Good Morning,

I receive a couple inquiries a day about our team in the SETI program
and asking the same questions.  So, I thought to take a minute to update
everyone with what we know.

1) Why has our team score stayed at 90 packets?

SETI's David Anderson advised me they corrected it and brought
it up todate as of last night.   The team scores are working properly
now.  Team NOSPIN now shows 618 packets processed and we are
in 68th place in the CLUBS division.  We are back in the top 100
of our division.

2) I hear there is cheating or hacking of the SETI system.

Yes, David Anderson in an article on Maximum PC admits they have
experienced some users hacking or cheating in the processing to put
themselves in the top 100 of processing.  They have also found at least
one user who has changed his country of origin to Mars.  Anderson
believes it is good that people have found the holes in the system early
on so they can make the security repairs before the program continues
down line:
http://www.maximumpcmag.com/inside_sources/99.6/99.6.9.phtml#SETIProjectStumbles

3)  When will we see the new SETI client package?

SETI has set the date for release of the new client/screen saver for June 21st.
The new client should solve the issue of connecting to SETI from Intranets or
through ports other than the standard HTTP port of 80.   Basically, this will
make it easier to download and upload packets to SETI for everyone.

4) Why is SETI experiencing so many problems?

SETI put this project out for assistance to the Internet community in mid May with
the hope of attracting 100,000 users.  In less than 30 days they had over
600,000 people join the project, with an additional 20,000 people joining each
day.  The project has already computed 7,900 years of CPU time and processed
almost two million "units" of data.  They have recently added several new
servers and they hope to have all the problems solved in less than two weeks.

5) I read we are processing the same packets over and over.

Yes, SETI has been reprocessing the data for January 7th & 8th over and
over while they solve some their internal problems.  Although we probably
will not find a little green spaceman reprocessing the same data, SETI wants
to be sure no data is missed while they get up to speed.  All packets processed
during this period will still show on your personal stats and our team stats.

6) Why should we bother with this project with so many people already there?

The short answer is, because it is fun and it is a good way to raise the profile
of our group to others on the Internet.  PCBUILD and PCSOFT continue to
grow in stature and exposure on the Internet.  We continue to bring the best
of the best to these forums to help with those really hard problems.  Public
visibility always helps to increase our depth of knowledge.

Out of the several thousand people involved here at The NOSPIN Group,
we have recruited 59 people to join us...   well, 58 actually as NoSpin2 listed
is me also.  But, we still hope that more of you will join us and we can move
up even higher in the rankings, demonstrating the depth of our group.

Thanks for making PCBUILD and PCSOFT such a great success.

                Bob Wright
       The NOSPIN Group, Inc
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org

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