CONTENTS:

* Personal Milestones
* July UoTD
* SETI.USA MiniCity
* Project of the Month
* PoTM Chosen by Members
* BOINC Standings
* July Trivia Winners
* Other Projects of interest
* Quote of the Month
* Team Standing and OS Support
* Request for Guest Articles
* Team Advertising Project
* Member of the Month
* Formula BOINC Standings
* Computer of the Month

Personal Milestones -Orion

SETI.USA would like to thank ALL of it's dedicated members and offer CONGRATULATIONS to all those who achieved significant personal milestones in July/Aug. As you all know, we are growing exponentially. We now have:

128 members with 1,000,000+ SETI
223 members with 500,000+
931 members with 100,000+

191 members with 1,000,000+ COMBINED
363 members with 500,000+
1,251 members with 100,000+

View SETI Milestones

View BOINC Milestones

July UoTDs -SargeD

July was a slow month for UoTDs with the team only grabbing 34 total.  Our best project for the month was QMC with 5 UoTDs. We are currently (as of 16 August)at 657 total which means we are still solidly in the number 8 position. We lost some ground on #7 ranked BOINC@Heidelberg who is now 56 ahead of us.

Congratulations also to our top members for the month of July:

theflux with 4 UoTDs
Blkjack-21 with 4 UoTDs

NOTE: If you have not done so, please build a user profile at each of the projects you crunch or are registered at.

View UoTDs  

SETI.USA MiniCity -SargeD

UPDATE:  We are doing an outstanding job with our minicity.  Currently we are averaging a population growth rate of between 600 and 700 per day.  With all of the other factors that have to be considered, this means we are getting between 800 and 1000 clicks per day.  We currently are the 16th largest minicity in the United States and with our current growth rate should not be much longer before we take 15th place.  Kudos go out to Bob Bihari and thepossum1 for all of their efforts with the minicity.  Bob participates in several link exchanges and possum does visit exchanges with several other cities.  The clicks these two bring in are a major help in our growth.

For those of you who may have never visited our MiniCity, it is an online simulated city.  It's growth is based on the number of unique IPs that visit each day.  These visits control the growth of several factors such as population, industry, transportation, security, environment and business. 

We would like to encourage those members who have not participated in this to consider helping us push on up to be the #1 largest minicity in the USA.  Here are the links that you need to help us with this project:

To check what is needed visit this link: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/xml
Increase population: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com
Increase industry: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/ind
Improve the transport network: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/tra
Increase security: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/sec
Improve environment: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/env
Increase business: http://seti.usa.myminicity.com/com

If everybody clicks every day it will not take us long to move on up to #1!  Discussions regarding our MiniCity are located here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9539

Project of the Month: -DrBob

SETI.USA encourages its members to participate in the project of their choice. Now that we have accomplished the team's original goal of being #1 in SETI@home credit in ALL BOINC projects is valuable to the team's future success.

Some members have asked for direction as to which projects they should allocate their resources to. Therefore we have decided to designate a "Team Project of the Month".

MilkyWay@home has been chosen for the Team Project of the Month for August.

Our team is currently ranked 3rd in BOINC standings on the project. Let's see how many cobblestones we can put on the board by September 15th.

MilkyWay@home
Project URL: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/
Create an Account: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/create_account_form.php
Join Our Team: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/team_display.php?teamid=53

Boinc Standings -DrBob

It was suggested by our Team's membership that the future Project Of The Month (POTM) should be voted on by our membership. Our Leadership Committee unanimously adopted this suggestion. So now all future POTMs will be selected by our Team's membership. The following paragraph explains in detail how the POTM will be selected.

The poll for the next Project Of The Month will be posted shortly after our monthly newsletter is published. As conditions and standings in projects are constantly changing the poll will allow a member to change his/her vote until the 13th of every month at which time the poll will be closed. The project receiving the most votes at that time will be the team’s next POTM and published in the team’s newsletter. The poll will consist of the current Project Of The Month and up to 4 additional projects nominated by our members. Projects nominated after the poll is posted will not be considered for the current poll if the limit of 5 projects has already been reached but will be eligible for inclusion in the following months polling. The current Project Of The Month will be included in each poll as some members would like to see us concentrate on a specific project for an extended period of time. If a project receives majority vote in consecutive months it remains the POTM becoming our teams new “long-term” project remaining so until another project receives majority vote in a following poll. In the event that there are no new nominations for POTM and previous nominations have been selected, the current POTM will remain the same for the following month.

We encourage everyone to participate in this process. Members should submit their nominations, along with an explanation why this project should be chosen. All members are also encouraged to select which project they would like to see for the next month's POTM. If you are a member of SETI.USA and would like to participate, please visit http://www.setiusa.net/forums/ and register today!

Other Projects of interest -SargeD

SETI.USA encourages it's members to crunch whatever project most interests them. However, there are a few projects that we run that do not interfere with our primary projects, yet help us to increase our overall numbers in BOINC. Two of these projects are Pirates@Home and Depspid. Depspid is a non-cpu intensive project that uses some of your bandwidth. Pirates@Home uses the CPU but the WUs are so short (usually less than a minute) that they never interfere with production on other projects. Work for these projects is very sporadic, so we encourage our members to connect and stay connected so that when work is released we can grab our share. Please consider connecting to these projects if you have not already.

Quote of the Month:

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

-Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )

Team Advertising Project

In an attempt to further our goals in recruiting new members an idea was formulated and discussed in our forums.  The idea was to develop and distribute team business cards that gave a basic explanation of distributed computing and introduced people to our team.  This idea has now come to fruition and the team has designed and ordered a few thousand of these cards.  We have also made a PDF file available that would allow members to print the cards themselves. We are now looking for volunteers to distribute the cards in places frequented by computer users (ie. computer stores, bulletin boards etc.). 
If you are a member of SETI.USA and would like to participate, please visit http://www.setiusa.net/forums/ and register today!  You can then volunteer in this thread.

Due to real life issues Beerdrinker is unable to do the member of the month interview this month.  Please stay tuned next month when he will once again introduce one of our members right here.

-SargeD

Formula BOINC Standings -SargeD

Team SETI.USA still holds its second place position at Formula BOINC with a score of 205, an increase of 10 points from last month.  L'Alliance Francophone retains first place with a score of 230, an increase of 18 points.

We currently hold the #1 spot in 10 of the Formula BOINC projects:

SETI
uFluids
Gerasim
RCN
TSP
Docking (Less than 1 million credits awarded so no FB points)
DepSpid
QMC
Proteins
AI

We also hold the #2 spot in 2 of the projects:

Cels@Home
Riesel Sieve
 

Full team stats can be viewed here.

For those of you who are interested in keeping up with Formula BOINC standings, zombie67 does a weekly update at our message forum here.

-SargeD

This month's Computer of the Month belongs to [seti.usa] Jon Carrel. It is a Q9450 build that he uses as his home computer.

STATS:
Processor: Q9450 (o/c at 3.4 GHZ)
Heatsink: ASUS Silent Knight II 92mm
MB: ASUS P5K3 DELUXE/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35
RAM: CORSAIR 2GB DDR3 1333 (o/c at 1600)
HD: 2x Western Digital Raptor 150 GB (Raid 0)
GPU: 2x GeForce 8600GTS (Unfortunately this board does no support SLI)
Case: Antec Nine Hundred
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX 520W
Mouse: Logitech MX Revolution
Monitors: 23" viewsonic, 17" norcent
OS: Vista Home Premium 64 bit
UPS: CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD 1500VA 900W UPS

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