GILBERT, Ariz. -- He searched for UFOs, aliens and creatures from outer space.
Brad Niesluchowski has resigned from the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert after allegedly downloading software that seeks out alien life forms.
Now, I know what you're thinking. He resigned over downloading some software? Doesn't that seem a little drastic? Well, it's not quite that simple:
Birdwell held a news conference Monday, where she stated that the former technology supervisor downloaded a University of California Berkeley program known as SETI@home onto more than 5000 district computers.
Oopsie...
Yeah, I can imagine that downloading a program to every single computer in the school district might be a bit of an issue...
That is all.
7 comments:
Oops, just a 'bit' over the top... :-)
I had the program as my screen saver for a bit back in college.
After a while I got sick of it and removed it.
Also on that scale I wonder what the difference in power consumption is. Essentially the program I had would essentially keep the processor running at 100% at all times, allowing other requests to go first, but all further idle time was spent grinding SETI data.
On one home computer I suspect the difference in electricity usage isn't all that much...multiply that by 5000+ even if it cost a penny extra per day that's real money real quick!
As usual the stupid reporter got it wrong.
SETI@home is _not_ "software that seeks out alien life forms." It's a gadget written by somebody for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI receives hundreds of megabytes of data from radio-telescopes, representing thousands of hours of scanning the entire sky for possible radio signals from alien lifeforms. Each chunk of data must be analyzed using a fairly complex, CPU-intensive set of algorithms. If they had to do it all on their own, it would take decades. So they wrote SETI@home to distribute the load. That way they get tens of thousands of computers part-time, and maybe get done in 10-20 years.
That said, however, loading it onto 5000 computers without higher authorization _is_ a bit excessive...
I really don't see what the big deal is here.
We used to load the same app on everything that came through our shop... it makes a great burn-in test before the machines are delivered to the users. If one of 'em is going to go toes up on you, it will probably be early on when you peg the CPU at 100% for a couple of days.
What harm is supposed to have been done with his actions? I can see if he'd loaded a porn-collector on them or something, but this is an app used in scientific research.
Does the district have something against science?
I saw the title and figured that they had fired an employee for handing over names to ICE*.
(*formerly known as INS, but since the gubmint does not give a flyin' pelvic thrust at a rollin' doughnut if they get "naturalized" (assimilated is far too un-PC to even contemplate!)).....
Oooops.
Well, I suppose it was better than downloading p0rn to the district computers.
Well, I suppose it was better than downloading p0rn to the district computers.
Actually, that was one of the other reasons he was fired. I didn't read that particular article, but somewhere else I read that the guy was also canned for "borrowing" 18 school-owned computers (he took 'em home with him) and for surfing pr0n.
Of course, that doesn't make as good a news story as saying he got fired for installing SETI@home on district computers.
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