Supporting SETI@Home and all BOINC Distributed Computing Projects
February/March 2007

©SETI.USA

CONTENTS:

* Latest News
* SETI News
* Member of the Month Interview
An Interview with SETI.USA's Possum
* From Our Founder
* Topic of the Month
SanDisk Doubles Capacity Of Memory Card
* Trivia Contest February Results
* Computer of the Month
* Quote of the Month Feb & Mar
* Personal Milestones Feb & Mar

With Intel more willing to work with Nvidia, the company has gone ahead with the new chipsets, which are Nvidia's first cross-platform integrated processors.

SETI NEWS:

March 15, 2007

Let's see. RAID systems... There were a couple of quick "hangs" in the whole system as our Network Appliance rebooted itself as we tried to add new disks. And I was tweaking with the SnapAppliance and purposefully failed the questionable drive that crapped out yesterday.

There was a longer outage in the afternoon as we had to reboot kryten again for the usual reasons. This time, though, I fsck'ed the upload directories as Eric spotted some file system corruption yesterday. This took a while, but did get fixed, and everything came up normally. Actually I'm still coaxing the splitters back to life as I type this. Eric just said the fsck cleared up problems we were having sync'ing disks with bruno - so that project is back on track. Maybe next week we'll have a new server in play.

A large chunk of my day was spent cleaning up the other lab so I could set up our new Dell 64-bit system. Dave bought this for BOINC development, and it's running Windows Vista. This was my first time playing with the new OS (I'm buried under unix/OS X otherwise all day).

Drink machine ate my $1.25. It's its own friendly way of reminding me not to purchase the junk it purveys.

- Matt

Member of the Month Interview:

We are now well into this year and it´s time for another newsletter. The next participant is a person, who probably is well known to most of you. This person was just last year nominated "Cheerleader" for this team...Yep you guessed right!.....Please welcome....

thepossum1!

Read Interview

From Our Founder:

The date was March 24th, 2005. I was standing on my toilet, and I was hanging a clock, and I fell, and I hit my head on the sink. And that's when I came up with the idea for the Flux Capacitor... er... SETI.USA, and THAT is what makes time travel possible, or is it world domination?

Topic of the Month:

SanDisk Doubles Capacity Of Memory Card

The higher-capacity card reflects both competitive pressure and the demand for more storage as consumers turn to digital cameras for shooting large quantities of still pictures and video.

Trivia Contest February Results:

Week 1

Topic: Grateful Dead Trivia
Difficulty Level: Average-Tough
Number of questions: 16

Week 1 winner: CrazyBob

Week 2

Topic: One Hit Wonders
Difficulty Level: Easy-Average
Number of questions: 14

Week 2 winner: CrazyBob

Week 3

Topic: Animals
Difficulty Level: Easy-Average
Number of questions: 15

Week 3 winner: CrazyBob

Week 4

Topic: 90s Rock Bands
Difficulty Level: Tough
Number of questions: 10

Week 4 winner: CrazyBob

Apparently this was CrazyBob's month! Hopefully we will see more members in April's issue!!!!

Computer of the Month:

This months computer belongs to Kevint!

This is 3 XQ6700's mounted on a single board. (the empty spot was a duo quad, now in replacement mode since it decided to "let out the smoke" while I was out of town.

The plexi case (not shown) has 10 fans 5 blowing in and 5 blowing out to dissipate the heat.

The PSU's are mounted on the back of the board to allow more space on the front and a spot for the monitor (not on the board at the moment)

KVM switch can be switched from computer to computer via a hole in the plexi - did not have a keyboard controlled KVM that would fit the configuration I needed.

The "unit" is set up as entirely self contained.

View Pictures and specs

QUOTE of the Month February:

The decision for this month's quote was a tough one. Ultimately, we decided to go with the simplest choice, which was also the original choice. It is modestly offered as a suggestion to current and future generations.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old
seek what they sought.

-Basho (1644-1694)

Personal Milestones:

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

48 members with 1,000,000+ SETI credits
99 members with 500,000+ SETI credits
334 members with 100,000+ SETI credits

View February Milestones

View March Milestones

QUOTE of the Month March:

Since it's the month of his birth (the 14th), we'd like to dedicate March's "Quote of the Month" to the father of modern science.

The true value of a human being
can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

In addition we have his three rules of work:

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.