You predicted the rest of the paper. I talk about how prophecy in an important sense actually has nothing to do with seeing the future literally, but instead prophecy is the art of challenging all that is stagnant and wrong with religion (this is the form it has taken in Christian Homiletics of Jim Wallis's ilk). I'll post the paper when I'm done with as I have most of my others that I thought would be interesting to MOT readers.

Also, I try to steer clear of the ivory tower in my writing style. While I sometimes get a little wordy here and there searching for the bon mot as it were, I try to make my essays interesting to everyone, not just theology PhDs.

whatever... hacker.

Oh, well, then if I killed my 8800 GT, I suppose I'd have to replace it with a 260 GTX, wouldn't I Blizzie? Then we could have a REAL race.

You DO realize that you're blowing your reputation as the team's "Chief Lurker"? I love it! On top of that, you must be a bit psychic. I've been debating about bringing up a goal for the year and yes, the 100 million number has a real siren's call! Since you brought it up though, it got me looking back over last year and rooting around.

First off, I took a quick look at the year end. We did 80,794,234 points. Out of curiousity, I backed out our Base Camper numbers and got down to 80,274.002 points. Then I looked at backing out Dataman's part that he did as a camper too. That got us down to 79,753,455 points. That's only about a day's worth of crunching shy of the 80 million and I have to believe we'd still have made it being that close as it was given this rather mercenary look at it. Fact is, we came close to 81 million. Anyone that crunches with us whether it's for a day or the whole year is still a team member and those points are no different. I did want to "what if" it and see how things would have looked without the visit. Keep in mind that when I noticed that we had a "possible but no gaurantee. it'll be a stretch" chance at 80 million, I was mentioning that in passing. I wasn't seriously thinking of us committing to it at the time. Everyone jumped at the chance though and YOU did it. It was wonderful to see and rather humbling. Face it, we're a frell of a good team! Also, I doubt anyone recalls it but back in the spring, we talked about a goal for 2008 and my thoughts were for something like 55 or 60 million points. Clearly, I'm not psychic!

I went back and pulled our monthly totals for 2008 too. Here's what we did:

January - 6,626,553
February - 5,336,862
March - 5,366,178
April - 5,585,266
May - 6,327,191
June - 6,885,782
July - 6,897,584
August - 7,277,978
September - 6,608,401
October - 7,250,812
November - 7,023,732
December - 9,607,895

Rather interesting, needless to say. We didn't have a summertime drop off like I would have thought from vacations and such. Also, we ramped up our regular production by about 1.5 million points in December - that was your response to make it to 80 million. Yes, we had some i7's come on line and some folks were pushing their machines more than they normally preferred to. Clearly, we don't want folks frying their machines. Still, it would seem reasonable to think we could do 8,000,000 point months now. Yes, you can argue that we've lost a good 12 million+ points of crunching from folks that left over the course of last year. Flip side is we have a number of new folks and new machines that clearly offset that to some degree. So, going with 8 million point months, we should expect a 96 million point year. Goals should be reasonable but also a stretch too. In that light, 100 million fits quite well.

We have to expect though that points will be a thing of the past pretty soon now and adjust to thinking in terms of credits like the rest of the BOINC world. 100 million divided by 7 just isn't a nice round number (14,285,714 for the curious). 14 million credits is 98 million points and 14 million is a nice round number (15 million is 105). An 8 million point month is 1,142,857 credit month. 1,150,000 credits a month means 13,800,000 credits for the year. So, all the blathering nets out to match parmesian's gut! 100 million points is a good point goal, 14 million credits is a good credit goal (the 2 million point difference is a week's worth of crunching) and there's nothing stopping us from raising it to 15 million credits (105 million points). No question it would be nice to look back on this at the end of 2009 after having done something like 17 million credits (119 million points).

I would like to add a second piece to a team goal for 2009. We're running 35-40 members returning a result on any given day. I'd like to get that up to say 50-55 a day. To the extent we can do that, things like 17 million credit years aren't so far out there.

EDIT: Oh yea, 1,150,000 credits a month is 37,808 per day (264,658 points per day) so parmesian's 274,000 per day is not out of line either (quite reasonable given that last few days). Setting a goal now means I can keep folks updated on how on track we are at the end of each month too. That keeps it out there and us aware of how we are doing.