Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

And your four years is an impressive commitment.

You know one of the big problems we have with society today is the need for continuous excitement and instant gratification. I tend to think of it as the "Extreme Factor" - if it's not "Extreme" well then its time to move on.

It's a real problem at NASA where I work. In the early days everything was "Buck Rogers" and the excitement level was high.

However, now that we have a space station and getting to orbit has become "routine" (if going from a dead stop to 17,500 mph in 8:30 is ever routine) the public has become bored.

It doesn't matter that we now have the ability to do important research in a zero-G environment, nor that we learn more about how to live and function in space every day.

Buck Rogers is BOLD, Star Wars is exciting, but real science is a long, slow, and often boring process. Which is why I see your long-term commitment to the project as being much more valuable and important than whose RAC is higher.

Make sense?

Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

And your four years is an impressive commitment.

You know one of the big problems we have with society today is the need for continuous excitement and instant gratification. I tend to think of it as the "Extreme Factor" - if it's not "Extreme" well then its time to move on.

It's a real problem at NASA where I work. In the early days everything was "Buck Rogers" and the excitement level was high.

However, now that we have a space station and getting to orbit has become "routine" (if going from a dead stop to 17,500 mph in 8:30 is ever routine) the public has become bored.

It doesn't matter that we now have the ability to do important research in a zero-G environment, nor that we learn more about how to live and function in space every day.

Buck Rogers is BOLD, Star Wars is exciting, but real science is a long, slow, and often boring process. Which is why I see your long-term commitment to the project as being much more valuable and important than whose RAC is higher.

Make sense?

Chris speaking as a guy who is getting painfully close to 60 years old, the problem with Nasa is its lack of telling the Public what it is doing and by doing so keeping them excited too! Back in the old days of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the early days of the shuttle everything was on tv and alot of excitement was generated. Today you guys just shoot people off, do something or other and come back. No details, when people did their space walks it was exciting, today you guys do much more interesting stuff in your space walks but show only about 2 minutes of it on tv. I can only assume that this is not your department, nor do you have the ability to fix it, but since there is no excitement generated, people like me are losing interest. When you guys went up and fixed the Hubble Telescope alot of press was generated and people were excited. Then the new pictures came thru and when they were shown side by side with the old ones even more excitement was generated. Today you guys go up to the ISS, stay for 7 to 10 days and come back with little to no news about what you did there or anything else. Yes I guess some of what is done could be considered 'classified', but not all of it is! I think some of the best minds in the World work for Nasa, but until you guys figure out how to make Science interesting, like Bill Nye the Science Guy does, Nasa is going to be a big hole in the sky looking for some way to get there. Carl Sagan made Space and the Universe exciting during his tv shows, he made it interesting. His comments about how 'there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the beaches in the World' excited people with the possibilities! Kids are your best audience, get them interested and the parents will follow right along. We ALL want the best for our kids, get them interested in what you are doing, with the occasional AND REGULAR update for the parents, and Nasa will be an unstoppable force again!

Sorry about that, it started out as a small thought that kind of took off! I LOVE Science but never had the brains to go farther than the wonderment of it all. I feel sorry for Nasa and by extension you guys that put your whole lives into it, you deserve better!

BTW I have been crunching since before Boinc and am not stopping anytime soon, if I can help it!! Keep on crunching is what I believe! I will add my signature so you can see that.

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speaking as a guy who is getting painfully close to 60 years old ...

Well you're not that far ahead of me. And I guess that age is another score where RAC doesn't count for much.

A couple of quick observations. Yes, NASA PAO stinks, at least in my my mind. Too much effort is put into being politically correct and chasing the fad of the day - lately that has been how is NASA helping the world be green.

No, I don't have any problem with being green and I try to toe the line as much as I can. But that is not NASA's job, exploration and science is. Before green it was outreach to the kiddos - which is good but when I was a kid I was enthralled by NASA coverage that like a news documentary, not like the Saturday morning cartoons they produce now.

The amount of coverage on TV? Hey, the stations broadcast what is going to get them ratings. So as we move past the era of Buck Rogers and into hard core science that gets to be a bit problematic.

I won't even go into the current administration's plans to use NASA a a diplomatic tool for outreach to Muslim nations. Once again, I have no problem with the outreach concept, just don't see it as NASA's job.

Just my two cents worth.

You are right - I have nothing to do with PAO activities. For 20 some years I did the real-time operating systems used in the Mission Control Center. Now I do the customized version of Linux used on board the station.

Mikey - one quick question: I see on your signature that you used to crunch for SETI but no longer do. It's none of my business but I was curious as to why.

I briefly crunched for them but withdrew due to the number of problems they had with their system (can be forgiven) and the lack of communication from the staff when they were having problems (less forgivable)

And everyone seemed so focused on RAC, even to the point where they would openly talk about culling their queue to eliminate "less efficient" tasks. I mean, is it a scientific project or the Grand Prix of RAC?

The whole environment there was one of the reasons I drafted my former pet as my avatar - his task is to hold the line against "four kitties on a shitty mission"

I think you know what I mean ...

Mikey - one quick question: I see on your signature that you used to crunch for SETI but no longer do. It's none of my business but I was curious as to why.

I briefly crunched for them but withdrew due to the number of problems they had with their system (can be forgiven) and the lack of communication from the staff when they were having problems (less forgivable)

And everyone seemed so focused on RAC, even to the point where they would openly talk about culling their queue to eliminate "less efficient" tasks. I mean, is it a scientific project or the Grand Prix of RAC?

The whole environment there was one of the reasons I drafted my former pet as my avatar - his task is to hold the line against "four kitties on a shitty mission"

I think you know what I mean ...

It's a little bit of both. I like credits, but I also like biology and curing diseases. Rosetta is known for giving low credits... etc, but that doesn't bother me at all.

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I used to crunch for SETI. I am excited about the possibility of little green men. ;) But since I did not, at the time, see significant progress in the task of looking at the results returned by the crunchers, I left.

Same here. I rather fold proteins.

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Mikey - one quick question: I see on your signature that you used to crunch for SETI but no longer do. It's none of my business but I was curious as to why.

I briefly crunched for them but withdrew due to the number of problems they had with their system (can be forgiven) and the lack of communication from the staff when they were having problems (less forgivable)

And everyone seemed so focused on RAC, even to the point where they would openly talk about culling their queue to eliminate "less efficient" tasks. I mean, is it a scientific project or the Grand Prix of RAC?

The whole environment there was one of the reasons I drafted my former pet as my avatar - his task is to hold the line against "four kitties on a shitty mission"

I think you know what I mean ...

I do know what you mean, I used to crunch for Seti and actually started there before Boinc. But I left Seti for several reasons, mostly I left because they started running out of work and didn't want to lose users so they started re-issuing the same work over and over and over again, without telling anyone! So we were essentially doing make work, not a good thing. Then they started having 'people problems', ie low staffing, so they stopped evaluating what we users were sending back. They got the work from the telescope, broke it up into little chunks, sent it out to us users, we returned our part and they put it on the shelf to look at later on! WTF is with that, if I wanted to do work for some future project I would, and of course it took some kid visiting them for that to come out too! Then Dr. David Anderson made me a 'Forum Moderator', I thought 'what an honor it was to be one', well that was the biggest mistake I ever did for them! Too much infighting, NO support from Dr. A or his staff and 6 or 7 of us quit and left, never to go back! I, and the rest, left Seti and joined malariacontrol.net on 23 Mar 2007. I have never crunched another Seti unit and won't, even if Seti is the last DC project on the planet! Dr. A is the original writer and grant getter for Boinc. He has been with Seti since the beginning.

And yes I agree about the problems of showing experiments on tv, but NASA used to have its own tv channel, but Comcast and Verizon either don't carry it or it is gone. I guess watching tv waiting for something to happen is no fun. I do remember watching space walks on that channel but it not being as much fun as in the old days, way to slow and steady for todays 'I want it right now' society.

My father-in-law used to work for IBM and it sounds like he did a similar thing as you do, but he was a hardware rep. He used to be in, I think Huntsville, for every launch of every capsule NASA sent up for many, many years. He left IBM when they sold their printers to Lexmark and did that HUGE buyout of alot of its employees. He was only two years from retirement then and got paid for those 2 years, got his retirement adjusted so it looked like he worked those 2 years and did not have to come in for those 2 years! It was a no brainer for him! Leave and get paid as if you are still working, retirement starts now but with the money as if you had worked for those 2 more years! I think he was leaving around the same time you were getting there.

It must be cool doing work on the OS for the ISS, now when there are problems we know who is working late! 8-)) I am knocking on wood hoping you get to sleep in ALOT!!

Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

I must admit, I'm a credit whore... Or at least I was, when I was running SETI. I quit, because I didn't like being called a cheater, just because I did use Crunch3r's optimized application (to me it's rather, that those, that were not using it, were dumbheads, since they were wasting valuable time). Anyhow I decided it was time for a change and I've chosen Rosetta: No optimized apps, no quorom and last, but not least, I think Rosetta is a more valuable project.

cu

Joe

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Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

I must admit, I'm a credit whore... Or at least I was, when I was running SETI. I quit, because I didn't like being called a cheater, just because I did use Crunch3r's optimized application (to me it's rather, that those, that were not using it, were dumbheads, since they were wasting valuable time). Anyhow I decided it was time for a change and I've chosen Rosetta: No optimized apps, no quorom and last, but not least, I think Rosetta is a more valuable project.

cu Joe

I came here for the exact same reason but had to quit because we could not get my Windows machines to work here, Linux worked just fine but Windows would not download the files! The Admins and I worked on it for almost a month, they even emailed me some files and nothing worked. I am now back on pure Windows machines and on PrimeGrid and Malaria with my cpu's. If I ever put a Linux machine back up it will crunch for Rosie!

Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

I must admit, I'm a credit whore... Or at least I was, when I was running SETI. I quit, because I didn't like being called a cheater, just because I did use Crunch3r's optimized application (to me it's rather, that those, that were not using it, were dumbheads, since they were wasting valuable time). Anyhow I decided it was time for a change and I've chosen Rosetta: No optimized apps, no quorom and last, but not least, I think Rosetta is a more valuable project.

cu Joe

I came here for the exact same reason but had to quit because we could not get my Windows machines to work here, Linux worked just fine but Windows would not download the files! The Admins and I worked on it for almost a month, they even emailed me some files and nothing worked. I am now back on pure Windows machines and on PrimeGrid and Malaria with my cpu's. If I ever put a Linux machine back up it will crunch for Rosie!

That's really weird....

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Well, I surrender. ;)

Come on Joe, I think that you know that from my perspective RAC is only a way to verify the health of your systems - what really counts is how long you have been in the game, now that's important.

I must admit, I'm a credit whore... Or at least I was, when I was running SETI. I quit, because I didn't like being called a cheater, just because I did use Crunch3r's optimized application (to me it's rather, that those, that were not using it, were dumbheads, since they were wasting valuable time). Anyhow I decided it was time for a change and I've chosen Rosetta: No optimized apps, no quorom and last, but not least, I think Rosetta is a more valuable project.

cu Joe

I came here for the exact same reason but had to quit because we could not get my Windows machines to work here, Linux worked just fine but Windows would not download the files! The Admins and I worked on it for almost a month, they even emailed me some files and nothing worked. I am now back on pure Windows machines and on PrimeGrid and Malaria with my cpu's. If I ever put a Linux machine back up it will crunch for Rosie!

That's really weird....

It is but honestly we tried and tried and it just would not work. It's okay for now though.