Thats what ET used to phone home.

I've been hearing rumors that SETI is going to shut down their clients for months and start a new and improved distributive search called BOINC. It seems it is not quite stable yet and Beta Testing has ran past schedule, so I'm reluctant to try it. There seems to also be some other more popular distributive projects now and when SETI shuts down I may look into another project. I'm currently at 2840 WUs ranked at 98.323% and I hate to see all my computers work disapear. Although, the new BOINC supposed to append WUs from the old client on top of the new Work Units, I just feel like it might be time to switch over to something more exciting. My computers don't crunch as fast as most the newer ones that I'll probably be competing against on other projects, so starting over after 1.98 total years of computing time just don't seem like it will be as fun as the early years of distributive processing. I remember when it took me a week to crunch one WU, now with one PC you can possibly do up 10 or more a day. I had hopes of doing a server farm at one time, but still, is it even worth it? Bragging rights of your proccessor speeds just is not as thrilling as it use to be, I also remember back in the day a billion instructions per second was considered a super computer. Now thats not even much for a home computer. There was also a time back in the early 90s when you could run windows with less than 4megs of memory. Those 4 megs cost over $300 and now 520megs can cost less than $75 and windows can barley run with with 128megs of memory. I guess thats good, but sometimes I wonder why so much computing power is necessary. Projects like these might make it worth it, but for who and what are the true bennifits? What would happen if we found aliens, and they will be laughing at us for waisting so much effort when all they use are a couple coconuts tied together with string to do the same thing.