This 'rogue' came thru because in fact 2 were in the quorum. The award system will take care of that in subsequent 'outlier' deductions, so that over a larger group of claims by the 'rogues' their net credit will end up substantially below the stock claimers.....they're not winning, they're loosing. As side effect, suppose carl.h had a temporary wide grin on his countenance.

Today i had same event of being a "low outlier"... my claim was excluded and got half of the 2 high claims was awarded. It will occur less and less. The noose is getting tighter.

The normal way to inform your SPONSORS (that's what we are, NOT part of your personal @home computer farm) is to send around an informative email and not post some side-remarks in some "never visited forum" (yes, I came here today for the first time after participating for > 1.5 years). This policy is ridiculous (one could say a slap in the face of your sponsors) and actually the only thing to (massively) complain about except for that I also wonder where the results of all these WCG projects have gone - the website does not seem to be informative in this respect at all (or I am too dumb to find it ).

But let me go a bit more into details with this entire credits issue, because it is an often debated topic. I am not a supporter of the optimized BOINC clients, rather I would prefer the DC project leaders to hand out fixed credits per each WU type (even this is not fair in all cases: Nano-Hive@home WUs of the same type must not necessarily "converge" to a result but in such cases the problem is solved because special credits are awarded). But here goes the story:

For a long, long time (I participate in DC projects since more than 6 years 24/7), I just used the official clients offered on the individual projects download pages - until I found out that people overtook my private >20 GHz computer farm using their single C64. I investigated the issue and found out that they were using these optimized BOINC clients. Well, since I do not give too much on credits (although sometimes it's fun to see what your machines can do while you are having a cup of coffee or two in the morning), I first kept on crunching using the standard clients (too lazy to reinstall for just the credits sake). But after a while I got a bit annoyed that stats handling became so inconsistent so I started using these clients, too. DC project leaders were not caring about the issue anyway, so why not keeping up with the others, I thought. You may therefore now call me a part-time cheater (although you never have officially set any relevant rules for participating such as not allowing modified clients that would justify such an attitude) but still I funded your research considerably for which you should rather be thankful. Instead, without a clean notice, you have adjusted your crediting system - as I understood it - such that people using the optimized clients now may get credits even lower than those they would have got using the standard clients. Are you cheating now?

And what about your cheating efforts performed on Linux users over all these years? Are you going to correct this, too? Or is this entire issue just a one-sided coin?

It is high-time that DC project leaders understand that DC participants are SPONSORS that donate a very expensive resource. We are giving it away for free but it would be nice if you guys wouldn't in return treat us as "computer cattle".

Best regards,
Michael.

P.S.: Let me stress that my post is not at all about supporting optimized BOINC client usage (although for the Linux guys I would say using these is only fair) but rather the policy how contributers are treated in general.

And one more thing: If you wanted to do something REALLY useful, you would take care that your DC clients make the most of up-to-date hardware, i.e. that - where possible - your software uses certain optimizations (SSE, SSE2, SSE3, etc.) instead of hoovering around the state of the arts in programming of the year 2000. I am buying machines to EXCLUSIVELY hook them up to DC projects NOT hooking up DC projects just because I have machines and you could save your sponsor some money by just investing a bit more of your time in your own project.

How about expanding the 'Whats new'-section on the mainpage and adding your updates there?

Wow, you seem unhappy.

As a chemist, you will then be able to understand when I tell you that the first HPF paper is in peer review (I believe a draft is available) and the results database will be made public when the paper is published.

I'm afraid you seem to have completely missed my point about "supercrunchers" like yourself. I'm just a volunteer, like you, and I have to confess I run my computers longer and harder than I should in a good cause. But there is a point where doing so becomes uneconomical - not for the project, because they get free computeing however it is derived - but for you. Supercomputers are far more cost efficient in terms of putting together new, dedicated computing resources. So instead of buying dozens of computers, you could donate the money to charities that will spend the money on research.

I'm not telling you that this is what you ought to do, or trying to belittle what you do in any way. I'm just trying to give you some perspective.

The vast majority of WCG members (hundreds of thousands of them!) are average computer users, donating a few spare cycles. Obviously, WCG would like to do everything they can to keep the supercrunchers like yourself happy, but their main focus, and the reasoning behind their policies, must always be dictated by that silent majority.

I think what it comes down to is this: if you are going to go to the effort and expense of donating a large computing resource, you must put that little bit of extra effort in to keep yourself up to date with what is going on, and all your computing resource running smoothly. That makes perfect sense to me. There's no point in half-measures if you are going to invest so much in the project.

Lastly, the source would be open if that were possible. Sadly, the code is usually owned by some scientific institution or other, and it takes a complicated three-way legal agreement just to let WCG optimise and board it for the WCG grid. Making it open source is just too much to ask (but we live in hope).

That is indeed VERY good news at least.


Firstly, a hobby rarely is uneconomical. Secondly, I get the feeling that you are not really employed somewhere in academics, right? If you were you would know that you will hardly receive a grant for spending it on supercomputer cycles - but maybe in America this is different...


Another misjudgement? Volunteers not active in your forum are e.g. even more active in ours. There is no such thing like "that silent majority" just because you don't hear from them. Also, if "they" were silent all the time, there would not be a need for you to act on the stats, right? Hence, a somehow inconsistent argumentation you come up with here, I think.
It is simply time - just to say it once again - that you change your attitude towards your supporting community.


Let me give you a small advise on what a really good DC project takes utmost care of: Never disturb the sysadmin in his/her cycles, i.e.: construct a client that after installation never requires tweaks. Else your client won't survive for long in his/her farm.


That's a result of American standard policy. Fortunately, this is different elsewhere...

Michael.