What were you doing on November 16, 2004?

On this date,



made its public debut!



Happy 4th Birthday, World Community Grid!!!!!

Dave, you take care of that leg!

Parmesian, good to hear from you! I guess among the old timers, I qualify as a young snot. It took two more days before I joined. MOT is also one of the original teams having started up on the 16th as well.

G'day everyone. Currently procrastinating a bit here instead of exam study..

4 years already? Happy birthday WCG! I joined a bit later in December, with the first and second results returned on the 9th.. I think my first machine crunching it, is the same one I'm currently using - the Pentium IV 3.0GHz.

How did the rest of you's discover WCG? I cannot remember how I learnt about it. I crunched for years and years with seti@home.. then migrated over here, although now with the extra computing power soon, might resume SETI as another project.

Will post again when I have the new system

You guys beat me here by over a Month.

Four Years ago, I was running work for grid.org (United Devices). Turns out they had run out of real work and were just sending out the same old work units time and again and no-one noticed.

Then one day, one of us contributors (not me) discovered it and after weeks of ignoring the questions we kept asking in the forums, they tacitly agreed that they were trying to get new work units out of the scientists in England but couldn't so were sending out the same series of WUs over and over giving us some such nonsense as confidence intervals...DOH do you need to run the same work unit hundreds of times?!

So they just let us spin our wheels burning up computer power, electricity etc for no good reason other than they wanted to keep us around.

Being the dissident that I am, I bolted. I looked at all the DC projects at that time and decided that the WCG had as much or more merit as any other and it had the IBM Corporation behind it.

In my long career dealing with IBM, I sometimes found the less than completely forthcoming and arrogant (This was before Microsoft) but I never found them dishonest as was United Devices. Most of the time, I could count on them to tell me the truth even though it was clearly not in their own self-interest. (Although they did sell me likely the last 370-AP on the planet &#%$).

Anyway, I figured if IBM would back it and it had social merit, I could put my computers to work there and count on doing some good. So I completely abandoned UD after leaving some less than complementary notes in their forum indicating what I thought of them (most of these were quickly deleted by the admins - I never wondered why).

As the old timers know, eventually other users scattered to the four winds as well (got tired of the shameless sham perpetrated on the volunteer community; which I find doubly dishonest).

I am not entirely sure what caused the demise of the effort (at least the last gasp) but finally they ended the sham.

I suspect that there are users that, after that experience with UD, decided that it was too difficult to ensure that their donations were being used in good faith and abandoned DC projects completely.

Sad; they did the entire community a great disservice.

Anyway, given all that as a background you can see that I was really “ticked” (I suppose that you can tell from the above, I still am). I do not tolerate intentional deceit well (which could explain why I have such systemic distaste for politicians including our president-elect that back-tracks on election statements daily - starting with his acceptance speech).

Anyway, it took me till December 22 2004 (over a month after WCG started) for me to get here and sign up. I have been around (off and on) since (In and out of MOT).

See! That wasn’t worth reading!

Great Day All

When you do, remember that MOT is there too.