| Personal background |
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Tell you about myself? Sure. I'm from upstate New York, USA, Planet Earth. I'm forty something, my hobby is computing and ... we'll leave the details until later.
Suffice to say I've learned a bit about the horses needed to produce units of work. More gigs of processor speed helps a lot. I just put a new 1.2 Gig Celeron on line and it cranks a unit out every 10 hours. The 500 Mhz K6-2 takes a little over 30 hours, the 233 Mhz Pentium II MMX takes about 50 hours and the venerable 100 Mhz Pentium takes a few hundred hours.
I suspect the Win XP and the 384 Meg of memory in the new Celeron machine helps a bit too. I've got another pair of K6-2 550s that I might put on line and I'm thinking of upgrading one from Win98 to WinXP with some more memory to test for a difference in performance.
UPDATE 4/6/03: Gigabytes of processor speed counts, but bus speed is more important and L2 cache size is most important. Fastest times are with a 2.4 gig P4 with 512 meg L2 cache averaging 3.75 hours. The P4s whip the Celerons because of the L2. The AMD Athlon XPs from 1.7 to 2.6 are great speed demons - do a work unit in about 4 hours. The L2 in them is high. Got a virtual farm going now with a total of 10 machines online. There may be no end to the number of computers I can build! hahaha
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I'd be much more surprised to find extraterrestrial life didn't exist than to find that it does. And assuming such life does exist, there is no assurance we will discover it.
Isn't it the Second Law of Thermodynamics that states that, within every closed system, entropy tends to increase with time? Well, I believe in the ultimate Holy Grail - that human behavior mirrors the behavior of matter and that true fundamental laws of science also apply to human behavor. Therefore, human behavior, human society, will tend to become more chaotic if we continue in a closed system. To provide more order, we need to break out of our closed system either by expanding our own territory by expanding beyond our earthly base or by the introduction of the proof of existence of extraterrestrial life. That singular benefit will eventually outweigh any possible danger.
Transmit a beacon? Aren't we transmitting a massive amount of radio emission now? I suggest we transmit the surf rock music genre exclusively.
I run SETI@home because it exists. Sort of like "I think, therefore I am". Of course I needed to find the website first...
I find the program pretty bulletproof. All my Windows 98 crashes have done nothing to destroy the program or data. The problem with Win XP is I'm going to forget where the reset button is on my computer... |
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