On Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:49:56 GMT, "GbH" <Geoff_Hannington@IEE.ORGasm>
wrote:

In news:o04ig1luhqt0bhokfts33ckgklih03ib4s@4ax.com,
f/fgeorge <ffgeorge@yourplace.com> blithered:

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 04:03:33 -0400, Roger
<Delete-Invallid.stuff.groups@tm.net> wrote:

SETI BOINC is down for a scheduled outage to do backups. They
should be back up in a couple of hours. This was anounced on the
SETI homepage.

It's back up now and *stuff* is transfering, but it was down a lot
more (as in more than a week) than the scheduled outage.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

ACTUALLY it was NOT down for very long and some of us did not have any
problems connecting. SOME people DID have problems though and MOST of
those were overseas, non USA folks. Using a proxy seemed to help most
of those although there are a few in Australia and New Zealand that
seem to have recurring problems connecting. I do not know if they are
on dial-up or dsl/cable.

If SOME people DID have problems, WE ALL have problems. It is a distributed shared 
project, or rather apparently not!

I believe if some have a common problem then it is a system problem,
but BOINC/Seti is not a distributed computing solution as in Peer to
Peer.  It is a *relatively* simple system where the work is broken
down into manageable chunks and these are spread out across millions
of independently operating computers.  The only thing they really have
in common is the data comes from a common source and is returned to a
common destination.  They are running the same programs, but again it
is done independently.

I think you will find the vast majority of the computers are running
Windows.  Due to its very nature Windows is susceptible to a number of
problems in addition to timing issues.  Unexpected program
interaction, or software conflicts are not terribly uncommon.  It only
takes one program that didn't follow guidelines on a system to
potentially cause problems.  There are many out there that did not do
so and some are rather large and expensive programs the programmers
felt they just had to tweak the standard DLLs instead of creating
their own.  However I do thing things have improved vastly since the
earlier days of Windows.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com