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I was looking for something else when I stumbled on this article and was reminded of my days as a big-time folder. Even though I gave up on my sad sack efforts to help out, I wanted to make sure none of you who still contribute do anything like this guy did and get yourselves into trouble.

That is all. Carry on, and good luck.

I would imagine that if it had been F@H, then it wouldn't have been such a big deal. The administrators probably would have just told him to stop doing it because they don't want to be anti-medical research.

Idiot. Although I doubt the figure quoted in the article is accurate. Still the guy is an idiot.

It said right there they would have supported cancer research, the guy just picked the wrong distributed computing project.

He might have won on volume but I still say my island hopping trip through the Caribbean 6 years ago going from internet cafe to internet cafe wins the stealth distributed computing award. That was of course before that was publicly frowned upon.

According to the article, he got approval from a previous administration. If that is true then it certainly muddies the water a little bit. May be just the new people in charge trying to show they are useful and the guy just being made an example?

A sit-down with the guy, understanding that the previous admin allowed it, and tell him to stop since they need to save $$ now would have settled this IMO. When the new people took over did they issue new Equipment Usage Policy? Granted the guy should find out if he's still allowed to do it, but the admin seems to want to highlight that 1 million "savings" than anything else.

It is a good time again to remind team 2630 folders to observe our Code of Conduct (other folders should take note of that too and apply to their specific situations).

im with fox on this one. its a bit hasty to rule out shenanigans on the managerial staff. i find it alot more likely that rich people would be dishonest than some guy with seven kids and a wife to support would risk downloading a program on 5000 computers to search for aliens. well... thats a pretty close call.

Wow, I like how the guy is characterized as an alien hunter, not just by the administration but by the article writer. In fact, he's the biggest alien hunter in the country! Why? Because his screen name has the most SETI points!

A bit more info in here, has the same info Fox was saying.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th ... p?id=56411

More specifically:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th ... rue#951517

leor wrote:

He might have won on volume but I still say my island hopping trip through the Caribbean 6 years ago going from internet cafe to internet cafe wins the stealth distributed computing award. That was of course before that was publicly frowned upon.

No it was always publicly frowned upon but there is no need to dig up that thread.

Either way it's probably not safe to install on PCs you don't own but if you can install at work and if there is ever a big management shakeup best to reconfirm any DC app and get confirmations in writing.

The article says the programs started 10 years ago. If they had problems with it, they should have removed it well before now. Its not like it was hardware that had to be physically installed, a simple uninstall process would fix the slowdowns. If he did not have the prior supervisor's approval as he says, then make him do the uninstalls on his own time.

tfp wrote:

A bit more info in here, has the same info Fox was saying.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th ... p?id=56411

More specifically:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th ... rue#951517

I am adding the previous post to that one too:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th ... rue#951513

That's some serious allegations with the superintendent's family member brought on board and the massive exodus of the dude's own staff members. This is clearly not black and white (as always). It's probably a combination of politicking, crappy tech news reporting (nothing new there), and a legal case in progress with lots of hidden details; we are never going to learn the truth.

Being featured on Engadget assures it to be not only a national matter, but also of the entire interweb.

Now there is pr0n involved? A news conference? Pictures "released"? This is smelling fishier by the minute. Like a lot of the comments in the linked article, the cabinet wiring seems ok to me. It's a bunch of routers and switches of course it is going to be stuffed with wires! $15K for an audit now that's dubious.

I wonder if the comments about the chick's performance review coming up is true...

tfp wrote:

No it was always publicly frowned upon but there is no need to dig up that thread.

you obviously weren't around when us little gerbils were trying to figure out all sorts of different ways to get points back in 02, 03.

of course that was also back when one CPU actually made a difference, and to some degree even running the client for a few hours a day on a machine and bringing a partial WU home and finishing it there was fairly common.

now one GPU client can blow away 20 CPUs.

leor wrote:

tfp wrote:

No it was always publicly frowned upon but there is no need to dig up that thread.

you obviously weren't around when us little gerbils were trying to figure out all sorts of different ways to get points back in 02, 03.

of course that was also back when one CPU actually made a difference, and to some degree even running the client for a few hours a day on a machine and bringing a partial WU home and finishing it there was fairly common.

now one GPU client can blow away 20 CPUs.

Back then, I sneaked it onto my Dentist's computer in the examination room. I figured I waited 35 minutes for him, he could fold for me. And yeah, one cpu was a huge impact.

Considering I joined just 4 months after you (and was reading for months before) and you weren't here for even a full month in 2k2 I think I might have been around during that time period. Besides it was the summer of 2k4.

Pretty much all DC projects have always said to get permission and a number of people in F@H and other projects lost all of their points for doing the things you did. Fortunately the amount of points you got hijacking machines was low enough no one really pushed.

It is too bad Stanford never set the points to a normal value based on work done instead of gimmicks. It kind of make it "pointless" to do some types of folding at least if your goals are mainly points. That and the F@H client stability issues really seemed to set things back.

well Emrys seemed to know what I was getting at, Mr. Accurate, so you might have been around but you weren't a part of the crew, such as it was.

I certainly don't remember your voice being a part of the jokes and stuff we had going on back then.

Yes, leor, we've all forgotten how cool you used to be.

leor wrote:

well Emrys seemed to know what I was getting at, Mr. Accurate, so you might have been around but you weren't a part of the crew, such as it was.

I certainly don't remember your voice being a part of the jokes and stuff we had going on back then.

Ah yes not being a part of the cool crowd on a tech site I'm really upset.

It's nice to see something things don't change. I can't imagine why the TR F@H team didn't grow like wildfire through the forums with people like you representing it back in the day.

Are they sure all the classroom computers weren't just slow because they all had 10 year old equipment? My computer from 1999 runs Crysis like molasses.

tfp wrote:

It's nice to see something things don't change. I can't imagine why the TR F@H team didn't grow like wildfire through the forums with people like you representing it back in the day.

just more evidence you weren't really a part of the community back then, if you knew the lengths I and others took to build the team up, maybe you wouldn't be acting like such a jerk. I actually used to respect you.

Buzzard44 wrote:

Are they sure all the classroom computers weren't just slow because they all had 10 year old equipment? My computer from 1999 runs Crysis like molasses.

I suppose if they were "forced" to "replace the CPUs' due to the accelerated deaths from SETI@Home, they may still be running those 10 year old equipment.

I really **** hate how this thing wipes out a post if you don't notice its "New, Improved!™" BS way of not posting your **** post unless you agree that, "Yes, even though someone else posted since I last read the **** thread, post it anyway." As if this is an important journal or something.

Flying Fox wrote:

Buzzard44 wrote:

Are they sure all the classroom computers weren't just slow because they all had 10 year old equipment? My computer from 1999 runs Crysis like molasses.

I suppose if they were "forced" to "replace the CPUs' due to the accelerated deaths from SETI@Home, they may still be running those 10 year old equipment.

I would at least expect them to say something about the PSU or HDs dieing instead of the CPUs. Hopefully everything turns out all right in the end.

leor wrote:

tfp wrote:

It's nice to see something things don't change. I can't imagine why the TR F@H team didn't grow like wildfire through the forums with people like you representing it back in the day.

just more evidence you weren't really a part of the community back then, if you knew the lengths I and others took to build the team up, maybe you wouldn't be acting like such a jerk. I actually used to respect you.

Yep, team TR grew to it's highest ranking back in those days. With showdowns like leor verses the might meat dish, leor's quest for the white whale, and finally in spite of the SMP crapola the leor verses drfish for the king of the hill. He, emkubed, Atryus28, and so many more inspired us to fold on what we had and add more when we could. My first impression of the Caribbean drive-bys was like a Robin Hood adventure, but luckily JBI as the voice of reason helped us all get our minds right. Although even now I had to grin at TheEmrys' dentist borg.

BTW tfp, what name are you using to fold for team TR? I noticed your entire 2009 folding effort for your old team, 2CPU.com Folding@Home, was eight WUs for a total of 3,265 points. H***, leor does nearly double that every **** day!

farmpuma wrote:

Yep, team TR grew to it's highest ranking back in those days. With showdowns like leor verses the might meat dish, leor's quest for the white whale, and finally in spite of the SMP crapola the leor verses drfish for the king of the hill. He, emkubed, Atryus28, and so many more inspired us to fold on what we had and add more when we could.

Good times those were. Let us not forget drfish's avatar debacle.

farmpuma wrote:

BTW tfp, what name are you using to fold for team TR? I noticed your entire 2009 folding effort for your old team, 2CPU.com Folding@Home, was eight WUs for a total of 3,265 points. H***, leor does nearly double that every **** day!

I don't fold anymore other then a family PC not at my location which is hardly ever on anymore. I'm suprised it's even 8 units.

tfp is searching for ET. I probably will be this winter as well - I did a few WU for TR F@H a couple weeks back as a way to test out that H50 cooler, but I got annoyed with babysitting the GPU client and dumped all the software entirely. BOINC has a single on/off switch, instead of F@H having to turn off each client separately. So much easier to deal with.

BOINC is awesome. And there are multiple protien folding projects if that's your bag.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

farmpuma wrote:

Yep, team TR grew to it's highest ranking back in those days. With showdowns like leor verses the might meat dish, leor's quest for the white whale, and finally in spite of the SMP crapola the leor verses drfish for the king of the hill. He, emkubed, Atryus28, and so many more inspired us to fold on what we had and add more when we could. My first impression of the Caribbean drive-bys was like a Robin Hood adventure, but luckily JBI as the voice of reason helped us all get our minds right. Although even now I had to grin at TheEmrys' dentist borg.

BTW tfp, what name are you using to fold for team TR? I noticed your entire 2009 folding effort for your old team, 2CPU.com Folding@Home, was eight WUs for a total of 3,265 points. H***, leor does nearly double that every **** day!

yeah i think we made it to 7th place. idchafee was also huge during that time and he, myself, and JBI got together with Damage to do some pretty cool front page pushes.

my little 6k per day are all CPUs, mostly pentium 4s in fact, and my office is going to be upgrading their systems soon so look for a mini resurgence, maybe even back to 5 digits.

the battle against dr. fish was the most epic, and the only one i lost. i also lost it by only 13 hours or something silly like that. you should have seen my apartment, I had bare boards running 2 and 4 way opterons on the linux SMP diskless client. the killer for me was all that power actually blowing not my internal fuses but the building's mains. had to wait a whole day to get back online and that's what killed me.

That loss ended up costing me a core2 duo, if i recall correctly.

Folding is what got me into these forums, those many years ago. In fact the first computer I folded on was named "PRIME1" and that was the default name the client took. So to keep things consistent that is the name I registered here.

I still fold on my own little team, to avoid any drama and to see how my individual systems perform. It's still a good cause.

As to the original topic. It sounds a lot more complicated than just SETI. If anything that's just a backdrop to some larger issue they are having.

Personally I would not have installed it even with permission. These projects do have bugs. Even if every day there was only a 1 in 1000 chance of a crash. Someone would have to deal with 5 crashes a day across that many systems. F@H does not always yield resources and I have had to shut it down on occasion to play certain games (especially the GPU client).

For the Apps I have seen for BOINC there is an option to completely unload the program from ram while the PC is in use. I'm not sure if that applies to all projects the ones I have looked at it does. It would have been nice if Stanford to moved to BOINC as the managing software and just work on the computing software but I don't expect that will ever happen.

farmpuma wrote:

...He, emkubed, Atryus28, and so many more inspired us to fold on what we had and add more when we could...

Oh hai der!

My numbers were big because I had a repair/build/consultation business. I would ask customers specifically "want to help with cancer/alzheimer's research with your idle CPU cycles?" More than half said "sure why not". Any numbers I've posted in the last year have been from those old additions to the fold.

It also helped when we got in hardware for a new lab or big deployment. Weekend burn-ins of new servers.. good times. I stopped folding because the SMP client was so finicky, I couldn't baby-sit the thing. For a project that big, backed by a university to have such piss-poor SMP support when it was one of a handful of apps that would actually use multiple cores... it got old after awhile.

As far as the OP, think about it. If you were running old hardware all over your organisation and could use this as an excuse for an paid-for upgrade... wouldn't you try?