Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Distributed.net- Waste of time?

BooRadley · 04-22-2003, 08:09 PM

I'm not bitchin' about my CPU cycles or the amount of time it takes me to click the client. It's a larger scale argument than my 750 chugging away. When 328,000 people has wasted time on something , you'd think that would be very significant and be cause for outcry, sorta like www.8march2003.com 's retarded marketing campaign.

Distributed.net is a volunteer thing. The people AT distributed.net get a certain amount of cash ( I think $2,000 ) if the keys are cracked, but the amount of money is trivial considering the huge amount of CPU power that goes into the contest and the overwhelming server costs. But that doesn't give them the right to carelessly waste people's generousity.

Here is the big deal : You do RC5 to solve the keys. Everybody wants to win, and nobody wants to/needs to go through unecessary keys after the correct one has been found. It's pointless, and a waste of CPU time. This wouldn't be bad if 50 or even a thousand CPUs are doing it, but when you probably 100,000 CPUs(A very low estimate, considering it was around 56,000 usernames and the top ones have a great number of computers on their account) putting in 3 months of 24/7 work each AFTER the key has been found, you could see how that sets up people for disappointment, and that throws a negative light to distributed computing in general.

It's like donating goods to a charity, and knowing they just threw it away becuase they already had what they needed and didn't tell the users.

SecretMethod70, there is MANY people that are hardcore distributed computers ( Especially in SETI, Dnet, & Folding@Home), so I wouldn't dismiss this as a "stupid" topic.

04-22-2003, 08:09 PM	#6 (permalink)
BooRadley Insane Location: Kentucky	I'm not bitchin' about my CPU cycles or the amount of time it takes me to click the client. It's a larger scale argument than my 750 chugging away. When 328,000 people has wasted time on something , you'd think that would be very significant and be cause for outcry, sorta like www.8march2003.com 's retarded marketing campaign. Distributed.net is a volunteer thing. The people AT distributed.net get a certain amount of cash ( I think $2,000 ) if the keys are cracked, but the amount of money is trivial considering the huge amount of CPU power that goes into the contest and the overwhelming server costs. But that doesn't give them the right to carelessly waste people's generousity. Here is the big deal : You do RC5 to solve the keys. Everybody wants to win, and nobody wants to/needs to go through unecessary keys after the correct one has been found. It's pointless, and a waste of CPU time. This wouldn't be bad if 50 or even a thousand CPUs are doing it, but when you probably 100,000 CPUs(A very low estimate, considering it was around 56,000 usernames and the top ones have a great number of computers on their account) putting in 3 months of 24/7 work each AFTER the key has been found, you could see how that sets up people for disappointment, and that throws a negative light to distributed computing in general. It's like donating goods to a charity, and knowing they just threw it away becuase they already had what they needed and didn't tell the users. SecretMethod70, there is MANY people that are hardcore distributed computers ( Especially in SETI, Dnet, & Folding@Home), so I wouldn't dismiss this as a "stupid" topic.