h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Argh 5000-9000 words, thats pure madness.
Anyway I was going to ask what are you doing over then replying to posts on here?

Totally sod all. Nitina disappeared off to Cyprus for three weeks today , so I'm really just suffering the repercussions of an empty flat... I'll be back to normal by tomorrow I suspect.

Today is Tomorrow: Back to normal now?
Ketchup or HP sauce in a bacon buttie? Its very important, and this is where you tell me you're vegetarian.

HP, of course! And I'm not a vegetarian almost exclusively _because_ of bacon sarnies!

I guess I'll be back to normal when I've given this flat a tidy and washed this mountain of dishes. And perhaps had a nice pot of fairtrade colombian.

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Do you run seti?

I agree, its got to be HP

I don't run SETI, no. This computer's clapped out and old enough that I suspect SETI would provide a small but noticeable performance decrease, that outweighs the potential discovery of extra-terrestrial life thousandfold...

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Well I was going to tell you some interesting faxs about running seti in linux and windozes, but fisrt I want to know why your machine is so clapped out?

I bought it in 2000, so it's pretty old now. That's all. Oh and I made the mistake of choosing Intel over AMD, but at least I got a processor with a Coppermine core.

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Well all I know about coppermine is that my P3 866 is a coppermine according to linux. Anyway seti, the P3 500 i'm righting on does seti in windows in about 60 hours, want to know how long it takes in linux?

Go on...

Well it takes around 12 hours on the same machine.
Anyway whats this about coppermine?

... actually that doesn't prove owt about linux except that it can allocate more resources to SETI ... try running it with "nice" in front of the command, it'll take as long as windoze I bet.

Coppermine is a different processor core (the early celerons didn't have it) that's a lot more efficient with power and stuff. In fact, I ran my computer for a year without knowing my CPU fan was burnt out!

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Well I'm running it in tkseti thing and the bit where it says how to run says "setiathome -email -nice 19" and it still faster then windozes so what is nice?

nice just basically tells the computer how many resources to allocate to a program. Interestingly, however, 19 means allocate as few resources as the system can manage to the process (ie run very slowly, but not interfering with other processes very much) ... -20 is the highest and 19 is the lowest priority... try changing that number to 10 (the default nice speed) and see if you can get it running even faster!

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Well I've changed it to 10 and we will have to see when it finishes, its currently done about 40% so we'll see.

... aye we'll see. Windoze is the ultimate lazy arse, it seems.

Just installed the command-line client and I'm running it on my machine now, with a "watch head state.sah" in another terminal (watch basically runs a command every two seconds, clearing the screen each time, and head displays the first ten lines of a file) so I can see the value of prog= (up to 0.006 atm )

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I thought you said your machine was too clapped out. So what made you decide to run it?

Just realised that running it at nice 19 wouldn't do my machine any harm. Mind you, there was a power cut this morning so I lost my computer and it didn't finish. I was running it at nice 1 and it still took about 4 hours to do 15%...

Maybe I'll have another go later.

You don't have to do seti all in one go, you can stop it and come back to it and it won't start over from the beginning.