Good morning all

Good Morning Team. I had some welcome rain last night accompanied by a spectacular electrical storm, a good opening act for Halloween!

Here's an interesting thought regarding the power of teams...

I've been fiddling around with my mostly stalled project to do an online stats generator, and so far I've managed to shove loads of data into an SQL database. I'm now trying to work out what to do with it (despite 30 years of experience as a software engineer, I've not fully embrace the doctrine of specifying requirements or designing stuff up front).

Anyway, I was just fiddling around running SQL queries on the database, and I noticed that if you just take the UK, there are 33 teams with "IBM" somewhere in the team name, with a total of 640 members. If you aggregate the totals, you find they have accrued 17.4 billion seconds of runtime (I think that's the right units), 942,000 results, and 503 million points. That would put the aggregate IBM team fourth in the UK ranking (behind "UK BOINC Team" and ahead of "Scotland").

Also, if you look at the current teams, "Scotland" are fourth and "The Scottish Boinc Team" are fifth... but together they would leap ahead of "UK BOINC Team" into third place. It makes you wonder if there is some kind of bitter rivalry between the two teams or something, and the same for the various IBM offices in the UK.

For me, the really interesting thing is the way that people divide themselves into teams or factions. I suppose it makes an interesting modern alternative to hitting each other with clubs and stealing the women/food/goats etc.

Hmm, interesting thoughts. I initially joined OC-UK as I was a member of a similar team when I used to crunch SETI. After 2 years (in 2011) I joined team UK with whom I have been ever since. I was No. 1 in OC-UK when I left in March 2011 with approximately 13 years of CPU time - 4 years on I am still No. 1 without having returned a OC-UK result ever since. Publicity is the key. Those words that say 'if we all joined the same team' could work wonders. United we stand - divided we fall.

PS welcome wiltonfry, you've joined a great team - let's hear from you soon.

Good morning all