Talk about really wanting to find E.T.
A network systems administrator for the Higley Unified School District has resigned after it was discovered he had deployed Seti@Home on more than 5000 computers.
What’s Seti@home? Why, only the first distributed computing project that used the unused power of individual computers to chug through data received from the Arecibo Observatory! Basically, the project scans the skies for signals from E.T. All that scanning creates data, and this stuff has to be analyzed to see if there are any signals.
In order to foster more adoption, the Seti@Home guys put ranking in place, so people would have bragging rights and create an element of competition.
And this guy really took up to it:
[Higley superintendent Denise] Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Apparently, the alien-seeking software had been running since Niesluchowski was hired nearly 10 years ago.
“Basically our processors were hooked up and running 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, every day of the school year,” Birdwell said.
It took them 10 years to figure this out? Forget intelligent life in space; what about intelligent life closer to home?
There is–supposedly–more to this story, apparently.
Links to same stories covered here and here.
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