Re: OT - BBC Climate Change "screensaver"

In article <fl0Lf.800$77.383@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dab.is@xxxxxxxxxxx says...
DVDfever Dom wrote:
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Sofa - Spud wrote:
Mark Hewitt wrote:
"DAB sounds worse than FM" <dab.is@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MHMKf.51643$Rw6.12677@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Seriously though, if they want us to donate our CPU resources then
this BBC Climate Change thread has to have the lowest possible
priority so that it basically stops dead when we want to do
something. Otherwise they can swivel. For a few years I've always
used these distributed computing things from cancer research, SETI
and World Community Grid, and I've never come across one that
doesn't have the option of being screensaver only nor one that's
overly greedy when you want to run something yourself.

The whole point of it being a screensaver is that when you use the
PC it is completely removed, not even a low priority thread. It
seems they've missed the point here.

Did those SETI thing ever do anything?


Yeah, it Searched for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It didn't find
anything like, but it was quite a pretty screensaver.


- where they the ones that
looked for prime numbers? How did it work?


It looked like it was doing Fourier analysis of wide bandwidth
received signals downconverted to baseband. I hope that explains
things sufficiently?

Why would anyone install something like that on their PC in order to
help SETI or find a cure for cancer or see a mini Peter Snow giving
out election news? At the end of the day, it's just something you'll
try out once or twice and might not remove itself completely on
uninstall, or might hang around in the background even when not used,
so it's just something that doesn't matter to you which will also
give your PC another reason to go slow or not boot up correctly the
next time you reboot.


I've no idea WTF you're going on about Peter Snow, but as for the

The clue was in what I wrote. It was a BBC election thing at the time.

finding a cure for cancer and SETI screensavers I've never had a problem
with them, and they only use *any* CPU cycles when the screensaver
starts, which by definition is when you're not actually interacting with
the computer, so I think it's a good use of resources that would
otherwise go to waste.

I don't have a screensaver enabled. Ever.

If I go out, I switch the monitor off.

In fact, as you've said you leave your PC on 24/7 I think you should
install one yourself and help the cause. The current one I'm using at
the moment is trying to find a cure for AIDS, so although I realise it's
a struggle for someone like yourself, you could think of all the
starving children in Africa who were born with AIDS you tight ***!

When I'm not using the PC and I'm not using a bittorrent program, I'll happily
leave it doing nothing. I don't want any program I don't use regularly
potentially getting in the way of everything I do use regularly.

So many people seem to like installing several little things on their
PC like this and then wonder why they start having problems later on.

What, so have you only got, say, Windows XP and MS Office on your
machine and you won't install any other software just in case it buggers
up the reliability a bit?

That's not what I said.

Do you not think that mentality is slightly
limiting your PC experience, Dominic?

No, but your mentality is clearly limiting your understanding of what others
type.

It's the kind of thing one of my relatives does - installs this, that
and the other from CDs that fall out of the paper (no broadband so
downloading the same stuff isn't an option) and then starts asking why
something unconnected is no longer functioning as it should.

He needs to plug it in then.

*whoosh*

Every
time, I point out that the chances are such problems wouldn't happen
if she just stopped installing any old bit of crap for temporary use.

Did he have a firewall on his PC prior to MS providing one as default? A
lot of people didn't have one, so he could have had shitloads of nasty
things on his PC if he didn't have a firewall.

Nothing to do with a firewall, but when you uninstall little programs that
come from such CDs, they're not going to build in something to clean
themselves out of the registry as if they were never there.
--

Dom Robinson Gamertag: DVDfever email: dom at dvdfever dot co dot uk
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