But you're not saying there's anything wrong with that - right? After all, as I think you said, what's important is that the researchers get their results - or words to that effect.

This is like the old rivalry with Easynews. I don't think anyone ever took the Easynews team seriously since the vast majority of people there were only in it for the money - or monetary equivalent to be more accurate.

Same here. I don't think anyone takes the Ripple Labs team seriously - I don't and I'm on the team. I'd rather be crunching for one of my old teams but I'm a sucker for killing 2 birds with one stone. And to be honest, it's sort of nice to have something to show for the work you've done. Granted the value of XRPs seems to be declining daily, but it's better than whatever pat on the head I get from WCG. Maybe if I were a dog I'd appreciate it more, but I'm not, so I don't.

Just because we are having a conversation about points does not mean it is the most important driver to any of us and I'm going to be presumptuous and suggest that perhaps you are placing Movieman's posts in a context other than he intended.

Knowing him as I do (he's the captain of our team) with coordinating the semi annual super computing week, almost annual donate crunching gear drives, his unrelenting drive to help us all crunch more, and to help us be better individuals ... nope ... he's not doing this for the points.

Points use to be the best direct measurement of the computing power any of us can bring. As already mentioned by others - points were frequently used to help us determine how we can "best" crunch. "Best" can be measured a number of different ways like which hardware performed best at raw crunching, how to get the best electrical efficiency, which OS processes which sub-project the best, etc. We all have different hardware, buy new hardware, re-configuring etc, always striving to get the most crunching we can out of what we have.

Now, crunching in general tends to be about as exciting as watching grass grow and the extra work we do to determine the aforementioned "bests" help keep us interested and involved ... as soon as a cruncher hits the apathy wall they tend to stop crunching. One of the fun things we get to do with points is to count them ... yes, most of us are highly driven self motivating types but there's something special about adding the spice of competition to help spur us on to do just a little bit more.

And finally back around again to the topic at hand ... when the points system goes all catty-wampus it is difficult at best to measure how well we are executing the science. None of us have stopped crunching, none of us are crunching less because of the current points situation (prime directive - crunch for science) but it certainly doesn't help us drive efficiency and is a bit less fun.

Happy crunching to all,
Steve

- multiple edits because I can't slow down and fix typos as I go :-)

God Bless your heart for this as you worded my thoughts better than I did.
To all: To understand my perspective you first have to understand that I tend to put all things in life in a certain perspective and at times even those small unimportant things go wrong and need to be fixed as I see things as either right( fair) or wrong(unfair) and although I may write here about an issue I'm not sitting at home wringing my hands and pulling out what little hair I have left over the issue. There is a problem and that issue although not earth shattering or something that will effect anyone's life is still important enough to be discussed so that a solution can be found.
As to me and points maybe I can clear the air on what I see them useful for. A couple small examples: We had a young guy on XS who worked his butt off ( this is a long time ago) to try and make it to the top 200 on the team. I think he was 14-15 at the time.. Tweaking his old AMD single core for all he could get out of it.. Really touched me as to how hard he tried so I stuck one of my dualies in his account for 6 months.. Another guy wanted to move to our team but had made a commitment elsewhere so I did the same thing to help him. This is what the points mean to me. They are useful when dealing with people and bringing smiles to faces. If I cared that much about money I'd have joined the ripple team myself. Actually, I wouldn't as to me the XS team is and are my friends and will be as long as I live and money means nothing when compared to friendship.

Nice one Movieman .....and it looks like the Ripple Effect did not spread very far and is now dying out anyway......I did not contemplate joining either!

Hallowed are the Ori ^^