Supporting SETI@Home and all BOINC Distributed Computing Projects
Our 1 year anniverssary issue!! October 2007

©SETI.USA 2006-2007

CONTENTS:

* Latest News
* SETI News
* Member of the Month Interview
An Interview with SETI.USA's Crazybob
* Project of the Month
September/October
* BOINC News
* Trivia Winners for August
* Computer of the Month
* Quote of the Month
* Personal Milestones
* Users of The Day

Microsoft To Extend Windows XP Sales As Vista Concerns Mount

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
September 28, 2007 11:20 AM

Responding to some customers' lukewarm embrace of Windows Vista, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT ) said it will extend by several months availability of the operating system's predecessor, Windows XP .

The company said it will make the full version of Windows XP available to PC manufacturers and retailers through June 30, 2008. It will continue to offer a basic edition in emerging markets through June 2010.

SETI NEWS:

5 Oct 2007 21:54:54 UTC

Problems at SETI@Home Continue:

Last weekend we had 3 servers go down, as Eric described in the previous tech note. Two of these were attached to a UPS that malfunctioned. Not good, but at least we understand what happened. The third machine, bruno, crashes every week or two and hangs on reboot for reasons we have yet to understand. Our best guess at this time is that the fiber connection to the disk array that holds the upload directory is sometimes throwing garbage onto the bus that the machine cannot gracefully handle. This is an old fiber array that we would like to phase out anyway, so we thought about different storage devices that we currently have that could hold the uploads. We came up with the underutilized disk space on the master science database machine, thumper. This could have the added benefit of hosting the assimilators on the same machine that hosts the back end science database. Eric ran a script that gradually migrated the uploads over to thumper.

Member of the Month Interview: -Beerdrinker

Yet another month has come and gone. It´s time for your monthly vitamins found in this newsletter. As we proceed with our mission in QMC, please take a minute and say hello to...........

GregK@SETI.USA !

Read Interview

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”. The chosen project typically will be one in which our team currently has a poor showing in that projects standings.

Due to our current involvement in QMC, RCN and RS, we are not naming a project of the month for October. Team members who may be looking for a project should select one of these three. You are encouraged to put faster machines (especially C2D and Quad) on QMC to help in the effort to take and hold number one there. Slower machines would be useful on RCN especially if you use BOINC 5.5.0. Some help would also be appreciated on RS as we are trying to take back our #1 from Francofone on that project. Otherwise, crunch whatever you like best. A new project of the month will be named in November's issue. Thank ALL of you for everything you give to this team!!

BOINC News:

LHC@home has moved from CERN to the University of London

Researchers in the UK are gearing themselves up for an influx of help, with the move of a successful volunteer computing project to the University of London. Forty thousand people have already run the LHC@home program on their home or office computers, to help scientists discover the secrets of matter. This week, researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, officially launched the new base for LHC@home, which has moved from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva.

September Trivia Winners -SargeD

Week 1

Subject: Computer Acronyms
Winner: Crunch3r
Score: 100
Time: 1 min 2 sec

Week 2

Subject: Snakes
Winner: BlkJack-21
Score: 80
Time: 1 min 40 sec

Week 3

SargeD on vacation!! No quiz this week.

Week 4

SargeD on vacation!! No quiz this week.

Computer of the Month:

We have had no entries for computer of the month in quite some time. Therefore we do not have a computer of the month for October. If you have a PC that you would like to see featured in our newsletter? Then visit here and tell us about your cruncher!!

If interest in this subject continues to drop, then we will place a different article in this area in the future.

Quote of the Month:

I found this quote most appropriate for our team:

Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power.

- Paul J. Meyer -

Personal Milestones: -Orion

Orion has lost his computer and has been unable to get online in some time now. Therefore we do not have any milestones to list this month.

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 month of September. As you all know, we are still growing exponentially. Many new members have joined during the QMC push and we hope to see many new milestones listed in next month's newsletter.

Users of The Day -SargeD

We had yet another good month in September with a total of 32 Users of the Day. Once again we had a tie for the top producer between Tank_Master and Irondog (4 each). Our best project for the month was Seasonal with 4 UoTDs. We have increased our lead over BOINC.BE to 43. We lost 3 to the number 8 team and are now 23 behind them.

View September UoTDs