Thank you all for the great honor.
Please don?t take my next comment as too severe a criticism for I only mean it in the form of a suggestion. This MVC award is a little unfair in that the largest team gets its nominees at the top of the list each year. Maybe each project ought to have its own MVC award.
/just an idea/
Look at the list of great TeAm Mates that received votes ? I?m proud to be included in the same company.
Now if you will all indulge me a moment as I climb up on the ole soapbox.
We are very grateful to Anand and his management team for providing us with this great forum but it does have its limitations and problems. One of the biggest problems is we are at times put into competition with ourselves. I?m not talking about individuals because that part can be fun as evidenced by
Ohio Dude?s ? Seti Race Stats and Milestones and our
Mini-Team Races. I?m talking about our different projects competing for those spare CPU cycles.
Many other DC teams have a separate forum dedicated to each project. This tends to minimize the sometimes uncomfortable situation when a ?newbie? asks the question, ?What project should I run?? This topic has been discussed many times in the past but the shear size of the AnandTech Forums makes such a proposal unacceptable to the powers that be. But there may be a solution right around the corner.
I have been (almost
) totally dedicated to the SETI project and have formed a mini-team of friends and relatives. It would not be an easy task to switch Clients on their computers so TeAm Smokeball could go from project to project as has been the most recent popular development in our TeAm. I hope that particular problem goes away when Seti At Home ? 2 (BOINC) get started in the next couple of months. I wish I had more details to report but at this time the specifics are a little fuzzy.
?BOINC? is supposed to be a ?multi-project? friendly client. Let me quote from the
Future directions of SETI@home article on the S@H website.
To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Like the original SETI@home, BOINC consists of a client program and a data-distribution server backed by a database. BOINC, however, is not a specific application program - it's a framework that can support many different applications. This will make it easy for us to run multiple computations simultaneously - like AstroPulse and our southern hemisphere search - and to release new versions of these applications without requiring you to manually download and install software.
Even more significantly, BOINC is an open system. Other science projects can create their own distributed computations using BOINC. You choose the projects in which to participate, and you decide how much of your computing resources should go to each project. Your PC might search for ET, study global climate change, and do biological research, all at the same time.
There are many advantages to sharing resources in this way. For example, suppose SETI@home's radio telescope is shut down for repairs and we temporarily run out of data to analyze. With BOINC, your CPU power would be diverted to other projects, under your selection and control.
We are truly a Distributed Computing TeAm and the ?uncomfortable situations? have been held to a bare minimum due to the high mutual respect we have for each other. That said, this BOINC may be the vehicle that can get us all running the same ?easy to install? client. Currently each project has its own ?HOW TO? set of instructions and scoring standards. Maybe sometime in 2003 we can all come together using this new framework and really compete as a single unified Distributed Computing TeAm helping many different projects, and still compete against the ?other? top DC Teams.
Please forgive me for taking this opportunity to do a little preaching from my soapbox. I will now shut up and try to step down without breaking my old, clumsy ass.
Thank you
?ViRGE? for this Annual ritual and
Happy Birthday ? TeAm Mates!? 
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