🚀 go-pugleaf

What do you mean?  It's working fine, and the most likely other uses
for that computing power is 1) doing nothing 2) playing video games
3) lookin' at porn 4) reading e-mail, and 4) playing solitare or some
other crappy games.

Also, there is something very special about "doing nothing" that 
needs elaboration.  When you are actually using your computer (as
I am right now typing this message), you are not using it's entire
capabilities.  The computer can (and does) only give you a fraction
of it's powers when it's not taxed.  In other words, the 
"cpu utilization" is less than 100%.  An idle process like SETI@home
can take that extra power without you even noticing a change in the
response / speed of the computer.  Right now, I'm running several
programs, a browser, a terminal emulator, winamp, some other stuff.
And even when I'm browsing the web or reading email / news, while
simultaneously playing music on my computer, SETI@home is sitting
in the background sopping up cpu cycles like a sponge.  And there
is plenty of extra computing power to be mopped up, it gets a good
80% of the cpu a lot of the time, even with all the other stuff I
do.  These cpu cycles would be completely wasted if there were no
background process like SETI@home.  They would be spent doing things
like monitoring the mouse position, etc. over and over and over
and over again, even though it is unnecessary to spend so many
cpu cycles on such things (since normal operating system functions
don't take up that much cpu power).


Neil Rivers (nrivers@mcb.net) wrote:
> Although I admire the concept of enlisting the help of the world's home
> computers to analyse the SETI data, I can't help thinking all that
> processing power could be put to better use. May be the real value of the
> project is it will inspire someone to come up with a more tangible goal in
> some other field.

You're not one of them anti-SETI people are you?

Anyway, I find it interesting that someone would bad mouth a privately
funded all volunteer project.  It doesn't take nothin' that people
don't give it.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Jones

My Web Page - "http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~cjones/web/"
My Space Page -"http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~cjones/web/Space.html"