Martin wrote...

Already answered!...

Where?  When?

Good question.  Lemme tell you, Jan...

More specifically, BOINC problems have been the utmost, most frequent topic
of discussion on this newsgroup for about a month.

The general consensus is that SETI@home released BOINC to the general public
although they had insufficient equipment to manage all the data, and
therefore the project has been one [almost] continual "outage."

The worst part was for the SETI-aholics, whom took great pride in crunching
Work Units continuously -- for years, and as quickly as possible.  Some of
them un-installed and abandoned SETI-Classic, switched to BOINC when it was
"released," and then watched their computers get cold, unable to download
work units.

One poor guy in New Zealand heats his house with warm CPUs.  Well you know,
it's Winter down there, and when BOINC fell apart, the temperature in
~misfit's~ house started to drop.  But who are you going to complain to?
He's had to play computer games just to stay warm, tsk tsk.

Certainly, the engineers at SETI@home are working at top speed, trying to
get things working as fast as possible, and probably haven't had a good
nights' sleep since the "release."  At the same time, a few thousand people
were getting unrecognizable, vague error messages on their new "clients"
after the "release," and received no guidance or advice from SETI@home -- 
either on this newsgroup or their webpage -- that the problem was in
Berkeley, not in our computers.  The few fortunate people that inhabit this
newsgroup compared notes, and were able to figure out that "the trouble was
on their end," and we've been here keeping each other company since then.

Welcome.

The few "News" items on http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/ do not reflect the
amount of members' confusion caused by the technical problems in Berkeley.
However, the latest item suggests that the problems are beginning to wind
down, and perhaps productivity will soon begin to gain momentum: "July 21,
2004 - The log files are currently being compressed, after thats done the
project should return to normal."

There is some dubiousity about their use of the word "Normal," since
SETI-BOINC has never seen a trouble-free period.  Achieving "normal" would
not be a good thing.  We hope their intended meaning was more optimistic.

Well, this too will pass.

CU soon,
               -Neil-