SETI: Some bad news for the TeAm

[Assimilator1]

Damn

 

[Smoke]

Assimilator1, that story from OcUK has a familiar sound ... doesn't it?

 

[Robor]

Edited...

 

[lobadobadingdong]

...
The barton idea's a good one, I'll (hopefully) be getting one w/my income tax return.

Wondering if a ramdrive would run seti faster. follow me around the room for this, I may have to try it, if possible
can you take a win9x box, setup the autoexec and config files to make a nice sized ram drive and windows access it? have the autoexec file copy the files from the seti setup directory and run from memory. Of course you'd need a stable system on a ups and plenty of mem, but is it possible?
hmmm */me strokes by beard in deep thought*
ediy:
I pulled some hair out of my beard
This didn't work, because the ramdrive wouldn't support long filenames...
anyone know how to create a ramdrive that supports long filenames?

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

hey if the pentium 4' 3ghz ever drops below 300 bucks you can consider me as good as gold for an upgrdae! ... but until then, 2ghz will have to do. Besides i do a WU eveyr 3.3hours thats good enough right? Maybe i'll keep seti going on low while using the computer to increase production a whopping .001% of what you actually need. lol!

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: xxsk8er101xx
hey if the pentium 4' 3ghz ever drops below 300 bucks you can consider me as good as gold for an upgrdae! ... but until then, 2ghz will have to do. Besides i do a WU eveyr 3.3hours thats good enough right? Maybe i'll keep seti going on low while using the computer to increase production a whopping .001% of what you actually need. lol!

If you use the SETI CLI with SETIDriver, or as a system service in NT/2000/XP, you can keep it running all of the time without messing with most of your apps (except Outlook and maybe a few other things, which you most likely don't use).

 

[Assimilator1]

Err ,guys lets not even hint that other teams maybe cheating ,at least not publicly ,we don't want to start another flame war with anyone.I know that most of the folks over at OcUK for example are decent people.
And lets not forget that the past cheaters were just a few bad members in an otherwise clean team.
If anyone has any info that casts suspicions on a particular member or team I suggest emailing S@H head honchos & keeping discussions to PMs or emails.

What do ya reckon?fair enough?

 

[Smoke]

What Assimilator1 said.

 

[Rattledagger]

Well, I've just lost the power-supply on the fastest machine, so don't expect much production from here.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
Err ,guys lets not even hint that other teams maybe cheating ,at least not publicly ,we don't want to start another flame war with anyone.I know that most of the folks over at OcUK for example are decent people.
And lets not forget that the past cheaters were just a few bad members in an otherwise clean team.
If anyone has any info that casts suspicions on a particular member or team I suggest emailing S@H head honchos & keeping discussions to PMs or emails.

What do ya reckon?fair enough?

I edited my comments but it doesn't change how I feel. I've been doing SETI for over 3 1/2 years and I was having fun with it until the cheaters came along. Now everything is in question. The only think I know 100% for sure is my production is legit. That's all I'm 100% sure of and it sucks. The cheaters have ruined SETI for me. To be honest I no longer care where we or I finish. I want the team to do well and grow but the reailty is the entire project is tainted as far as statistics are concerned and I don't approve of the way Berkeley handles the caught cheaters. They treat them with "kid gloves" and remove suspicious WU's rather than just delete their account completely. Answer me this... What's the deterent in that?

I realize that statistics are not the most important part of the project (the science is) but most SETI users are in it for just that. That said, if the statistics can't be trusted, what's the point? IMO that's why you see the SETI team suffering right now. People got a bitter taste from the cheats and moved to other projects. I know that's how I feel anyway. For 3+ years my CPU power was 99% SETI. Now it's about 60% and going down from there.

 

[Smoke]

That really sucks, Rattledagger.

Guess it is time for a larger, better one.

 

[Smoke]

Robor,

I, too, along with you and everyone else have been very disappointed and upset with the scandals. And what you expressed (now edited) is what most of us feel.

The really sad part is it now appears that S@H-1 is going to be running until late this year and probably into 2004 before BOINC is ready for prime time.

I believe there will be more "pushes" to eliminate the cheaters before S@H-1 finally winds down. It will be in spurts.

The problem with "nicking" the accounts of cheaters instead of just completely zapping them from the git-go does seem to lack common sense.

But even zapping the accounts leads to an additional problem: some of the cheaters are so flamboyant about their ability to cheat that no sooner than one of their accounts gets deleted, they just sign up using a different name and a different Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail address and get right back at it. They sometimes even take names that indicate that they are cheating.

One of the reasons for the delay in ending S@H-1 is the thoroughness of the beta testing on BOINC. Great efforts are being made to eliminate cheating. They are talking about sending out "test WUs (though they will probably be called something else) that when returned will indicate whether cheating is taking place. I don't know exactly how all of this is supposed to work but then if I did it would probably mean the measures were not secure enough.

If we keep up our efforts I believe we will end up in our rightful place as one of the very top Seti Teams. If the teams coming on fast are doing it with a fair, honest crunch then more power to them. If they have some cheaters among them, they will be caught. It is just a matter of time. We are not the only team concerned about this and there is much scrutiny going on in other circles.

I for one will press on until the very end. I would like to encourage everyone else to do the same.

Remember, the old military slogan: ?When the going gets tough ? the tough get going!?.

Sometimes when I?m a little weak, I?d appreciate a helping hand. I hope you get my drift.

 

[CraigRT]

I for one will press on until the very end. I would like to encourage everyone else to do the same.

I as well will do this. I hate cheating MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE.. but it's so rampant and ridiculous you cant escape it anymore. I feel defeted by it, by just accepting it.. but what else is there to do? there is nothing I can do except hate it and hope one day it goes away...

ANY DAY NOW! :disgust:

 

[SoulAssassin]

Pardon the 90 degree turn, but have we seen a measurable increase in team members since the recruiting threads went up? ie prior to that we were getting X new members per week, now we're getting x+1. Last time I recall we did, but it doesn't seem as heavy this time (although I haven't been around as much lately so it might be me).

Just wondering what else we can do to increase production...

 

[Robor]

I used to think the best thing would be close SETI1 to new members and delete (not adjust) cheaters accounts when they're busted but even that wouldn't stop it. It might be a little harder but as long as a cheater knows someone's SETI Email address they could crunch bogus WU's under their account and there's not much they could do about it except report it to Berkeley. They could even work together with current members to do it.

I'm not happy to hear about BOINC being so far off. I was hoping that would get released soon and eliminate these cheating problems. It would be nice to look at user and team statistics and not wonder if they are legit or not.

I just hope Berkeley gets BOINC going earlier than expected. The longer it takes the more people are going to join other DC projects.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin
Pardon the 90 degree turn, but have we seen a measurable increase in team members since the recruiting threads went up? ie prior to that we were getting X new members per week, now we're getting x+1. Last time I recall we did, but it doesn't seem as heavy this time (although I haven't been around as much lately so it might be me).

Just wondering what else we can do to increase production...

We're definitely seeing more new members now than before. I don't know if it's recruiting threads or the new "TeAm Anandtech" link on the front page but something's working.

EDIT: Speaking of that link, it appears the teamanandtech.com homepage needs a little updating. There's not much news on there and the project links on the side are missing at least one project (DF) and probably more.

 

[BMdoobieW]

I just upgraded to an nforce2 mobo, an XP 2100+ @ 2171 MHz (13x166), and 512MB Crucial PC2100 ..... and I did a .419 WU in 2hr 33min and hi/low (for other WU sizes) of 2 hr 47 min / 2 hr 13 min Does that sound about right? I might be able to get more speed since I haven't tried changing the multiplier, and I think my RAM is still running at stock speed 133/266.

 

[Swanny]

I think AMD needs to bring out the Athlon 64 sooner!!!:Q

 

[lobadobadingdong]

edited my previos thread to remove my reverse enthusiasm.

 

[Smoke]

One thing that may help (I hope) is I just did a rewrite of the Seti portion of the "Welcome to the DC Forum" thread. That same change will be done to the "Recruiting Threads" in the next 24 - 48 hours as soon as our AT DC MOD gets the time to do it. /did I just invent a new term? "our AT DC MOD". :Q LOL

I had put in the previous verbage that S@H-1 would be ending around this time and asked for new members to join us to make that final push. I think it worked well for a while. But it occurred to me (this afternoon) that any propective new members would look at that here in February, 2003 and figure "why join a project that is about to end". So if that has had a negative effect, it has now been removed.

We have quite a few new members this year as you can see here.

We need to keep that going and hope we get one of those big bangers in the mix. Let's just keep at it ... something good is going to happen. /somebody write that down/

 

[Ken g6]

My Dell seems to be dying, the Wildnet's getting heavier usage, and my professor still hasn't replied to the request I made to run SETI on the 130-node cluster (being housed here) I recently got access to. Not to mention I'm graduating in May, and I may lose the Wildnet entirely.

 

[Tarca]

Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
...
The barton idea's a good one, I'll (hopefully) be getting one w/my income tax return.

Wondering if a ramdrive would run seti faster. follow me around the room for this, I may have to try it, if possible
can you take a win9x box, setup the autoexec and config files to make a nice sized ram drive and windows access it? have the autoexec file copy the files from the seti setup directory and run from memory. Of course you'd need a stable system on a ups and plenty of mem, but is it possible?
hmmm */me strokes by beard in deep thought*
ediy:
I pulled some hair out of my beard
This didn't work, because the ramdrive wouldn't support long filenames...
anyone know how to create a ramdrive that supports long filenames?

There are programs out there that do this. I played with one awhile back but did not notice any difference in the times.

 

[DDad]

Well, just looked over the stats page, and I've noticed that in the top 200, we have around 30 that are inactive. If we were to get those folks cracking again......

 

[zodder]

I have quite a few machines that were moved from our main location to an outlaying office. It will be a few days before I can get them up and running again. I've been a slacker for the past 2 weeks.

 

[BBRsMacBridger]

Originally posted by: Robor
I edited my comments but it doesn't change how I feel. I've been doing SETI for over 3 1/2 years and I was having fun with it until the cheaters came along. Now everything is in question. The only think I know 100% for sure is my production is legit. That's all I'm 100% sure of and it sucks. The cheaters have ruined SETI for me. To be honest I no longer care where we or I finish. I want the team to do well and grow but the reailty is the entire project is tainted as far as statistics are concerned and I don't approve of the way Berkeley handles the caught cheaters. They treat them with "kid gloves" and remove suspicious WU's rather than just delete their account completely. Answer me this... What's the deterent in that?

I realize that statistics are not the most important part of the project (the science is) but most SETI users are in it for just that. That said, if the statistics can't be trusted, what's the point? IMO that's why you see the SETI team suffering right now. People got a bitter taste from the cheats and moved to other projects. I know that's how I feel anyway. For 3+ years my CPU power was 99% SETI. Now it's about 60% and going down from there.

The cheaters should upset the entire SETI community. They aren't cheating our teams, they're cheating SETI. That's what is really troubling. Keeping having fun with it! You're helping out SETI, and that is our primary goal.