b: You can stop the reselling problem.... by a simple expedient: a different color case.
Excellent idea, although possibly yellow rather than black ?
I kind of like the bright colour, makes it less like a work machine.
Although if black is all we can have, then I'll take black.
I'm keen to try one out and start working on some (free) software tools to add to them.
If they had a 'buy two now get one later' scheme, I'd go for it.
Order and pay for them now, but you don't get yours until the retail version becomes available.
The problem with the "Save" button is that it exists at all.
One of the best text editors I have used for writing code was CodeWright, which had a 'save on loss of focus' mode.
This meant that it automatically saved the file when you alt-tab(ed) to something else.
Once you got used to it, this was incredibly useful and very intuitive to use.
You never had to 'save' anything, it just worked.
I can think of three reasons for having the 'save' button in a word processor.
First, in yey olden days, disk space was expensive, so everything had to ask before it used up precious resources.
With many desktop machines shipping with 100G disks as standard, is this really such a problem now ?
Perhaps the time has come where a word processor should just automatically save the document; unless you explicitly tell it not to.
Second, certain commercial word processors had a habit of crashing or trashing your document fairly regularly.
When editing large technical documents I got into the habit of clicking SaveAs every few hours and adding a number to the name, just to be safe.
Often ending up with 10 or 20 copies of a document after a week of editing and revising it.
A year or so ago I changed to using OpenOffice on Linux for technical documents, and one day suddenly I realized that I had had the same document open on screen for several days, adding
and editing text and diagrams, and it hadn't exploded yet.
I was so used to my old word processor trashing things after a few hours that this was actually a surprise.
Third and final reason for the 'save' button and the 'Do you want to save your changes' dialog are unintended edits.
If the user opens a document to read it, but accidentally hits some keys on the keyboard, they will want to close the document without saving the changes.
Ok, this makes sense.... ish.
Until you consider how often this occurs, and look for an alternative way of achieving the same result.
1% of the time, I close a document without saving it because I don't want to save some accidental changes.
99% of the time, I get the 'Do you want to save' message because
I'm tired and need a rest, having just spent several hours working on a document. I close the word processor, and up pops a message box asking "Do you want to save the last 4 hours of work... or just throw it away ?" - dumb
Or, I shutdown my laptop because it is almost out of battery power, and up pops a message box saying "I'm sorry I can't shutdown because you haven't explicitly told the word processor to save those really important changes" - also dumb
If we take the 99% case, and always save everything; unless you explicitly tell it not to.
Then how do we handle the 1% case where you only wanted to read the document, and accidentally made some changes you don't want to save.
How about two modes, reading and editing.
By default, the program opens a document in reading mode, and you have to explicitly switch to edit mode when you want to make changes.
If the two modes were available when the program was launched, then you could have two right click menu options to open the document, 'read' and 'edit'.
So rather than 'open with word processor', the options would be 'read the document' and 'edit the document' - much nicer.
This idea is free to anyone who wants to add it to an Open Source program.
Commercial applications will need to ask permission.
There is a common ground. IT personnel are paid for their experience, and ability to adapt, and not to simply follow instructions.
Yep, apologies if my post sounded too confrontational.
You are right, not everyone in development needs to understand "IT", and IT should have a fairly good idea of what is actually going on underneath the hood.
However, someone in development team should have tested the release before they passed it on.
In which case a good starting point would be to write down the steps they used to install their test system
IT test the instructions by installing it on their own test system, and ask for clarification if it isn't clear
Development should not be allowed to login and 'tweak' the system, they have to reply in text
Repeat until IT have a fully working test install, and a repeatable set of instructions showing how they got there
Then install the release on the live system and archive the instructions
As part of the process your IT and development teams have to learn to talk to each other, and you end up with a documented set of instructions for installing a replacement if all goes pear shaped on the live system.
IT should own the deployments.
Assuming the dev department does their job well, a deployment would not require any of the dev department's skills.
Absolutely agree.
If the developers do their job correctly, then a release should include a full set of install and migration instructions for IT to use.
If IT do their job correctly, they should test the install on a separate system before deploying it live.
If the install does not work 100% first time, don't tweak it, send it back.
If the developers complain that IT didn't follow the instructions correctly, then the instructions were wrong.
Send it back to the developers to write better instructions.
If all goes pear shaped on the live system, IT should have a full set of (tested) instructions on how to rebuild the system from scratch.
If the developers can't supply those instructions, then you don't know what you have.
Ok, I know this is nice in theory and difficult to acheive in practice, but both teams should be working towards this as their goal.
.... unless there's some real reason to believe that Novell is going to deliberately put patent-infringing code in Linux.
It isn't necessarily deliberate addition that we would be worried about.
If Novell developers are going to be working with Microsoft developers as part of the move towards better interoperability - which is a good thing - then they are likely to pick up ideas and techniques from each other.
If Novell as a company know that their customers are protected, then they might not put as much effort into verifying that they aren't injecting ideas or techniques picked up from the Microsoft developers.
Roll forward a couple of years, and a Novell developer picks up a nifty new technique while she was part of the Novell-Microsoft interop team.
She changes her job within the company, and joins Novell's OpenOffice team.
Not only does she have to remember where she got the idea from (do not think about a rhinoceros), but she also has to remember not to use it when working on the OpenOffice code (remember - do not think about a rhinoceros).
If the idea is in your head and it solves the problem in front of you, then you will just use it (still not thinking about a rhinoceros ?).
Roll forward another year or two, and lots of other developers have picked up on the neat trick that they found in the OpenOffice code.
Presto, up pop Microsoft and declares that they own patents on a technique that is used in a good percentage of the Linux GUI applications. The technique in question is non-obvious and someone who hadn't seen the original code would be unlikely to have thought of it.
Ok, the individual projects could refactor their code, and try to solve the problem without using the patented technique (remember, don't think about a rhinoceros) . But in the interim, many of the large Linux distributions have to pull the applications from their releases, setting Linux on the desktop back a couple of years.
Lets say Microsoft have a patent for using "a button with the word 'Go' to start a process".
Balmer seems to be saying that if someone has installed a Linux system that included a program that uses "a button with the word 'Go' to start a process", then Microsoft could sue them (the user) for patient infringement.
Ok, IBM, Sun, HP etc. probably have quite a few patents themselves.
So, lets assume that IBM has a patent for using "a button with the word 'Stop' to stop a process".
Does that mean that if someone has installed a Windows system that included a program that uses "a button with the word 'Stop' to stop a process", then IBM could sue them (the user) for patient infringement.
If Microsoft can sue Linux users for infringing [insert patent number here], then surely this implies that [insert name here] can sue Windows users for infringing [insert patent number here].
In which case, doesn't everyone who has a Windows system installed "sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability" too, because there are lots of people out there with patents that cover lots of things, many of which we don't know about yet, and some of which may be used in Windows.
"We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world - the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs,"
No disrespect to the guy, but I don't think he understands what OpenSource actually means.
In fact, I get the impression that he hasn't really considered using OpenSource software.
To be fair, if you are already busy trying to maintain the systems that you already have, then experimenting with OpenSource alternatives can seem a lot more hassle than it is worth.
How often does an IT manager sit down and think "Ok, looks like I have some spare time... should I think about replacing all of my existing (working) services with a completely new set of (unknown) services".
Unless there is a policy change from higher up, then the only way that change will happen is if enough techies within the department discover OpenSource for themselves and begin to suggest alternatives.
With virtulization built into the CPU, and multiple cores it becomes trivial for servers to run multiple OS's for different tasks and with the PCIe slots a disk subsystem that would theoretically support independent raid storage for each core and virtual OS (it would be in theory possible to have 4 independent raid subsystems based on the PCIe slots).
Which lets you pack everything onto one, single, very expensive box.... and have the whole lot fail when someone trips over the one, single, very important power cable.
Sure, the US could push for a multilateral approach to space exploration. Now, stop and think about the current state of affairs in the 'states and you'll see why this isn't likely to happen.
Oberondarksoul (grand parent post) is probably right. It is unlikely that anything like this is happening... yet.
However, once some of the ISPs start charging content providers, then I think this is the way things will go.
Present company excepted, most of the people using the low cost ISPs won't notice if SlashDot is a little slow,
or downloading updates to OpenOffice or Linux take ages.
As long as the commercial websites, MySpace, MSN etc are nice and zippy, they will be happy.
Even if one or two service providers do still offer a neutral connection, they will have to charge a premium price for it to cover the
money they will loose from not prioritising commercial content.
Which means we have a two tier internet; standard price to access the
commercial websites from our sponsors, pay extra to see the rest of the net.
In the UK things have gone crazy, to the extent that our local supermarket is offering low cost 8M broadband packages.
However, the people who go for these services wouldn't be able to tell if their service provider prioritises commercial content.
In fact, I think I'd find it tricky to figure out how to write a test that could detect a non-neutral connection.
You could argue that if the customer couldn't tell the difference, what is the problem.
The problem is that once this becomes established as common practice, then the networks will become more and more biased towards commercial content,
and the prices the ISPs can charge the content providers will go up and up (pay $x for level 1 priority, $xx for level 2 priority... etc).
The content provider who pays most will get the highest priority.
In the UK, several of the ISPs are fighting a price war, offering broadband packages at cut price rates.
The one or two service providers who do cater for the more technically savy user still have to compete with the low cost service providers.
If the low cost providers use the money they get from charging content providers to cut their end user prices even lower,
then all of the service providers will have to start charging content providers, just to stay competitive.
The FC5 installation tools seem to have taken a step backwards.
I have FC4 installed on a range of machines, from old 166MH Pentiums to 2GHz Athlon machines.
The FC4 install was a breeze, and everything went according to plan.
I tried to upgrade them to FC5, and I found all kinds of problems.
The older machines don't have enough memory (64M and FC5 requires a minimum of 128M).
All I want these machines for are simple headless servers running things like backup DNS.
They don't have bluetooth, they don't have wireless or USB, they don't even have a mouse.
At the other end of the scale, the FC5 install fails on the Athlon machines.
I haven't worked out exactly why yet, but I think it is because I have a nVidia graphics card.
Why this causes problems for the text mode install I don't know.
As I said, the FC4 install works fine on both the low end and high end machines.
The FC5 install won't install on either.
I've stuck to using Fedora because it gave me a good stable general purpose system
that worked for both text only servers and a good development desktop system.
I have just convinced my non technical brother that he should move from Windows to Linux,
but there is no way that I can recomend FC5 if he has to spend a day on Google to
find out that he needs to type "linux text ide=nodma nofb skipdde" on the command prompt just to install it.
In light of the recent aquisition of JBoss, what are the plans for Java support in Fedora ?
Do you expect to see a major performance improvement in the gcc based java,
or are you hoping that Sun to will change the restrictions on the Sun JDK ?
I've noticed an increase in the minimum memory requirements for a basic Fedora install.
I run Fedora on several machines, from an old 166MHz Pentium machine with 64M of memory, to GHz AMD64 machines with 1G of memory.
Ideally, I'd like to run the same version on all of them.
However, FC5 has raised the minimum memory requirement from 64M to 128M, excluding the older machines.
Is there a specific technical reason for increasing the minimum requirement, or is it because a lot of packages are being included to make the system user friendly.
I'm sure the 'minimum' text only install includes a large number of packages that it does not need.
I appreciate the excellent work being done to make the full desktop install more user friendly,
but please remember that a lot of Fedora installs are for text only servers.
What about the data center and server market ?
There has been quite a bit of discussion recently about virtualization technologies.
Does anyone know how well VMWare or Xen will map onto a multi core system ?
If a data center can run n virtual machines on a single core system, will they be able to run n*8 virtual machines on an 8 core system ?
The ability to pack more into less rack space would probably be a major selling point for data centers.
As far as I can remember, the foam on the tank is insulation to keep the contents cold while the shuttle is on the landing pad.
It isn't actually needed during flight.
The problem is that during launch, large chunks of it can fall off and dent the orbiter itself.
In which case, why don't they cut the foam into small cubes when they stick it on to the tank ?
It could rain small cubes of foam during launch and not harm the orbiter.
Ok, sticking individual cubes on would be more tedious that spraying it on, but it might be possible to create a mold that shaped the foam to add break points in it so that it would split into small chunks rather than big chunks.
Ok, I know, they have probably already thought of this and found good reasons why not.
Just an idea...
I agree.
I used to run the Seti@home client on all of my machines, but stopped running it when they ended support for the old client.
I haven't have time to RTFM and write custom shell scripts to install so all my machines now just run a blank screen when idle.
Is there a yum rpm repository ? Even Skype have a yum rpm repository.
Make it as simple as
yum install seti
then I'll install it.
Also, the Seti@Home project seem to have changed their target audience.
For me, the sheer scale of the project was a major reason for contributing to it.
Seeing stats on their home page showing "x years cpu time in the last 24hrs" was a major WOW factor.
The new site no longer seems to show the collective stats for the project as a whole.
Everything is geared towards competition between the individual users, with leage tables of groups and users showing how much they have contributed.
I don't care how much CPU time individual fanboys have contributed, or who is 'star user of the week'.
I want to know how many tera flops the whole project has managed to accumulate, that is the impressive figure.
I don't see it as a competition to get yourself higher on the list.
I (used to) see it as a collective contribution to a large scale project that couldn't be done by any one single institute.
Now, I can't be bothered.
Slashdot Mirror
Did I miss something, what part of Postgres did Oracle buy ?
A quick Google(tm) for 'oracle aquisition postgres' and all I found was this http://www.postgresqlfr.org/files/oracle.html which probably isn't what you meant :-)
Excellent idea, although possibly yellow rather than black ? I kind of like the bright colour, makes it less like a work machine.
Although if black is all we can have, then I'll take black. I'm keen to try one out and start working on some (free) software tools to add to them.
If they had a 'buy two now get one later' scheme, I'd go for it. Order and pay for them now, but you don't get yours until the retail version becomes available.
I use this technique all the time. Very useful way to avoid bugs, particularly with C++ pointers or Java references.
Tricky to remember at first, but after a while it become automatic to type
Miss out the ! and you get a compiler warning rather than a hard to trace runtime error.One of the best text editors I have used for writing code was CodeWright, which had a 'save on loss of focus' mode. This meant that it automatically saved the file when you alt-tab(ed) to something else. Once you got used to it, this was incredibly useful and very intuitive to use. You never had to 'save' anything, it just worked.
I can think of three reasons for having the 'save' button in a word processor.
With many desktop machines shipping with 100G disks as standard, is this really such a problem now ?
Perhaps the time has come where a word processor should just automatically save the document; unless you explicitly tell it not to.
- Second, certain commercial word processors had a habit of crashing or trashing your document fairly regularly.
When editing large technical documents I got into the habit of clicking SaveAs every few hours and adding a number to the name, just to be safe. Often ending up with 10 or 20 copies of a document after a week of editing and revising it. A year or so ago I changed to using OpenOffice on Linux for technical documents, and one day suddenly I realized that I had had the same document open on screen for several days, adding and editing text and diagrams, and it hadn't exploded yet.I was so used to my old word processor trashing things after a few hours that this was actually a surprise.
- Third and final reason for the 'save' button and the 'Do you want to save your changes' dialog are unintended edits.
If the user opens a document to read it, but accidentally hits some keys on the keyboard, they will want to close the document without saving the changes.Ok, this makes sense .... ish.
Until you consider how often this occurs, and look for an alternative way of achieving the same result.
1% of the time, I close a document without saving it because I don't want to save some accidental changes.
99% of the time, I get the 'Do you want to save' message because
If we take the 99% case, and always save everything; unless you explicitly tell it not to. Then how do we handle the 1% case where you only wanted to read the document, and accidentally made some changes you don't want to save.
How about two modes, reading and editing. By default, the program opens a document in reading mode, and you have to explicitly switch to edit mode when you want to make changes. If the two modes were available when the program was launched, then you could have two right click menu options to open the document, 'read' and 'edit'. So rather than 'open with word processor', the options would be 'read the document' and 'edit the document' - much nicer.
This idea is free to anyone who wants to add it to an Open Source program.
Commercial applications will need to ask permission.
Yes
Yep, apologies if my post sounded too confrontational.
You are right, not everyone in development needs to understand "IT", and IT should have a fairly good idea of what is actually going on underneath the hood.
However, someone in development team should have tested the release before they passed it on.
As part of the process your IT and development teams have to learn to talk to each other, and you end up with a documented set of instructions for installing a replacement if all goes pear shaped on the live system.
Absolutely agree.
If the developers do their job correctly, then a release should include a full set of install and migration instructions for IT to use.
If IT do their job correctly, they should test the install on a separate system before deploying it live.
If the install does not work 100% first time, don't tweak it, send it back.
If the developers complain that IT didn't follow the instructions correctly, then the instructions were wrong.
Send it back to the developers to write better instructions.
If all goes pear shaped on the live system, IT should have a full set of (tested) instructions on how to rebuild the system from scratch.
If the developers can't supply those instructions, then you don't know what you have.
Ok, I know this is nice in theory and difficult to acheive in practice, but both teams should be working towards this as their goal.
It isn't necessarily deliberate addition that we would be worried about.
If Novell developers are going to be working with Microsoft developers as part of the move towards better interoperability - which is a good thing - then they are likely to pick up ideas and techniques from each other.
If Novell as a company know that their customers are protected, then they might not put as much effort into verifying that they aren't injecting ideas or techniques picked up from the Microsoft developers.
Roll forward a couple of years, and a Novell developer picks up a nifty new technique while she was part of the Novell-Microsoft interop team.
She changes her job within the company, and joins Novell's OpenOffice team.
Not only does she have to remember where she got the idea from (do not think about a rhinoceros), but she also has to remember not to use it when working on the OpenOffice code (remember - do not think about a rhinoceros).
If the idea is in your head and it solves the problem in front of you, then you will just use it (still not thinking about a rhinoceros ?).
Roll forward another year or two, and lots of other developers have picked up on the neat trick that they found in the OpenOffice code.
Presto, up pop Microsoft and declares that they own patents on a technique that is used in a good percentage of the Linux GUI applications. The technique in question is non-obvious and someone who hadn't seen the original code would be unlikely to have thought of it.
Ok, the individual projects could refactor their code, and try to solve the problem without using the patented technique (remember, don't think about a rhinoceros) . But in the interim, many of the large Linux distributions have to pull the applications from their releases, setting Linux on the desktop back a couple of years.
If you run Windows in a VM inside a Linux host, would all of the DRM code still be able to control what you were doing ?
Lets say Microsoft have a patent for using "a button with the word 'Go' to start a process".
Balmer seems to be saying that if someone has installed a Linux system that included a program that uses "a button with the word 'Go' to start a process", then Microsoft could sue them (the user) for patient infringement.
Ok, IBM, Sun, HP etc. probably have quite a few patents themselves.
So, lets assume that IBM has a patent for using "a button with the word 'Stop' to stop a process".
Does that mean that if someone has installed a Windows system that included a program that uses "a button with the word 'Stop' to stop a process", then IBM could sue them (the user) for patient infringement.
If Microsoft can sue Linux users for infringing [insert patent number here], then surely this implies that [insert name here] can sue Windows users for infringing [insert patent number here].
In which case, doesn't everyone who has a Windows system installed "sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability" too, because there are lots of people out there with patents that cover lots of things, many of which we don't know about yet, and some of which may be used in Windows.
Did RedHat know this was in the pipeline when they bought JBoss.
I look forward to seeing Fedora ship with the Sun JDK and JBoss installed as part of the system.
No disrespect to the guy, but I don't think he understands what OpenSource actually means.
In fact, I get the impression that he hasn't really considered using OpenSource software.
To be fair, if you are already busy trying to maintain the systems that you already have, then experimenting with OpenSource alternatives can seem a lot more hassle than it is worth. ... should I think about replacing all of my existing (working) services with a completely new set of (unknown) services".
How often does an IT manager sit down and think "Ok, looks like I have some spare time
Unless there is a policy change from higher up, then the only way that change will happen is if enough techies within the department discover OpenSource for themselves and begin to suggest alternatives.
- Vermont - 9,620 sq miles
That is still a very big postage stamp - does your postal service need special equipment to handle these ?We do cooperate on some things, like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.
Which amongst others includes contributions from :
Oberondarksoul (grand parent post) is probably right. It is unlikely that anything like this is happening ... yet.
However, once some of the ISPs start charging content providers, then I think this is the way things will go.
Present company excepted, most of the people using the low cost ISPs won't notice if SlashDot is a little slow, or downloading updates to OpenOffice or Linux take ages.
As long as the commercial websites, MySpace, MSN etc are nice and zippy, they will be happy.
Even if one or two service providers do still offer a neutral connection, they will have to charge a premium price for it to cover the money they will loose from not prioritising commercial content. Which means we have a two tier internet; standard price to access the commercial websites from our sponsors, pay extra to see the rest of the net.
In the UK things have gone crazy, to the extent that our local supermarket is offering low cost 8M broadband packages.
However, the people who go for these services wouldn't be able to tell if their service provider prioritises commercial content.
In fact, I think I'd find it tricky to figure out how to write a test that could detect a non-neutral connection.
You could argue that if the customer couldn't tell the difference, what is the problem. ... etc).
The content provider who pays most will get the highest priority.
The problem is that once this becomes established as common practice, then the networks will become more and more biased towards commercial content, and the prices the ISPs can charge the content providers will go up and up (pay $x for level 1 priority, $xx for level 2 priority
In the UK, several of the ISPs are fighting a price war, offering broadband packages at cut price rates.
The one or two service providers who do cater for the more technically savy user still have to compete with the low cost service providers.
If the low cost providers use the money they get from charging content providers to cut their end user prices even lower, then all of the service providers will have to start charging content providers, just to stay competitive.
The FC5 installation tools seem to have taken a step backwards.
I have FC4 installed on a range of machines, from old 166MH Pentiums to 2GHz Athlon machines. The FC4 install was a breeze, and everything went according to plan.
I tried to upgrade them to FC5, and I found all kinds of problems.
The older machines don't have enough memory (64M and FC5 requires a minimum of 128M). All I want these machines for are simple headless servers running things like backup DNS. They don't have bluetooth, they don't have wireless or USB, they don't even have a mouse.
At the other end of the scale, the FC5 install fails on the Athlon machines. I haven't worked out exactly why yet, but I think it is because I have a nVidia graphics card. Why this causes problems for the text mode install I don't know.
As I said, the FC4 install works fine on both the low end and high end machines.
The FC5 install won't install on either.
I've stuck to using Fedora because it gave me a good stable general purpose system that worked for both text only servers and a good development desktop system.
I have just convinced my non technical brother that he should move from Windows to Linux, but there is no way that I can recomend FC5 if he has to spend a day on Google to find out that he needs to type "linux text ide=nodma nofb skipdde" on the command prompt just to install it.
In light of the recent aquisition of JBoss, what are the plans for Java support in Fedora ?
Do you expect to see a major performance improvement in the gcc based java, or are you hoping that Sun to will change the restrictions on the Sun JDK ?
I've noticed an increase in the minimum memory requirements for a basic Fedora install. I run Fedora on several machines, from an old 166MHz Pentium machine with 64M of memory, to GHz AMD64 machines with 1G of memory.
Ideally, I'd like to run the same version on all of them. However, FC5 has raised the minimum memory requirement from 64M to 128M, excluding the older machines.
Is there a specific technical reason for increasing the minimum requirement, or is it because a lot of packages are being included to make the system user friendly.
I'm sure the 'minimum' text only install includes a large number of packages that it does not need.
I appreciate the excellent work being done to make the full desktop install more user friendly, but please remember that a lot of Fedora installs are for text only servers.
What about the data center and server market ? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently about virtualization technologies. Does anyone know how well VMWare or Xen will map onto a multi core system ? If a data center can run n virtual machines on a single core system, will they be able to run n*8 virtual machines on an 8 core system ?
The ability to pack more into less rack space would probably be a major selling point for data centers.
As far as I can remember, the foam on the tank is insulation to keep the contents cold while the shuttle is on the landing pad.
It isn't actually needed during flight.
The problem is that during launch, large chunks of it can fall off and dent the orbiter itself.
In which case, why don't they cut the foam into small cubes when they stick it on to the tank ?
It could rain small cubes of foam during launch and not harm the orbiter.
Ok, sticking individual cubes on would be more tedious that spraying it on, but it might be possible to create a mold that shaped the foam to add break points in it so that it would split into small chunks rather than big chunks.
Ok, I know, they have probably already thought of this and found good reasons why not. ...
Just an idea
I agree.
I used to run the Seti@home client on all of my machines, but stopped running it when they ended support for the old client.
I haven't have time to RTFM and write custom shell scripts to install so all my machines now just run a blank screen when idle.
Is there a yum rpm repository ? Even Skype have a yum rpm repository.
Make it as simple as
then I'll install it.Also, the Seti@Home project seem to have changed their target audience.
For me, the sheer scale of the project was a major reason for contributing to it.
Seeing stats on their home page showing "x years cpu time in the last 24hrs" was a major WOW factor.
The new site no longer seems to show the collective stats for the project as a whole. Everything is geared towards competition between the individual users, with leage tables of groups and users showing how much they have contributed.
I don't care how much CPU time individual fanboys have contributed, or who is 'star user of the week'.
I want to know how many tera flops the whole project has managed to accumulate, that is the impressive figure.
I don't see it as a competition to get yourself higher on the list.
I (used to) see it as a collective contribution to a large scale project that couldn't be done by any one single institute.
Now, I can't be bothered.