Brian Atkins writes:
> "To our users: SETI@home is off to a great start! We now have
> almost 350,000 users, many more than we expected. This has caused
It is probably just a temporary spike. Many will drop out as soon as the novelty will have worn off. Two years is a long time for the Net attention span.
> some temporary problems:
>
> Our servers are overloaded. You have probably seen "can't
> connect to server" messages; the problem is at our end, not
> yours.
Couldn't they have anticipated that?
> Credit for work units and CPU time may not show up immediately
> in your totals.
And that?
> Our new "team" feature has had some problems; If you've joined
> a team, you may need to get a new password and join it again.
Couldn't they have made seti@home a part of distributed.net, and relied on their extensive expertise?
> We are a bit overwhelmed with emails and bug reports, and won't
> be able to respond to them individually. Please check our "known bugs"
> list carefully before reporting problems.
And ditto?
> We're working hard to fix these problems. With the help of new high-performance
> machines from Sun Microsystems, we'll upgrade our server capacity; this will
> happen in about a month. We'll release
A Beowulf cluster with a much better price/performace ratio, stability and scalability could be installed within a few days, at a much lower absolute cost. Perhaps excusable, if they got the hardware donated.
> new versions of the client software (probably next week) that will
> deal with server problems in a more user-friendly way.
>
> So please bear with us during these "growing pains", and thanks for being part
> of this incredible project."
Translation: "Gee, we're bozos. Don't hit us"