Guys, I made a rookie mistake and want to apologize for making my wingmen wait. I was having trouble keeping enough work to get through the outages so I increased my cache on my default setting. Next outage I still didn't make it through so I increased it some more. When that still didn't help I finally opened my eyes and realized I had my computer set to home. I switched it to default and it downloaded way more work than I needed. I decreased my cache again but I've got a bunch of extra work I've got to plow through. I should be back up to speed in a couple of days. Again, sorry 'bout that! :-)


PS: Please don't throw things!

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Lucky. I've not been able to get work for a heck of a long time. And I have a couple hundred WU uploading that simply won't upload, which means as far as SETI is concerned, I've not done my work and won't get issued any more WU :D Nothing like waking up in the morning to see everything in 12+ hour project backoff. Goodness knows how long it's been in project backoff overnight, heh. And short of me sitting at home all day spamming retry, means there won't be any more work for today at the very least. :(

Been with this project (on more than one account) for 10+ years now, and I must admit, tempting to just stop bothering with it, given this.. whatever it is. Spose the plus side is it means less demand = more supply for other users, and my powerbill would go down.. hrm..

Yeah, uploads are slow with everyone trying to hit it all at the same time. The problem I'm running into is all the pending credit. sheesh I've got a lot of WU's sitting there waiting for wingmen to upload.

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Yeah, uploads are slow with everyone trying to hit it all at the same time. The problem I'm running into is all the pending credit. sheesh I've got a lot of WU's sitting there waiting for wingmen to upload.

The only thing I don't understand about that is that always seems to be the reason why "no one" can upload and download anything: because "everyone" is uploading and downloading o_O. Sounds to me like it's a small portion of the community (probably not even the ones on forums) who tie up the servers with their 10+10 day cache on fast (or numerous) crunchers that can happily saturate the 100mbit pipe simply with how fast they get work done, leaving stuff all for the smaller crunchers (sad that my 'normal' 23k RAC is considered small these days, too!)

Really, I'm almost all for a per-user speed cap so "everyone" can at least get -something- through. Of course, this is a bad idea and I'm just venting my frustration at this months-long issue that seems be getting only worse :(

Yeah, I just completed all my uploads/reports about 20 mins ago, and now I have 96 new units downloading.

Also, the repair shop called and said they still think they can fix my Retry button, but they're doubling their estimate, and they want to know if I got the license number of the truck that ran over it! :0

Martin

edit/ My cache is still set at 4 days and I do run out of work occasionally. No biggie, time to get out the vacuum and chase the dust bunnies around...

<rant>
Rookie mistake is right... and it began with it's users turning the SETI@home forums into a rant slum. 10+ huh, good for you buddy. I started SETI@home at about 225k people and you will not find 1 post with me complaining in any of my 11 years on this project ... If you were old school enough, you wouldn't have to shout it. You would know what you were getting into before it became a number games on people who can only go to sleep at night when their WUs are flowing or their credit score is updated. SETI@home is and forever was a volunteer project and with that means you can't throw money at the problem like you can in a business. If you want to grow SETI@home, please pony up the financial backing. Be glad you are donating your time, and if it frustrates you that much, feel free to take a small hiatus from the project. There are like millions of people now that with shear numbers will overcome any one person's absence too make much of a dent.
</rant>

+1 to those of us that just do what we can, when we can, just like the staff.

>>Been with this project (on more than one account) for 10+ years now, and I
>>must admit, tempting to just stop bothering with it, given this.. whatever it
>>is. Spose the plus side is it means less demand = more supply for other users,
>>and my powerbill would go down.. hrm..

<rant>

11+ huh, good for you buddy. It's people like you that drive people away from projects like these with your elitist "oh well, piss off then, someone will take your place" attitude.

Good call bro, good call.

+10

Are there really projects hurting for crunchers?

Are there really projects hurting for crunchers?

Folding@home is always, always looking for crunchers. Hurting? No. "Would be glad for more people to join, and not just have the mentality of people like Ryan"? Yup.

ib4 "herp derp maybe you should go there"

Ah well. I already do Folding. I may break into the top 10,000 there, this year.

<rant>
I started SETI@home at about 225k people and you will not find 1 post with me complaining in any of my 11 years on this project ... If you were old school enough, you wouldn't have to shout it.
</rant>

You are complaining, and you're shouting about your own "old schoolness". We were making observations, not complaints. [EDITED for more friendliness than originally worded and intended:] We're all in this together for the same goal. Bickering only hinders the process.

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RAC was the bad idea. I'm getting so fed up that I'm 99.9% of the way to making DA rue the day he thought up RAC. pay_to_crunch@home. Your RAC can be purchased. Cold hard cash for RAC. How many credits you get for a flop is multiplied by your RA$. The more $ you send the higher your RAC. I was thinking of just a big for loop but that isn't very green. No instead the science app will be a mal-bot. Give it to lulzsec and anonymous! Send $10 and get 10X RAC. Send $100 and get 100X RAC. The sky is the limit!

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Payment in Boincoin.

edit
How much Boincoin for a toaster?

Be glad you are donating your time

Wow, and I thought I knew how to be righteously indignant!

But just so you'll know - there are only a little more than 160,000 active users running under 250,000 hosts now (as reported by BOINCstats). The 2,000,000 figure is misleading. We're doing 550+/- TFLPSs collectively, about half of what NASA's The Pleiades system is doing right now.

Active users and active host numbers are falling slightly, even as we are doing more work (thank you nVidia and ATI).

I'm thinking that if we care about getting the data sifted, it might be wiser to tell people not to worry so much rather than to invite them to go, even for a while. They might not come back. And if you look at the long-term cricket graph you'll see that the odds of the project's getting more reliable aren't good judging by its past.

There's been a lot of that lately, "Let the door hit you on the way out," and similar nasty sentiments. Is it just the heat of summer? Is it the economy?

After so long a time without any papers or results published or hope given, I think it is a testament to our hopes for and dedication to the project that so many of us are still here.

I personally love the idea of a new source and type of data and look forward to new challenges for the team and us volunteers. I'd like to see more volunteers, maybe even *especially* more of those who are a little obsessive / compulsive about their hobby and think before they shut their computers off and go on vacation without a thought as to whether their work will be delivered or not.

While we might all get a little annoyed at the project from time-to-time, I don't think it helps to get annoyed with each-other. I mean, really, does it bother me if someone's really, really angry about their RAC? Not really. I hate it for them, but nobody's making me read their postings.

They could always go elsewhere and get more "points" so the fact that they are here says something about their priorities.

If I want to complain it will be about the project's capacity and that has nothing to do with anyone here or anything anyone at SETI@home can do anything about. But who else am I going to tell to get it off my chest?

The only reason I think to complain is doing the math and realizing that with 250,000 computers running at an average cost to operate of $200/year (ultra conservatively), that's an annual donation of about $50 million we're collectively making to the project. I don't care if you're Bill Gates, that's serious money.

You'd think someone that matters might think a $50 million subsidy justifies a little more bandwidth and some quicker storage. If we had it I suspect a lot of all this whining and frustration would go away.

I wonder if they (the powers that be) feel we should all be happy to have our power bills?

But sure, if we really wanted-to we could see if we could raise enough money for a PFLOPS computer and give it to SETI@home and then we could stop worrying about the @home part and nobody would have to be unhappy.

SGI is right down the street from Berkeley. If we threw enough money, those poor guys in the lab could turn the project over to someone else and stop suffering for us so much. But then... they should be glad to be able to donate their time. I'm SURE they've never dog-cussed a server.

(I'm being sarcastic to make a point. I don't want anyone going anywhere and I'm happy I'm not the only volunteer so I'm happy for every volunteer, even if they are grumpy.)

Well, this is interesting. I started this thread as an apology to my wingmen for taking a bit longer than I normally would to finish my work and to explain why so others might not make the same mistake. Never expected it to turn into a rant thread. I've reread my post a couple of times and I don't see where I might have been construed as ranting. I haven't quite made it to nine years yet but I plan to be here at least another nine if that's what it takes to find the signal. I donate what I can and try to help whenever I can. Maybe someday I'll buy a winning lottery ticket and donate a big portion of it to SETI. Until then I'll just keep crunching along.

Okay, enough from me, rant on if you wish gang, the thread's all yours.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

I was about to say somehting similar. There's no need for you to apologize, we all do that - and I mess up more than most! But it is a good idea to mention mixups to help us avoid the same thing. Happy crunching..

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Another Fred
Support SETI@home when you search the Web with GoodSearch or shop online with GoodShop.

You did nothing wrong perryjay.
While testing mistakes happens.
Otherwise we wouldn´t learn.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Well, this is interesting. I started this thread as an apology to my wingmen for taking a bit longer than I normally would to finish my work and to explain why so others might not make the same mistake. Never expected it to turn into a rant thread. I've reread my post a couple of times and I don't see where I might have been construed as ranting. I haven't quite made it to nine years yet but I plan to be here at least another nine if that's what it takes to find the signal. I donate what I can and try to help whenever I can. Maybe someday I'll buy a winning lottery ticket and donate a big portion of it to SETI. Until then I'll just keep crunching along.

Okay, enough from me, rant on if you wish gang, the thread's all yours.

Peerjay, you have absolutely nothing to apolgise for - you've got a bunch of tasks you weren't expecting, all nice and snug on your machine and as ever, will doubtless process and report them within the alloted time frame - which I believe is the general objective of the project. Whether it was by accident or design, the important thing is that you look after the data and do what is required with it whilst it is in your care.

It is the general 'naysayers' posting to this thread who need to take a cold hard look at what they are posting about and where, and consider the relevance of their comments to the thread (including who started it, ie you) before they hit the Post Reply button.

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Getting more tasks than you bargained for can happen quite easily. It recently happened to me when switching to optimised applications over on beta. I forgot to reduce my cache to 1 day as a precaution and before I knew it I had between 40 and 50 tasks. Each task had an estimated run time of only 12mins, when the reality was several hours! Bit of a panic there when the estimation was slowly creeping up, but thanks to the long deadlines I managed to get them done.