SciFi wrote:

"Jason H." <exosearch@juno.com> wrote in message news:1164811252.168749.318730@j72g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Straining Earthlings' Terrestrial Intelligence (24 Nov.'06)

http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2006/11/straining_earth.html

Points out issues with BOINC, its makers and its forums.

Regards, Jason

Well it looks like I'm not the only one who dropped out because of that BOINC piece of crap! I was proud to have participated in this project for over 7 years & even recruited others to join but no more. SETI admins, just how many users have you lost since the change? This "improved system" lasted only about a week with me. The program bogged down pc performance, refused to stop when screensaver disengaged, & was constantly in the way & in my face every time I needed to use the computer! This "improvement" ranks right up there with NEW COKE....how did that one go again ,oh yea alienate your loyal fans & turn them in to vocal opponents, loose market share, then relies your mistake, switch back to the original as quickly & quietly as possible,& FIRE THE MORON that came up with the idea in the first place! Wait a minute....you guys didn't hire that same idiot to "improve" SETI did you??? Since you do have the first part of this strategy down pat maybe you look into the last part.

Your Discussed Former Member,
SciFi
7+ years
56,870 hours CPU time
2650 work units

I'm sorry to hear that you - and apparently some others - have had problems with BOINC so severe that you felt obliged to ditch it.

I switched to BOINC shortly after it started, and have run both Seti and CPDN successfully on several PCs with none of the problems you refer to. OK there have been various outages, notably at Berkeley, and some of the earlier BOINC versions were rather flaky, but the most recent versions of the BOINC software has been stable, and have caused me no problems whatsoever. I suspect that at least some of your problems were because the software wasn't configured properly in the first place. In particular, I have never found that BOINC continued to hog CPU resources when I was doing other work, or caused any of my PCs to overheat. (An "idle" PC isn't idle anyway, it's repeatedly executing an "idle loop".) However it _is_ designed to continue to use spare processing capacity at all times, and not just when in screen saver mode. (And it is generally recommended that the BOINC screensaver should not be used in any case.)

I have always found the help forums to be just that, helpful - on the relatively few occasions when I have found it necessary to use them.

Remember that BOINC isn't just a "new and improved" Seti, it's a distributed framework used by several other projects as well. Ever heard of Einstein, Rosetta, World Community Grid, ...?

Far from *disgusted* continuing member.
178269 Seti BOINC credits and counting
170966 CPDN credits and counting