Straining Earthlings’ Terrestrial Intelligence

If you’d like to participate in the great quest for extraterrestrial life, you just have to have some spare capacity on your computer. Well, and maybe the smarts to deal with some software that doesn’t work very well and the patience to tolerate some flaming from those you ask for help. That is what one long-time supporter of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) says she has discovered in recent months.

“I recently received an e-mail from the SETI@home people at UC Berkeley asking me to re-up in lending my computer resources to their search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” the reader wrote. “In the past this involved installing a little screensaver replacement application that crunched numbers instead of just showing a pretty picture when it was screensaving. Then a year or so ago SETI switched to some new and incompletely engineered software called BOINC. I dumped the program, as did many others at the time.”

But as an IT professional for almost 30 years, the reader has seen a few applications that got rolled out too soon but were ultimately made workable. “When I was solicited to return to the program, I figured they must have solved the many problems expected of a pre-beta bit of software, since that is what BOINC certainly seemed to be when I tried to it the first time. Unfortunately, I see no meaningful difference in the current version of the software. I’ve now had some problems with the software using massive bandwidth even when I had totally disabled it. Apparently you have to check and/or change a number of settings to prevent this behavior.”

When the reader visited the SETI project’s tech help message board, she was discouraged to see her problems were minor compared to those other would-be BOINC users were suffering. “There are so many problems with the software that the board has literally thousands of requests for help on the most trivial installation issues imaginable. You cannot even change local preference like the screensaver mode without logging onto the server and forcing an update routine. These are things that ought to have gone totally smoothly — after all, BOINC is just a vastly glorified screensaver. And it often appeared that anyone with problems with the software would be flamed by the tech support volunteers as an incompetent moron for not fishing through the software to find its many switches and checkboxes.”

But what really convinced the reader that the BOINC software is really not ready for public consumption were the many message board posts related to overheating problems that the software can cause, particularly with some laptops. “If you read through their rules and policies, you see they do warn that the ‘applications run by SETI@home may cause some computers to overheat,’ and that you are responsible for monitoring your CPU with a separate utility program,” the reader wrote. “You’re supposed to be able to control CPU usage with BOINC, but that’s just another one of the things they’ve promised — along with all the new and improved and wonderful interfaces — that never seem to arrive.”

Why, the reader had to wonder, did SETI summon back its old users before it had fixed the problems with BOINC that had driven them away? Even more disturbing to her was the way complaints from users of the old screensaver were being handled on the tech support message board. “Within the boards you regularly see the tech support people telling users there are no overheating problems and to go ahead and use it. And not only do they flame any professionals who point out their errors, they will go back later and ‘moderate’ the conversation to make themselves sound better and to make everyone who complains seem to be just some cretinous child pointlessly flaming them. To see that kind of treatment is aggravating because I proselytized heavily with my colleagues on behalf of this program. It is the overall lack of professionalism and willingness to give out bogus advice at the official site that gets to me.”

And what will the ultimate BOINC effect be on the science that SETI and other projects are trying to accomplish? “I just can’t understand why they couldn’t have been a little more patient and waited until the software was actually ready to be put in the hands of average users,” the reader writes. “They have managed to lose a huge numbers of users because of this software, and how many will be willing to try it yet again the next time they tell us it’s ready for primetime? It just seems like a gigantic boondoggle in that one can have little faith in the science being performed invisibly by this software when the obvious parts of it work so poorly. I have to doubt that much of the research being done by BOINC will fly in peer-reviewed journals since there is no comparable network of distributed computing to test BOINC results against.”

Got a story of your own to tell about software that doesn’t work or support that doesn’t help? Call the Gripe Line at 1 888 875-7916 or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.

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