It's something about free bandwidth for usenet...

more info here:

http://www.easynews.com/wcg/info.phtml

Welcome EasyNews ! Your contribution over the past few days has been impressive. Let's face it: Team Slashdot has lost the battle !

That's an interesting slant.

Our 'payment' is more of an inducement; more like credits on a loyalty card rather than cash on a debit card IYSWIM.

The 'payment' makes me no richer and I still have to subscribe to be able to get the benefit of the bonus gigs, so even the ananlogy of the loyalty card doesn't truely hold water.

In all, it's a very effective business plan in that it is more incentive for the customer base to stay loyal. Nobody loses out: EN gets a regular income, the user gets a bonus, the WCG community gets a big boost to its membership and best of all, the worldwide community gets a whole heap of crunching done towards a very worthwhile cause.

NOPE. Set up a few thousand if you want.

The only restriction I know of is that all device names for a membername must be UNIQUE. When checking your device manager, get in the habit of changing the picklists to all devices ever registered and all results ever sent in. If you are only looking at the last couple of weeks, it's easy to forget a few.

If I've had a computer crash or something and devices become inaccessible, I will change my device names I don't need anymore to OLD WHATEVER with a number, so I can use those other sentimental names over again later.

It is also possible to run with UDMonitor to have several cache slots run before you send them in. The only difference between here and the other place is that UDMonitor must be started with the WCG bat file in there. I have nearly 30 device names on each of two computers (AMD64 3400+ and AMD64 4000+) and 4 devices names on a Pentium III/500....all of which must be globally unique for my membername, of course, not just within one computer. I was out of town last weekend. I rounded up 34 finished results to send in yesterday....each from a separate device name. Don't set up more slots on a computer than will run in 5-7 days. The timeout is shorter here, 2 weeks, but the workunits are smaller. Build up slowly if doing the UDMonitor thing. I've sent in over 800 results here so far, and not lost any that I know of except for a couple when I was having some memory problems. The UDMonitor method avoids calling in every couple of hours and tying up the primary phone line, since I'm on dialup by choice. I can control when I send in a batch.