NEZ was the #1 cruncher at Seti@home with over 579,000,000 credits! As MIS Director for a school system he was using almost 5,000 of their computers for Seti@home over the past 9 years; he's been caught and fired:

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NEZ was the #1 cruncher at Seti@home with over 579,000,000 credits! As MIS Director for a school system he was using almost 5,000 of their computers for Seti@home over the past 9 years; he's been caught and fired:

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Wow! How did he manage to get away with this for so long? Maybe the option of hidden computers should be disallowed.

No question about it though - his contribution to S&H was huge...

As a law school graduate, I would caution that there are two sides to every story.

Seems that this particular school district has had a lot of issues since the current superintendent took office.

Just because she has gone on a media tour, it doesn't imply that everything she has said, or the media selectively reported, is true.

There are a lot of red herrings, bordering on defamation, libel, and slander, made against NEZ.

Additionally, it appears the school district may have violated some laws in releasing information from NEZ's personnel file.

It has not yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that he did not, in fact, have permission from a previous superintendent.

I hope he has a good criminal defense lawyer, as well as a good litigator for the civil lawsuit he likley has against the school district.

It will be interesting, from a legal perspective, to see how all this plays out.

For opposing points of view:

He was the director of Internet Technology until Dr. Birdwell promoted a family member of hers into that position. What I love most about this is that they neglected to mention that the previous superintendent KNEW and APPROVED him utilizing district computers in his home since he worked from home. In addition, they not only removed the districts computers from his home, but his families personal ones as well. Let's not forget that the district FORCED him to take a 3 week vacation this summer when he was in the middle of a huge project of getting the new school into our district ready for opening. Then they toook that project from him and gave it to another who FAILED to do it and blamed him.

As far as the outrageous claim about the smart boards, they were new to the district last year and a select few classrooms at each school actually had them. I doubt that this so called alien tracker had anything to do with them crashing. The computers at the district are always dealing with one thing or another.

As an employee of the district, I feel this is nothing more than slandering of Brads name. A good majority of his team walked out after he did, only to become bullied or slandered as well. How does that make you feel Dr. Birdwell? How do YOU sleep at night with all the bullying you do?

Although everyone has an opinion, I really find this article one sided. Unfortunately, I don't feel there will be another side that is equally published in the paper.

This ship is sinking and I only hope there are survivors when it does

and

It is true that Brad was replaced by one of Birdwell's "family members". After nine years working for the district, his salary and title were cut, so that Birdwell could put into place her loyalists.

This article is extremely one sided and the reporter should be ashamed for not publishing all the facts.

In the nine years that Brad worked for the district, the student population more than quadrupled, thus half a dozen new schools opened, and Brad and his understaffed team set all the technology up for each one.

Now, that Birdwell is in charge, she used money that should have gone to the classrooms to pay for outside consulants to dig into all employees in order to find dirt on them and force them to resign. Since she had tech consultants who had access to everyones' acounts, who is to say that the consultants did not do some of these alleged installs and such, and set Brad up? Brad was obviously on Birdwell's hit list- thus to pay cut and title demotion. And if there is any question as to whether or not Birdwell has a hit list- take a look at the number of employees forced to resign/ terminated during her 18 months in charge.

NEZ was the #1 cruncher at Seti@home with over 579,000,000 credits! As MIS Director for a school system he was using almost 5,000 of their computers for Seti@home over the past 9 years; he's been caught and fired:

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I don't know about Seti, but the statement that a computer running word would be sluggish in use is untrue AFAIK. Boinc runs all its jobs at low priority, so anything like Word would get instant response.

Early in the year, when I completely ran out of work, I noticed no performance improvement, and when jobs came back on stream, no performance hit.

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Depends a lot on your machine Sid. If the school's machines are older, and shorter on memory and slower on a single CPU... there certainly ARE cases where the user experience suffers due to underlaying conflicts with L2 cache, etc. CPU priority is not the end-all control mechanism that people might wish it to be.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

more on seti here

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/confused-school-district-fires-sysadmin-for-running-seti-as-an/3#comments

Depends a lot on your machine Sid. If the school's machines are older, and shorter on memory and slower on a single CPU... there certainly ARE cases where the user experience suffers due to underlaying conflicts with L2 cache, etc. CPU priority is not the end-all control mechanism that people might wish it to be.

Point taken. Easy for me to say sitting on 8Gb RAM. I do recall what school machines are like (not my lifetime obviously - that would involve programming cards and punch tape...)

The power demands are fair criticism, but if the machines were running something useful like Rosetta or WCG instead of something totally worthless like Seti maybe the reaction would be very different.

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The power demands are fair criticism, but if the machines were running something useful like Rosetta or WCG instead of something totally worthless like Seti maybe the reaction would be very different.

Sid:

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.

I don't think S@H is totally worthless considering that their director David Anderson also runs the BOINC project thus making this endevour (R@H) possible. And you never know - they may make contact one day. Glass half full or half empty? :-)

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.

I don't think S@H is totally worthless considering that their director David Anderson also runs the BOINC project thus making this endevour (R@H) possible. And you never know - they may make contact one day. Glass half full or half empty? :-)

The first apart I can accept, the last part, not. Aren't they just re-working the same old stuff nowadays. The project, for what little it was ever worth, finished ages ago but few have realised. I find it quite offensive tbh.

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Didn't read the article, but I'm pretty sure they didn't fire him just because he ran a DC project. They didn't go "oh, you are running SETI, you're fired" I mean the normal person would actually be interested in it, or not even care about it at all.

There has to be something dirtier underneath it all. I mean, who fires someone that's good and responsible for running a DC project? :S

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Didn't read the article, but I'm pretty sure they didn't fire him just because he ran a DC project. They didn't go "oh, you are running SETI, you're fired" I mean the normal person would actually be interested in it, or not even care about it at all.

Not a DC project per se, but one that attempts to find little green men at the cost of power bills. If they were attempting to cure cancer or AIDS or Malaria or understanding and attempt to accurately replicate the behaviour of proteins for the possible health and benefit of people around the world it wouldn't have been such an easy sell to ridicule or criticise what was happening. As it stands, ulterior motive or not, I can hardly blame them for their reaction.

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I don't know about this world.

We all have to remember the mail rule of Boinc. Install Boinc only on computers, where you have the permission to run it.

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Didn't read the article, but I'm pretty sure they didn't fire him just because he ran a DC project. They didn't go "oh, you are running SETI, you're fired" I mean the normal person would actually be interested in it, or not even care about it at all.

There has to be something dirtier underneath it all. I mean, who fires someone that's good and responsible for running a DC project? :S

My work has over 10,000 computers and I asked if they would run Boinc on them at night and they said NO!! I work for a local government and they said it was not in their best interest to even consider it. They now shutdown the pc's at night to save 3 bucks per pc per month, at a cost of 40 dollars per year per pc for the program to do the shutdown! Sometimes things don't make sense, but as champ said ALWAYS get permission if it is not your own personal pc!!

We had a guy running an international blog at night on his desktop, they fired him too! He said 'well it was at night so I thought it was okay', they said 'you don't have permission to use our pc's in that way' and escorted him out of the building. They shipped him his personal stuff in a box!

Time to call in your local television station's / newspaper's "government waste" reporter...

They now shutdown the pc's at night to save 3 bucks per pc per month, at a cost of 40 dollars per year per pc for the program to do the shutdown! Sometimes things don't make sense...

I for one am hopeful that somehow the free publicity resulting from the dispute will actually benefit the BOINC community.

I've started blogging about BOINC and distributed computing and current scientific challenges. Perhaps that is one way to help spread the positive word about BOINC.

R@h and protein folding is my second blog topic. I think I misspoke in my headline when I said H1N1 is different in a few of it's proteins, I believe I should have said it is a bit of DNA that differs. Oh well, bloggers aren't perfect.

I invite any input about future topics you'd like to see in my blog that you think will help interest the public, and the researchers in BOINC projects.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

They now shutdown the pc's at night to save 3 bucks per pc per month, at a cost of 40 dollars per year per pc for the program to do the shutdown! Sometimes things don't make sense...

Time to call in your local television station's / newspaper's "government waste" reporter...

They 'say' the local power company is the one that is doing all the saving because it doesn't have to ramp up and make additional power because we are saving electricity by turning the pc's off at night.

pc I reordered the posts so it can be read from the top down.

Cool. For us, I guess we must get the electricity dirt cheap.

Basically, our HQ building was renovated (to base concrete) about 10 years ago. Ok, think a building with about 300 people per floor in cubes/offices.

The designers actually ran the calculations that said that it was cheaper to leave all the offices ON, instead of wiring lightswitches. (cost of wiring, labor, etc) There are 3 switches per floor. (so, the lights can be turned off if necessary). 10 years later, and the only change, is that there is now a light switch for most of the conference rooms. (but, that may be for the projector systems)

The PC folks had similar debates on whether it was better to turn off the computers at night or leave them on. There was no consensus either way, but, it was somewhat suggested for folks to turn off their computers if they will be on vacation.

I guess I need to put one of my P3 powermeters on my home computer to see what the power difference is it being idle, and running BOINC.

Cool. For us, I guess we must get the electricity dirt cheap.

Basically, our HQ building was renovated (to base concrete) about 10 years ago. Ok, think a building with about 300 people per floor in cubes/offices.

The designers actually ran the calculations that said that it was cheaper to leave all the offices ON, instead of wiring lightswitches. (cost of wiring, labor, etc) There are 3 switches per floor. (so, the lights can be turned off if necessary). 10 years later, and the only change, is that there is now a light switch for most of the conference rooms. (but, that may be for the projector systems)

The PC folks had similar debates on whether it was better to turn off the computers at night or leave them on. There was no consensus either way, but, it was somewhat suggested for folks to turn off their computers if they will be on vacation.

I guess I need to put one of my P3 powermeters on my home computer to see what the power difference is it being idle, and running BOINC.

When I did a Google search I found where it said turning a work pc off for 12 hours per night saves 3 dollars a month! I am guessing a work pc is similar to a pc running Boinc, heavy use for most of the day. Although since Boinc is 100% of the cpu 100% of the time Boinc may use it a bit more. I am not turning mine off, but have turned off some of the slower machines as I get newer and faster ones.

When I did a Google search I found where it said turning a work pc off for 12 hours per night saves 3 dollars a month! I am guessing a work pc is similar to a pc running Boinc, heavy use for most of the day. Although since Boinc is 100% of the cpu 100% of the time Boinc may use it a bit more. I am not turning mine off, but have turned off some of the slower machines as I get newer and faster ones.

I wonder if they considered the cost of the worker turning on and authenticating to the computer every morning?

FTE (hourly fulltime employee) with benefits is $15+/hr.
20 weekdays x 1 minute (power up/login) = 20 minutes/month.

Not that the worker would start working once they did get to their office, but, at least there is one less obstacle in the morning for them in order to start working.