Eyepopping if you have time to sit and watch BOINCview all day and night, who wants to be spared needless work and confusion through a bit of foresight and planning will, I guess ;>)

Look at the dates of your programs. Until they start showing recent dates, you are not running a beta program. So far, I have not downloaded a new program.

I owe you all an apology for not posting sooner - we have set the HPF2 project to 'beta' status. Right now there is no new work (and no new version of the application) but we are letting the few remaining workunits that had been started for HPF2 prior to shutting it down go ahead and finish themselves off.

The primary reason for letting them do this is that more then 85% of the workunits on HPF2 were completing correctly and we would like to get that data as well as let members get the points for those workunits. We set the application to beta becuase the users who have opted to be beta testers should be watching their computers and making sure that they remain responsive.

Please do as users have been doing with HPF2 - if the workunit is making progress, then please let it continue. If it has stopped for more then 12-14 hours, then go ahead and abort it.

As to some of the other posts in this forums - we like a lot of your ideas and you have raised some good points. We are looking at what it would take to to name the workunits 'BETA_xxxyyyyzzzzz'. Please continue to provide suggestions as how to how we can make sure that the beta is effective. I am honored that 246 members have already signed up to help us beta test. This will give us a platform to provide significantly broader testing then we were able to do with our resources alone. Thank you for volunteering.

As far as what to expect from the quality of the applications we release onto the beta environment - they will have undergone significant development testing with our set of computer. We will have done a significant amount of testing with our computers. The primary objective of the beta testing is to test a large set of workunits on a larger set of computers. More info will be provided when we start beta testing.

We will announce beta test launches in this forum - we would then ask that users keep an eye on their computers they have allocated for beta testing and keep an eye on this forum. We may from time to time ask for certain information like the messages logs from users computers and any other symptoms they observe - however we will monitor beta test work closely to watch what will occur for any errors.



Absolutely.

knreed wrote:

Thinking out loud, to exert maximum control, would thus activate one of the unused standard BOINC profiles, school, work, home, mark one of these as the beta tester profile and associate that one with specific devices, to let it run on testbeds of choice(for the privileged that have more machines).