The purpose of seti@home is to use the vast processing power in the idle clock cycles of thousands and thousands of computers all around the globe to process the data from radio telescopes in the hope of finding signs of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe.

Therefore without all of us running the software on our machinces there is no seti@home. Obviously the search for ET would continue, just without the valuable contribution of the seti@home project.

I also understand that when anything like this changes there will be a few teething problems. What I don't get is why the switch to BOINC/seti has gone so wrong!

Common practice for a switch like this is too look at worst case senarios. Assume that everyone is going to switch over at the begining! It should be pretty easy to look at all the active users in the seti@home project and make sure that should they all switch straight away you have got the resources to cope. And isn't the purpose of beta testing to iron out all the little wrinkles that you hadn't been able to predict. Just because Microsoft and other companies release stuff that they know isn't 100% solid doesn't mean that its acceptable practice, especially as this is a voluntary project.

All that aside, I think the thing that has most irritated me and prbably a great deal of you, my fellow 'crunchers' is the lack of information from the people running seti@home/BOINC about what exactly is happening. Why many of us have been unable to get any work units whilst some people have. Why it was taing so long to activate accounts. Why 'credits' arn't being credited. Why sometimes we can connect to the server and sometimes not.

At the end of the day, we are all understanding people. Please just keep us up to daye with what is going on and when we can expect to see things improving and we as the 'processing power' of the project are much more likely to stick around. keep us in the dark and we will just get frustrated, dispondent and eventually disconnect.

I agree with your opinion regarding the information policy.
There should be at least a status page showing if the server is online and distributing WU's or not.

Another nice thing would be a status on the verification process for the credits.
It seems that this is currently offline, looking at my own account and the many complaints on this board.

But we also have to consider that they have to run two projects paralell at this time, since the classic project is still online. I suspect they now have to do twice the work with the same ammount of manpower and that is certainly not an easy task.

For my part I will just hold out and give the S@H team the credit and time to figure all the problems out...


Chris Bosshard
astroinfo Team
http://www.astroinfo.org

Fully agree with both posts.

I think providing people with as much information as possible in times like these is key to making sure they dont just walk away and never come back. I dont think theres any excuse for keeping everybody in the dark.

The other problem I've just come up against is that I vcan only connect one of my computers via dial up. How frustrating is that! :-

No work available
No work available
over and over again.

Thats bad enough on broadband but at least the phone line isnt tied up and its costing you no more than normal.

I feel very sorry for anybody who can only connect by modem.

Neil

Without trying to complain...I'm very demoralised by BOINC. Switching from S@H1 to Boinc, expecting it to be ready, I find I have lost the use of 80% of my machines and 90% of my processing power to the project as 4 of my 5 machines have no internet access and will never have internet access.

At least with S@H1 I could manually port WUs to the other machines. With Boinc I cannot do this.

I'm now returning to S@H1 and unless Boinc can accomodate manual WU moving I suspect I shall be giving up on Seti/Boinc. I don't want to, but I'm not going to be mucked about. I'm sure I'm not the only one affected by this...many people have seti farms and rely on setiqueue/setidriver or similar programs to manage WUs. Why has this been overlooked.

Seti crunching for 5 years and counting...

> Without trying to complain...I'm very demoralised by BOINC. Switching from
> S@H1 to Boinc, expecting it to be ready, I find I have lost the use of 80% of
> my machines and 90% of my processing power to the project as 4 of my 5
> machines have no internet access and will never have internet access.
>
> At least with S@H1 I could manually port WUs to the other machines. With Boinc
> I cannot do this.
>
> I'm now returning to S@H1 and unless Boinc can accomodate manual WU moving I
> suspect I shall be giving up on Seti/Boinc. I don't want to, but I'm not going
> to be mucked about. I'm sure I'm not the only one affected by this...many
> people have seti farms and rely on setiqueue/setidriver or similar programs to
> manage WUs. Why has this been overlooked.
>
> Seti crunching for 5 years and counting...
>
I think this oversight was because the development team though that setiqueue and the like were mostly used for queueing work and with the built in queue in BOINC such things would not be needed. By the time they realized that as many or more people used it to buffer the internet connection and feed offline computers it was too late. To do it now will require a client with most of the server logic in it. I still think that buffering the connections on a LAN will come, but it will be after seti I ends. I don't think feeding offline computers will come though. These are my opinions and not backed by fact in any way.

John Keck
BOINCing since 2002/12/08

I may be wrong on this but I think the moving of WU's from one PC to another was eliminated to try and cut down on the cheating a little bit.

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