Thursday, December 15, 2005

The end of an era

Seti@home classic has ended after a trifle over six and a half years. I've been participating for a trifle under six and a half years but today is the day they stopped sending out new work units. My count at the time of writing is 85269 though I still have a few dozen work units on hand and they are still accepting results.

Not bad for a project that was originally going to run for two years; they just kept extending it and extending it.

As I've written before[^] it became quite the obsession though I haven't been as bad in the last three or four months as I was. I stopped maintaining that spreadsheet for one thing and when they had an outage I just didn't care :) Nonetheless the experience of obsession is a warning I'm going to heed for now; I'm not planning to take up one of the other shared computing causes for the nonce.

An interesting detail; my total went up by more than 2500 on Monday evening; the count was rising at a rate of three or four per minute. Why? *shrug*

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