[Tilesathome] Problem under windows again

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sat Aug 23 01:45:50 BST 2008


Hi,

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Just because 90% of all computer users use windows that doesn't mean
> that 90% of all potential users of t at h are Windows users, claiming
> that is just a gross misuse of statistics. 

And even if it were, and even if it sounds a bit arrogant:

We don't need 90% more uploaders. We probably would have difficulties 
handling them. While t at h is a nice "bottom up" effort, the project is 
helped much more by someone setting up a render farm and fixing the 
problems he encounters himself, than by someone running a client on his 
desktop machine which he switches off at night. I don't have statistics 
to back this up but I would assume that the former is much less likely 
to run Windows than the latter.

Maybe we should just change the name - tiles at home suggests that, like 
seti at home, anyone can just install a Windows "screen saver" and 
contribute while in fact it is much more difficult, and less granular.

It seems that t at h has a certain fascination for many; I've seen people 
asking about how they can set up a t at h client even before they had 
mapped anything. Maybe this is a misconception that we should make an 
attempt to remove.

Again, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I'd rather lose the "long tail" 
of tiles at home clients. If we'd say "you need at least a machine running 
the client 24/7 with at least 500 kBit upload bandwidth and 2 GB of 
RAM", then (my wild guess) we'd probably lose about 90% of clients but 
only 10% of tiles, and also get rid of many problem cases. But this 
really is an outsider's view, I haven't run a production client for a 
while now, so take this with a teaspoon of salt ;-)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"




More information about the Tilesathome mailing list