Thanks for all that Matt. It's nice to know that there are humans behind all the numbers.

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Let me be the first to say thanks Matt for the post
It was like finding gold in your xmas stocking

It really helps put things in perspective
I realize people think my posts are all negative but at times I just don't get it
Often staff posts appear after mine and people point to them saying I'm wrong the info is there.

I'm glad the gigabyte line is NOT a dead issue

Now if the yearly budgets could replace the old one from 2008 maybe we could get behind the fund drive for operating cash

EDIT
Guess I should have looked budget now says fall 2010 SURPRISE

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Oh well got beat by two posts

Matt....

Thank you so much for joining in the discussion and sharing your thoughts with us.

Could you possibly look further into updating the g-link situation, or ask whoever is more in that loop to do so, and get back to us with some updated numbers?

There are some who have expressed interest in making this the next big project for us to help Seti with.

Some current info would be very helpful, even if you cannot get the campus folks to move much faster maybe we can help Seti get prepared.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Robert your ok you liven the MB up we miss you if you were not here

... Personally, I'm always at complete odds with how little public relations this project has, ...

Which is where hopefully some of the old names on the forums can help out a little...?

which is why I'm driven to inform as much as I can.

Which is always very welcome, even if we would also prefer you not to be distracted from the development work!

(That's also a thanks in there :-) )

... As a fun aside, it turns out by some small miracle the lab (which is located not on the campus proper but in the Berkeley hills) is actually in my line of sight from my kitchen window (about 4 miles away as the crow flies). I dream someday of installing a zip line which would make the commute from the lab to my backyard MUCH faster.

Yeeeeeee-Haaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! Whooosh! :-)

Rocket assist for getting back up the hill?! ;-)

More seriously... 5GHz narrow beam radio data link? Or a laser link? For high speed access to the servers?...

... Yes, sometimes all we need is for somebody to come up and push a button and me, Eric, and Jeff are too busy. That's when we call Dan or Dave.

Excellent. Is that the only time the softies get their fingers dirty with real hardware?! ;-)

... As always I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of many of y'all in wanting to get us the hardware we need. We actually have a new system being assembled/tested coming down the pike, and trying to get oscar and carolyn up to speed. Let's let the dust settle on these - then we'll have a better understanding what our needs are.

Keep us posted... The kittyman may well be purring up a rescue ;-)

Anyway... I dig the frustrations of many people. ... But we work with what we got.

It's all still impressive stuff, and a good test of all the systems and Boinc. I'm amazed it all works as well as it does...


As ever, thanks for the posting.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

(snippage)

4. We didn't ditch any science from SETI@home classic. Yeah, a lot of people were angry about various aspects of the painful transition, and so we lost a number of old participants. But we still have the results they processed. (more snippage)

- Matt

Thank you Matt. It surprising how often "Ya, S@H dumped a bunch of the the classic data yadda yadda yadda you see here and in other forums. Nice to see thy're mistaken.

Now, if we could just pry some hardware info out of you guys, like details on what's needed and where it should be delivered, Christmas might come several times a year. Especially for lower ticket items like hard drives and switches.

Let me be the first to say thanks Matt for the post
It was like finding gold in your xmas stocking

It really helps put things in perspective
I realize people think my posts are all negative but at times I just don't get it
Often staff posts appear after mine and people point to them saying I'm wrong the info is there.

I'm glad the gigabyte line is NOT a dead issue

Now if the yearly budgets could replace the old one from 2008 maybe we could get behind the fund drive for operating cash

EDIT
Guess I should have looked budget now says fall 2010 SURPRISE

I'm another that's glad to see you're still hear and posting.

Helpful hint, make sure you've cleared the holster before you pull the trigger. :)

I'm another that's glad to see you're still hear and posting.

Helpful hint, make sure you've cleared the holster before you pull the trigger. :)

Thanks
I wish the mods thought the same
Taking the down low for a while lest I get into trouble

Rest assured I don't draw with out the intention to kill
he he (haven't had chance to shoot my pistol in over a yr)
but its ready if I need it

Thanks, Matt.

Let me go on the record as being neither frustrated or annoyed at or by the project, or you, or anyone associated with the project.

I do find it curious that the school considers this and other BOINC projects low priority since it is a genuine innovation and the school's name is all over it. To hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people BOINC is the only thing they know that's ever come out of UC Berkeley.

But, distributed computing, as a "miracle," is getting more prevalent and long in the tooth. Does anyone appreciate the ac motor,anymore? Nah. They are everywhere.

It's only possible for me to understand the frustration of participants if I imagine them having a mindset which says to them, "We are going to find an ET signal in my lifetime if we can just hurry enough." Personally, I don't believe this.

Speaking only for myself, SETI@H is interesting as a data-handling project. As my hope for an identifiable ET signal approaches zero, my interest in the data-handling side of your experiment rises toward "importance."

If we (the crunching community) are pushing on a string, then we aren't pushing against the edge of any envelope; exploratory, IT, nothing.

What I take-away from that is that the frustration will build among the tens of thousands of rank and file participants (present company excepted; the folks here are interested) if they cannot maximize the project's use *to them,* which is all about "credits" and "competition."

Again, personally I'm not disappointed or frustrated or anything negative. I am thinking about the birthday I had in 1999 and the one I just had in 2010 and I'm wondering if the project can survive another eleven years if the project itself has become nothing but a maintenance issue.

Am I being clear, or do I sound negative? Those things are mutually exclusive in this case.

Bret

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Well just like the dysfunctional family we are in positive times we are all friendly, in the worst of time we are at each others throat. Especially during times where it seems it's all going wrong. The difference between a skeptic and a cheer leader here seems to be work, and often from which side of the fence they are throwing punches from, hopefully we can all agree the Seti project needs our help and we are all willing to tough it out for the good side of things.

Crunch along my friends!

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Bret, we all have our own perspectives. Personally I find BOINC to be a limited success, potentially commercially viable, and of no further academic interest to me.

For the ET search, I happen to think that an ET signal will be found. Perhaps not in my lifetime, perhaps not by this project, perhaps not with radio waves at all. But taking part in the search is the goal. The project going forward, the results being gone through, until a final "yes or no" determination can be made for the results, those are the important parts to me.

Credits.. are just an indication of how much work my computers are doing. Sure I like to see mine go up. But I really do not care. It is just interesting.
For people just interested in credits, there might be better projects. For those of us that are here to TRY and find ET, SETI is the primary and to some only reason to run BOINC.

But whatever your reasoning, lets enjoy the ride. One big happy dysfunctional family indeed!!

---

Janice

>For those of us that are here to TRY and find ET<

Hey, I was just describing a function when I said "approaches zero"! I hold-out hope that the search is fruitful! I have my doubts that our approach here, in my lifetime, will find what we're looking for, but that isn't to say I want to stop looking. What some see as futility, I see as progress.

That reminds me of a fella I know that says current space-flight is pointless since we'll be able to fly faster at some point in the distant future.

Huh?

If we quit flying we'll fly faster in the future?

Huh?

That must be how Orville and Wilbur managed to build a 747.

E.T. may well be easier to find than "happiness" for some people.

Me? I'm content.

Bret

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Me? I'm content.

Bret

I think that sums up a lot of peoples attitudes at this point. I am getting happier by the day as I see work flowing through my machines again.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Bret, we all have our own perspectives. Personally I find BOINC to be a limited success, potentially commercially viable, and of no further academic interest to me.

my one and only rule for attaching to projects is that it be 'pure' science and i'm not helping anybody to line their own pockets. So you're scaring me with that 'commercially viable' stuff.

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If you don't touch it, you can't break it.
;

There are some projects running BOINC that are commercial entities. As I do not recall of the top of my head which ones I will say nothing more other than Seti is not one of them.

Bret, we all have our own perspectives. Personally I find BOINC to be a limited success, potentially commercially viable, and of no further academic interest to me.

my one and only rule for attaching to projects is that it be 'pure' science and i'm not helping anybody to line their own pockets. So you're scaring me with that 'commercially viable' stuff.

---

Please consider a Donation to the Seti Project.

Interesting. If they are using the boinc structure to run a commercial project shouldn't there be some royalties paid somewhere?

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

If they are using the boinc structure to run a commercial project shouldn't there be some royalties paid somewhere?

Ethically? Perhaps. Legally? No: the open-source licence under which BOINC is distributed includes no such conditions AFAIK. Caveat crunchor. ;)

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Well......
All seems to be going rather well right now.

Although the bandwidth as shown by Mr. Cricket is maxxed, I am getting fewer comms errors and backoffs than I was this morning. Most of the rigs now have as much work cached as allowed by current server settings, and seem to be able to get, and report work pretty much at will.

If we could keep things going at this pace, we might start to see some reduction in bandwidth usage in a day or so (my optimistic guess).

Then I'd like to see the limits raised before the coming week's pre-announced 3 day outage (by Matt in his last tech news post) so the kitties could 'cache up' a bit to carry them through.

I think the wild card is how many 'set and forgets' have not yet filled their tanks.

And I think that Oscar has turned into a wonderful beastie.

When I first started the fund drives for him I was hoping that he would have a major impact on the daily operations of Seti. My hopes were dimmed a bit when it was announced that he was going to be the master science database, and I thought that everything done by him would be in the background.

I am soooooo happy that Oscar has been allowed to show his stripes (no pun intended, see Matt's discussion of striping in his last couple of tech posts) by being allowed to join in the fun by taking on some splitter duties....which it appears he relishes and has been clawing away at with much abandon. Both MB and AP too!!! Meow, Oscar!!!

So....lest some naysayers try to imply that our fundraising efforts and the purchase of Oscar and Carolyn have yielded little........

I think the best is yet to come.

Matt also mentioned the subject of a gigabyte network finally getting to the Seti servers to link them to us.

STILL not quite ready to happen, but things seem to be moving in that direction.

If you and I can help it along, and I can get some real numbers, we may have another fundraising project at hand.

Until then, I thank all of you who have had a hand in donating a little or in some cases a lot.

Never underestimate the power of the Seti faithful.

I have learned not to.

Meow meow!

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

I concur, things are looking really nice on my end right now too. Seems the only thing holding us back is bandwidth. Happy time ahead.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!