What to do with an idle computer...revisited


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Old 06-17-03, 05:37 AM
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What to do with an idle computer...revisited

Since the question was asked a couple of weeks ago and Magister making a comment on something I had forgot about. I had time to reflect for just a few seconds and got SETI up and running again.
I installed it on the kids computers also and we are kicking out about 3-5 units a day, depends on several factors. It is ran constantly in the background and does not realy slow down my computer. (Wintop tells me it runs about 40% - 45% of the processor usage with me doing other stuff, kid's computer basically the same) Now we will not get to 1872 years of time like HP has but we have over 1000 hours.

Magister, the kids find it just as interesting to watch it from time to time as I do. Once again, great idea....
 
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Old 06-17-03, 09:39 AM
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Glad to be of service and I was going to run through a couple of movie references as a reply, but the list kept evolving; So instead, I'm just going to toss a few out and set the statusbar to associate titles with their IMDB links; Jodie Foster; Charlie Sheen; Steven Spielberg & Tim Burton; And on a more serious note; Here's another link to SETI@Home because I believe it is a worthwhile endeavor and especially, if your internet connection is always on; I'm hardpressed to find a reason not to participate...

Keep Passing Open Windows;
R
 
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Old 06-17-03, 03:07 PM
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I have run these sorts of programs in the background for many years. Surprising that it does not seem to bog down the computer. I run them under Linux so there is no graphical user interface use. That saves on horsepower. The program runs only when the computer does not need the processor, anyway.

The novel thing about SETI is that there would be no evaluation of this data without the efforts of millions of idle computer cycles throughout the world.

I don't know if we will find evidence of extra terrestrial life or not, but we will have evaluated the information that we have. It beats letting it go to waste.
 
 

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