.
.
.
..

Ned, please don't lose your perspective on all this. Some of us rely on your insight.

The idiotic posts are either from idiots, who will leave, or from trolls trying to wind you up. Neither deserve your time and attention.

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Nobody asked me either. So what?

Limits of tolerance exist. Mine have just been exceeded. Yours may not have been.

Let's try it this way.

I'm very angry with my bank.

I went to the branch today, and I expected them to give me $50.

Not $50 out of my account, I expected them to give me $50 as a gift for being a customer.

It doesn't matter that they never said anything about giving cash to customers. I'm a good customer, they should reward good customers, right? I deserve $50.

To add insult to injury, I went there at 6:30 and the doors were locked. No one would even let me into the lobby!

Now, it says right on the door that the hours are 9:00 - 5:30, but I expected them to be open, and they weren't.

I'm so very angry with them, that I'm going to take my accounts elsewhere.

Now, who is the idiot? My bank for not meeting my expectations, or am I an idiot for getting mad because I decided that they'd give me free money, and stay open after hours.

... and yet, that's exactly what we see here in the forums.

When someone points out that maybe, just maybe, that isn't reasonable, the response is "Well shove that where the sun doesn't shine."

Mean. Threatening. Rude. If that's the standard, that's fine. Clearly, it isn't that hard to get people's attention -- but making them think is an entirely different proposition.

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Ned, please don't lose your perspective on all this. Some of us rely on your insight.

The idiotic posts are either from idiots, who will leave, or from trolls trying to wind you up. Neither deserve your time and attention.

It's a lack of perspective (and a lack of reasonable expectations) that is the cause of all of this angst. Maybe, just maybe, some of the idiots will realize that they might be a little bit out of line.

If they're trolls, and they think they're getting a rise out of me, they are mistaken.

-- Indy

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Eric has posted all he knows about the problem. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=59250

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Communication. There has been none. End of story.

What sort of communication would be possible, let see?

"We have a problem with upload, we have no idea yet what it is, or how long it will take."

Quite often, all of the time is spent diagnosing the problem, and the fix is only a few minutes. Or, you try a dozen fixes, any one of which might be the fix, and it is only when you try the last one that you realize it is fixed. Or (like a problem at my work at the moment) you do some diagnostics, you try a fix, you do some more diagnostics, ... It can take a while and you don't know how long it is going to take until you are done.

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BOINC WIKI

Or you pull what's left of your hair out troubleshooting your gear only to find out it's not your stuff broken! :-)

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Mean. Threatening. Rude. If that's the standard, that's fine.

Have you noticed that most of these people posting have never been posting before, but for when the problems last for more than a few days? And then the tendency is to start with asking, preferably each in their own thread - or in threads that have nothing to do with their question, it was just the first they came across on the forum they started in - to ask for information.

When we - other volunteers - answer in there, with what info we have, or else with knowledge of what happened the last time around, maybe 1 in 10 will say thanks and happily sit it out, while the rest will see your message as a personal attack and start a vendetta on you.

Example given, answering someone who claimed he was donating his electricity and hardware to Seti, I asked him if he were really packing them in and sending them to Berkeley, before I explained to him that volunteering and donating were two different things.

I got an "I don't mean to be rude" answer in which the person was very rude and wondered why - after crunching 10 years for Seti - my credit was so low and my post-count so high. I've since explained to him the difference between volunteering and donating, which I doubt will do any good and asked him to check my account and see all the other projects I run and get credits for and how I could've gotten that post count.

I didn't explain to him all the times we lost the credit due to BOINC Beta restarts. I didn't explain to him that BOINC wasn't here yet 10 years ago.

Maybe I should've run some more MW on my ATI card and slapped him around the ears with a couple of million of those useless things. But sorry, I prefer to play FEAR and FEAR 2 with it. (Managed to get the Limited Edition for a mere €9,99) :-)

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Good images, the only problem with your bank is that you want to pay the $50 in and not to get it as a gift. I'm personally not participating for the credits, but for the help.
other:
"We have a problem with upload, we have no idea yet what it is, or how long it will take."
That's the all information what I waited for.
THX

As one who first joined SETI 10 years ago (and took a 5 year break and returned recently) and now is posting for the first time, I think this is a great project that is fun (late night dreaming of being the one who makes the first contact) and scientifically helpful. The volunteers who run it deserve our thanks and the project deserves a cash donation occaisionally. We need to get away from the attacks and the "blame game" that seems to predominate posts when there is an outage.

Lets keep this a fun project.

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