This month's most interesting messages:

Most from the SETI@home team members at Berkeley. Non-official statements but interesting anyway.

Seth Shostak (Public Programs Scientist, SETI Institute / Project Phoenix) - 2000.09.14 in s.a.s./a.s.s., about comments insinuating he said SETI@home was basically useless:

I have tried to reply to this weeks ago. I certainly never said that SETI@home was a waste of time! That's nonsense. The analysis done by this software of the data being distributed is very deep. What I did say is that there are many folks doing this (which is a good thing in terms of raising consciousness about SETI), and that it will take some time for the Berkeley SETI team to check out the millions of signals found so far.

Seth Shostak

Hiram Clawson - 2000.09.15 in s.a.s., about dealing with the porters and if there will be a command line beta:

[ >8 ] I have more porters than I can shake a stick at. And sometimes I do have to shake a stick at them...
There are plenty of porters. We don't do many versions of the Beta test code because it isn't necessary. Once it has been proven to work on Solaris, Windows GUI and Mac, it pretty much works properly elsewhere, and it is checked on the other platforms when it is ported.

Eric J. Korpela - 2000.09.18 in a.s.s., "The Quest for the Holy Client":

Well, things got bogged down for a little while. We're tweaking the gaussian chi-squared threshold a bit to cut down some of the low-quality detections. We've also fixed a dozen or so bugs in 2.74, and we're hoping to distribute a new beta in the next couple days.

I'm trying to push hard for the full release to go before the end of the month.

Hiram Clawson - 2000.09.22 in s.a.s., deficiencies?

Good Morning SETI Fans:

The often commented upon 'deficiencies' of the SETI@Home project are easily understood in the context of the following:

1.  There is a very long wish list of tasks and desires facing the
    project.
2.  There is a finite amount of machine, people, and monetary resources
    available to the project.
3.  The list of tasks and options are ordered according to priority
    relative to the aims of the project.
4.  The project is a science experiment, not a CPU benchmark.
5.  Within this context, the priority list of tasks has optimizations
    for particular processors below the cut-off line of possibilities
    at this time.

--Hiram - WB6RSS