Profile: D. Drake

Personal background
I love to gaze at the stars. I don't have "professional" equipment, but what I do have allows me to see the moons and spot of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn when they oblige us with a good angle. Maybe someday, I can point it at a bright dot in the sky and tell the grandkids "That's where they live."
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Why do I run SETI@Home...

If we are the only civilization in the galaxy, it sure is an awful waste of space. Since my computer isn't making any money, it might as well try to make contact (sort of anyway) with something - be it a pulsar, black hole, Elvis... whatever is out there. Just as long as anything we are broadcasting into the heavens doesn't equate to a Burger King commercial for anyone out there who might be listening, I guess it's all good, huh?

Of course, my friends think I'm nuts. They see it like this...
A) there's nothing out there but gas, dust and rocks.
B) if there is someone out there, they are too far away to hear us
C) if they do hear us, it will take 1,000 years to call back
D) if they can get HBO, they will think we hunt ETs like we do rabbits
E) if they get CNN, they will avoid us because if we treat each other like this, how would we treat someone who doesn't live here?

What are my views about the project...

It's too complicated with BOINC. My page says one thing, the client says another. I had to wait forever to get past BOINC Beta workunits because when I got BOINC from the link, it was the BETA and not the SETI@Home and it filled my alloted space up with that. So now I have a beta account and a seti account and can't make sense of either. Not to mention that the software would rather run beta testing than workunits on my machine for some reason.

And the messages in the client window? Greek to me. I don't have a clue. I couldn't tell you if it even finished a work unit in the past 24 hours. There's no stats like there used to be. Once I figured out how to see the graphic display, it was distorted and I can't read it. Not to mention it's bouncing around like the Mad Hatter to make reading it even harder.

My suggestions...

I liked the old client. I at least understood what it was telling me. I knew if I was actually doing units or not and could tell when one was due to be done or could tell one had been done. BOINC has been running for almost 20 hours now and done 2 hours of work according to the client. My "To Completion" gets bigger every second, not smaller. I might never complete a unit with BOINC. So far, the only "results" I see is that the SETI@Home server has an inventory of my computers guts. I'm going to keep with it a while, but I'm not sure I'm going to continue with BOINC.
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