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ABCnews story on the SETI project and SETI@home 45

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-kill-cpu-time-with dept.
Derek Pomery writes "ABCnews has done a nice special report on the SETI project, the Drake equation, and the recent successes of Seti@home. Will this mean another spike in Seti@home downloads? "
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ABCnews story on the SETI project and SETI@home More

ABCnews story on the SETI project and SETI@home

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  • Yeah, my Linux version of Seti@HOME is much faster than my Windows98 version. Maybe cause it doesn't have to draw any graphs or anything??? Maybe this sort of thing is just more suited to Linux.
  • This is a very interesting point! I agree with you. I would only add that, assuming a rather old and advanced cizilization we're targeting with such radio-surveying as what Seti@HOME is concerned with, wouldn't it be more than probable that intentional radio transmission in the form of a "beacon" be what we humans would stumble across? I don't think that unintentional transmission noises by such a target would be picked up by us.
  • Is it just me, or does the new ABCnews "science" look appear to look like one of those apocalypse-ranting tabloids?

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
  • Ugh .. i've been trying to get help for months now. Nobody has the answer or the time to find look into this problem I've been having with the SETI@Home Client.

    Now, I have this machine:

    Pentium II 400MHz
    128MB RAM
    6GB UltraATA/66 HD
    4GB UltraATA/33 HD
    OS: Windows 98

    That's a fast box. Don't say it's slow just because it has Windows running ... it's still relativly fast.

    Now, I've been running SETI@Home in screen saver mode. And not much goes on with this box since it's not on any network and all together boring computer (what with windows running on it and all). This means that when the client runs, it has a lot of resources. Furthermore, the screen saver is set to blank after 10min .. which means it doesn't even have to do the graphics proccessing for very long.

    USER INFO

    Name: freefall
    Data units completed: 3
    Total computer time: 257hr 01min 56.9sec

    WHAT?!?! 260 hours to process THREE data units?? Something is VERY wrong with this picture. How can this be? The average for a computer of these specifications is 20hours / data unit. That means this box has spent 200 hours sitting around doing what?

    IF anyone can help, please do. This is starting to annoy me. And the SETI@Home people are too busy to respond.

  • Yea, I know this is not an appropriate post... but there aren't that many posts anyway.

    So the Team Slashdot is doing great on the SETI @home thing. In fact, so great that some of those members could join a smaller team that needs some help ;)

    If you are a fan of the band They Might Be Giants check out our Team TMBG SETI group at http://seti.tmbg.net/

    Josh
  • Don't rely on the web to do your work for you. Try the usenet groups for seti, you'll be surprised the help you can get if you just do a little research.
  • If you want to optimise your SETI@home software, mosey on over to http://zap.to/clubteam for approx. 30 tips including info on SETI@home settings, Win/Mac system optimisation tips, info about the release of Beta versions and even info about accelerator hardware and overclocking.

    HTH,

    Kris.

    Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
  • If I remember correctly, the SETI@Home Windows 95/98 client does not keep the time correctly. I'm not sure if there is an update or not. (I stop using it after it refused to send me any more packets. I just jumped on the rc5 bandwagon instead.) =8)

    The time bug on the Windows client basically keeps on adding time as soon as the client starts. So, if you're using the machine for anything at all since the screen saver closed/minimized, the time keeps on ticking.

    Linux and other clients do not exhibit this bug.

    Again, I am not sure if they've corrected it or not.

    On average, it takes approximately 20-30 hours for a decent Pentium II/Celeron system running Windows 95/98 to finish a unit.
  • Ummm.. I'm game. What does this have to do with radio astronomy and SETI@Home?

    1 - The data is collected from Arecibo Observatory. A *radio* telescope, not optical. Radio telescopes don't need dark skies to do their observations.

    2 - Participants in SETI@Home do not have to have their own telescope or know anything about the use of a telescope. The data is sent to them via the Internet (You know.. routers, TCP/IP.. etc...) and processed by a client application on a PC.

    So, what does any of that have to do with your post????
  • The idea that alien civilizations will be using radio in anything like the primitive single-frequency technology humans invented this century and are already discarding strikes me as very unlikely. Bandwidth in the air is becoming scarcer and scarcer - huge chunks of the radio spectrum are being turned over to new technologies that make much more efficient use of it through digital transmission, compression, spread spectrum, not to mention the use of encryption so only the sender and the intended receiver(s) can understand a transmission. And that's after only 100 years of radio technology - another 100 and our radio presence will probably be at most subtly indistinguishable from Earth's thermal spectrum - and no remote alien civilization would be able to tell anything from what they heard. Assuming the average civilization out there will have been around several hundred million years, a technology that lasts only 1/millionth of that time doesn't seem a likely way to find them, does it?

    Given the hundred-million year time scale likely for our alien friends, they also seem unlikely to be in much of a hurry to contact us. Why bother with harmless non-space-faring cavemen who can't possibly do any galactic harm for another few millennia at least?

    Still, the search is worth doing, at least at the amateur level, to reassure ourselves that we really aren't missing out on something (though undoubtedly if they're beaming anything at us it will have been something we could have detected decades before we actually do detect it).

    But I'm not planning to waste my CPU cycles on the search.
  • Running NT Workstation on PII 350 clocked at 430.
    Seti client as a low priority task finishes one work unit in 30 hrs.
    The command line seti client for winnt completes under 9 hrs. Go d/l it!!!
    http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/seti athome-1.2.i386-winnt-cmdline.exe

    Running Linux AND NT workstation on P133. Command line nt client and Linux client (libc1) both finish in 32 hours. No significant difference. The problem is probably in graphics drawing routines.

    Hope this helps.
  • You are a nutcase. It's people like you who scare the jeebers out of me. Let me guess, when 2000 hits, you'll proclaim that God will come down and kill all the sinners. Give me a break.
  • Well, I have a 400Mhz P2, 128MB RAM too, and I averaged 40-60 hrs/unit as a win98 screensaver too.

    But I also dual boot to linux (RH 5.2, but upgraded the kernel to 2.2.6), so I downloaded the linux i686 version.

    10-12hrs/unit (not exactly sure since the windows results were averaged in too).

    3-4 times faster in linux. Big surprise. Needless to say I deleted the windows version...
  • I wonder if seti@home could be modified to include some sort of asteroid tracking system. Perhaps companies could sell compatable telescopes, and even computer systems.......
  • Posted by zyberphox:

    is it possible to approximately measure how fast do all computer perform in running SETI@home, is it faster than redASCII ?
  • Posted by zyberphox:

    if we never find, then we ll never found,...
  • I am glad I am not so foolish as to waste my time looking for little green men.

    There is much work to be done in the field on astronomy. But unfortunately it is festered with UFO bufs who have read to much SF.

    PS: I am not just saying this because i work for a secret goverment agency, who is involved in a conspiracy with aliens to rebuild the pyramids.
  • I'm glad I use SETI@Home.

    Instead of flying windows and toasters, my computer is actually doing something worthwhile with the idle CPU time.

    Argue for distibuted.net, but I'd like to know we aren't alone.

    And wouldn't it be cool if my computer found the answer? :-)
  • This article comes at a very opportune time, I was asked to give a little interview on our local ABC station (WJXX 25, http://www.wjxx.com) about the SETI@Home project and was even gonna get a little Slashdot plug in there, but the powers that be (at my office) didn't want to be associated with SETI@Home (even though they don't care I run it on my workstation), so I had to decline.

    Not that this matters or that anyone cares, I just thought I'd tell someone :)
  • Somebody out there (I know, I've forgotten who. . .) was putting together a generalized framework for distirbuted computing applications.

    However, asteroid tracking would not really be a suitable application for distributed computing.
    Why ?

    1. To do successful asteroid tracking, you need a consistent set of telescopes tracking activity over the entire sky, and over enough time that motion is visible. A distibuted net of computers is of no use here. . .
    2. Then, you're going to have to digitize that data. The bigger telescope already provide the data in digital format, but are booked doing other observations. Again, no use for a distributed network. . .
    3. Now, you're going to have to marry your evolving sky database to a database of known celestial objects, to remove all known objects from your sky database. This is where it gets too unwieldy for distributed computing. And after you do that, your remaining data items have to be unknown objects. But this is a job for a mainframe, or at least a Beowulf Cluster: it's storage-intensive as well as CPU-intensive. . .
  • "UFO bufs who have read too much SF" is an oxymoron. SF people have no interest in UFOs and little green men. And the SETI project has nothing to do with UFOs either, quite the opposite in fact.
    TA
  • I was doing RC5 for a while, but I found SETI and felt better about it. As someone else said, this science is worthwhile and may actually find something. Thanks to /.'s initial story, the numbers (at least for the /. team) spiked nicely.. I dont want to admit this, but abcnews has a bit larger of a following, and hopefully the spike will be larger..

    Although, when we do find something out there.... then what?
  • The SETI project is important...who knows what we may find with this much computing power all interlinked working towards the same goal. this is much more important then decrypting :).


    while your at it:
    join the Black Belts SETI Team! [berkeley.edu]


    Sensei
  • Question:

    "Are we alone in the Universe?"

    Hypothetical answer:

    "We don't know.
    We didn't even look."

    --
    Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
  • Question:

    "Are we alone in the Universe?"

    Correct answer:

    "Who gives a shit? You're not leaving this planet anytime soon."
  • Somebody out there (I know, I've forgotten who. . .) was putting together a generalized framework for distirbuted computing applications.


    It is called Cosm and more information about it is available from http://cosm.mithral.com [mithral.com] or on channel #cosm on EFNet. The project leader is Adam L. Beberg aka Duncan. Coders are welcome to help.

    ---

  • "aliens are not here. But are they out there somewhere in the galaxy?"

    Hmm... the strange this is that _we_ are someone else's aliens.. we may even actually be them ourselves, and have just forgotten...

    And somewhere out there there is another race of beings looking at transmissions from space trying to find _us_....

  • Windows may be part of it tho...I have a dual Celeron 400 running Linux and seti@home...granted, it's a dual box...I haven't run it in uniprocessor mode in a while, but seti@home only uses one proc anyhow...

    anyway, my average is something like 16.5 hours for a data unit...I'd figure that yours would be more like 20 hours (cause I got an extra cpu to do stuff on even when seti is running)....I don't know what your box is doing, but just for fun you might try running seti under linux for 2-3 days and getting an average that way


    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • I suppose you're the kind of person who delights in dispelling the myths of Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy and The Easter Bunny to little kids.

    It doesn't hurt anyone to hope that just maybe we are not alone in the universe...well, maybe those religious fanatics who think the universe starts and finishes with a flat earth, but they don't count...

    Bah, Humbug.
    Kingbob
  • It should be "Loot and pillage, rape and burn" :)

    we actually came up with a jingle based on it...something like
    Loot and pillage,rape and burn
    Rape and burn
    Rape and burn
    Loot and pillage, rape and burn
    All day long!




    Who am I?
    Why am here?
    Where is the chocolate?
  • Please note that these are the mayan pyramids, and not the egyptian ones. This is significant since the egyptian pyramids are simply burial places, but the design for the mayan temples was dictated to Conan of Cimmeria by a vast, cool and unsympathetic intelligence from the dog star Sirius. After Conan became King of Aquilonia he brought this knowledge to the western hemisphere and taught it to Mayan priesthood (Conan is Quetzlcoatl).

    If your I.Q. is over 150, and you have $3,125.00 (plus handling), you might be eligible for a trial membership in the A.I.S.B. If you think you qualify, put the money in a cigar box and bury it in your backyard. One of our Underground Agents will contact you shortly.

    --Shoeboy
  • #include "humor.h"

    Why are we wasting time w/ Seti@home???? We should be working on ways of creating new propulsion systems and weapons so that we can beat the stuffing out of the little green! Remeber the 3 step system to personal success:

    1) Rape
    2) Pillage
    3) Burn

    Of course, I always problems with the order......I'll get it eventually though :-)
    --------------------------
  • Yeah dude, I believe they got that sorted out a little while ago...All ahead full!
  • What ELSE are you doing with your system? I'm running SETI@Home on a Celeron 400 pushed to 450. It pumps out a data unit every 13 hours or so running Win98.

    Why be a noone on Team /.? If you're going to join a SETI@Home team, you should really join the Quake Team [q3center.com].
    A team where you can actually find your own stat istics [berkeley.edu].

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