ROFL, BoincDeathPool@Home project

[Son Goku]

LOL, noticed this on another board (one of the project boards). Someone's responce to another project going down Looks good for a humor section...

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/forum_thread.php?id=1753

BTW, and to put some of the humor in perspective, Einstein's Linux client takes a lot longer then the Windows client to crunch a WU. The project admins say they hadn't figured out which compiler switches to use yet, to remedy this...

I was just sitting there reading logs, minding my own business, when I noticed that the CPDN project died last night.

I had an epiphany.

Why not start a BOINC project? One that will utilize spare processor cycles to accurately predict which BOINC project goes down next and when the outage will occur?

BoincDeathPool@Home

The Linux client will be written in compiled BASIC and utilize copious delay loops to further slow things down. This will ensure a lively message board.

The space-time continuum crunching should not be restricted to just BOINC project outages. It can also be used to predict exactly when the first whiney "We never had these problems with BoincDeathPoolClassic!" posts will appear.

Questions? Comments?

Nice idea!

Other things to predict: how long the outage will last, and what will cause the outage (hardware problems, software bugs, faulty breakers, ISP problems, cosmic rays, sunspots, gravity waves...)

The screensaver will show the probabilities of the projects going down, in nice colors (like red = "probably down at this point" and green = "likely to be up"), for a period of time equal to every project's WU deadline (so CPDN predictions will take most of the time). Of course these are the probabilities predicted by your set of parameters (workunit), another workunit will predict other probabilities.
The screensaver will compare the predicted outages to the real outages. (Care should be taken that this data-collection does not influence the outages of the other projects.)

Every BoincDeathPool@Home user who accurately predicts an outage (or aspects of it, like the cause) will be mentioned on an "honor roll" on the BoincDeathPool site. Some kind of metric to measure the accuracy of the predictions needs to be developed for this. The honor roll is in addition to the standard "cobblestone" stats and is an extra incentive to join this project (you will be famous on the entire Internet, not just a co-author of a hard-to-find scientific article).
The users that accurately predict an outage of BoincDeathPool itself will have a special place on the honor roll.

Oh, by the way, the Windows client should be written in Java to ensure it is not too fast, either. The fact it is in Java will be mentioned on the site, but not the fact you need to download some kind of JRE to run it. This should flood the forum with "how to install" questions and a few messages about interesting experiments to install it on non-Windows platforms. Furthermore, this garantees different bugs on Windows and on Linux.

;=)

My own reply

ROFL, good one... Only thing; what happens when the BOINC project death pool project goes down? Especially if someone couldn't report back the WU that predicted it's own downage until right after it comes back up?

Oh, and

> Oh, by the way, the Windows client should be written in Java to ensure it is
> not too fast, either. The fact it is in Java will be mentioned on the site,
> but not the fact you need to download some kind of JRE to run it. This should
> lood the forum with "how to install" questions and a few messages about
> interesting experiments to install it on non-Windows platforms. Furthermore,
> this garantees different bugs on Windows and on Linux.

should this be restricted to the SUN java virtual machine, or should Microsoft java be allowed? If the latter, convince M$ that it's a benchmark to their OS and losing it could be a major selling points (more credits and hence ego boost) for free Linux over expensive Windows liscenses, so they can find all the programming tricks to their own JVM to make it run faster...things like dynamically changing this or that instruction into making a Windows API call to cut down crunch time... Interoperability or maintaining cross platform compatibility not an issue. Risking ticking Sun off in court not an issue, as M$ can afford the best legal beagals, and we all know they managed to over-turn Judge Jackson's ruling, and got an appeals court to agree to them deciding their own sentencing in M$ vs. DOJ