I'm going to step on a couple of toes, and I apologize. Raistmer, IMO, you're missing the single most important point.
I don't crunch because I want to DONATE, and I can't imagine that anyone does. I started crunching SETI Classic because a good friend said "this is cool" and I looked, and it was cool. Those idle clocks could mean something. Finding ET, while being very unlikely, would change the world. As a technologist, I like the idea of using idle CPU time for a purpose. I crunched for HashClash because I use hashes, and the work was interesting to me as a working software developer. I don't do any of the pharmaceutical projects. Yes, they are important, but I don't find them exciting. They don't stir my interest at all. I don't do Climate. I do not believe in Anthropomorphic Global Warming or our ability to model climate in sufficient detail to draw a valid conclusion. I'm sorry, I said I was going to step on toes, and I support their right to exist -- and I hope they support my right to not participate. People who chose projects on that basis, who donate clock cycles because they believe, care little about credit. The problem is Money. I don't mean that in the terms of dollars or rubles or yen or pounds. The BOINC credit system is an economy, an amazing number of people treat it exactly as if it was money, they expend resources to make more money, and they chase projects based solely on greed. While I agree with Dr. Anderson that a fair and equitable credit system would be helpful, I don't think that's the real problem. Credit is Money. If there was a way to make it some other thing, something not money, something that doesn't stir that same level of emotion, then I think a lot of problems would go away. But it isn't because people are driven by their desire to donate. They get caught up in the money. -- Lynn Raistmer wrote: >> It's not that difficult to find a thread where the only conversation >> is about the credits, or to find a thread of someone new to the >> project who doesn't care about the science, his only question being >> "How can I maximize the amount of credit/RAC with this machine?", or >> "Which GPU should I buy and what is my maximum credit/RAC with it?" >> >> Science? Pah! Not interested. Credits is what we need. >> These totally useless things seem to be what BOINC is all about these >> days. BOINC went from Berkeley's Open Initiative for Network Computing >> to Because Our Insanity is Numbers of Credit. > > IMO you get it totally wrong. > Science mostly for project founders. They "make science". Some other, > usually small part of participants interested in that science. > It's just their hobby. > But main share of participants don't want to go very deeep in scientific > results. BUT (!!!!) they still do just THAT project founders asked them to > do - TO DONATE COMPUTING POWER. > And here again 2 parts of participats - silent ones, who installed BOINC and > forgot about it. Maybe BOINC still works well on such hosts, but we all know > BOINC not ideal and most probably after few years such host became unusable > for projects w/o new user intervention. > But there is another part - active users. They try to maximize RAC, well, > FINE, FINE and once more, FINE! > They donate not only computing power of their PCs, their donating their own > time and efforts to maximize that power and to ensure that BOINC works fine > on their hosts. What wrong with that? nothing wrong. > As long as higher RAC ~= higher performance - lets increase RAC. > Only "credit cheating " and all those howls about it are non-productive. The > aim to maximize RAC and to construct host with max RAC for same amount of > money is just good aim IMO. And it's THE VERY PURPOSE of Number Crunching > forums. Science can be discussed in Science forums. > > _______________________________________________ > boinc_dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev > To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and > (near bottom of page) enter your email address. > _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
