Was thinking a bit more and wonder if for different levels Einstein could be first primary black and his hair get colored with bronze, silver, gold and finally a red tongue.
Then moving over the the proposed bronze, silver and gold badged ; again followed by red tongue if number of badges require it ...
Does seem strange there has been no official response on anything to do with Einstein@home credit milestone badges? For those of us just crunching for fun, it would be another incentive to keep on crunching. The chance of being a contributory discoverer is also an incentive, but is a bit like dropping a stone down a deep well - you may never hear it hit the bottom.
I don't personally like bronze silver gold (platinum) (whatever palladium) type of categorization. Every ponzi scheme is using those words. Also most of the commercial businesses that use those words are pissing customers in the eye.
Does seem strange there has been no official response on anything to do with Einstein@home credit milestone badges?
I'm pretty sure this thread isn't the only place where requests/comments about badges have been made.
I'm also quite sure the Staff are well aware of these requests and have given an 'official' response at some point, even if that was a fair while ago. I haven't gone looking to find when and where it was, and I even haven't gone back through this thread to see if it might be in here. I assume you will have already searched for such a response? If you haven't found one, I know I've seen one previously somewhere, so you could try searching some more.
The substance of the previous response (as I recall it) was that there was no basic objection in principle, to doing something along these lines. The big problem was the time and resources to set this up, test it properly and implement it - things that are not readily available commodities at most projects, including this one.
There are also other aspects that need to be considered. This project supports a number of quite different science searches - from radio pulsars, gamma-ray pulsars to the potential continuous GW emissions from these sorts of massive objects, particularly in binary systems. The logistics of assembling and prepping the data for all of these searches, modifying and testing the software every time a new search is implemented, maintaining the server farm and databases to handle data distribution and results processing already stretches the human resources to the limit, in addition to the equipment. Is it any wonder that the 'official' response is to the effect that it's on the 'to do' list but has a low priority? Seeing as the desire by some to have a system of badges is well known, what's the point of continuing to nag about it? The staff aren't going to forget about it. They will handle what is achievable, when it's achievable, without compromising the science behind the project.
It's not as if the science behind this project is boring. I think that projects that add to our understanding of the universe are very motivational. If you have a somewhat unappealing product to sell, then sure, the 'marketing gurus' use advertising/promotions/gimmicks/trickery/blatant dishonesty - whatever it takes to move the product. In Einstein's case, there doesn't seem to be any problem with that - quite the reverse. The science is very interesting to lots of people and the servers always seem to be almost at breaking point. Server response is quite often very slow and the staff have made odd comments from time to time about how 'close to the edge' things sometimes run. A good example happened only a few days ago when there was an outage of GPU tasks that lasted for a day or so. I'm very happy that staff aren't spending time on gimmicks at the potential expense of project reliability.
Here's an extra thought for you to contemplate. I'm a big consumer of the 'product' of this project. I download lots of tasks and data and return lots of results. No doubt, I already consume lots of database records to keep track of all that. Why would I want to consume even more to maintain a system of badges? In fact, I try to minimise my impact on the project by caching reusable apps and data wherever possible so as to limit unnecessary transfers which consume server time and bandwidth. A system of badges will consume server resources and bandwidth.
If you ever look at the server status page and note how many millions of tasks are in the online database, you'll get some appreciation of why things run slowly at times. The way I try to help with this is to keep my work cache as small as possible (about 0.5 - 1.0 days) so I'm contributing as small an extra number as possible to that load. The penalty I pay is that I quickly run out of work if outage events (like that one a few days ago) do occur.
I could easily increase my work cache to say 5 days and reduce my risk of running out of work to near zero - but I won't. If everybody did that, the online database would grow considerably and the risk of things breaking would increase. I would put a system of badges in the same category - things that would probably impact on project reliability.
So my opinion is exactly the same as that of robl - if asked, I would vote NO to a system of badges under the current circumstances.
I agree with Gary too up to the point that some people only crunch for badges, both getting them and improving the ones they have to new levels. IF the Einstein Servers are overwhelmed now then attracting more users is not a good thing, but if Einstein needs/wants new users then badges are a way of doing that. Gary also brought up a good point about the different kinds of work the Project does, getting a volunteer to work with the Einstein Admins to design different badges based on those searches could give some really cool badges that people would really want to have in their collection. And each new search could bring them a brand new badge keeping people hooked on Einstein for quite awhile.
In conclusion to me badges are a good thing, unless they bring too many users to the project that then make it too slow for everyone. It's alot like credits, give out a ton of credits and all those people seeking credits will flock to any project giving out more than some other project.
Nice proposal pututu !
)
Nice proposal pututu !
Was thinking a bit more and
)
Was thinking a bit more and wonder if for different levels Einstein could be first primary black and his hair get colored with bronze, silver, gold and finally a red tongue.
Then moving over the the proposed bronze, silver and gold badged ; again followed by red tongue if number of badges require it ...
+1 to badges!
)
+1 to badges!
+1
)
+1
Does seem strange there has
)
Does seem strange there has been no official response on anything to do with Einstein@home credit milestone badges? For those of us just crunching for fun, it would be another incentive to keep on crunching. The chance of being a contributory discoverer is also an incentive, but is a bit like dropping a stone down a deep well - you may never hear it hit the bottom.
pututu wrote:Maybe the
)
What about the rest of us? Do we get to voice our opinion? Then I vote no for badges.
I don't personally like
)
I don't personally like bronze silver gold (platinum) (whatever palladium) type of categorization. Every ponzi scheme is using those words. Also most of the commercial businesses that use those words are pissing customers in the eye.
Alexander Knox wrote:Does
)
I'm pretty sure this thread isn't the only place where requests/comments about badges have been made.
I'm also quite sure the Staff are well aware of these requests and have given an 'official' response at some point, even if that was a fair while ago. I haven't gone looking to find when and where it was, and I even haven't gone back through this thread to see if it might be in here. I assume you will have already searched for such a response? If you haven't found one, I know I've seen one previously somewhere, so you could try searching some more.
The substance of the previous response (as I recall it) was that there was no basic objection in principle, to doing something along these lines. The big problem was the time and resources to set this up, test it properly and implement it - things that are not readily available commodities at most projects, including this one.
There are also other aspects that need to be considered. This project supports a number of quite different science searches - from radio pulsars, gamma-ray pulsars to the potential continuous GW emissions from these sorts of massive objects, particularly in binary systems. The logistics of assembling and prepping the data for all of these searches, modifying and testing the software every time a new search is implemented, maintaining the server farm and databases to handle data distribution and results processing already stretches the human resources to the limit, in addition to the equipment. Is it any wonder that the 'official' response is to the effect that it's on the 'to do' list but has a low priority? Seeing as the desire by some to have a system of badges is well known, what's the point of continuing to nag about it? The staff aren't going to forget about it. They will handle what is achievable, when it's achievable, without compromising the science behind the project.
It's not as if the science behind this project is boring. I think that projects that add to our understanding of the universe are very motivational. If you have a somewhat unappealing product to sell, then sure, the 'marketing gurus' use advertising/promotions/gimmicks/trickery/blatant dishonesty - whatever it takes to move the product. In Einstein's case, there doesn't seem to be any problem with that - quite the reverse. The science is very interesting to lots of people and the servers always seem to be almost at breaking point. Server response is quite often very slow and the staff have made odd comments from time to time about how 'close to the edge' things sometimes run. A good example happened only a few days ago when there was an outage of GPU tasks that lasted for a day or so. I'm very happy that staff aren't spending time on gimmicks at the potential expense of project reliability.
Here's an extra thought for you to contemplate. I'm a big consumer of the 'product' of this project. I download lots of tasks and data and return lots of results. No doubt, I already consume lots of database records to keep track of all that. Why would I want to consume even more to maintain a system of badges? In fact, I try to minimise my impact on the project by caching reusable apps and data wherever possible so as to limit unnecessary transfers which consume server time and bandwidth. A system of badges will consume server resources and bandwidth.
If you ever look at the server status page and note how many millions of tasks are in the online database, you'll get some appreciation of why things run slowly at times. The way I try to help with this is to keep my work cache as small as possible (about 0.5 - 1.0 days) so I'm contributing as small an extra number as possible to that load. The penalty I pay is that I quickly run out of work if outage events (like that one a few days ago) do occur.
I could easily increase my work cache to say 5 days and reduce my risk of running out of work to near zero - but I won't. If everybody did that, the online database would grow considerably and the risk of things breaking would increase. I would put a system of badges in the same category - things that would probably impact on project reliability.
So my opinion is exactly the same as that of robl - if asked, I would vote NO to a system of badges under the current circumstances.
Cheers,
Gary.
Gary Roberts wrote: So my
)
+1 for the NO ...
... excellent explanation and/or rather a very well formulated piece of text describing both sides of the "badge".
I wish I could express myself in English as good as Gary !!
Cheers to down-under.
I agree with Gary too up to
)
I agree with Gary too up to the point that some people only crunch for badges, both getting them and improving the ones they have to new levels. IF the Einstein Servers are overwhelmed now then attracting more users is not a good thing, but if Einstein needs/wants new users then badges are a way of doing that. Gary also brought up a good point about the different kinds of work the Project does, getting a volunteer to work with the Einstein Admins to design different badges based on those searches could give some really cool badges that people would really want to have in their collection. And each new search could bring them a brand new badge keeping people hooked on Einstein for quite awhile.
In conclusion to me badges are a good thing, unless they bring too many users to the project that then make it too slow for everyone. It's alot like credits, give out a ton of credits and all those people seeking credits will flock to any project giving out more than some other project.