Yes, we need a more forceful message. Possibly either a dialog box similar
to the cannot connect to the internet warning, however, not everyone runs
the BOINC Manager, so an email might be a good idea in addition. But not
for every error. Also, an email if a sufficient validation failures occur
would be a good idea.
The punishment is to decrease the amount of work that they are allowed to
download and trash. The problem is not those that quit the project and
abandon hundreds or thousands of tasks, but the computers that attempt to
do work and generate hundreds to hundreds of thousands of errors in the
process. These take up server time and bandwidth. Some cases error every
task in a second or two, or create a result that does not validate every
few seconds. These can trask 80K tasks in a day per CPU unless there is a
limiter in place.
With 200K to 500K users at s...@h, there is no way that the administrators are
going to be able to do the determination by hand, therefore there must be
an automatic mechanism. We are calling it punishment as a convenient
terminology. It does not remove any credit from the user, but it merely
limits the amount of work that the computer is allowed to download.
jm7
Charles Elliott
<elliott...@veriz
on.net> To
Sent by: <[email protected]>
<boinc_dev-bounce cc
[email protected]
u> Subject
Re: [boinc_dev] host punishment
mechanism revisited
05/26/2010 02:15
PM
Please respond to
elliott...@verizo
n.net
If you outline the book Campbell, J. P., M. D. Dunnette, et al. (1970).
Managerial Behavior, Performance, and Effectiveness. New York, McGraw-Hill,
you will find that all 19 chapters fit neatly into 4 categories: Selection,
motivation, training and development, and psychology. The words
punishment,
punish, punishing, etc., do not appear in the chapter titles or in the
index. This is in line with our Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian-Anglo-American
heritage and is congruent with the distinction between the Old and New
Testaments: In the former God wiped out the population with a flood,
visited
people with plagues, and turned people into pillars of salt when they
sinned, whereas in the latter he sends his son(s) to show people how to
solve their problems.
If you go through a pending credit list you will probably find several
instances where users have simply abandoned s...@home leaving hundreds if
not thousands of work units unprocessed. De-select them; if they come back
after a month or two, fine. If they don't, that is fine too. The same
treatment should be accorded to the person who day after day returns
nothing
but errors. I don't see any other way to protect the system against people
who intend harm or simply don't care.
As for people who error-out hundreds of work units, they have a problem,
and
punishing them is not going to fix it nor earn you any goodwill. A message
telling them that the problem is almost certainly due to a bad video card,
bad memory, or overclocking and giving a URL to a page describing basic
hardware debugging techniques (e.g., substitute a known-good part, run a
diagnostic such as Memtest86+, reduce the bus frequency, etc.) is far more
helpful and more in line with our culture.
We need to motivate people who do well by, say, giving extra credit for
consistency, rather than punishing them for their mistakes, which they
probably already know are stupid, or for part failure over which they may
have no control.
Charles Elliott
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