[lug] Seti at home

[Mike McCallister]

Wayde (and others),

Admittedly, in the early days the SETI at home site was pretty barren of 
information. This is no longer the case. A good place to start is: 
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/learnmore.html. From there, you'll get a 
fairly popularized description of what's going on. There's a separate page 
(accessible from the URL above) that describes what exactly the screen 
saver shows, and a FAQ page at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/faq.html.

Ultimately, this is a project of the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab (no 
ordinary hackers, here), with a bunch of corporate sponsors and the 
Planetary Society. For the truly skeptical, the Project Director, David  P. 
Anderson, has a mailto: link on the site: davea at ssl.berkeley.edu. It says 
here he wrote the client.

I just passed my 100th data unit, so I haven't been doing it as much as 
others (I had a painfully slow machine for a long time), but I've never 
given it a second thought. They are certainly generating some data!

Mike M
(who really envies Sean's .sig generator)

At 09:33 AM 8/11/00 -0600, you wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Timothy Klein wrote:
>
> > and my Seti at home times-per-work-unit went from time around 25 hours to 
> around
> > 7 hours.
>
>I have a really dumb question about Seti at home.  A while back I was curious
>about this service and visited their web page.  One thing that seemed
>curiously missing for a service that people should volunteer to run on
>their home systems was a clear and concise description of the software,
>the analyses to be done, the organization responsible for this code, and
>especially a guarantee or some degree of assurance that it actually does
>what they say it does.  With the current worry about network security I
>find it interesting how commonly distributed accross the net this program
>is without these kinds of assurances.  I haven't checked their web site
>lately so perhaps this has changed, but I guess what I wonder is how do
>you know that your machine is really working on Seti data rather than
>perhaps chewing on some encryption breaking code?
>
>- Wayde
>   (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)
>
>
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Mike McCallister		"The fundamental obligation of a revolutionary
Boulder, CO			is to tell the truth;
workingwriter at email.com	the other is to always carry a pen."