| Personal background |
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Live in Minneapolis Minnesota. Technically retired, but active as volunteer. Married 54 years. Father of four, grandfather of 10, and great grandfather of one.
Veteran U.S. Air Force, member of American Legion, Air Force Association and other pursuits. Also blogger.
I grew up with the computer industry from its early mainframe era. Wired boards for tabulating equipment. My first computer was a Univac 1105. Had to program in USE, one of the first assemblers. Programmed Honeywell and IBM mainframes. Did a lot of COBOL and Fortran work. Installed and programmed the IBM PCs the first year of their introduction. Also used ATandT 8086 machines. As an Intel/Microsoft system builder and VAR, I built and installed servers, personal computers, and local area networks. Still active as computer network architect and IT consultant, mostly to schools and non-profit corporations. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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RE: Question 1
I won an Intel solid-state hard drive during an Intel Channel Conference. Had an ASUS motherboard I wanted to try. Also had a chassis laying around from my collection. Decided to build a workstation. I put together an i7 PC with the ASUS motherboard and ATX chassis. Used the Intel SSD and a couple of RAID-capable hard drives in my "collection" to configure a RAID 1 configuration. Installed 16 GB RAM so I could play with virtual. Added liquid cooling to keep the i7 happy.
With all of this hardware, it needed something to do. BOINC solved that problem with Milkyway@home and SETI@home. This machine can run up to 9 different tasks at the same time using 8 cores and the on-die GPU. The liquid cooling lets the i7 run flat out on all cores without losing its cool.
RE: Question 2
Seems to me that SETI has usefulness beyond finding alien signals. What is an aggravation to SETI is useful for other purposes. Oops. My military streak is showing.
RE: Question 3
I noticed that Microsoft does not play nicely with BOINC when it has to restart the machine to process updates. Every time that happens, Microsquash seems to cut BOINC off at the knees. |
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