Saturday, October 17, 2009

What is APS@Home?

      Sadly, APS@Home is in a persistent vegetative state.  The project WAS doing some kind of atmospheric simulations, but, according the the APS@Home site, "it more efficient to wait for local machines to finish jobs than putting in the considerable effort required to keep a BOINC project running."  Too bad. 

     Because I don't have a lot to say here, I'll also add this:
I had a rather unfortunate run in with one of the moderators of this project.  I attached to it as they were beginning to shut down and were unsure of their future.  Upon attaching to the project, I got only errors from them.  I searched for the text of the error message and found NOTHING on their site, so I asked about it.  A rather self important seventy something posted a half sentence snide remark, after the question had been answered.  He was spoiling for a fight.  In subsequent posts he was rude, insulting, and really, downright childish.  At 70+ years, I would have expected a bit more maturity.  In any case, when others in the thread started to come to my defense, he retreated to private messages where he hope lobbing more insults at me would get me to continue the engagement.  Rather, I added him to my ignore list and informed the project administrator that his moderator needs to be moderated.

     Really, what drives people to be so aimlessly bitter?  He was throwing around wild and baseless accusations and making assumptions about my age, educational level, and intentions; all of which were, of course, incorrect, but it still begs the question, what makes someone feel the need to simply attack someone, repeatedly, unprovoked like that?  What drives someone to bait people, just hoping for a verbal fight?  How much courage, really, does it take to assault someone character, in a public place, where you can, essentially, remain completely anonymous and free of any real world consequences?  On the birhgt side, the project administrator was very polite and I do hope to be able to crunch numbers for them if they ever get their project off the ground. 

Brian

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