Slashdot | Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?

Before I start, I want to impress upon you, that what you run on your computer, is your choice. You can choose to run a certain program versus another. That being said, why are people getting agitated about the SETI@Home using idle CPU cycles? If you don’t like it, run something else. We know what the chances of isolating an alien signal are. We know that the odds are low. However, this is data that has to be processed somewhere. I know that the funding for this project is not sufficient to buy high computing power. Why would tax payers want to pay for SETI if the returns are practically non-existent? I know I wouldn’t want to pay for such a programme. Although, I would gladly donate idle cycles on my CPU for that because it doesn’t cost me as much.

Let me also remind you, that this program brought on the concept of mainstream distributed computing. It is a trend setter which surprisingly is still popular. Since then, there have been other distributed computing projects which more altruistic purposes such as drug molecular modeling for diseases like cancer, and AIDS, run by academic institutions. Now, I might be more likely to run such programs over SETI’s as it has an impact in medicine. These projects are firmly placed on the ground, and we can see useful instantaneous results.

Speaking about funding projects which are expensive and potentially wasteful, are we forgetting DoD’s black hole? Can you imagine how much of our tax-payers’ money goes to projects that are classified, and if it fails, how would be know that it failed? There have been so many reports of billions of dollars going wasted on failed projects. I know it is part of science, but science is about streamlining. If we don’t know something has failed, how would we learn from the mistakes?

Before most of you start spouting increased global warming from used idle cycle, I bet that it pales before any other source. I’m saying that the effect is insignificant. Air-conditioning, and heat from housing probably absorbs majority of the electricity rather than computers. People who say computers running all the time is a waste, look at the cost figures, it’s not a substantial waste.

Distributed computing is ushering in a new era for crunching data. There are bound to be more and more project which use this means, and the projects may get more esoteric as well. For example, astrophysics enthusiasts may rather donate computer cycles to model supernovae, rather than cancer drug model ling. People concerned with national security could donate idle cycles to social network analysis (Wikipedia) of data pooled by intelligence agencies, if there was such a program. The possibilities are endless, and in the end, is totally up to you to choose which one to promote. If there are multiple ones you are interested in, then BOINC is for you.

Technorati Tags: computers, information, Opinion, Research, Science, distributed computing, SETI@Home, BOINC

Oh my God! I was wondering why I had absolutely no comments since I started this blog. I just figured it out. It was a CoComment error as I placed the code in the wrong section of comments.php.

It is fixed now.

I can’t wait for comments and discussion!

Technorati Tags: cocomment, troubleshooting, wordpress

TechCrunch: Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content

Visit this blog post for more information, and links to the official Google Research site and Google blog on this project.

Here is what I have to say:

Is google crazy?!? I can’t even imagine what this current project would make the privacy advocates say. Letting it hear us over a mike, and then making ads? This is giving me the creeps, and I have no intention in allowing 1984 style loss of privacy coming any quicker that it already is. I can see this information being used for good, but in the hands of the wrong people. Oh my god! What if the government is successful in subpoening google for information? So, now apart from phone calls, they literally tap into our living rooms, and hear our conversations.. Absolutely not! I will not allow that to happen. Google is becoming the Information blackhole. Anything I want to know, I just google it. I don’t want people or bots being able to tap into my private life unless I willingly disclose it.

Technorati Tags: google, internet, privacy, 1984, techcrunch, computers, audio, ads, business, opinion, information

Things are coming into place. Schools are being to get back to me. PSU (MSE) is scheduling me for a visit in 10 days, and then I guess they’ll tell me if they are giving me an offer. UMD (MSE) is yet to get back to me about money. So, here is the root to my grad school woes. A mediocre recommendation. That got me so riled up. That’s about what I’m going to write about that.

Lazy saturdays are great. I woke up really late because I got to sleep around 3 am. The evening was excellent! After dinner, Komal and I went on a walk and talked. We went around the lake close to Coe. I wish it didn’t stink so much due to all the pollution. And then ended the night on a high note going to the Top of the Five with Angela M. I invited her to go with me because she was a ton of fun to dance with at Presidential Ball this year. I really like talking to her because we can relate on several levels like academics, politics, and world view in general. So, I got great dancing, and excellent conversation. Now, that’s a fantastic way to spend a Saturday in company of a beautiful intelligent girl who likes dancing. hehe..

You know what annoys me the most? When sites don’t allow Mozilla Firefox to render them well. For some odd reason, Yahoo! Music dislikes Firefox. And today was a testament to that. It froze my SessionSaver extension, as it kept trying to launch a video I was trying to watch. I spent going back and forth between the normal and the safe mode to see if that would fix it. It wouldn’t let me do anything in the normal mode. So, finally after two hours of utter frustration, I found a neat trick in Firefox. It’s the about:config command for the location bar. It brings up all the config variables. I was able to reset my SessionSaver variables in Safe mode, and then every thing was okay.

Sigh, what a waste of a night. I could have blogged about something else. But now, it’s a rant. Sorry!

Technology - BitTorrent: The Great Disrupter - FORTUNE - Page

BitTorrent is a great downloading tool. Whenever I miss a show, I just use BT to download it the next day and it is usually done in a few hours. I found this Fortune article about the creator of BitTorrent. It’s a fascinating read.

Nigeria, Microsoft Fight Internet Fraud - Yahoo! News

finally some official effort from Nigeria to fight spam and cyber crime, most famous of them being the 419 scam. This is the email that promises a 33% share if you help in bank transfers. So many people fell this, it’s quite funny now.

The Firemonger Project

(via /.

i’m sad that I have to use the native blogger interface or Hello to post pictures on my blog. I would like to have batch file uploading capabilities.. It’s extremely time consuming to post 100 or more pictures individually. My picture blog has over 600 pictures now. There are a lot more to come although it seems like the pace of taking pictures since the first few weeks at Oak Ridge has diminished. I haven’t done as much recently. Hopefully that will change.

I have a lot of busy work like doing homework for the class, and studying for the GRE. I’m taking the GRE sometime around the end of October. I think Rachel might doing it sometime there too.

So far we don’t have much planned for this weekend except for a bbq in honor of one of the Dans getting run over by a bull. Next weekend should be a ton of fun because my brother is coming to visit.

Today has been a productive day so far. I came in at 8.30 and ran AFM scans of the annealed samples that had been in the furnace overnight. And then I conducted a thin film run by myself without my mentor watching me for the first time! We have to run an X ray diffraction scan to check the quality of the thin film. Taking a early quick lunch, I had enough time to put in another sample that should be ready to taken out in half an hour. This should allow me to put a substrate in and create a vacuum in the chamber for Monday. My mentor will be gone all next week and he gave an outline of what he wishes for me to accomplish. He talked about his perception of the right amount of samples and characterization tests needed to write a decent paper worth publishing and it doesn’t look like I’ll meet the quota. That makes me sad but I can’t do much about it because i lose almost 5 hours a week to stuff that I need to do for ORSS which includes the inorganic chem class and a seminar.

I did something fun today post lunch. I took my hour break at work with Jenn and we went to Baskin Robins to get some ice cream. I got a chocolate fudge single scoop cone for $1.50. It was sooo good. I might do that once a week. It reminds me of gelato from Italy. yummmmmmm..

Listening to: [R.E.M. - Try Not To Breathe]