LHC@home

Hey River, isn't a "negative debt" a credit? ;-)

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Hey River, isn't a "negative debt" a credit? ;-)

Every debt is a credit,
just as every borrowing is also a lending

- to someone else ;-)

But seriously, to go into geek mode in response to your joke, in BOINC terms, if a project is in debt (and therefore will not be scheduled for a while, or will not download for a while, the "Debt" figure is negative.

If the project is owed time (and therefore a priority for downloads or for the cpu) the debt figure as recorded in the client_state goes positive.

So you could actually say that a positive debt is a credit. ;-)

Did JM7 get the signs wrong? Well no, becoause the sign depends whether you read the table as being of debt owed *to* the project, or debt owed *by* the project.

So to avoid confusion I usually say "positive debt" and "negative debt" referring the sign of the numbers in the file.

R~~

BTW, for anyone curious; if a project is set to no new work, but has WUs, and the WUs themselves, rather then the projects are suspended, they will accumulate negative debt. Noticed this with seasonal attribution, as I had suspended the WU (not the projects) to seasonal attribution and CPDN while going through LHC WUs.

There's an obvious reason to this also. CPDN WUs are extremely long, and if one needs to suspend it, one doesn't want it downloading new work and then possibly getting over committed. CPDN has issues if it's allowed to run, while certain CPU or memory intensive apps are also running, so...

All said however, I'd rather not have it continue going out again and again when there is no work, but here is a way if anyone is curious on how the books could be balanced. Don't be late on the last WU if you try to make use of this though.

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Every debt is a credit,
just as every borrowing is also a lending

- to someone else ;-)

But seriously, to go into geek mode in response to your joke, in BOINC terms, if a project is in debt (and therefore will not be scheduled for a while, or will not download for a while, the "Debt" figure is negative.

If the project is owed time (and therefore a priority for downloads or for the cpu) the debt figure as recorded in the client_state goes positive.

So you could actually say that a positive debt is a credit. ;-)

Did JM7 get the signs wrong? Well no, becoause the sign depends whether you read the table as being of debt owed *to* the project, or debt owed *by* the project.

So to avoid confusion I usually say "positive debt" and "negative debt" referring the sign of the numbers in the file.

R~~

My being a B/A has me spending lots of time with programmers explaining such things for many hours :-). I get the inevitable; "What about adjustments?" Then I have to explain suspense accounts. Then there's the bank statement question; "But aren't credits good, I have them on my bank statement?" No, that's not your statement, it's the banks. They just send you a copy. Just remember, creditors: bad!".

Ten minutes latter they'll be back; "Sorry, which one's the negative?"

I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.

I just hate programmers :-) And, yes, I used to be one =8-D....

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... Then there's the bank statement question; "But aren't credits good, I have them on my bank statement?" No, that's not your statement, it's the banks. They just send you a copy ...

At least one UK bank uses a minus sign next to the number to indicate a debit entry - and tell you that in the key. Whose statement is that?

And then yeah, but then why do the banks send us a copy of *their* statement if it is a current account (chequebook a/c), but send us *our own* statetment if it is a credit card a/c?

And why do we have debit cards and credit cards when they both do exactly the same thing - a plus transaction in a shop moves money from you to the shop, and a minus moves it back but one statement calls it a credit and the other a debit?

Yes, I know one card is named from the bank perspective and the other from the customer perspective (and don't tell me which I could work it out if I cared) and is it any wonder anyone without an accounting qualification gets confused?

R~~

Did JM7 get the signs wrong? Well no, becoause the sign depends whether you read the table as being of debt owed *to* the project, or debt owed *by* the project.

I believe that the signs are reversed for the calculations. However, in my defense, Short Term Debt was in place before I started, and the signs for LTD match those for STD (imagine trying to explain that dichotomy). In actuallity, it is a CPU balance instead of a CPU debt calculation. However, I am not about to try to fix it.

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BOINC WIKI

Did JM7 get the signs wrong? Well no, becoause the sign depends whether you read the table as being of debt owed *to* the project, or debt owed *by* the project.

I believe that the signs are reversed for the calculations. However, in my defense, Short Term Debt was in place before I started, and the signs for LTD match those for STD (imagine trying to explain that dichotomy). In actuallity, it is a CPU balance instead of a CPU debt calculation. However, I am not about to try to fix it.

Quite right.

My point was that neither sign convention would have been "right" nor "wrong" at the outset, as either can be defended.

The only thing that would be wrong would be to try to change the sign convention once adopted. I'd assumed you had previously chosen the signs for STD, but as they were already in place then I absolutely commend your choice to go with what was already there.

Maintaining a sign convention does indeed mean swapping the signs round in the code - not only here but in many finance apps too. This is much much better than trying to optimise the coding by confusing the sign cenventions in the files or in the communication protocols.
R~~

ok i'm done with this project. i'm going to detach it no point in being part of the project if there isn't any work.

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ok i'm done with this project. i'm going to detach it no point in being part of the project if there isn't any work.

Minus 10 IQ points for irrelevance to this thread, minus another 15 for bad spelling and grammar.

"River~~" wrote:

Maintaining a sign convention does indeed mean swapping the signs round in the code - not only here but in many finance apps too.

I don't know about project "debt", but with finance apps you also need to remember who's going to be using it: a fully-qualified accountant, a secretary-come-bookkeeper, or a total innocent who can't afford to pay either of the former to do the paperwork for him/her. That's for the input.

Then you worry about how to format the output, depending on what sort of use it'll be put to (tax returns, management accounts, import/export with other programs...). No wonder there's so much confusion.

Since the current version of BOINC seems to be having trouble evaluating the % done of a WU (any project), I've given up worrying how project "debt" is calculated. What I have noticed, though, is that client-side AMD and PowerPC processors cope with it better than P4s.

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sQuonk
Plague of Mice
Intel Core i3-9100 CPU@3.60 GHz, but it's doing its bit just the same.