NEWS

Hardware freaks trying to make some sense out of a bunch of numbers

SETI@Home snipets...
.....for those who may have not known there is actually a usenet newsgroup for SETI (alt.sci.seti). I believe that it originally was meant for discussion of the SETI project, but it has been taken over by SETI@Home members. I have clipped some interesting comments and rumours for your perusal. Yea I know most of these people arent any hardcore technophiles, but they do point out how little some people know about their computers.

I notice that the late March and April work units now being distributed are about 20-30 minutes slower than the earlier ones.  Someone speculated that it was due to greater solar interference.
Terry

as for me I usually draw my shades in my computer room, decreases solar interference and really speeds up my WU time! ;-)

next thing you know they will be selling work units on ebay....

Hi, I am surprised for all the replies I've got from my message :tired of  S@H. I am selling my WU's because S@H damaged one of my hard-drives. It is a matter of fact. I would keep going, but S@H is giving me hard time because of the fans (5) that I have on my computer, at night I'd like to sleep...the endless, continuous white noise of the fans and the air is driving me crazy and I certainly feel a lot of relief when I finally turn the computer off.

 not to be outdone........

SETI repartitioned my hard drive when ever I changed from 256 colors to 16 bit high color.  I don't know if it still will do that with the new 1.6 version or not, haven't tried it out nor do I want to.  But, repartition it has.  I was lucky, it did not damage any of my data.

I know lots of people who want a program to repartition their hard drive without losing their data.....i never knew we were already using it!

I ran across this thread also....I dont know the validity of what is posted in the thread....but it is interesting.

>> It has come to my attention that the
>> next version 2.0 will be released in 30
>> to 60 days. The new version will have an
>> additional search patern,
>> pulse, to be detected. Also this new
>> version will take twice as long to
>> proccess as the one we have now due to
>> this additional search patern.
>>
>> It seems that someone has shown them
>> their is good reason for this search at
>> this time. It is about time that
>> dispersion/scintillation, "Spectral
>> Scatter", is real and is encluded in the
>> SETI @ Home client proccess.
>>
>
>No, actually the main reason for the update is that they are hoping to
>decrease the demand for WUs by 50 percent.

My comments on this? Well, coming out with a new version of the client may be a good thing. Most people would think that it would be great if they optimized the code to make processing of work units faster, but it appears that they may also try to take advantage of the numbers and do some extra crunching and analysis of the data. The downside of this is that they may alienate alot of the SETI@Home members because it may further lengthen the time to process a work unit. Just how many people who have average WU times,. say, around 20 hrs will continue with the project if their average time jumps to 40 hrs?

If a new client does come out and slows down the average time for a WU, it may be bad news for the Team since it would slow down our chase to overtake Slashdot and MacAddict......on the other hand 90% of Art Bell would probably quit and we would take jump up a spot ;-).

I hate Micro$oft
.....I just have to bitch since I had just about finished this update and FrontPage Express crashed on me :P.

Team Lamb Chop News
.....Alot of movement in the past couple of days. Team Lamb Chop added 38 members over the past couple of days. The most notable addition today is Zer0 Defects who jumps in at the #76 spot with 299 Work Units.

.....leech does alittle bit of bloodletting from Caesar, and slithers up into the #13 spot.

.....News from the SETI page is that now you can add a URL to your listing.....you can do it here.

Final Words...
.....If you want to discuss anything related to Team Lamb Chop or SETI in general you can discuss things over at the "unofficial" Team Lamb Chop thread over at the ArsTechnica forums

Uh Oh......
.....Why is it when I make some type of profound statement, something happens to help screw things up? Yesterday I said something about Team Lamb Chop overtaking Slashdot in the not to far off future and today they post something like 3100 WUs for the day. They added several new members today, and they seem to have brought along a boat load of WUs with them. Not to be outdone, Team Lamb Chop added several new members also today, and they brought along a bunch 'o work units with them, most notably....Darkmage, who immediately jumped into the #49 spot. The new team additions came after the daily SETI@Home Club team update, so look for a nice jump for Team Lamb Chop tomorrow.

Update....Update....Update....
.....I moved some graphs around. Team oriented miscellaneous graphs are now found here. It can be accessed through the Team Top 100 frontpage.

.....As mentioned yesterday we are gaining on Slashdot and MacAddict. I have added a graph to the Misc Graphs page, which shows our progress in cutting the work unit and member lead those teams have on us. Take a look at it here.

Team Moves
.....After mentioning the imminent arrival of Whiner in the top 20, I was amiss in mentioning the other team members who have cracked the top 20 in the past week or so. New members in the Team Lamb Chop Top 20 are (in no particular order): Grimas, romkey, Uncomm0n, and adastra. Congrats to all!

.....more Top 20 moves: romkey passes K()de for the #10 spot, while OrlBamf skates on by Beryllium for the #10 spot.

One Last Note:
With the news yesterday about the bug in WU transfers, and it being indefinitely shut down.....that does not mean that if you join a team, that your credits wont come with you. The bug only affects the transfer from one account to another, not to and from another team. Of course we dont want you to leave Team Lamb Chop....but we dont want it to keep you from joining the team (if you arent already :-).

-zAmboni

Bad News for Some...
.....News passed on from Rat Bastard a couple of days ago was confirmed on the SETI@Home page today:

October 6, 1999
Due to a bug in the "credit transfer" page, we have taken it off line indefinitely. Several people exploited this facility to increase their stats. We have been logging all this activity and removed all the bogus stats, but will keep this feature turned off until we figure out how to fix it.

I know that some of you use "anonymous" accounts on machines and then transfer the credits to your account. As of right now it doesnt work. Who knows how long "indifinitely" will last. But anyways some of you may be SOL.

So....Just how does Team Lamb Chop Rank?
.....all of the statistics that I show on these pages are comparing Team Lamb Chop with other "club teams". Just what is a "club team"? who knows exactly....but apparently a club team is one that doesnt fit into the other categories of: Company teams, school/university teams or government teams. I have been asked by several people just where do we stand compared to *ALL* teams? I am going to keep track each week just where Team Lamb Chop stands compared to all teams. Currently we are 4th of all of the "club teams". As of right now we stand 9th compared to ALL teams. Here are the current standings for the Top 10 teams overall:

Intel is going down!

Club Teams Above Us
.....Doing alittle analysis of the Club Teams immediatly ahead of Team Lamb Chop (MacAddict, and Slashdot), it look like we are gaining on them slowly. The way things are going right now it appears that we will pass Slashdot before MacAddict. Over the past month Slashdot has added only 5 members, MacAddict has added 232, and Team Lamb Chop 130. In that time we have been steadily chipping away at the lead Slashdot has over us. Within the last month we have chopped off 9000+ WU from their lead, 7000 of that within the last week and half alone. The story with MacAddict is alittle different though. In the past month MacAddict has actually widened the gap by alittle over 1000 WU, but in the past week and half the trend has turned in our favor, after a MacAddict peak, we have been chopping into their lead, to the tune of 3000 WU in the past week and half.

If we can keep up the current trend, we will pass Slashdot sometime near the beginning of 2000, and pass MacAddict maybe sometime around the beginning of February. BUT! the only way we can accomplish this is for all of the team to keep up the good work they have been doing, and constantly adding new and valued members!

News within Team Lamb Chop
......eskatonic, the leader in CPU time/WU (1hr 53min/WU) has dropped out of the top 100. In the past month or so i have been keeping track of the top 100, he hasn't completed a single WU. He was eventually overtook and crowded out of the top 100 by hungrier members.

.....The SouthPark Admin Crew must be working hot and heavy on the new Halloween Special, they havent posted a completed WU in the past couple of days. We look forward to seeing the "schweeeeeeeeeeeeet" new episode at the end of the month!

.....No real changes within the top 20 team members, but watch out below.......Whiner has been streaking through the top 100, and should move into the top 20 within the next couple of days

Errata.....
.....It was pointed out to me, and I admit i was dead wrong, in part of my Tips & Trick section. Note to people......including myself.....get your facts straight! This is what i wrote in the Tips section about the command line SETI client:

One advantage the GUI client has over the text client is that the GUI client can be set to automatically dial up an internet connection when the work unit is finished. The text based client doesnt allow you to do this. When a work unit is finished it attempts to connect to the SETI servers and unless you are already connected to the internet or you have a dedicated connection, the server connection will fail and the text client will quit.

BZZZZZZZT! I am wrong.....completely wrong. That is what happens when you write stuff at 3am with little to no sleep the night before. If you are running Win98 and the command line client and have dial-up networking to automatically dial up, when a WU is finished, DUN will automatically dial up, attempt to connect to the server, send results, and download a new WU. The reason why i wrote that was cuz i was getting MY situation alittle confused. I have a one way cablemodem, and for dialups to the internet i have to go through a seperate connection program (which itself goes through DUN to dial up), but this program is not able to dial up to the internet automatically. Sorry for the confusion.

That is all for now!
-zAmboni

Week in Review
.....Team Lamb Chop passes the 100,000 WU mark the same day that Team Art Bell passes the 200,000 WU mark.

.....a bit of strangeness going on with Team Art Bell since several times this week, they post huge numbers of work units, only to have the next day show them posting a loss in work units. May be because of people joining and leaving the team, but also could be something to do with problems with bookkeeping at the SETI servers.

.....the weekly stats page has been updated...the SouthPark Admin Crew and guru come close but not quite to posting 1000 WUs for the week. Chezzy Poofs for all!

Top 100 News
.....mjdewitt moves up into the #7 spot.

.....et tu Smithius? Caesar gets passed up by OrlBamf (#11), and C. Eric Smith is about to do the same.

.....leech is in the position to move past Rat Bastard. Rat is still afflicted by the nolo transfero work unito blues, and is stagnating....when the SETI gurus get things straightened out Rat should be back up there to challenge OrlBamf again.

.....romkey is movin on up...he enters the top 20 and has moved up to the #18 spot.

.....there has been a lot of movement at the bottom of the top 100. several members have moved both in and out of the top 100. New this week to the top 100 are Quinn, xlian, PoopOnYou and VulTure.....welcome to the charts!
-zAmboni

Team Lamb Chop Passes the 100,000 WU Mark!

A word of thanks goes out to each and every Team Lamb Chop Member. We would not have been able to pass this milestone without the efforts of all of you....From team member #1 to #1275 every WU you complete helps our entire TEAM.