This month's most interesting messages:

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

Matt Lebofsky - 2001.01.03 in s.a.s./a.s.s., mandatory update:

We will start making the version mandatory starting as early as this week. We need to make some tweaks to our server to make the version warning messages work properly. We had a bug where people downloaded 3.03, finished their work unit and sent it back, and then their version was "obsoleted" by accident. How annoying. This'll be fixed and tested today or tomorrow. Then the mandatory upgrade messages will start, and a couple weeks down the line we're shutting down the old clients by shutting them down at the router (via a DNS switcheroo).

FYI, over 25% of our current results are coming in from 3.03 clients.

Hiram Clawson - 2001.01.15 in s.a.s., client for the i386-pc-os/2-warp platform:

I have made an error in the release of the v3.03 OS/2 client.

The client [ >8 ] is reporting itself incorrectly as version 3.1.0 and probably can not return results. It has been withdrawn from the download page.

Please stand by while I sort out this problem with the porter of this client. I hope to have it fixed in a week and release the proper client.

Pardon my confusion.

Hiram Clawson - 2001.01.16 in a.s.s., client retirement:

This is the best statement I can make at this time. The team is trying to get the pre-v3.03 clients turned off as soon as possible. As they work through various problems with the transition, the exact moment is unknown.

For your purposes, you should assume your pre-v3.03 client is obsolete and you should upgrade now. Otherwise, when the moment does happen, your processing will be dead in the water.