There's a world of difference between malware and viruses. A perfect firewall (were there such a thing) could not protect you if you deliberately download an app. By definition a virus spreads without you having to do anything to help it - other than forgetting to protect yourself either by having a firewall or running a nix-based system.

F.

Malware includes viruses, Trojan horses, worms, etc. The wikipedia and others agree on this, I'll even throw in the Google search I made too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci762187,00.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=malware+definition&ie=utf-8

OK! Point taken...

However, you were the one who introduced malware to the discussion. My point stands that the examples you were quoting had no relevance in a debate about firewalls and Martin's post referred only to viruses.

Please understand, this is not a personal attack - just trying to clarify the issue.

F.

I didn't think It was a personal attack, I was just trying to correct ML1 as He said that there are no viruses on the MAC and so I pointed out what has been pointed out by others and so It does have relevance, I could go Google that too If You'd like(relevance). And I am quite well acquainted with different OSes across different brands of computers both open and closed OSes(dabbled with a friends TI-99-4A once, talk about a computer that could have used some better cooling), But then I've been using different computers since the late 70's when computers were just starting to be used in the home and It's been a long 28 years so far, I even contemplated buying and building a homebrew Heathkit S100 bus computer back then too, But went towards something that was easier to do back then as My soldering skill is not so good.

As some people noted in other parts of the forums, there was an article in the Washington Post this weekend about the crisis in NSF funding for the Arecibo Observatory (and, perhaps, radio astronomy in general.) I just want to let everyone know that we are aware of the situation and are planning to fight for Arecibo's future.

Dan and some others that I work with were in Washington this week attending a meeting to discuss the scientific future of Arecibo. The observatory does have unique capabilities, primarily because of its size. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) currently has 42 dishes (not all have yet been operational), but the combined collecting area of those dishes is about 1.5% of the area of the Arecibo telescope. If ATA is able to get funding for an additional 40 dishes that will be 3% of the Arecibo collecting area. Even at the initially proposed 300 dishes (which won't happen any time soon) it is a small fraction of the collecting area of Arecibo. ATA's power comes from being able to focus in on smaller areas of the sky, which makes it an excellent instrument for looking for signals from specific stars, but inappropriate for surveys of large sky areas like SETI@home. Only when the Square Kilometer Array is fully operational (scheduled for 2020, but who knows) will Arecibo's capability be surpassed.

What led us to this funding problem? Primarily a combination of flat budgets for astronomy research and expensive new instruments. The National Science Foundation budget for Astronomy is about $200 million dollars per year, and prior to this year, the budget for Arecibo was about $10 million. Neither of those numbers are chump change, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If the NSF doesn't get a budget increase for Astronomy and doesn't close some facilities, there will be a $30 million dollar shortfall, so Arecibo isn't the only facility in trouble.

What does make Arecibo different is that most of those other facilities are in states, whereas Arecibo is in a U.S. protectorate. Puerto Rico doesn't have Senators to help protect budget appropriations. It does have Representatives, but the last time I checked, their representatives are not voting members of the Congress.

On the other hand, there is the National Radio Astronomy Observatories (NRAO) which has facilities in West Virginia (home of Senator Byrd) and New Mexico (home of Senator Domenici). Arecibo is NOT part of NRAO. A couple years ago the director of NRAO called his senators and said NRAO needed $2 million more than NSF was going to give it. So Byrd and Domenici earmarked $4 million (yes $4 million) in additional funds for NRAO. Of course that money had to come from somewhere else in the NSF astronomy budget. That was when Arecibo's budget was reduced by $2 million. I don't know where the other $2 million came from.

The directory of the Planetary Society said, in the Post article, that an earmark might be a good option for keeping Arecibo open. I'm not so sure, given that any money earmarked for Arecibo will come from some other Astronomy program. A better option is a 15% (constant dollars) increase in the NSF Astronomy budget over the next 5 years.

I'll talk to the people who attended the meeting next week. I've written my Senators and Congressmen already and used some back channels to make the chair of the House Appropriations Committee aware of the situation. It would probably help if you wrote yours as well. We may organize a full letter writing campaign in the near future to help get our point across to Congress, but there's no need to wait for that. Letters work better than emails, and personal visits work best of all, if you happen to be traveling to Washington DC.

For those of you outside of the U.S., should all of our efforts fail, there may be a place for international cooperation in funding Arecibo. If the U.S. government doesn't want it, maybe the E.U. does. We'll let you know how it goes.

Replying to only a portion of post by Keith (SwissNic):

I guess that's a definition thing. I was led to believe the FLOP measurement was the same as defined by the CPU manufacturers. If that's so there's a wide difference in how many FLOPS your CPU does by machine cycle between model, make and series. It's also complicated by those extended instructions (MMX,SSE2)that can process bunches of them quickly. So maybe someone can clarify for both us? It would save me getting the wrong picture. Does anyone know if the Seti/Boinc FLOP is a synthetic thing or related to machine code concepts?

The term FLOPS is only really defined in terms of the particular benchmark which attempted to measure floating point performance.

What setiathome_enhanced is doing is counting floating point operations. If the standard application has a routine which loops i times and contains x floating point additions, y floating point multiplies, and z floating point exponentiations, the FLOP_counter value could be incremented by i * (x + y + z) at the exit from the routine. When someone builds an optimized application, that increment should not be changed even if the mix of operations is actually different. The count is to be treated as an estimation of useful work done so that all applications successfully doing the same WU can be granted the same credit.

Here's an actual formula used for the main count in Triplet finding:

analysis_state.FLOP_counter+=(10.0*numBinsAboveThreshold*numBinsAboveThreshold);

                                                            Joe

But it IS all fair.
And for crying outloud, no matter what method is used to calculate credits, a fast computer will always make more credits than a slow one.
I don't thing it's so hard to understand, but oh well, I remember now, I must be a complete moron. ;)


Peace.

Not to put to fine a point on it, I'm getting the feeling you don't actually give a jot about credits. If so, why comment at all ? Surely it'd be something you'd just ignore?

It seems intuitively obvious that we have at least two or three different meanings for the word "fair"

When I read "fair" I think "equitable" -- that everyone has an equal chance of getting "easy" and "hard" work units, and that everyone who does a work unit gets the same credit.

Clearly, some read "fair" and see "equal" -- that an hour of crunching will return the same number of credits no matter how many "easy FLOPs" and "hard FLOPs" are involved.

Some read "fair" as "no less than I used to get when I ran an optimized app."

... and as a result, we're often talking past each other when we start saying "fair."

I think "equitable" is the best meaning....

FLOPs are dependant on architecture of the CPU, efficiency of brand, and use of optimisations of extended instructions etc ie P3 vs P4, AMD vs Intel, MMX vs SSE2. It would be extremely hard to map every kind of processor fairly to get an average FLOP.

Not sure I agree. A Floating Point Operation is a mathmatical calculation, and has nothing to do with the hardware perfoming the calculation... If I "2+2" in my head, on an abacus or on a calculator, the answer is still 4.

So if a million calculations needs to be performed, and say that is worth 10 credits - then if a slow outdated antique excuse for a computer takes 3 years to perform those calcs, and a heavily optimised, overclocked, water cooled monster takes 3 secs to do the same work, both machines should still only receive 10 credits.

CPU time, however, is also influenced by CPU efficiency, extended instructions etc. It's not simple to just consider it is a measure of how many cycles your cpu has donated to the task. Some of those cycles can do a lot more with extended instructions etc. So again taking CPU time as a lump figure doesn't work fairly. More importantly it doesn't allow people to see optimisation at work. Hence it makes it hard for the devs to see real life feedback on the core client's effectiveness and therefore the bulk of work being done on their application.

Yeah - but not sure I really see the relevance of this argument...

The last(?) option is for the Seti guys to analyze the data, pick an arbitrary value for the average WU and give the same credit for each WU across the board. Sounds like going back to Seti Classic concepts and it has its own problems but they seem less of a 'fairness' issue.

This does not adress cross-project work, and is therefore unworkable... sorry.

The main issue is to prevent the obvious 'cherry picking'. I know people will cherry pick good WUs for a while but it's bound to show in the 'aborts' showing up for an account. There's already a crude penalty system in place to reduce WUs sent to an individual showing failures and aborts. It just needs to be watched....

I like my credit and seeing my name shoot up the tables on BoincStats, but this "cherry-picking" issue really doesn't bother me at all... If some nerd has the time to watch every WU coming into his/her farm and cherry-pick the fastest - fine! I actually have a life, and am not _THAT_ bothered about it...

The secondary issue is that it blocks the idea of throwing computations to appropriately powerful processors. Then again, that's only really useful for amazingly long single calculations or time critical applications.

This seems to be possible with the approach the team are adopting (ie by asking for un-optimised client results to be reported). This could allow them to produce the required averages....

It's basically a rock and a hard place decision.

I guess I don't really care either way but it would be nice if it could all be 'fair', still allow for the optimisers and not penalise those that don't have the facilities to contribute much. That to me says the last option.. to others it doesn't.... again... such is life ;-)

My tuppence,

Keith

Because of the type of maths involved, there is no way to predict precisely the amount of FLOPs required to produce a result, and as such, a single WU cannot be pre-assigned an amount of credit. Equally, as different architectures handle FLOP's in different ways, the amount of operations to complete a mathematical calculation might vary, and therefore a real-time count will be inaccurate, but probably the closest to the mark.

At the end of the day, life isn't fair (Abramovich proves this point I think), and I think the BOINC team are getting it fairly spot-on. If there is any favouritism toward people running slow machines with standard clients (but who happen to be big loud-mouths at complaining - not mentioning any names mmciastro!!!) over people who donate the time to optimise apps and run fast machine, then I would feel the project is shooting itself in the foot. A fast optimised machine is the BEST platform to turn-around WU's - and that, at the end of the day, is what the project is all about...

Hiya,

I guess this has all been said by people far greater in intelligence than I but here are the ideas I haven't seen trashed as imbalanced......yet!

I thought I was intelligent, but I must be a complete moron because I still can't understand why people bitch about credits. ;)

I guess I don't really care either way but it would be nice if it could all be 'fair', still allow for the optimisers and not penalise those that don't have the facilities to contribute much.

But it IS all fair.
And for crying outloud, no matter what method is used to calculate credits, a fast computer will always make more credits than a slow one.
I don't thing it's so hard to understand, but oh well, I remember now, I must be a complete moron. ;)


Peace.

If we have difficulty understanding negative numbers, that will manifest when we’re doing subtraction, rather than division, making it seem harder than addition. If a computer language makes use of an ‘unsigned integer’ data type (thereby saving a bit per word), subtraction of a larger number from a smaller will produce an error—or require a type-conversion step to make the result an ordinary signed integer.

But here we’re talking about floating-point operations, and AFAIK you’re quite right that division and multiplication are symmetrical in this realm. I suspect Pooh was thinking of integer multiplication, which is always safe (barring an overflow) in comparison to division, never producing a floating-point result. Likewise, when people find division more difficult than multiplication, it’s likely because their grasp of fractions is weaker than of integers.