|
|
Year 1 Hardware freaks working for the betterment of science. |
|
|
Year 1 Hardware freaks working for the betterment of science. |
|
What
a long strange.....na
you've hear that one before... Back in the day, I was a "reborn" computer user. Years ago I had a kickin' Atari 1040 ST. When support for the Atari died, I was computerless. I didn't know too much about computers....and 8 or so years after my Atari I finally bought a Compaq P166 based computer (big mistake!). I didn't realize it was such a big mistake until I wanted to upgrade and found it nearly impossible on the proprietary POS I bought. Quickly through some web reading about the only way to get the most out of my money was to build my own. Reading through sites such as Sharky's, Anand's and even Tom's gave me the ideas to build my first computer. Then I wanted more. I tried to find everything I could about overclocking, and sought out every overclocking article I could find. On one of the sites, there was a reference to this one sight I never heard of....Ars Technica. I read the O/C article and read the news. I liked what I saw. Why did I like Ars Technica so much that it became the first site I visited every day? Presentation and Content. The news was different. I could go to an infinite amount of sites and get news blurbs about this that and the other....all it did was turn into an endless click of links to find the "actual" story. On Ars the news was brought to me in a way that 1) you could tell that they actually read the news 2) they understood it 3) presented it in a way that made you interested in checking out the rest of the story. I could tell right away these guys knew their shit and they actually thought that this story was important enough that their readers should know about it also. Sometime last July, I read a blurb on the front page about the SETI@Home project. I had no idea what the project was....but with this post on the Ars Front page I investigated alittle.
I held off. Don't know why though....But on July 21, 1999 there was another post on the Ars news: I downloaded the client, joined Ars Technica Lamb Chop I cant remember what sparked my interest in the stats of SETI@Home....but it didn't take long till everything got started. It probably started with seeing how we were doing compared to the other teams around us When I first started the club teams were all bunched together. The main competition was the Powerbook, Planetary Society, and Linux teams. Team Lamb Chop only had around 850 members at the time, and Teams such as Slashdot, MacAddict, and Powerbook had over 1000. Things looked tough unless we could get some more members. Within two weeks of joining Team Lamb Chop I had whipped out Excel and started keeping track of how we were doing compared to PowerBook who was directly ahead of us. We were catching up...but how soon would we pass them? The first data points were added on 8/1/99. Soon I started keeping track of other teams...these were only Club Teams though. If you would take a look at the overall teams, the non club teams were just way too far ahead and there was nothing we could do to catch them. I put together a few graphs and started alittle stats page on my personal web space. To start some discussion on the team....the first team Forum thread was born. It started on 8/6/99 and had the swanky title "Team Lamb Chop Puts the Smack Down!". Soon after, TLC passed PowerBook into the #3 club team spot. Unfortunately that stay at #3 was short lived. There was this team that came from nowhere. Team Art Bell. They had an incredible amount of members, and they just kept adding more. They shot past everyone eventually and became the #1 club team. Through perseverence, TLC eventually passed both Slashdot and MacAddict. And was entrenched in the #2 club spot behind AB. The team kept rolling. Forget about the club teams...we wanted blood. Microsoft, and Intel bit the dust also. The nemesis Art Bell still loomed ahead. Team Spirits were high and soon a countdown began as we closed in on Art Bell. Finally at the end of June Team Lamb Chop passed Art Bell for the #1 club team spot. Before the celebration was over though, the team lost 5 of its top producers, and we dropped back below AB, and even below Intel. The climb started again. It has been great being part of Team Lamb Chop for the past year. I have learned alot in that time, through the newsgroups, through the Team Forum threads, from other team members. I cannot take credit for the accomplishments of the team. There are now over 2400 people who share in the credit. I cannot even take full credit for the success of this website either. It also has been a team effort. Around the middle of October last year, Rat Bastard decided to see how we can tweak our systems and clients to fun faster and started a benchmarking page to compliment the stats site. We had separate sites, mainly due to the bandwidth limits we each had on our ISP accounts. With two sites we could remain under our limits. I started to have problems on my ISP when my thirst for more stats and graphs started to push the bandwidth limits on my ISP. I survived, and appreciated the offers from many team members for use of their web space also. Things started to reach a breaking point because the pages became so popular, the site was shut down for almost a week because of exceeding the bandwidth limit. This time another team member stepped up to the plate. C. Eric Smith along with Jason Johnston offered to 1) register the domain name www.teamlambchop.com and 2) host the site for free. How can you pass up such an offer? After things were registered, the stats and benchmarking sites were integrated....and here we are. What does the future bring? I don't really know. The team is doing well. There is a real strong sense of community with this team, and I am glad to be a part of it, and to provide the stats for the team. Art Bell will fall....that is only a matter of time. That would leave only 3 teams ahead of us in the grand scheme of things. Right now they are way ahead of us, and seem to be too far to catch within the scope of the SETI@Home project. But I have learned something in this past year. Nothing is impossible. When I joined TLC, it looked as if noone would pass Panders. When Art Bell passed us I thought we never would catch up to them. People can do extraordinary things when there are goals to be made. Take a look below. Would you ever think that companies such as Macintosh, Micro$oft and ChipZilla would be looking up at you? Sometimes I do sit back and smile at what the team has accomplished. All I can say, is thank you to all of ya! Yes, what a long strange trip it's been...
|
