At s...@h, there are around 500,000 users running BOINC. There are perhaps 50
users that post regularly on the forums. There are perhaps 500 that have
ever posted. That leaves 99.9% of the users that have never posted about
anything. I would call this a very silent super majority.
I check on my credits frequently. Most of my machines would have to be on
24/7 anyway, so they might as well be doing something useful when they are
on.
jm7
Jeremy Cowles
<jeremy.cow...@gm
ail.com> To
Sent by: Jorden van der Elst
<boinc_dev-bounce <[email protected]>
[email protected] cc
u> BOINC Dev Mailing List
<[email protected]>
Subject
01/14/2010 02:20 Re: [boinc_dev] The Dark Side
PM
Jord,
If it makes you feel any better, my wife has been using BOINC for years &
her sole motivation is the projects to which she contributes. She believes
that the projects she has selected will help make a positive change in the
world (she contributes primarily to WCG).
It's true, she is concerned with credit, but it's because that's the only
tangible indicator of progress that she has, without it BOINC is a black
box. Credit provides a sense of personal contribution and in a real way,
it's the fundamental link between the volunteer and the project. In this
context, being competitive or mobbing a project that gives more credit kind
of makes sense.
Also, to my knowledge, she has also never posted on a forum about credit or
modified her computer hardware for BOINC. So I don't think it's fair to say
that zealots on the forums are an accurate representation of the entire
community. Of course, she is only one person, but perhaps there is a silent
majority as Eric indicated.
--
Jeremy
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 7:22 AM, Jorden van der Elst
<[email protected]>wrote:
> It's been over a week since I stopped all BOINC activities and have
> been thinking about my future with the program.
>
> BOINC used to be a program with which you used the spare cycles of
> your CPU to help and better science. These days it's only about
> credits. Just go to any project forum and check the threads.
>
> 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.
>
> Seeing how Rom has been swayed to the dark side, when he said in a
> conversation I had with him that he had passed 1 million credits at
> Collatz, using his ATI GPU only, I doubt it is about anything else
> these days.
>
> While computer makers and software makers alike will try to make
> everything as green as possible, to conserve electricity, and where
> BOINC used to be for spare CPU cycles, the user base changes its use
> to leaving their computers on 24/7, having crammed as many GPUs in
> there as possible and only get a RAC that's at least 5 digits. Any
> lower and it's not interesting anymore. Just check the posts after a
> day's outage at Seti. It's not about why there was an outage, but how
> to get all that work in that's now on the computer, as the RAC is
> dropping. Oh my God, those poor people, their world must be coming to
> an end!
>
> Have you seen how many projects have been set up in the past 5 years
> and which ones survived? Can you imagine that not many administrators
> want to set up BOINC only to be jumped upon by this wild horde of
> insane monsters who don't care what they crunch, as long as it "pays"
> enough? Who will dictate what pay is "enough" and who will even demand
> that he gives out the same pay for work that had client errors, just
> to compensate for the fact that their computers burned electrons and
> not to make their precious RAC drop? That they do this through forums
> and by email, some even phoning Admin personally, just to get "their
> message" through?
>
> No, I don't have a solution or an answer to get rid of this problem. I
> am not even going to try. Whatever solution you throw out there is not
> good enough for the masses anyway. As long as the change isn't
> mandatory for all projects to follow, you'll find that "the users"
> will tell the project what credits to use or else... Even if you lose
> the database that held their credit, they'll demand you put back their
> previous numbers as soon as you're up and running again. Do not touch
> their credit as it's all they have to show for what they did at these
> projects. Ask them if they know what the projects are actually doing
> and perhaps you find 3 people on any project who know what's going on,
> the rest are only there for those incredibly stupid and retarded
> credits. Some of the newer projects don't even tell on their front
> page anymore what they do, as no one is interested anyway.
>
> I never was in it for the credits. I liked the program.
> So what do you do as soon as the program changes its goal, its intended
> use?
> What if the program is growing well beyond its initial design
> parameters? What if the idle time use is only in word the design goal
> of the program, but the program grew to be much more than that by
> adding increasingly more hardware that can't run at idle? What to do
> when the user base hijacked projects and made sure the pay is the only
> design goal that matters?
>
> I've found my answer. I am stepping back and leaving, keeping the
> possibility open that I return in the future. But on the other hand,
> this may be the last you've seen of me.
>
> Take care everyone,
>
> --
> -- Jord.
> _______________________________________________
> 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.
_______________________________________________
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.
