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LHC@home Alpha petition
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 37 Credit: 5,448 RAC: 0 |
If you like LHC@home and LHC@home Alpha, sign this LHC@home Alpha petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/LHCalpha/petition.html.  mars2019.org Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition |
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 456 Credit: 75,142 RAC: 0 |
A couple of comments to explain why LHC alpha was left closed. This posting is not an official one, but is coming from someone who, like you, would like to be in LHC alpha but is locked out. LHC alpha has as many testers as it needs. The purpose of an alpha project, like LHC alpha or Ralph (Rosetta Alpha) is to test new software. Once the project has sufficient people on board who can be relied on to contribute sensible comments when errors happen, and spread across a range of platforms, then it becomes counter productive to keep the doors open. Closing the doors means that an alpha project gets progressively better, as the helpful-commenters tend to stay, and those who like to complain when problems arise tend to self-select themselves out. Also the expertise of those left rises with experience, at least if the project team take the time to give feedback about which comments are useful and which are not. Leaving the doors open means a steady influx of people, some of whom will never give a useful comment on a bug, and some of whom will give useful comments sometime in the future but not yet. This means more buggy WU typically have to be run before the enlightening feedback is provided, and also means the project team are spending more time in debugging the comments than the code. Faced with the expectation of creating more work for the humans in order to produce a lower quality of testing, keeping the doors shut is a rational response. Sadly then, it is unlikely that any of us will get onto LHC alpha in the near future. Just keep trying the door every week or so... One day they might open, and it is likely to be only for a limited new intake so it will be a race to get in before the door shuts again. River~~ PS: hi Henri - I see we both joined LHC on the same day... I remember the excitement when I noticed that the door to LHC was open (the main project had been numbers-limited before that). 
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 37 Credit: 5,448 RAC: 0 |
A couple of comments to explain why LHC alpha was left closed. This posting is not an official one, but is coming from someone who, like you, would like to be in LHC alpha but is locked out. Hi! I appreciate you comments.
Cool. :) mars2019.org Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition |
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Send message Joined: 7 Mar 06 Posts: 9 Credit: 9,816 RAC: 0 |
If you like LHC@home and LHC@home Alpha, sign this LHC@home Alpha petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/LHCalpha/petition.html. Hi Henry, When someone starts a petition mostly he/she gives an elaborate reason why he/she wants the item mentioned in the petition. When reading your petition I would not know why LHC should open LHC Alpha. Is it to help the Alpha-project, is it because you like the science, is it to share your knowledge about Boinc-projects with the Alpha-people or is it just to collect another project to your list of Boinc-projects ? I think River is correct in saying that LHC is better off with people that stay a longer time than short 'visitors' that will abandon the project when the first problem occur. Or start boring rants why they don't get enough credits. Personally on most of my puters I only run stable versions since I don't have enough time to check all the log-files and report problems. Only my home PC is being used for some new/alpha-projects. I hope for you that Alpha needs some additional testers soon and open (or invite people). But I don't know if I would spent much time on it. I am Homer of Borg. Prepare to be ...ooooh donuts!    |
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Send message Joined: 1 Sep 04 Posts: 506 Credit: 118,619 RAC: 0 |
If you like LHC@home and LHC@home Alpha, sign this LHC@home Alpha petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/LHCalpha/petition.html. What unspeakable arrogance! The LHC team will operate their project as they see fit. They are not beholden to you, me, or anyone else. I wouldn't open my front door just because a bunch of self-important jokers demand that I should. You'd do well to remember that the project is run for the benefit of CERN, and not for the benefit of the crunchers. Gaspode the UnDressed http://www.littlevale.co.uk |
 Seventh Serenity Send message Joined: 27 Sep 04 Posts: 51 Credit: 72,804 RAC: 0 |
I think the petition is a very bad idea. LHC will have the alpha project closed for a very good reason, such as having enough users to continue testing the software before it is released into the standard LHC@Home project. |
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Alex Send message Joined: 2 Sep 04 Posts: 378 Credit: 10,765 RAC: 0 |
I appreciate the fact you want to help. Making the Alpha server public will not help. It's more efficient to leave the initial code development and project design to a small team with a professional coder and professional tester. I'm not the LHC Alex. Just a number cruncher like everyone else here. |
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 37 Credit: 5,448 RAC: 0 |
Hi, Ledi! Hi Henry, I want to help the Alpha-project, I like the science, I want to share my knowledge about the other BOINC-projects and...yes...I like to collect another project to my list. :) I like SETI@home Beta more than the normal SETI@home. See my SETI@home Beta vs. SETI@home credits. I have many more pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta BOINC-projects on my list, so I do have some experience on Alpha/Beta testing. I have reported some bugs that occured in the Nano-Hive@home application on Acer-laptop. I have also reported bugs that occured in SETI@Home Beta and BOINC Alpha. My BOINC program is currently 5.6.4. That's the Alpha version of BOINC. I am using Windows XP Professional x64 and Windows Vista Beta 2 / Release Candidate 1. I study physics at the Jyväskylä University and I am going to be a particle physicist. I am a fourth year student, almost a Bachelor of Science. Is this CV good enough for yet another BOINC-project - LHC@home Alpha? mars2019.org Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition |
littleBouncer Send message Joined: 23 Oct 04 Posts: 358 Credit: 1,439,205 RAC: 0 |
Sorry , but I think the LHC-Alpha-Project is dead...:-( greetz littleBouncer BTW: without opening for public account creation, I would sign...:(   
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 37 Credit: 5,448 RAC: 0 |
Sorry , but I think the LHC-Alpha-Project is dead...:-( How can the small alpha test group do the alpha testing, if the server is down? At least, the server seems to be down. mars2019.org Manned mission to Mars in 2019 Petition |
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Send message Joined: 13 Jul 05 Posts: 2 Credit: 84,413 RAC: 0 |
Arrogance, eh?? Hmmph... I wonder who is being most arrogant??? |
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Send message Joined: 29 Sep 04 Posts: 196 Credit: 207,040 RAC: 0 |
FWIW- LittleBouncer made a very good observation - LHC@Home Alpha has been down since 9/20/2006 and is still unreachable. It makes little sense for only that reason to start a petition to "open it up" when it's not even available. Like some of the other posts on this subject I agree wholeheartedly with River, Ledi, and Gaspode. I realize that by allowing those WUs to run on my machine may make it crash, lockup, or any number of undesirable things. Those undesirables go against the intention of BOINC (A fully working distributed computing network) and thus should be controlled to some extent. Besides, LHC Alpha has been doing nothing useful for over a year now. IMHO, with all the in-house testing with LHC@Home at CERN there seems to be not much of a reason for a public alpha site at this time. As always, I would love to be corrected by someone who works with LHC@Home.. 
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Chrulle Send message Joined: 27 Jul 04 Posts: 182 Credit: 1,880 RAC: 0 |
The alpha-server is still running. But it is hosted on the same machine as the old lhc@home. So when the DNS record for lhc@home was changed alpha became unavailable. I do not know what the plans are for the future though. The workunits on alpha has not been important since the very beginning of lhc@home. It is simply the same study run a 100 times. So that we would always have work there. Alpha was simply kept alive to test updates to webpages, daemons, setup and sixtrack, before they were moved to the main server, thus exposing as few people to the transition problems as possible. Whether this will be relevant in the future i do not know. Especially when there is no regular admin. We barely have time to work on one system. cheers, Chrulle Research Assistant & Ex-LHC@home developer Niels Bohr Institute |
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D.J. Schweitz Send message Joined: 1 Sep 04 Posts: 9 Credit: 40,545 RAC: 0 |
Many thanks Chrulle for taking the time to let us alpha people in on what has been going on over there. Will detach from alpha and re-attach to the LHC project, and pass the info on to my team mates. Again many, many thanks for the update cheers from cali deej ô¿ô¬ wwseti.net <img src="http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=162d855da85b4ee993029a39cfeed63a"> |
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