Hi everybody

One of Carl\'s problems is that when the BBC project was set up, he and Tolu were the only developers in Oxford, just the two of them with the BBC insisting on a simpler version of the boinc manager, different FAQs, separate BBC forum and so on. Which meant it was such a rush that all the effort went into setting it up and an exit strategy couldn\'t be properly planned.

Fortunately Carl and Tolu now have Milo working with them, which makes the situation \'less worse\', but it\'s clear to the mods that all three of them are under tremendous pressure and that as far as credits are concerned, Carl is feeling his way - working through what is possible and what is not. (His first idea was brilliant but turned out to be unworkable.)

So there has been no advance grand plan re credits that the developers and cpdn mods knew about but did not explain or discuss on the forums.

I have to say that we mods hardly thought about the potential for problems on the stats sites because we\'ve been so busy helping on three forums with the two phases of the migration and sorting out various problems thrown up by the BBC follow-up TV programme and its associated website.

So bear with us please and don\'t all shout at us at the same time........

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Cpdn news

Hi Mega

If there was ever \'a big wodge of our licence fee\' paid to Oxford, I have certainly never been told about it.....and I think the idea may be causing a few hollow laughs there, not least in the room where Carl looks after the servers......

A lady born in 1903 and now deceased who once worked for the BBC in Br***** told me years ago that ladies wanting a part in productions or just a promotion in the office routinely \' climbed into bed with \' the producers. Autres temps, autres moeurs (I hope). Not quite what you meant, I know.

In any case, the Oxford research team have always undertaken some outreach educational work for schools and the general public. For example, there\'s the Open Uni climatology course developed in collaboration. The researchers give frequent presentations, and Sylvia had AFAIK at least one grant from the Nuffield Foundation to develop materials for schools. So the collaboration with the BBC fitted the research team\'s ethos and aims. Drs David Anderson and Eric Korpela certainly seem to think that the way to expand DC beyond the realm of computer hobbyists and into the general public is by getting media publicity.

Thinking about cpdn communication with the stats sites on a longer-term basis, not all of the cpdn mods are great experts. I know next to nothing. Are there sites/places/forums we should be looking at from time to time to pick up on or report problems?

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Cpdn news

I got one short question about all the creds: What will happen to UniCourse / CPDN classic creds that are earned AFTER the recent calculation of the added BOINC creds? Will they be added to the CPDN overall creds as well or was that a one time merge between Classic and BOINC?

Thx! :-)

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Hi Mega

If there was ever \'a big wodge of our licence fee\' paid to Oxford, I have certainly never been told about it.....and I think the idea may be causing a few hollow laughs there, not least in the room where Carl looks after the servers......

Thanks for the reply to my post: Although the fact you deleted it might make others confused! However, I accept that the extended sexual exploitation and abandonment metaphor may have not been everyone\'s idea of an appropriate post in a general access forum, and I apologise if it went too far.

Anyhow, my intention was not to accuse you of feathering your nests (I\'m sure some dosh was involved but I can see that the trickle down effect, as always in the public sector, might be non-existent) but to express my sympathy at being your left high & dry as the BBC have bailed out.

So the collaboration with the BBC fitted the research team\'s ethos and aims. Drs David Anderson and Eric Korpela certainly seem to think that the way to expand DC beyond the realm of computer hobbyists and into the general public is by getting media publicity.

Yep it was general media publicity that got Seti Classic 5 million users. I think it would have been better if the BBC had publicised CPDN and Boinc in general rather than insisting on a short-term stand alone BBC branded project. I just hope that a fair number of the Newbies keep on going. Having been kept ignorant of matters Boinc until the last minute I\'m not sure they will. The telly programme was a bit generic and didn\'t mention your previous and continuing work or even refer to Boinc or Distributed Computing as the important movement it could be.

Thinking about cpdn communication with the stats sites on a longer-term basis, not all of the cpdn mods are great experts. I know next to nothing. Are there sites/places/forums we should be looking at from time to time to pick up on or report problems?

It looks like Willy of Boincstats will come to you and keep you right! Also the Boincstats shoutbox had lots to say about your efforts and would be worth observing if ever you try anything as adventurous again.

As a final comment I will say that well motivated though your efforts were, and splendid though it would be to to have my CPDN, BBC and SAP credit conflated, the current position is probably as good as we can easily get.

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The Scottish Boinc Team

... (I\'m sure some dosh was involved ...

As far as is know to those outside of the core team, the dosh was just enough to pay for a couple of file servers for their part of the project. Small ones, too.
More money had to be found from other sources to get a bigger one when it was found that the influx from the BBC\'s shows were putting the existing servers under a lot of strain.

Hi Megacruncher, we meet again! After the TV programme\'s failure to make much of BOINC and DC, the BBC have redeemed themselves more than somewhat by these great web pages. They still haven\'t made it easy to find out that the experiment is ongoing and that people can still take part, but at least the pages might make people interested enough to try to find out.

I\'m getting a little tired of \"techies\" being scathing about the staying power of BBC newbies, of whom I\'m one, and I know of lots of others who have done and are doing good work, not only in crunching themselves but also in encouraging and helping others for whom much of the techno-speak in the various message boards is double-Dutch.

Best wishes,

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Visit the Scotland team

Thinking about cpdn communication with the stats sites on a longer-term basis, not all of the cpdn mods are great experts. I know next to nothing. Are there sites/places/forums we should be looking at from time to time to pick up on or report problems?

If it would have been discussed here for some time beforehand, say some weeks or months, as would have been proper behaviour of a communicating project, the stats site operators would heve been made aware of this and they would have probably come here to insert their 2c. But as this was all done in secrecy, hidden from public, there was no chance for them to give their expert view.

Just to inform you about the main stats pages for BOINC, here are their fora (with the usual necessity to register of course):

Willy de Zutters BOINCstats (and the shoutbox is just for short term shouts, not for discussion)

Neil Mundays BOINC stats counters

Zain Uptons BOINC Synergy stats (Team forum as well, scroll some rows down for stats part)

BOINC UK

Even more interesting for the Classic removal as they count all DC-Projects, not only BOINC, are this sites (although I next to never go there myself as a BOINC-only cruncher:

DC-Vault

Free DC

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Grüße vom Sänger

But as this was all done in secrecy, hidden from public, there was no chance for them to give their expert view.

It was not done in secrecy, don\'t be pananoid.
It was done quickly (perhaps too quickly...) because Carl has really more important things to do. (working on the model code to give crunchers obsessed by credits faster and more stable models......)

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Arnaud

It was mentioned last November on the BBC boards (which is a public forum).

http://bbc.cpdn.org/forum_thread.php?id=5097#34986

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

It was mentioned last November on the BBC boards (which is a public forum).
http://bbc.cpdn.org/forum_thread.php?id=5097#34986

But it\'s effect is only on this project, it\'s nothing to do with BBC.
The adding of credits from classic and several betas doesn\'t effect anyone on BBC, it\'s abslutely irrelevant for BBC.
There are 2 official fora for CPDN main, this one and the phpBB one. So a proper discussion had to be on this two, not on some other projects forum.

And regarding speed vs. other tasks at hand: Why hurry such a sensitive thing when there\'s not enough manpower at hand? Just wait a bit, nothing will vanish, as the stats were always counted somewhere.

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Grüße vom Sänger

Sorry megac, it was I who deleted your previous post as it was a bit nasty for the forum. Anyway, the BBC gave us some much needed publicity/participants and £10K for a server for the results. So it wasn\'t as if we got millions of the licence fee etc (although we have been taxpayer funded via NERC & DTI in the past). In fact, Microsoft has helped keep us afloat with a fellowship to keep me on the project for two years (well another 1.5 years by now). So remember that the next time you hear someone cursing about the \"blue screen of death\" or \"evil\" Bill Gates! :-)

The \"Meltdown\" documentary (the one that \"launched\" the BBC experiment) had quite a bit (well a few minutes) on the distributed computing nature, CPDN, SETI@home, but the recent \"results programme\" quickly \"refreshed\" this. I imagine they figured the general public would be bored by a \"computer-oriented\" segment, as exciting as it would be for us working & participating on CPDN and other projects. We should probably have also stressed that it wasn\'t really something for \"general consumption\", i.e. if we were as easy to run as SETI or Einstein or Folding@home that would be possible, but these climate models need to be run for a long time and on a pretty modern PC.

The next version of the hadcm3 model will be easier on PCs I think (90% less disk i/o, a little more RAM, i.e. 100MB free required, and faster as it will require a minimum of a Pentium IV for SSE2 optimizations I turned on). Future models will be a bit tough -- the regional project, if it goes through, will require running the hadcm3 as above, as well as about 300MB for the regional model will run separately and be \"coupled\" to hadcm3 global model. Then the HadGAM model will be done and be a 64-bit model that needs probably 1GB of RAM minimum! So the next hadcm3 will be the \"minimum spec\", and we have lots of ideas for good experiments with it (more IPCC scenarios, airplane exhausts experiments, etc).

Luckily with \"Moore\'s Law\" PCs will continue to grow and the average PC will be fine for running CPDN, whereas we\'ve always been far ahead of what the average PC can run (hence our lower numbers for users staying on, finishing runs, etc).

I\'m getting a little tired of \"techies\" being scathing about the staying power of BBC newbies, of whom I\'m one, and I know of lots of others who have done and are doing good work, not only in crunching themselves but also in encouraging and helping others for whom much of the techno-speak in the various message boards is double-Dutch.

Best wishes,[/quote]

Hi All,

Just to second MM\'s post. I\'m also a \"newbie\". With a couple
of exceptions all \"The Greenies\" ( from Team Greenpeace in BBC CCE)
are newbies. Also, with a couple of likely exceptions, we\'re all coming
over here with some of us already crunching CPDN models. This applies to
many of the \"BBC\" teams. So I would say it\'s a win win situation all round.

The fact that the program was a bit of a bummer ( can I say that??)
with regard to credit to all the crunchers, not to mention not getting
down to some more serious climate change issues ( we hope more programs follow)
it hasn\'t taken the wind out of the \"newbie\" sails.

Let\'s be honest it\'s brought many to DC who previously just didn\'t know it existed and would have probably thought it all too techy to attempt.

Chrissy

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IainsstatspageforTGP

I\'m getting a little tired of \"techies\" being scathing about the staying power of BBC newbies, of whom I\'m one

Just to second MM\'s post. I\'m also a \"newbie\". Chrissy

If you\'ve got this far you can\'t be fairly described as a Newbie. You might even be veering dangerously close to techie-hood!

My point about newbies was that, BBC with it\'s implicit \"no one else has has ever done anything like this before\" stance and keeping everyone in the dark about the tradition that went before, hasn\'t exactly made it easy for people to keep going.

The vast majority haven\'t kept going & won\'t survive to become seasoned Boincers: but for those that have, welcome to the club.

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The Scottish Boinc Team

Microsoft has helped keep us afloat with a fellowship to keep me on the project for two years (well another 1.5 years by now). So remember that the next time you hear someone cursing about the \"blue screen of death\" or \"evil\" Bill Gates! :-)

Not at all. I\'ve always regarded Mr Gates and his company as heroes - indeed architects of the 21st century no less. Without some degree of standardisation, which, almost by definition is going to be flawed and mediocre, but nevertheless essential, the internet couldn\'t work, or at least wouldn\'t have taken off, and I wouldn\'t be talking to you.

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The Scottish Boinc Team

Please take the flamewar to another thread.

PS: I\'m on Dragorath\'s side.

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Post previous to last has been deleted for violating the rules about \"language\".

Post previous to last has been deleted for violating the rules about \"language\".

I apologise for saying Bill Gates eats his own boogers.

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As a refugee from the BBC side of things, I\'d like to see my BBC credits alongside my CPDN credits on my \"Your account\" page.
However, my CPID differs between the two sites.
Is there a resolution to this?

As a refugee from the BBC side of things, I\'d like to see my BBC credits alongside my CPDN credits on my \"Your account\" page.
However, my CPID differs between the two sites.
Is there a resolution to this?

The easiest way is to have a PC that\'s attached to both projects at the same time. It doesn\'t need to crunch for them both, just be attached. Then your CPIDs will sync up.

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The easiest way is to have a PC that\'s attached to both projects at the same time. It doesn\'t need to crunch for them both, just be attached. Then your CPIDs will sync up.

It\'s sufficient to have a third project crunching on both puters, so all will sync up. If you chose one without WUs atm (like LHC, SIMAP, Predictor) you won\'t have to crunch a WU or delete a DLed WU if you don\'t want to crunch for them.

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Grüße vom Sänger