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News? We Don't Need No Steenkin'
News!
Things has been kind of quiet on the news front in the past couple of
days....plus I have been a bit busy....so no news :P Maybe I can
scrape something together for tonight!
Less Clients for Version 3.0?
There has been a lot of threads on the newsgroups with different
"wish lists" for the version 3.0 of the SETI clients. Most of
these requests are things that can already be found in different addons
that have been released for the version 2.x clients. I guess people
are too lazy to fish them out and install them on their computers.
Hiram who is responsible for the porting of the Unix clients added his
thoughts in all of these requests:
If I promise anything for
v3.0, I will promise you this:
I will do everything I can to *reduce* the number of client versions
available for v3.0
You will *not* get your
favorite CPU optimized version of the client. We have a finite
amount of time on our hands, and we need to manage it as best we
can. That means trade offs.
--Hiram - www.sco.com/seti/
What does that mean for version 3.0? Do not expect
specialized clients for a variety of different processor/OS
combinations. Expect to see more generic types of clients....all of
the linux clients rolled up into one for example Don't expect to
have too many any frivolous additions to the clients.
Ok I cant think of any more news......so lets look at the
team!
New Team Thread
The old thread on the Ars Technica
open forum started to get unwieldy, and I created a new thread. The
old one is dead so don't make any more posts there! Check
out the new thread here. Also check out the current topic
of ways to hide the new computer crunching SETI from the
wife/girlfriend...
Mixing Things Up
Team Lamb Chop gained a new member several days ago. OoklaTheMok
jumped ship and moved from the Powerbook team to Team Lamb Chop. He
immediately announced his arrival, and simultaneously issued a challenge
for those in his vicinity (#21) with this post:
OK
I'm in. Be nice to me now. 
Anyone within a couple hundred beyond 3200, watch out!
So how has he been doing? Since his arrival he has
been averaging 55 WU/day passing Dr. Xing in the process. How
has others in the top 40 been doing? We'll take a look at that now:
Team Lamb Chop added Ookla, but lost a member Office
Boy. He had been with the team since the early days, but
has decided to change teams and go over to Team AnandTech. he takes
1600+ WUs with him. It would be nice to see the cool hardware sites
teaming together to bring down the Evil Empires of Compaq, SGI, Sun (sorry
guru ;-), Intel, Microsoft, and Art Bell, but I can understand if
some of the other sites do want to have a team of their own and use it to
further their sites.
/editorial mode OFF
Meanwhile...Back at the ranch: C.
Eric Smith has been cranking along passing Gonzo back for
#4. Gonzo has dropped off a bit since guru has withdrawn his support
and has started cranking out on his SpeedRacer account again. Turbo
moved past ojohnson yesterday, and moved into the #17 spot. Before
Ookla joined the team Dr. Xing had
been moved up two spots before Ookla moved him back a notch to #22.
Everyone from #22 down moved down a spot with the addition of Ookla, but
some have recovered from that demotion like PGS.
He moved up two spots into the #23 position. Beryllium
and The Phrog regined their lost spot
each moving up one back into #32 and #31 respectively. Finally, mzanthrope
moved up one today to #37.
Fun at the Top!
The battle between Gonzo and C.
Eric Smith was not only a battle between the two of them.
Unbeknownst to either, another team member had a hand in the
proceedings. Gonzo (on hiatus in Alaska) was wondering why his
WU/day was so high. He had been adding machines running SETI, but
not the numbers give him 300+ WU/day. It turns out that guru
again was giving Gonzo a WU boost! Today though it looks like guru
has started cranking out some work units himself (SpeedRacer) and is
leaving the battle up to Gonzo and CES themselves.
Other shenanigans going on in the top 40 include: Dr
Xing moving up one to #22.....man it was quiet yesterday with
no one in the top 40 gaining or losing ground!
New GUI Client Out
A news item I forgot to mention earlier, is there is a version 2.03 of the
Win9x GUI client out. This version fixes a bunch of bugs, probably
the most important is that it changes the writes to the hard drive to once
per minute. In earlier clients there was a problem with the GUI
crashing and starting a work unit over from the beginning. What it
turned out to be was that the reads and writes were getting out of sync
because the writes to disk happened quite frequently. A side effect
of the fix is that add on programs such as SETIWatch and SETISpy cannot
update information as quickly and updates are limited to once per
minute. Here is the readme for the 2.03 GUI client:
----------------------------------------------
Bug fixes and new features in Windows v 2.03:
----------------------------------------------
- Screensaver now draws at 480X640 screen resolution ("immediate
blanking" bug).
- Fixed drawing problem when switching screen resolutions.
- Write the state file no more than once per minute.
- Improved logic to keep files in sync. This should reduce the
likelihood of spontaneously resetting progress to zero.
- Made autodialing and connection retries more robust.
- Fixed bug where Connect Now menu was sometimes not enabled properly.
- Don't show connection dialog if "connect automatically" set.
- Setting "connect automatically" takes immediate effect (some
old versions needed exit & relaunch of client).
- Fixed a crash bug when memory or disk space was low.
- Modified installer to fix occasional conflicts with existing setup.exe
files.
A Shot Across the Bow
Today, Team MacAddict gave Team Lamb
Chop a sign that they're "not dead yet".
They moved within striking distance (~20,000 WUs) of Team Lamb Chop by
adding 37,000 WU to their rolls. Their big gain turns out to be from
a team/user called MagicVillage.
It appears that MagicVillage is really a group of people using one email
account to send their work units. They originally had their own
team, but decided that they needed a bit more exposure and left the team
that they founded and ended up with MacAddict. They are a German
group and have a message board. I filtered some of their posts
through babelfish and "guessed" at what they were saying.
From one of the posts, It sounded like MacAddict sought them out some 6
months ago to join their team....looks like they got around to doing
it. I am not sure if MacAddict will pose an immediate threat.
MagicVillage did bring along some work units with them but I am not sure
how many WUs they will add to MA's total on a daily basis....I will have a
close look to see how they fare.
The Gonzo Strikes Back!
Gonzo didn't take being left at #5
lightly....he struck back and took the #4 spot from C. Eric Smith.
It may be a battle to the death! But in the long run, Team Lamb Chop
wins!
Other moves today: PGS
had their weekly windfall of work units cracking the 3,000 WU mark and
moving up one spot to #24. Guidant laid
a little smack down and moved up one spot to #27. LrdHghFxr
keeps on moving up and slides into #30. Beryllium
a big mover in the past week moved up another 2 spots to #32.
Finally Darkmage moved up one spot to
#35.
On the Weekly Slide...
A newcomer this week took the top spot in the moving up this week. MrCatbert
moved up 25 spots this week....another recent newcomer GarthH
moved up 24 for the week. In the work unit department, C.
Eric Smith held off a late charge from Gonzo
to take tops in work units...unfortunately he couldn't hold onto the #4
spot! 3rd in work units still crunching away was Tobler
Design.
Site Moves...
Just a small word here...possibly sometime this week the stats site maybe
moving to a new bandwidth friendly address. I am not sure if it will
happen this week, but will be sometime soon :-)
Phew!
Man O Man......C. Eric Smith and Gonzo
put the hammer down yesterday. When the dust cleared when I did the
update today it was CES on top. The work units were flying with CES
posting 696 WUs and Gonzo posting 502
WUs yesterday....CES is now in the #4 position, and Gonzo is still
at #5. SouthPark Admin Crew
dropped two spots down to #6. But the question is who make #4
first? It was really close, but CES passed SouthPark first. It
was so close that when CES moved into #4, there was only 10 WUs separating
all three. Gonzo tried to make a comeback actually passing CES and
moving into #4 for a while, but CES passed him back to retain the #4 spot
for the day.
In other news.....Beryllium
moved up two spots to #34. Unfortunately while there was a pretty
good race going on....there was some attrition to the team
yesterday. Both Warthog (1991
WU) and psingh01 (498 WU) left the
team. Warthog had mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in the team
thread that he was going to give up on SETI.....and today he left
the team. I just want to point out, if you decide that you want to
give SETI a rest for a while, or if you want to quit SETI outright, you
don't have to leave the team. If you stop producing
work units you wont lose your work units already processed, nor will you
disappear from a team. If you leave the team though, the team that
you were on loses the work units that you have processed.
Weird Stats
There has been some strange things going on with some people's stats
recently. There was a thread on the newsgroups questioning the work
units that some members have been posting recently.....and there were some
who where hinting that those people were cheating in one form or
another. In one post, there was a list of people who "cranked
out" an amazing amount of work units in one day. In the list
there were 8 people who posted 10,000 WUs in a 24 hr period....with the
tops being 31,000 WUs. In that list was none other than....lugosi.
Remember him? Read a bit further down for more info on him. He
posted 18.5K WUs during that day. At the same time the stats
reporting on the SETI site was screwed up with a day missed on the Team
stats update.
Someone questioned whether or not it had to do with the Feb
29th bug that some people predicted would cause problems. I
posted that it was near the time where some of the older clients were
going to be retired/cut off from returning work units, and said that some
unscrupulous people may try to pad their stats with bogus work units for
one last time.
Hiram chimed in on the thread with this post:
As all ya'all have
noticed, something unusual happened to the stats on March 1st. We
are still not sure what it is. It seems to be a problem at the server
receiving end.
It seems to be related to the version 1.x expiration of the
clients:
sparc-sun-solaris2.6, alpha-dec-osf3.0, i386-sco-sysv5.unixware7,
i386-pc-sco3.2v5.0.x, i386-pc-sysv4.2uw2.1,
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1, and i386-sequent-sysv4
Which happened this past weekend. The WU return rate for all of
these clients mysteriously jumped on March 1st. It is merely a
problem of properly counting results. The science has not been
jeopardized, and these clients are not actually returning more WUs than
is normal.
We are looking into the problem to see what happened.
-News
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