Re: intent of package seti@home
Kevin Dalley <kevin@not-speaking-for-seti.org> writes:
(..if you missed the not.debian.org thread, er.. nevermind ;-)
> Not at all. But there may be advantages of knowing which data was
> analyzed with which bugs.
agreed, this was of great benefit when it came to 'discovering'
penicillin ;-) -- and the Free Software community is already very
fluent with the concept and value of version numbering.
> If I were directly involved in this project and the decision were up
> to me, I would try to find an excuse for as much of the source code as
> possible.
needing 'excuses' for opening source code is really just a subtle, (or
not so subtle) denial of making excuses not to open it based on other
historical fears..
John Hasler in particular has made some very salient points about how
those fears, like most others, are best addressed by bringing them out
into the open where we can all work to dissolve them. I won't reiterate
them -- though they can probably not be stated often enough, in this
forum I'd be mostly wasting bandwidth of the converted.
I must confess I find it strangely amusing that, while they are keen to
adopt the concept of distributed processing to further their research,
they are slow to recognise the immensely more powerful resource of
distributed thought which could be applied to their project!
Still it's an interesting analogy that the closed politics of commercial
science has much in common with the proprietary software camp ...
Beyond the issue of collating reliable results from an unreliable,
untrusted network of processors, we also have the rather non-trivial
case of selecting the 'right' algorithm to winnow interesting signals
from the mass of background radiation from innumerable sources ...
This is another aspect of seti@home's project where community interest
could in fact prove priceless toward achieving their stated goal. And
one which almost ensures that at some point their data will need to be
re-analysed anyway.
Anyone who thinks this is a task suited to a small closed focus group
could perhaps explain to us all why internet search engines still suck!
Let's face it - they are analysing data that we can already recognise and
understand and still mostly can't separate the 'wheat' from the 'chaff'.
Even a 'simple' modem signal is almost indistinguishable from white-noise
without correct filtering - and I doubt the seti folk expect to chance
across someone in a distant solar system keying morse ;-)
> And if I know their definition of impossibly quick, I slow down my
> forging.
You don't need their source to make a reasonable estimate of this either,
just extrapolate it from how fast your own machine runs the client..
This would be a *very* basic consideration for any would-be cracker.
seti@home is the kind of project that has the potential to attract a
strong following from segments of the community - it would be a pity
if it didn't simply because they didn't understand the nature of our
interest in it.
best,
Ron.
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