WASTING MY TIME?

I started in the pioneer year of 1999, and I am starting to question this effort.

The problem, as I see it, is not the present problem(s), but LACK of communication from the people running this. THERE IS NONE!!!

I hear "Matt is on vacation" and we have to await his return to fix whatever the problem is! This project is over 13 years old, employing thousands of volunteers, utilizing many thousands of computers, large electrical usage, accepting our donations, and it depends on one person? Berkeley should be ashamed.

I am beginning to smell a scam. If it is not, perhaps we should think of this effort as nothing more than a glorified High School Project.

I hope my many years of effort, not to mention money, have not gone to waste.
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I started in the pioneer year of 1999, and I am starting to question this effort.

The problem, as I see it, is not the present problem(s), but LACK of communication from the people running this. THERE IS NONE!!!

I hear "Matt is on vacation" and we have to await his return to fix whatever the problem is! This project is over 13 years old, employing thousands of volunteers, utilizing many thousands of computers, large electrical usage, accepting our donations, and it depends on one person? Berkeley should be ashamed.

I am beginning to smell a scam. If it is not, perhaps we should think of this effort as nothing more than a glorified High School Project.

I hope my many years of effort, not to mention money, have not gone to waste.

I started in the pioneer year of 1999, and I am starting to question this effort.

The problem, as I see it, is not the present problem(s), but LACK of communication from the people running this. THERE IS NONE!!!

I hear "Matt is on vacation" and we have to await his return to fix whatever the problem is! This project is over 13 years old, employing thousands of volunteers, utilizing many thousands of computers, large electrical usage, accepting our donations, and it depends on one person? Berkeley should be ashamed.

I am beginning to smell a scam. If it is not, perhaps we should think of this effort as nothing more than a glorified High School Project.

I hope my many years of effort, not to mention money, have not gone to waste.

Just to correct you Matt is not on vacation, he is only a part time employee and as I understand his hours have been cut back, so he is pursuing his musical career with this band

Secret Chiefs 3

As funding has been restricted there are few people in the lab able to deal with problems at the moment.

Just for those of you who may not have seen it Matt posted this in the staff blog on 26 July

It's no real surprise given financial constraints we're operating with a minimal crew here at the lab. In fact, I'm down to working just above half time on average. Lucky for me, though, these hard times coincide with my music career exploding. I've been performing around the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Iceland, England, and France during the past year. And there's more to come. Maybe I should tell you about these gigs on the off chance you're interested. They involve three of my active bands,

I feel your frustration as Im sure many on here do also. When I heard of this project I knew this was for me. It still is even with all the crashes, klitches and mayhem. I will continue to crunch right up to the day they pull the power plug at the lab.
Its not BOINC that is the problem, Its an underfunded undermanned project.
That it has lasted this long is a testament to the guys in the lab who wont quit either.

Im really suprised that Matt hasnt quit outright after getting his part time hours cut more. That man could get a full time job anywhere doing system magic.

Only you can say when you have had enough. I wish you well and hope that someday you return to the community. After all this is where ive met some great people from all over the world.
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Couldn`t agree more Bernie and Jim.
Its very sad though.

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OK - OK

I've had my rant, and got it out of my system.

I'm still in it for the long-run and waiting for them to fix the damn thing!

Sorry for the rant.
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Just a reminder.
We are volunteers.
We are here to help the project not vice versa.
Not that i wouldn`t like it would work smooth also.

With lack of man power its all about priorities.
We just need a millionaire donating.
See my pledge drive.

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Mike, if I had volunteers contributing to my efforts, I would treat them as a valuable resource and not ignore them and take them for granted. It is simply the courteous thing to do.

We would love to see an endowment capable of funding the whole program or even providing a single income. We have had term endowments in the past in the $10K-$30K range with 2 or 3 year terms to pay for operations of specific projects. To pay for a person is another scale entirely... a just out of school junior programmer with salary and benefits really does run close to $100K even in the current job market.

Pulling out my trusty slide rule you wanted to pay for that for 5 years, with a 2% annual COLA and no promotions (which is unreasonable, a new programmer would get a promotion every 2 years or get fired) that's $520K, the endowment to achieve that would need to about about $480K (assuming it could earn 4% annually)

A perpetual endowment usually has different assumptions and can achieve higher growth, but we could assume the instantaneous payout of $100K is equal to a 4% growth and which means it would need to be at least $2.5M. And to run the whole project in perpetuity $10M-$15M would be the target vicinity.

Sounds like a lot until you realize that people spent $4B on the last election. Anyone know any multi-million dollar superPAC contributors? Of course people who contribute millions of dollars to superPACs probably expect a return on their investment. (In case I didn't the sarcasm obvious enough, I think $2.5M is a hell of a lot of money.)

So, funding has been cut. It has always been apparent, dispite all the volunteers, that Berkeley has never really backed this effort. What a shame.

So, funding has been cut. It has always been apparent, dispite all the volunteers, that Berkeley has never really backed this effort. What a shame.

Berkeley is the landlord! All the funding has to come from private donations, like the Planetary Society, YOU or if they get lucky NSF grants. As government funding has dried up and with the economy in the gutter so has private donations. However YOU could make a difference. Maybe turn a rig off and take the electricity money saved and send it as cash so they can keep your other rigs fed. Think about it.

I'd be all for this, but we don't have a clue where the cash is going.

We know that there's something going-on in WV and that money's coming from somewhere to make it happen. We don't really know how much money or anything else.

We do know that donations to SETI@Home are now apparently donations to "SETI Efforts at Berkeley" and don't necessarily have anything to do with our project (look at how some donated hardware is being deployed if you need proof).

So, if we sent $100k to SETI@Home we would never know if it went to airline tickets to send a large group to a week-long conference in Geneva concerning data at Green Bank that we'll never see, or if it would go to help fund Matt's salary.

What we do know is that *this* project is starving.

We don't know if the budget was set such that this project will starve no matter how much money we send.

Again, it's a matter of a lack of communication. We just don't know. We know there are things we don't know, but there may be a lot of things that we don't know that we don't know.

Nobody's saying.

There are several SETI projects housed at UC Berkeley. Designate SETI@Home and it goes to this project only.

If you say-so.