(Kirk Pearson) wrote in
:

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not a SETI purist. I am a
distributed computing zealot, as anyone who's visited my website in
the past 5 years can attest. BOINC is an important part of the
SETI@home project, and is making great contributions to the overall
SETI project. But, the two Usenet newsgroups created for seti were
created for discussing the science of SETI and not for discussing the
distributed computing client applications used for SETI@home. You,
and others who have not been here since these newsgroups were created,
need to remember that SETI@home is not all of SETI--it is only a part
of it. To "evolve or die," as you suggest, we should leave the SETI
newsgroups for discussion of the science of SETI overall, and for the
scientific aspects of SETI@home, Optical SETI, and any other projects
which arise to further the study of SETI, and move the discussion of
the technical and user aspects of SETI@home and BOINC, and all other
distributed computing projects, to comp.distributed, where they are
more appropriate. The SETI newsgroups will not die, as you suggest.
They will contain conversations more in line with the original goals
for the SETI newsgroups, conversations in which the "SETI purists" to
which I referred previously, are more interested.

To answer John's reply: most SETI purists probably appreciate BOINC,
since it is doing so much to further the study of SETI, but they DO
object to the discussion of technical and user aspects of BOINC in the
SETI newsgroups, as you will see in many past posts.

To make the assumption that some of these discussions belong in only one
place or another is just plain wrong.

The seti science issues belong here. All of the other issues in getting
seti to work and problems with that also belong here.

Now, if you want to ask the question should some of the seti topics that
happen to deal with distributed computing should be cross posted to
another group, then the answer is yes. At some point should those
discussions have a follow-up header added? That answer would also be
yes, but only if the discussion drifted to a point where that was the
right thing to do.

Trying to force certain topics that could or do belong here is just
wrong. Trying to cross post so that other experts can get involved is a
good thing.

--
Ed

http://www.geeks.org/~ed/Usenet_Servers.html
strip to reply