Statistically the 15% is correct and not unrealistic from a purely mathematical
point.  What my point was is the numbers are derived using data that consists of
a large number inactive users and grossly skews the reality of performance.

My 187 units puts me in the group of 589571 out of 4666299 registered
processors, which means then the bulk of the processing is done by 20-25% of the
users. Now 4.6 Million people processing Seti is correct but my preference would
be to have a classification of active processor and calculate statistics from
there, after all it's a simple matter of programming.

~misfit~ wrote:

"Steve VE4LR" <ve4lr@arrl.net> wrote in message
news:3F5E0892.93ECB3A9@arrl.net...

What upsets me is that I've only done about 170 wu and I'm way up in the
85% area and less that 2000 of 4 Million have done this well (?).  It
seems a lot of those people do a couple of wu and quit.  It would strike
me that to maintain an accurate idea where SETI@home is going is to prune
users who have not done a wu for a certain period of time and those who
have only done a very few over an extended period.  I'm in the top 15%
for doing 170 units, thats not realistic.

I for one am glad that SETI don't 'prune' users who have been inactive for a
certain amount of time. Maybe if they don't return a unit after 6 months or
something they could be dropped but not if they've actually done some
crunching. I started SETI on a 486 and stopped after a few units. They were
taking quite a while (Think hundreds of hours) and encouraging me to leave
my PC on 24/7 which I couldn't really afford.

Now I have a faster main PC running an Athlon 2200+ and a couple of Celerons
on my LAN and was reminded about SETI a wee while back I'm crunching again I
like the fact that when I check my stats it says SETI@home user for: 4.263
years. even if my average results returned per day is only .33

Also, being in the top 15% for doing 170 units *is* being realistic. It's
based on statistics, how could it not be realistic?
--
~misfit~

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